Francisco Garcia Holguin, born around 1490, in Cáceres, Extremadura, it is estimated that he was brought to the Antilles in 1502, when he was about 12 years old, settling in Hispaniola. There he witnessed the construction work of the Hispanic colonial machinery and the fierce exploitation of the aborigines. We must imagine how much that environment influenced the young man's ideas and actions.
Those minds of chivalric training, grown in vassalage, in the experience of wars against the Moors, and believed predestined to impose their spiritual world, accompanied by the desire for adventure and personal courage, together with pride, intransigence, fanaticism and The majority's ambition for gold, originated in Francisco Garcia Holguin, a type of enterprising man, aware of his strength and his weapons, capable of great feats and unheard of baseness.
In 1509, Francisco Garcia Holguin joined the group that set out from Hispaniola to conquer Jamaica and, shortly after, when Velásquez landed in the Port of Palmas, in the area of Guantánamo Bay, with a group of conquistadors, went to Cuba.
Francisco Garcia Holguin was one of the founders of the Villa and Cabildo of Bayamo at the end of 1514 and one of its Ordinary Mayors.
Between 1520 and the mid-1530s, Francisco Garcia Holguin found himself in Mexico. There, under the orders of Hernán Cortés, he participated in the war against the Aztecs, and on August 13, 1521, he was the captain who imprisoned Cuauhtemoc, the great leader of the resistance to the invaders. Between 1526 and 1532 Francisco Garcia Holguin stood out in public service within the Cabildo of Mexico. Between 1526 and 1527 he served as Councilor of the Town Council and in 1531 as Ordinary Mayor.
There is very little information about Francisco Garcia Holguin's properties in Mexico. By 1533, Francisco Garcia Holguin's activity within the Cabildo disappeared and there is no more information located about him in that country.
Upon his return to Cuba, sometime around 1535, Francisco Garcia Holguin found a colony exhausted by the violent decline of the aboriginal population, the reduction of gold mining, Hispanic depopulation and the repercussions of the waves of aboriginal insurrections that since 1520 , devastated the encomenderos.
An example of these anti-colonial struggles were the guerrilla actions of the entrusted Indians of Alcalá, who in 1538 burned crops and executed ranchers. New productive forms were imposed and that is why, based on the experiences of the ranches, the grants for the herds and corrals were initiated by the Cabildos. Livestock became a pillar of the colonial economy.
Francisco Garcia Holguin, together with several companions in arms, began to populate the land of his legitimate property, founding and granting several sites, placing his residence to the north of the jurisdiction of the town of Bayamo so that it would be the head of all the farms, calling it Holguin, dedicated to San Isidoro, in 1545.”
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