Hershey, Cuba: A Town Built by Milton Hershey

Posted on March 21, 2018 at 4:54 PM

Hershey, Cuba, was a town built by Milton Hershey to help insure a constant supply of sugar for his chocolate factories in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Milton Hershey went to Cuba in 1916, and was immediately enamored by it and its possibilities for his US company. In Hershey, Cuba, he built a town fashioned on the one he had built in Pennsylvania. It included housing, a baseball stadium (all that remains today is the baseball field), a movie theatre, shops that sold his products, restaurants, a hotel, fields full of sugar cane, and a factory or mill to turn it into sugar.

He also built an electric train that ran between Hershey and Matanzas, where he had ships at the ready to transport the sugar back to the US.

Eventually he expanded the tracks to include Havana. The train made 47 stops along the route to bring workers into Hershey. The train is still in existence and remains the only electric train in all of Latin America.

View the entire gallery here.