It is located 50 km (31 mi) southeast of Havana, next to the Mayabeque River.

[1] Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, what is now Güines was part of a region ruled by the Indian chief Habaguanex.

Güines can be considered one of the primary points of Cuba's transformation into a sugar-producing slave society in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.

As the historian Ada Ferrer explains, "people classified as white had accounted for about three-quarters of the population in 1775" but "by the 1820s, they constituted less than 38 percent.

"[4] In 1837, a railway was opened from Havana - the first in Cuba and Spain, and one of the earliest in the Americas.