Ttinidad de Cuba: historic, romantic, combative

49

A CITYAND

ITS MUSEUMS

Marta Arjona

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How c m museams be inobilized to b1-ing to @e the bistoiy ofa Caribbean towia that bas been iii existence .for ,zearl_l' j v e ceirtzrries.2Marta Arjoiaa, Director of the Cidtiiral Heritage of Cuba and inember of the Executive Council of ICOM, ofers a71 aiiswer.

The town of Trinidad, founded in 1514 Seen through the window of a museum, on the southern coast of central Cuba a city that is almost a museum in itself. and one of the most outstanding testimonies to the urban architecture of Cuba and Latin America, is on the World Heritage List of Unesco's Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and epitomizes the old settlements founded 011 the island and throughout the Caribbean by Spain. The historic urban centre of Trinidad covers an area of 37 hectares and possesses various cultural and social facilities that provide a permanent socio-cultural service for a population that includes a large number of young people and schoolchildren. Museums occupy a distinguished place among the cultural facilities of the town, which has been gradually organizing its cultural heritage and, in so doing, has rescued a great many objects and his- dll photographs by courtesy of the Dirt'ccion del torical material. It h i s so far succeeded. Pntrimonio cultural de Cuba

in establishing five museums containPutting their raison d’être ing substantial collections and is now across working on a project for a museum of the flora and fauna of the Valle de los The Architecture Museum was opened Ingenios, 5 kilometres away from the in 1979 and contains everything imaginable relating to the architectural dehistoric centre. The first museum to be established in velopment of the historic centre of Trinidad was the Museo Romántico, Trinidad: maps, scale models, unifying which was set up in 1974 in the Palacio features such as sculptures, studies of Brunet, an eighteenth-century man- materials, ornaments, door-knockers, sion. Its collection comprises mainly flagstones and so on. This museum, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century located in an eighteenth-centuryhouse Cuban furniture and porcelain, glass- facing onto the Plaza Mayor, monitors ware and lamps of the same period. It is the conservation and restoration proone of the most complete collections of jects of the historic centre for the Prodecorative art of the time, and in Trini- vincial Commission for Monuments, in dad it remains a testimony to the life of particular its Trinidad office. The Palacio Cantero, the country’s affluence of a society the growth of whose resources kept pace with its finest example of neoclassical architecsugar production-the largest in the ture, houses the Trinidad Municipal world in the first half of the nineteenth hluseum, established in 1980. This century. forms part of the national museum The Archaeological Museum, cre- network comprising other municipal ated in 1976, houses collections of museums that collect and exhibit all Cuban aboriginal artefacts and objects testimonies relating to the history of from the colonial era. It is involved in their respective regions under a policy intense promotional activities and designed to project the museum as a deals with matters relating to the centre for the rescue, conservation, archaeological excavations in the promotion and dissemination of the region; such work is carried out only by heritage and for a better understanding qualified persons and after due autho- of what constitutes the cultural identity of each region of the country. rization has been obtained. In 1981the Museo de la Lucha contra Bandidos (Anti-Banditry Museum) was set up as a tribute to the men who had fought to wipe out the gangs of bandits that had depredated various regions of the country, robbing and killing peas-

51

Triilidad de Cirbn: historic, romantic, coinbafiiw

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An atmosphere of nostalgia prevails

around the eighteenth-centuryPalacio Brunet, now the Museo RomSntico.

ants, literacy workers and other defenceless people. The museum houses a substantial display of objects, documents and weapons that played an important role in this fragment of Cuban history. It is located in the old eighteenth-century Convent of St Francis of Assisi, whose tower soars above the buildings of the town centre. The museums of the historic centre of Trinidad, as described in this article, are fine examples of the desire to project the correct image oftheir raisoiz d ' ê t ~ eto the local people and to visitors. Professionally, they cover the disciplines by which they are formally identified, and on the sentimental plane their most earnest desire is to reveal to the visitor-as Alexander von Humboldt did to the world after visiting Trinidad in 1801-the beauty, the life 4 and the nature of their city.

Display methods used in the Archaeological Museum.