ABSTRACT

In 1954, President Batista opened a modern international-style building to house Havana’s national museum that, paradoxically, owed much to recent interest in Cuba’s colonial architecture. Today, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) is a shrine to Cuban art from colonial times to the present. However, at its inception as the Museo Nacional (founded 1913), it was dedicated to both art and history and included European art. The story of how the new museum came to be built in the 1950s, rechristened as a fine arts museum in the 1960s, and then remodeled in the 1990s demonstrates the central place of history and particularly the values associated with the nineteenth-century Independence Wars in establishing an appropriate monument to Cuban national identity. This position had significant political bite for audiences sensitive to the ongoing influence of the United States, while also serving the goal of drawing more dignified tourists to Cuba. The new MNBA was indebted to the Colonial Renaissance, a deepening of interest in the Spanish colonial past (1920s–1940s) on the part of the Cuban vanguard and others, defined here for the first time. This chapter evaluates the press coverage of the museum campaign, evolving architectural plans, and art exhibitions elsewhere that presaged curatorial choices for the permanent collection in relation to the Colonial Renaissance. The MBNA building is an example of local modernism that conjoined international style with colonial tradition, thereby activating ideals articulated since the Independence Wars and continued in the twentieth-century quest for national autonomy.