museums to visit in Cuba

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The best museums to visit in Cuba. This May 18, International Museum Day is commemorated. If you are a faithful lover of culture and you plan to travel to Cuba shortly, do not miss the opportunity to visit the best museums in Cuba.

Since 1977, International Museum Day has been celebrated every year to raise awareness about the importance of these institutions for cultural exchange, the enrichment of cultures, and the development of mutual understanding, collaboration, and peace among peoples.

In Cuba there are around 300 museums that keep valuable documents and objects that contribute to the investigation and conservation of values for the knowledge of the new generations. There are 7 different types of museums: art, natural history, archaeological, monographic, historical, science and technology, and agriculture and soil.

Paradoxically, the sweetest museum in Havana is located on Calle de la Amargura. You will be able to learn everything about the history of cocoa cultivation, how it is produced and how it has been marketed for centuries. During the visit, when touring its facilities, you will find interesting texts and references about chocolate, as well as curious commercial posters of internationally known brands, both from the industry of this delicious product, as well as Cuban and foreign firms that have marketed it for centuries. very different.

From the outside you can already guess the intense and tasty aroma that the museum gives off, if you get closer you will not be able to avoid going inside to try such a delicacy. With tables arranged for small groups or couples, it is an ideal place to sweeten the palate in the hottest moments of the day.

This museum feels more like a café or chocolatier than a proper museum, and chocoholics can get an unforgettable dose of luscious chocolate and tasty truffles here. Its restaurant area has a very varied chocolate menu and in different states: cold, hot, tablet, white, black, smooth, thick, sweet, bitter…

The amazing Havana Club Rum Museum

The Havana Club Foundation’s Rum Museum is located next to the colonial Plaza de San Francisco de Asís, right in front of the port of Havana.

You don’t have to be a drinker to enjoy this fabulous museum, as visiting it will allow you to fully immerse yourself in part of Cuban culture. The sugar cane needed to distill rum made colonial Cuba a leading society at that time. Sugar cane and rum are the hallmarks of the Caribbean. In addition to learning about the history at the Rum Museum, you can delve into different products and meet their producers, as well as learn about pairing and cocktails.

The museum has an interesting guided circuit, where the complex process of making rum with old machines is exposed. The circuit is available in Spanish, English, French, German and Italian and explains the entire process, from the preparation of the white oak barrels, to their fermentation and aging, going through a model where a sugar mill is reproduced in detail.

National museum of fine arts

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba is an exciting art museum that is housed in two beautiful buildings located next to the famous Paseo de Martí, in Centro Habana.
Its objective is to restore, preserve and promote the works that are part of Cuba’s plastic heritage and it is equipped with 24 rooms where collections of ancient art are exhibited, art rooms dedicated to masters of all times and rooms with temporary exhibitions.

One of the buildings, specifically the Asturian Center, focuses on Cuban Art. In it, the works are exhibited in chronological order and are amazingly varied. Here works by prominent artists such as Guillermo Collazo, Rafael Blanco, Raúl Martínez or Wilfredo Lam are exhibited.

As a whole, they house one of the largest collections of paintings and sculptures in all of Latin America, thus being considered one of the most important museums in Latin America and the Caribbean. If time is short, it is advisable to see El Centro Asturiano, since the Cuban Art Collection is the most complete of the two.

Museum of the Revolution

The Museum of the Revolution is housed in the old Presidential Palace, built between 1913 and 1920 and used by several Cuban presidents, the last of which was Fulgencio Batista. The famous Tiffany’s in New York decorated its interior.

This monumental building located in Centro Habana houses one of the most interesting museums in all of Cuba and is a must-see, especially for anyone who is curious about the history of Cuba.

At the entrance to the museum is a fragment of the old city wall, as well as a SAU-100 tank that was used by Castro during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

Behind the building is the Granma Memorial Pavilion, a tribute to the 13-meter-long yacht that was used to transport Fidel Castro and Che Guevara along with 80 other revolutionaries from Tuxpan (Mexico) to Cuba in 1956. The ship was displayed in a large glass case. This pavilion is surrounded by small planes and other vehicles related to the Revolution and is accessible from the Museum of the Revolution itself.

Museum of Natural History

This museum specializes in the natural history of Cuba and houses various collections on Cuban flora and fauna. Its exhibition halls are designed to promote knowledge about nature, emphasizing the need to preserve natural resources.

On the lower floor they have the La Tierra y La Vida exhibition, dedicated to the paleontological evolution of the Earth with different samples of fossils, murals and diagrams. Among them, the skull of a Tyrannosaurus stands out. It also includes a zoological exhibition on reptiles, birds and mammals of the Caribbean.

The upper floor is dedicated to Caribbean vertebrates, invertebrates and mammals, as well as a collection of rocks and semi-precious stones. Among others, a petrified tree millions of years ago and marine fossils from Cuban waters stand out.

These are some of the magnificent museums you can visit on your trip to the island, where you will find history, art, nature, architecture and much more.