The first public museum in Cuba, Emilio Bacardi, turns 120

The 120th anniversary of the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Provincial Museum, the first public museum founded in Cuba, will be celebrated in this Santigao de Cuba on the 12th and 13th, with the 11th edition of the Bacardí in Memoriam Heritage Researchers event.

Its opening will take place next Tuesday with a tribute to the founder who gives the institution its name, on the steps overlooking the small Bacardi square, in an esplanade on Carnicería street on the corner of Aguilera.

It will be followed by a lecture by Dr. Olga Portuondo, Historian of the City, who will talk about facets of the life of the patriot and prestigious intellectual in the Art Room. Museum extension, located in front of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Park.

In this place the photographic exhibition "Continuadores del legado de Bacardí" will be inaugurated and the following day the following session will take place in commissions for the presentation of the scientific works, and the awarding and closing of the event is scheduled for the afternoon.

Nairobis Clavel, a specialist museologist, spoke of the valuable heritage the museum preserves of the history, art and ethnography, thanks to the management of Emilio Bacardí, especially during his time as mayor of the city, together with his wife Elvira Cape and other illustrious people of this eastern Cuban city to acquire objects and belongings linked to the 19th century libertarian wars, their generals and patriots.

She specified that in the first are those related to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, initiator of those feats, as a replica of the flag that waved on October 10, 1868, fragments of the trunk of the jagüey tree belonging to the La Demajagua mill, objects used in San Lorenzo to teach children to read and write in the mountains and the cover of his revolver.

In addition, a bill signed by him as president of the Republic in Armas, a plate he used in his visit to El Cobre, the printing press where El Cubano Libre, the first independence newspaper founded by Céspedes, saw the light, and the funerary urn made of lead and wood that kept his remains until 1910, after being removed from the mass grave where they were in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery.

Emilio Bacardi and other patriots were in charge of making a tomb worthy of the Father of the Fatherland in the necropolis of this eastern city. (ACN)