National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba

The museum's real strength is holding, under one institution, both the single largest Cuban art collection anywhere and a serious secondary international collection - European painting from the medieval period to the 20th century, one of Latin America's better ancient-art holdings, and Asian and American material most Caribbean museums do not attempt at all. The Cuban collection is the reason to come: four centuries of the island's own painting and sculpture, shown as a continuous narrative from colonial portraiture through the mid-century modernists (Lam, Pelaez, Ponce de Leon, Victor Manuel) to work made after 1959, including pieces its own directors describe as once censored and now reinstated as central to a post-colonial Afro-Cuban artistic identity.

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba is not one building but two, under a single institution and a single director. The Palacio de Bellas Artes, on Trocadero street on the edge of Havana Vieja, holds the museum's Cuban art collection exclusively - more than 4,300 paintings and roughly 12,800 works on paper running from the 17th century to the present, installed in a rationalist building the architect Alfonso Rodriguez Pichardo designed and that opened in 1954. A short walk away on San Rafael stands the Palacio del Centro Asturiano, built in 1927 by the Spanish architect Manuel del Busto as the clubhouse of Havana's Asturian community association; since 2001 it has housed the museum's international collection - European, American, Asian and ancient art - under the same eclectic dome and eight-columned facade the Asturian club members financed a century ago.

A reader planning a single museum visit in Havana needs to know this before buying a ticket: seeing both requires two separate entries, at two different addresses, several minutes' walk apart, and the two buildings hold entirely different collections rather than being two wings of one gallery.

The museum was created by presidential decree on 23 February 1913, under President Jose Miguel Gomez and his secretary of public instruction Mario Garcia Kohly, and opened two months later, on 28 April 1913, as the Museo Nacional de la Republica - inside a former jai-alai building at the corner of Concordia and Lucena. It did not stay there. The city reclaimed that building in 1917 and the collection moved to the Quinta de Toca on Carlos III Avenue; when the government sold that property to a religious order in 1923 the museum moved again, to a house on Aguiar street. Cuban writers have nicknamed it the pilgrim museum for this history of eviction and relocation, and one incident from the 1923 crisis has stuck in the museum's own telling of its history: with the collection's future uncertain, the director Antonio Rodriguez Morey handed out First World War rifles held in the collection to museum staff and students - among them a young Julio Antonio Mella, later a founder of the Cuban Communist Party - as a gesture of defiance against the building's loss. Rodriguez Morey ran the institution from 1918 to 1967 and is credited with turning what began as a general encyclopaedic museum, with departments beyond fine art, into a specialised art institution. The museum found a permanent home only in 1954, when the Palacio de Bellas Artes opened on the site of the old Mercado de Colon.

The Cuban Revolution of January 1959 reshaped the museum's holdings at a stroke. As the depositary for private art collections the new government seized, the institution absorbed, in a short period, more material than its galleries could show - among the collectors whose Cuban and European purchases were confiscated and distributed into state hands were Julio Lobo, Oscar Cintas, Jose Gomez Mena, Tomas Felipe Camacho, Maria Dolores Machin, Evelio Govantes and Ignacio Ponce de Leon. Cuban cultural authorities eventually kept only the fine-art material at the Bellas Artes museum and split the rest across new specialist institutions created to hold it - the Museo Napoleonico, the Museo de Artes Decorativas and the Museo de Arte Colonial among them. Cuban commentary on the museum's own collection, including retrospective writing published in Diario de Cuba, treats the unresolved status of this seized private property as a live question for any future reform of Cuban property law, rather than a closed chapter - a legal and restitution question this museum's collection cannot be read apart from.

In May 2021 twenty-three prominent Cuban artists, including Tania Bruguera, Sandra Ceballos, Tomas Sanchez, Marco Castillo, Reinier Leyva Novo and Carlos Garaicoa, signed and sent the museum a letter asking it to withdraw their own work from exhibition and from its website, in protest at the detention of the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, the best-known face of the independent San Isidro Movement, who was by then several weeks into a hospital confinement after a hunger strike and a police operation around his home in Old Havana. The museum refused. In a statement reported by both OnCubaNews and 14ymedio on 27-28 May 2021, the institution said the artists' demand 'does not align with the service mission of our institution nor with the public interest it serves,' and that it acquires work from Cuban artists 'of all generations and tendencies' using state funds without applying what it called non-artistic considerations. The episode is a rare instance of a state museum publicly overriding living artists' own wishes about the display of their work, and it sits, unresolved, alongside the older question of the confiscated private collections: two moments, four decades apart, where the museum's authority over what it holds and shows has been directly contested.

Whatever a visitor remembers afterwards, it is usually the Centro Asturiano building's staircase. A double marble stair curves up around an open well toward a domed, oval stained-glass ceiling set into the roof - visitor photographs and reviews return to it more often than to any single painting in either building. The structure was built in 1927 for a mutual-aid society of Asturian immigrants, in the eclectic classical style favoured by Havana's early-20th-century social clubs, and functioned after 1959 as the seat of Cuba's Supreme Court before a 1996-2001 renovation, reported to have cost 14.5 million dollars, converted it into the museum's international-art building and expanded its exhibition space by roughly half. It reopened on 18 July 2001. A 2010 gift from the collector Gilbert Brownstone of more than 120 works by Picasso, Miro, Warhol and Duchamp added further to the building's 20th-century holdings after that renovation.

Across both buildings the museum reports holding around 45,000 to 47,600 works. The Cuban collection at the Palacio de Bellas Artes is described by the museum and by independent sources alike as the largest holding of Cuban art anywhere. At the Centro Asturiano, the European collection runs to more than 1,600 paintings and around 8,000 works on paper, with Spanish art the largest single national school (more than 700 pieces) alongside Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch, German and British work spanning medieval to 20th-century painting; named artists include Zurbaran, Sorolla, Rubens, Courbet and Turner. The ancient-art holding, built around the Conde de Lagunillas collection, runs to close to 600 pieces and is considered one of the more important such holdings in Latin America, with Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian material including nine Fayum funerary portraits. An Asian collection of roughly 450 works spans China, Japan, India and Vietnam, including more than 200 Chinese paintings and around 100 Japanese ukiyo-e prints. An American collection beyond Cuba includes Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, and 20th-century United States artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

Visitors consistently single out the Palacio del Centro Asturiano's domed double staircase and its stained-glass ceiling as the single most memorable thing in the museum, and praise the depth of the Cuban art collection - the range of the 20th-century painting in particular is repeatedly called out as stronger than expected. The most common complaint is uneven access: several recent visitors describe whole floors, side rooms or the third floor of one building roped off, closed, or under restoration on the day they went, without warning at the door, and a few mention aggressive unofficial guides trying to sell add-on tours once inside.