Fall 2005
.
.
With oil paintings that reflect the Spanish era in Cuba, to more modernistic works showing the influence of new ideas on the island nation, the Cuban Museum at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach provides a memorable overview of Cuban culture from 1659 to 1959.
The Cuban Museum was born in the turbulent years leading up to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and is, according to Professor Juan A. Martinez, Florida International University, "The only permanent public exhibition of colonial and republican Cuban art in this country."
During his long presidency prior to the revolution, General Fulgencio Batista and his second wife, Marta, amassed paintings, prints and folk art that reflected Cuban history and culture. The Batistas established a second residence in Daytona Beach and created the Cuban Foundation to direct and maintain their collection during that time. The works were located in a house next to their North Halifax home on the Daytona Beach peninsula. Batista kept the community links strong by sponsoring trips to Cuba in the 1940s and 50s for Daytona Beach high school seniors and even conducted some of the Cuban tours himself. In 1957, the Foundation collection and real estate was gifted to the city of Daytona Beach.
After being ousted from power by Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, Batista went to Portugal and then Spain. His collection stayed in Daytona Beach, augmented by donations from others of historic maps, documents, sculptures, photographs and ceramics. The Foundation Museum "was designed to keep Cuban history alive as Castro tightened his grip on the island and its rich Hispanic culture," explained Gary R. Libby, director emeritus of the Museum of Arts and Sciences and author of Cuba: A History in Art.
The original Daytona Beach collection consisted of 27 major paintings, 45 ceramics and items of folk culture, photographic examples of Cuban architecture and industry, some personal items from the Batistas and ornate, Colonial furniture.
Two years before the Cuban collection was given to the city, the Museum of Arts and Sciences was founded as a children's after-school center. In 1967, the paths of the two institutions merged. City officials asked the museum to take over the Cuban art collection and run it as a public trust. The museum promptly moved its tiny home in a Quonset hut into the old Batista mansion, 137 N. Halifax Ave., on the river in Daytona Beach.
By the end of the decade the museum had outgrown the house. A 90-acre site was located next to a city park on the western end of the city. The Cuban Museum moved there along with the children's museum in 1971 as the new Museum of Arts and Sciences. Photos of the opening show Batista's son, F. Ruben Batista, among the dignitaries. He and two of his three brothers, Jorge and Robert, saw each other for the first time in several years during a Cuban Foundation meeting at the museum in 1999. F. Ruben remains president of the Foundation and lives in Coral Gables with his wife and family.
The 2,500-square-foot Cuban Museum gallery has been renovated twice since it opened, with new gifts added to the growing collection. "The number of items in the collection has tripled," Libby said. "The collection has also broadened through the introduction of New World Spanish Colonial objects, including s
Visit the Museum of Arts and Sciences at 1040 Museum Boulevard in Daytona Beach, phone 386.255.0285 or visit www.moas.org. The 110-page volume, Cuba - A History in Art, highlighting the historic collection of paintings in the Cuban Foundation Collection at the Museum of Arts and Sciences is available from the Museum store.