HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie: an article (in French) on how Cuban museums represent slavery and African cultural legacies.
BEROSE reference: Toutain, Maxime, 2025. « De l’altérité à la communauté. L’esclavage et ses héritages dans les musées cubains (1913-1986) », Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie. https://doi.org/10.70601/5zfago6.
This article explores the museum representations of slavery and its legacies in Cuba, following in particular the history of the ethnographic collections of the Casa de África since their origins in the Museo Nacional de Cuba. By retracing the history of their exhibition, it highlights the tension that exists between the ideal of an inclusive nation defined beyond race, and the criticisms that have targeted religious practices of African origin throughout the republican and revolutionary period. It thus proposes an original periodisation of the relational dynamics that unfold in museums, in which the place of the heirs of enslaved Africans evolves from the figure of a suspended otherness to that of a community bearing an anti-racist message. “On January 7, 2023, on the sidelines of an international conference on Afro-American anthropology held in Havana, an excursion was organized to visit sites connected to the country’s history of slavery,” Toutain observes. “The small group, composed of historians, anthropologists, and artists, visited the former Triunvirato plantation, now a memorial site commemorating enslaved people’s resistance and the solidarity between Cuba and Africa. The tour continued in a working-class neighborhood of the city of Matanzas, including a visit to a Santería worship site, the cabildo Santa Teresa, where each participant paid respects to the African-origin deity presiding there, the oricha Oyá. The diversity of sites visited during this trip illustrates the complexity of Cuba’s memory of slavery, which oscillates between the experiences of enslaved Africans and their contemporary cultural legacies. This duality is also reflected in the museography of the two institutions that organized the conference and the excursion: Casa de África (founded in 1986 in Havana) and Museo Castillo San Severino La Ruta del Esclavo (founded in 2003 in Matanzas). Both museums offer exhibition paths that create a dialogue between material remnants of the slave system and ethnographic objects related to African-origin religions…”
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