ICOM-ICOMOS headquarters in Cuba inaugurated

Rodolfo Zamora Rielo (Opus Habana)

IN a recently renovated building, members of the Cuban delegation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Council on Museums and Sites (ICOMOS) gather to inaugurate their new headquarters and systematize the work of different specialists. The two organizations are designed to develop heritage work on the island. Their new home was restored years ago by Leonardo Morales – one of Cuba’s most eminent architects, without whom, according to Eusebio Leal, "the modern history of Havana, of Vedado, could not have been written."

For that important occasion, City Historian Eusebio Leal, current president of the National Committee, expressed his satisfaction with and the national, regional, and international connotations of the council’s work, undertaken by different institutions and significant figures in the context of restorations, conservation, and museology in Cuba.

According to Leal, "we are people of culture, and as such, we have assumed a commitment to do everything in our reach to move our own vocations forward. In this society comprising cultural and world heritage institutions, with their projects for undertaking new things, we have done something truly beautiful and good, like restoring this part of the old Santa Catalina de Siena Convent, built at the end of the 17th century."

The speaker urged making the headquarters a house of fraternity and a meeting place, where vocations coexist, specialties meet and interrelate, and which is visited not only by architects and professors of urban planning, but also by restoration experts, historians, anthropologists, students of ancient documents, paleographers, archeologists, and museology experts, he added.

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is an international organization made up of museums and their professionals and dedicated to preserving cultural and national heritage worldwide, assuring its continuity and communicating its value with a basic organizational, informative, and methodological function. It acts as an intermediary and advisor between international organizations such as UNESCO and governmental institutions in the countries that make up its membership.

ICOM is a global professional network with more than 21,000 active members in 145 countries, including Cuba. Created in 1946, it is an NGO that is formally associated with UNESCO and has consultative status on the UN Economic and Social Council. Its headquarters, which includes the UNESCO-ICOM Museum Information Center, is located in Paris, France.

Cuba has been a member of UNESCO since the year that Cosme de la Torriente, Cuban politician, intellectual and colonel of the Liberation Army, inaugurated its headquarters on November 17, 1947, in a building located on Cuba and Obra Pía Streets. However, it was in 1959 that Cuba became an active member of ICOM, creating a new National Committee within the Consultative Committee and, on several occasions, in the same Executive Council, represented by Dr. Marta Arjona.

Currently the Cuban committee is composed of 26 individual members from the City Historian’s Office, the National Cultural Heritage Council, the Music Museum and Archive, the Council of State Historic Affairs Office, among others. One institution, the National Museum of Fine Arts, is a member.

One of the most noteworthy of the regional committees is that linking the Latin American and Caribbean countries. The current committee is headed by Spengler with the architect José Linares as executive secretary.

With much work ahead, the Cuban ICOM committee is seen as a continental reference point for cultural heritage given the work undertaken over the last 50 years by a number of figures and institutions, among them the distinguished Havana City Historian’s Office, founded by Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring. Since 1935 it has fought to recover historical monuments from obscurity and make them speak to contemporary experience in the interest of the people who enrich and guard it.