Cuba Guide
Santiago de Cuba
Museo del Carnaval
Address: Heredia no.301
Opening time: Tues– Sat 9am–8pm, Sun 9am–5pm
Price: $1CUC, plus $1CUC for a camera, $5CUC for a camcorder
The Museo del Carnaval is a must if you can't make it for the real thing in July. Thoughtfully laid out on the ground floor of a dimly lit colonial house, the museum is a bright and colourful collection of psychedelic costumes, atmospheric photographs and carnival memorabilia.
Beginning with scene-setting photographs of Santiago in the early twentieth century, showing roads laced with tram tracks and well-dressed people promenading through the parks, the exhibition moves on to photographs, newspaper cuttings and costumes belonging to the pre-revolutionary carnivals of the 1940s and 1950s. Pictures of extravagant floats – including one bearing the logo of now-exiled sponsors Bacardí – are jumbled together with minutely embroidered satin capes garlanded with flowers, harlequin outfits and giant, head-shaped, papier-mâché masks.
In a separate room are photographs of some of the musicians who have played at carnival accompanied by their instruments, displayed in glass cases. A final room shows off costumes made for post-Revolution carnivals, often rather less glamorous than their predecessors. The most recent prize-winning costume is kept in the centre of the room, along with some of the immensely intricate prototypes of floats that are constructed in miniature months before the final models are made.