Napoleonic Museum

Scholars from France, Canada, USA, England, Poland and Russia, among other countries, traveled to Cuba to attend the event for the first time based in America and living what for many has been a great adventure: to know the Napoleonic Museum Havana, created in 1961, but apparently recently discovered off the island, after its restoration and reopening in 2011, details the journalist Anett Rios cable Efe.

The museum has a vast library and more than 10,000 pieces of the Napoleonic period, to which is attributed a millionaire value, including relics like the original death mask of Bonaparte and the gold watch that marked his last hours of life.
Other objects of the emperor also stand out: a jacket, a cocked hat and spyglass used in Santa Elena, who carried two pistols for shooting in Moscow in 1812, a lamp that gave Josephine, a lock of hair and a molar.
Princess Napoleon, widow of Luis Marie Bonaparte, Prince Napoleon, a descendant of King Jerome, the younger brother of Bonaparte attended in 2011 at the reopening of the museum and donated part of dinnerware to give "testimony of esteem" of his family by that institution.
Three years later, the International Napoleonic Society (INS, for its acronym in English), based in Montreal and dedicated to promoting and sponsoring academic studies of Napoleon and his time, Cuba believes that contact and specialists is equivalent to the "discovery of a treasure unknown".
"Why did it take so long? Because no one made it happen. Cuba is full of silent treasures. Cubans know them well, but they could always be better promoted in the world, "admitted Dalla Bona.
The director of the Napoleonic Museum, Sadys Sánchez, believes that this kind of "boom" is the result of the painstaking restoration of the building and the collection, a process by the Office of the Historian of Havana, which lasted five years.

"(The collection) is the most important in Latin America from an institutional point of view. There are private collections, but this is the most important open to the public, "said Sanchez.
Much of what exhibited belonged to the millionaire disappeared Julio Lobo, tycoon of the sugar industry, considered the richest man in Cuba when the revolution triumphed in 1959 and spent part of his fortune to purchase parts related to Napoleon in auction houses Europe and the United States.
Although Lobo heritage is the focus of this type of collecting on the island, there are "many Napoleonic memorabilia" in other parts of the country, private collections and museums still studying pieces that surprise the researchers said Cuban historian Ernesto Alvarez.
In the province of Matanzas, Alvarez explains, a fragment of the slab that covered the remains of Napoleon on St. Helena Bonaparte and a bust of the famous sculptor Antonio Canova is treasured.
Several objects bequeathed Juan Bautista Leclerc, a painter born in Matanzas and raised in France, who fled with his possessions in Europe to the island and hid in a plantation of his family to know that purchased parts for its Napoleonic collection they had been stolen from cabinet medals King's Library in Paris and the police were after them, she tells Alvarez.
"There are many individuals associated with Napoleon who lived here and are still studying (...) They came to Cuba fleeing processes such as the French and Napoleonic revolutions, settled, and objects brought back memories," he said.
The historian says that even Napoleon's Imperial Guard died in Matanzas, and his remains were found in the city museum.

From these figures, the most important was undoubtedly that of Francois Antommarchi, doctor of Napoleon and who, after dying this one in Santa Elena, returned to France and from there traveled to Cuba, where he moved to study yellow fever, of which he died.
"With him brought relics that belonged to Napoleon himself," says Sánchez Sadys, including the famous first death mask which he drew up and then be reproduced several times.
Sanchez believes that Cuba experts have ahead several lines of research, especially to shed light on the links formed between Napoleon and the island through other people.
"If Napoleon had not died, I think it would have been interesting to get to the Americas. Anyway, arrived in Cuba in this way, by collecting "he said.