The story
Havana's national art museum splits itself between two buildings a few blocks apart. One holds the universal collection, European and ancient art gathered by wealthy Cubans before 1959. The other, the Palace of Fine Arts, is given entirely to Cuban art, and that is the one most visitors come for.
It traces the island's painting from colonial portraits to the 20th-century modernists, above all Wifredo Lam, whose blend of Afro-Cuban ritual and Parisian Surrealism made him the most famous painter Cuba has produced.
Many of the works reached the state after 1959, when the collections of families who left the country were nationalized, so these rooms also record a sharp turn in Cuba's history.
