Trinidad strives to protect and preserve its identity

Its stone streets and small palaces turned into faithful guardians of its most precious heritage and handicrafts highly appreciated beyond Cuba's borders, as well as its mestizo culture, make it hard for anyone to resist the charms of the museum-city of Trinidad, permanently devoted to protect and preserve its identity.

Located in the southern part of today's Sancti Spiritus province, the municipality of Trinidad was one of the most important regions of the island in the 19th century thanks to its sugarcane fields and mills run by slave labor, which turned Valle de los Ingenios―Valley of the Sugar Mills, a World Heritage Site―into a sugar emporium and the former town a most prosperous area.

In addition to its archaeological sites, squares, Afro-Cuban rhythms, traditional music and openworks is the love of its residents for the town’s most autochthonous values and the government’s will to promote multiple initiatives to foster this feeling from an early age.

Trinidad boasts splendid institutions such as the Romantic Museum, rich in crockery, furniture, porcelain and glassware collections, and Count Brunet’s House, all of which keep capturing the attention of visitors and experts.
Undertaken by the Office of the Curator of the City and of the Valley of the Mills since February 1997, the preservation efforts have paved the way for alliances and dissimilar projects that engage local actors whose devotion and knowledge in this field have become a matter of pride to the residents and the families who have dedicated themselves for generations on end to pottery and craftwork.

Unfortunately, some traditions have faded away, but those involved in these actions to revive them keep instilling the love for clay in children, regardless of whether or not they will embrace the trade in the future, as do others in the case of traditional cuisine, partly based on criollo, Spanish and African food and dishes that once were common among the mambi fighters during the independence wars.

Yudit Vidal Faife, the famous visual artist who has led for several years the project Entre hilos, alas y pinceles, stresses that protecting one’s identity goes much further.

“It comes with the seed of every local child, so it’s in our blood, which we honor one way or another,” she said. “It’s an inexhaustible source of knowledge and traditions and, at the same time, of contemporaneity because we have engaged the new generations in works that our grandmothers never thought feasible. We’re all duty-bound to salvage and preserve this treasure, and that’s another goal of this project to encourage young people who can make it even better”.