Museo de la Revolución

The Museum of the Revolution occupies the former Presidential Palace — a sumptuous neoclassical building completed in 1920 whose interior was decorated by Tiffany's of New York and whose marble staircases, frescoed ceilings, and Hall of Mirrors rivalled any government building in the Americas. Batista fled this building on New Year's Eve 1958, and Castro's revolutionary government converted it into a museum documenting the revolution's history with the victors' confidence that only a successful insurrection can produce.

The museum's narrative is unapologetically partisan — the pre-revolutionary period is presented as a succession of corrupt dictatorships and American exploitation, the revolutionary struggle as a heroic campaign by a handful of idealists, and the post-revolution period as a series of triumphs against imperialist aggression. The yacht Granma (the boat that carried Castro, Che Guevara, and 80 revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to begin the armed struggle) is displayed in a glass enclosure behind the museum, surrounded by other revolutionary vehicles including a bullet-riddled delivery van from the Bay of Pigs.

The building itself is the unacknowledged star — the presidential rooms on the upper floors, with their Tiffany decorations, painted ceilings, and the opulent furnishings of a government that taxed its people to build a palace, provide a visual argument for revolution that the museum's political narrative only reinforces.