Until the late nineteenth century, few Cuban sugar barons could challenge the Iznaga clan’s fortune, nor the family’s legendary propensity to spend it on exorbitant decorations and lavish furnishings of the highest quality and design, mostly acquired in Europe. Their home in the center of Trinidad remained the depository of the family’s treasures, including huge caches of heavy (not sterling!) silverware, paintings, jewels, custom-made place settings for more than a hundred. As Vice Conservator of the City of Trinidad, José Luis Hurtado, told me, nothing was ever removed by the Communist state because the last heir to the house and material fortune never left Cuba after the Revolution of 1959. Yet after she died in the early 1990s, “vultures” descended nightly on the house, looting it of even the marble floors, the tiles on walls, even the ornate iron bars that had once lined the stairs and kept one from falling off the balconies on the second floor. Nothing, as these pictures show, was left. Appalled, I said Trinidad was a UNESCO World Heritage site. This should have been a museum! And, I said, the Communist state claimed such wealth as national patrimony. José Luis smiled ironically. Who do you think stole everything? His assistants nodded: Yes, they all wore olive green. Trinidad de Cuba, July 2001.
