Cuba’s Museum Day honors heritage, education and youth poster winner
Cuba’s Museum Day put living museum work in the spotlight, from Playa’s award-winning Juan Manuel Márquez site to an 18-year-old poster winner from Las Tunas.
The Museo Juan Manuel Márquez in Playa walked away with Cuba’s Premio Museo del Año, while an 18-year-old student from Las Tunas won the youth poster contest, a pairing that put education at the center of Museum Day on May 17.
The awards mattered because they rewarded museums doing more than keeping collections under glass. The National Museum of Fine Arts was singled out for educational work it has sustained for 60 years, and its project Sentir el arte received the Premio Nacional de Museología for educational initiatives. In Santiago de Cuba, the Museo Histórico 26 de Julio was recognized by the Cátedra Marta Arjona of the University of the Arts for its own educational work. Taken together, the honors pointed to a museum sector being measured by how well it teaches, convenes and reaches beyond its walls.
The youth poster prize went to Conexiones de la Memoria, by Laura Liz Ramadán, a student at the Instituto Politécnico Conrado Benítez in Las Tunas. The jury praised the work for its conceptual and visual handling of the theme “Museos uniendo un mundo dividido,” especially the way it linked memory, heritage, technology and society. That choice fit the broader tone of the day: museums as active spaces in a country trying to connect history with present-day debate, not as silent storehouses.
Sonia Pérez, president of the National Council of Cultural Heritage, used the occasion to note that the year also marked the 80th anniversary of the International Council of Museums. That anniversary gave the celebration extra weight, especially with International Museum Day observed every year on May 18 and originally established by ICOM in 1977. UNESCO describes the day as a chance to highlight museums as places of dialogue, education, cultural continuity and peacebuilding, and the 2026 theme, “Museums Uniting a Divided World,” matched the Cuban program closely.
Cuba had already been building toward the observance with a national program previewed on May 7 and then outlined again on May 13 as a nationwide, multidisciplinary effort under the same slogan. The Museo Casa Natal Juan Manuel Márquez, founded on October 20, 1989, and the Museo Municipal de Playa, founded on January 25, 2002, fit that model well: preserve, investigate, conserve, exhibit and animate community heritage. That is the real story behind the awards in Havana, Santiago de Cuba and Las Tunas, and it is why the museums drawing attention now are the ones already working like public classrooms.
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