Casa de África
Colonial townhouse turned ethnographic museum, its rooms filled with sacred and everyday objects from across the African continent.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Casa de África in Havana opens with a young Havana lawyer named Fernando Ortiz, who in 1906 published a book branding Afro-Cuban priests as criminals and arguing their sacred objects should be locked away in museums as evidence. It follows how Ortiz spent the decades that followed completely changing his mind, eventually coining the term transculturation to describe how African, Spanish and Indigenous strands wove into Cuban culture. You'll hear about the colonial townhouse on Calle Obrapía that became this museum in 1986, filled with pieces gathered from across the African continent. Climb the stairs slowly, the story changes room by room.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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