Museo Nacional de Historia Natural

This guide to the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Havana centers on Polymita picta, Cuba's brilliantly striped painted snail, and the naturalists obsessed with it, from Felipe Poey, who gave the museum its early name, to the Galician collector Patricio Paz y Membiela, whose forty-thousand-specimen hoard was bought by Spain's national science museum in 1873. It also follows the shell's darker trade, including a 1942 estimate of more than half a million snails leaving Cuba every year for tourist necklaces. Look closely at the colors banded onto a single shell in the mollusk hall as you listen.