The National Museum of the Slave Route was located in the famous Castillo de San Severino on June 16, 2009, in Matanzas, Cuba, and arose as a result of a project known as the Slave Route Project, an initiative of Haiti already the one that other countries joined that, in their deepest roots, carry the African traditions and today it is part of their identity.
The Museum of the Slave Route of Matanzas aims to show the world the horrors of slavery of an era that marked American history and in turn reflect everything that Africans bequeathed to us: art, culture, customs and traditions that are now part of each one of us.
The interior of the Museum
The Slave Route has managed to rescue the history of African slavery and the broad cultural and religious legacy that came from that continent and that today is part of the Cuban ideology.
The place, the first of its kind in America, has four permanent exhibition rooms in which archaeological pieces, photographs and texts, reflect with vestiges of pain all that these men lived, stripped of their life in their native Africa and forced here to do heavy work.
The exhibition rooms are, the House of the Commended, Archaeological Presentation, of slavery and of the Orishas and they house pieces, photographs and belongings that add to the history and enhance the cultural heritage of Cuba today.
During the museum's opening ceremony, Miguel Barnet, president of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), affirmed that Cuba without black people would not be Cuba, and that:
"We must keep in mind the deep mark left by men and women who, bound by thick chains, arrived on our shores, never to return to their lands, their families and their cultures."
Slave Route Project
Courage, strength and rebellion are qualities that the project of The slave route in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, whose objective is to address the phenomenon of the slave trade, as well as to assess the impact of the cultural mix that led to the African footprint in these lands.
The Project was born as an initiative of Haiti and other African countries, with the name of the Slave Route, a project sponsored by UNESCO and the World Tourism Organization emerged in 1994.
Cuba, which has in itself a great African witness since colonial times, joined the project with the support of prestigious institutions such as the Fernando Ortiz Foundation, the Cuban Commission for UNESCO and the National Council for Cultural Heritage.
And united the different countries, they achieved that the slave trade and slavery were recognized as a Crime against humanity by the United Nations in 2001 during the World Conference against Racism in Durban and that the African cultural and religious heritage was also cultivated as a heritage immaterial of the world.
