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News > Latin America

The House Of The Guayabera Reopens In Cuba After Restorations

  • Fidel Castro wearing a guayabera

    Fidel Castro wearing a guayabera | Photo: http://www.escambray.cu/

Published 25 June 2018
Opinion

The museum holds hundreds of historical guayabera traditional shirts, among them those worn by Fidel Castro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Hugo Chavez.

The House of the Guayabera, which holds the island’s largest collection of the traditional white men’s shirt, reopens its doors after the neoclassic property was repaired.  

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The director of the museum, Carlo Figueroa, said that the most important change made to the mansion was the add-on to a room that houses a temporary exhibit of some 250 guayaberas.

Visitors can now watch as a guayabera is made and learn more about the history of the shirt that is now worn throughout the Caribbean but is thought to have originated in Cuba.

What remains in the museum is its in-depth collection of guayaberas worn by former Cuban president, Fidel Castro, Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning writer, Miguel Angel Asturias, and the guayaberas of former presidents Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa.

Figueroa tells Prensa Latina that the museum will eventually dedicate space to celebrating bolero and rock music and will open a ‘Lourdes Caro’ room in tribute to the singer and composer born in Sancti Spiritus, where the museum is located.

The guayabera museum has been safeguarding the traditional guayabera, declared in 2010 as a garment of ceremonial diplomacy by the Cuban government.

Among the shirt’s characteristics of rigor, the guayabera has two vertical rows of tightly sewn pleats along the length of the front and back of the shirt, and are made of linen, silk, or cotton edges and openings that distinguish it from a common shirt.

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