The Provincial Museum of Cienfuegos: Documentary Reservoir of Masonic Collections (1819-1933)

Abstract

The objective of this research was to determine the presence or not in the collection of the Provincial Museum of Cienfuegos of documents due, directed or linked to local, provincial and national personalities with Masonic affiliation, in the midst of a historical context in which some of the fundamental economic, ideological, political, social and cultural national, regional and local processes of the period took place, which spans from the founding of the initial Colonia Fernandina de Jagua in 1819 to 1933. The significance sociocultural existence of the Provincial Museum of Cienfuegos is reaffirmed by the quantity and quality of its collections. In the qualitative research, methods such as analytical-synthetic, with a predominance of heuristics, and deductive-inductive, among others, were basically used. The presence of two hundred of his documents, randomly selected from all those stored in the funds of said institution, was confirmed in about thirty of them, a trace of the activity and presence of Freemasonry and Freemasons in the city of the same name. It was concluded that the funds of the Provincial Museum of Cienfuegos keep a significant trace of the work of local, regional and national Masonic figures, consistent with the levels of activity of said institution at those levels. By extension, it is considered that museum collections should be considered by researchers of Freemasonry, given the revealed possibility that their collections contain primary and secondary sources of and about it.