#Havana500…. A majestic gift for the wonder city (+ Photos)

When I was little, I heard a lot about the adjective majestic, refering to The Capitol Building. Although I had visited it before, the reminisce of that monument was quite vague; so, taking the advantage of its recent opening, after a deep process of restoration, I ventured to revisit it.

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27 de julio de 2019 - By Elizabeth Cabrera Morejón

When I was little, I heard a lot about the adjective majestic, refering to The Capitol Building. Although I had visited it before, the reminisce of that monument was quite vague;  so, taking the advantage of its recent opening, after a deep process of restoration, I ventured to revisit it.

Humans live of expectations. If these are surpassed by reality, the sensation is so rewarding that it fills us with life. Thus, it happened
to this reporter as I walked through the  Lost Steps Hall, and anxiously photographed every detail, while descending the 55 step staircase that returns us to Havana. Because being inside the Capitol is like entering the closet that leads us to Narnia; it is traveling in time, living the past and the future at the same time.

The project to create this building, which is often compared to that one in United States even if it is not a replica of it, began in April 1926 during the Gerardo Machado administration, and its construction was
supervised by the Purdy and Henderson American firm. The construction of this monument of more than 200 per 92 meters (681per 300 feet) took more than 5000 workers, 3 years, 3 months, 20 days and approximately 17 million US dollars, a figure rewarded by the fact that in 1929, when the work was completed, and until the 1950s, The Capitol was the tallest building of all in San Cristóbal village.

The Tomb of the Unknown Mambi, one of the outstanding places of the National Capitol is a vaulted room located just below the roundabout of the Lost Steps Hall, "coinciding, on the vertical axis, the center of
the dome, the diamond and the bronze and marble eternal flame which crowns the enclosure. The Tomb is a marble stone where symbolically rests one of the expressions of the moral, political and historical
principle of the nation".

Among the most attractive elements of the emblematic building we find its dome, a work by architect Eugenio Rayneri Piedra, who inspired himself on the Paris Pantheon. This is covered by stone around a steel frame built in the United States, showing the shields of the former six Cuban provinces. The Capitol houses among its halls the third largest indoor statue of the world, only surpassed by the Nara Buddha of Japan and the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington. The Statue of the Republic, weighing 49 tons and 14.60 meters high, represents a young woman standing still, dressed with a tunic, a helmet, shield and spear, sculpted by the Italian Angelo Zanelli, who inspired on Athena -the Greek goddess of wisdom- and on Lily Valty -a native Cuban who served as a model. Covered with a 22 carat gold leaf, the statue was cast in bronze, into three pieces bronze, in Rome, and was introduced in the building after its arrival in Cuba.

The Zero Kilometers Mark of the National Highway, the starting point of the country's higways, is represented by a diamond (a 25 carat gold leaf replica), embedded on the floor in the middle of the main room. “"The original diamond, which is said to have belonged to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and sold to the Cuban State by a Turkish merchant, was stolen on March 25, 1946, and mysteriously returned to President Ramón Grau San Martín, on 2 June of the same year". 

The famous Lost Steps Hall, named like that by its acoustic properties and not by the popular belief of an invisible presence of some entity having lost its course, stands out by its eclectic style, beauty and
building features. Its marble floor with inlay work and golden lamps, lead to two semicircle chambers that formerly hosted the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives. Depending on how the guided tour begins, either at the entrance or the exit, we may be impressed by the stairway, the thousands of tourists, Havana inhabitants and Cubans in general, who wait at the bottom of the building to take a snapshot or make a selfie.

"On both sides at the end of the staircase there are two bronze sculptural groups with granite pedestal (also by Zanelli), one male and the other female, with a 6.70 meter high, representing The Work, a progress of the human activity and The Virtue guard of the town". Since 2013, the Cuban government has been restoring the building to become it the seat of the Cuban National Parliament, which has made the
building recover the beauty of its façade and reaffirms it as one of the most emblematic Cuban sites, one more gift for this city on its 500th anniversary.

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