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03/15/13 - WALL STREET JOURNAL - Got a Question About Cuban Snails? 

Take a Peek in Mr. Cueto's Hall

Havana Émigré Builds One-Man Smithsonian to Homeland in a Washington
Apartment By NICHOLAS CASEY

WASHINGTON-In this collection of Cuban artifacts, the porcelain is from
Holland and Spain, the antique books from colonial Havana. Ignore the
toothbrush though-that's from the corner store just down the street.

This is the home of Havana-born Emilio Cueto, a retired lawyer who once
wrote (and starred in) a one-man play on Cuban history. For decades, he has
been setting his sights on another project: Becoming a one-man Smithsonian
of the island-albeit one in exile.

No one, not even Mr. Cueto, 69 years old, can put a figure on how many
newspapers, biographies, musical scores, maps, menus, coins, school
yearbooks, slang lexicons, tobacco tins, perfume bottles and gunpowder
holders made of animal horns inhabit this apartment-and the adjoining one
that he took over in the 1990s in order to expand. The place is known as
the Emilioteca, the name a late friend of Mr. Cueto's gave it to honor its
curator.

Emilio Cueto looks through the book section of his Cuban collection.
[caption]

A dozen rooms have shelves looking much like ordinary library stacks. There
is a digitized card catalog. There is a closet containing sizable holdings
on Cuban law. A kitchen cabinet lacks food but has just about every
cookbook that can be found on Cuban cuisine.

"I am fully aware that it is not easy to describe my collection or assign
it a generic name. What is 'it'?" asks Mr. Cueto. "I am not sure there is
any good answer."

The bedroom is filled with histories of Cuba, manila folders of files on
Cuban Catholic clergy going back centuries-and a very small bed. Mr. Cueto
sleeps there; few traces that this is a home exist elsewhere.

It isn't clear just where Mr. Cueto's obsession comes from. In some ways,
he is trying to capture a kind of Cuban essence that his island can't
anymore. Poverty has left many treasures up for sale on the streets. Aging
revolutionaries proclaim that Cuban history really began in 1959. "There
are five centuries of history in Cuba," Mr. Cueto says.

Mr. Cueto is tied up a bit in that history, too. He was born in Cuba, but
was spirited away to Miami under the Central Intelligence Agency's
Operation Peter Pan, when parents sent 14,000 Cuban children away to the
U.S. fearing life under Fidel Castro. "There were years in Cuba when the
officials would go into the art museums and take away all the paintings of
those who left Cuba. So I decided I would do the opposite-everything is
welcome here and nothing is not."


A Trip to Cuba, From Emilio's Rooms

Take a virtual tour to Emilio Cueto's vast Cuban history collection.

Snails are welcome. He gestures to a jar of colorful shells in a hallway
from an endangered gastropod found only in the hills around the isolated
Cuban coastal town of Baracoa and whose scientific name is Polymita picta.
These snails were first described by a Transylvanian scientist named Ignaz
Edler von Born in the 1780s. Mr. Cueto proudly notes a recent article he
published about their mysterious appearance in nine still-life paintings by
Dutch masters a century before that.

"My article was, for sure, the best thing that was written on that
particular topic," he says.

If Mr. Cueto wants an object for the Emilioteca, he usually gets it. When
Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuban economist who lives much of the time in
Pittsburgh, tried to get his hands on an old map of the island at a print
shop in Brussels, it went roughly like this: "I asked the seller how much
he wanted for it," Mr. Mesa-Lago recalls. "And he said he was sorry, but
the map was reserved for the Cueto Museum in Washington."

Mr. Mesa-Lago, a friend of Mr. Cueto's for decades, didn't mind though.
"Emilio deserved the map," he said. "He is an obsessive man, but he is a
humanist."

Mr. Cueto, who started collecting in his teens, never married or had
children to carry on his project. He says his goal for posterity is to
bring his collection back to the island if one day it is possible to return
there with it.

"So people will know what an impact this little island has had on the world
outside in the arts, in music, in literature. Little things no one thought
to see. But I saw them," he says. "Back to Cuba, that is my next move."

While it is many things, the Emilioteca isn't open to the public. Most
neighbors have never been inside and the attendant in the front lobby only
has a vague notion that "there's some kind of library up in there, I hope
he's insured." Asked if he would open his doors to a reporter and
photographer, Mr. Cueto initially declined, saying he feared being deluged
by "requests from all over."

But after some more prodding, Mr. Cueto changed his mind, and on a chilly
Thursday, he put on his best tropical shirt with a Cuban print on it, drank
a cafe cubano-essentially a sweet espresso-and headed to work at a small
computer sitting by his collection of Cuban menus.

"Dear Señor Cueto," began an email from an art history professor in
Florida. The scholar was looking for the dimensions of a lithograph by
Pierre Toussaint Fréderic Mialhe, a 19th-century Frenchman who traveled
around the island to create scenes of daily Cuban life.

The professor was in luck. Mr. Cueto has authored a catalog of Mialhe
lithographs and has a wide-ranging collection of prints. In fact, he owns
perhaps the largest collection of Mialhe's sketches transferred onto
porcelain dishware, which occupy shelves on two walls of his dining room.

Later, he remembers the day an antiquarian in Barcelona called him to say
there was an orphaned box of Cuban miscellanea that was available. An
intended original buyer had run out of money and the seller wanted to know
if Mr. Cueto wished to claim the items for himself. "My God, I thought.My
God, oh my God, you would not believe this!"

Was the collection valuable? Mr. Cueto shrugs.

"Not really. But I didn't know it existed. The universe was X. Now it was X
+ 1."

Write to Nicholas Casey at nicholas.casey@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 15, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S.
edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Got a Question About
Cuban Snails? Take a Peek in Mr. Cueto's Hall.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Ri