The bag belonged to Juan Carlos Abrantes, one of the sons of Juan Abrantes, who was chief of Fidel Castro’s security guards and later the head of the Ministry of Interior.

2025.1

Belonged to Juan Carlos Abrantes.

MAKER: Unknown; handmade. The bag is hand-worked in yarn. No maker's mark or label is visible. DATE / PERIOD: Not marked; undetermined. The materials and style are consistent with a mid-to-late twentieth-century date, but nothing on the object fixes it. ORIGIN: Not established from the object. The banded geometric style reads as Latin American/Andean folk textile, but that is a stylistic impression, not evidence of where this piece was made; no origin mark is present.

28.5 x 17

28.5 cm

17 cm

1

Thread

MATERIALS: Yarn — most likely wool or an acrylic/wool blend given the banded colorwork; possibly cotton. TECHNIQUES: A hand-worked textile in colored bands. The dense, slightly raised banding and dotted rows are consistent with crochet, though tight multicolor stranded knitting can look similar, so the structure (interlocking loops of crochet versus rows of knit stitches) should be confirmed on the object. The patterning is carried in horizontal color bands with small repeating motifs.

Good

This is a hand-worked, brightly banded pouch-form bag whose visual style belongs to the Latin American/Andean folk-textile family — horizontal pattern bands of geometric and dotted motifs in red, black, orange, cream, and white. That stylistic placement is an impression to test, not a determination of origin, since such patterning has been widely imitated and the object carries no mark. The provenance recorded with the object is its most significant feature.