Oscar B. Cintas

Oscar Benjamin Cintas y Rodriguez, (31 Mar 1887 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba – 11 May 1957 in New York City, N.Y.) was a prominent sugar and railroad magnate who served as Cuba’s ambassador to the United States from 1932 until 1934.

He was educated in London and became director of the Cuban Railroad Company’s sugar mills in Punta Alegre, Jatibonico and Jobabo. He was president of Railroad Equipment of Brazil and Argentina, director of the American Car and Foundry Company and the American Locomotive Company and had business interests in Europe.

As a patron of the arts and with the advice of the legendary Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cintas assembled a collection of Old Masters and modern paintings that was once considered among the best in Latin America. In 1940, he lent one of the pieces from the collection, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Rabbi on a Wide Cap, to the "Masterpieces of Art" exhibition at the New York World’s Fair.

Bliss Copy
Cintas also collected manuscripts and his acquisitions included the only first edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the fifth and final manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s "Gettysburg Address", once owned by the family of Col. Alexander Bliss, and known as the "Bliss copy". Cintas’ purchase of the manuscript, for $54,000, in 1949, set a record at the time for the sale of a document at a public auction. Cintas' properties were claimed by the Castro government after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, but Cintas, who died in 1957, willed the Gettysburg Address to the American people, provided it was kept at the White House, to where it was transferred in 1959. The manuscript, the only one to which Lincoln added his signature, is exhibited in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

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