Oscar B. Cintas

Oscar B. Cintas, born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, in 1887, 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 and the American Locomotive Sales Corporation, and had business interests in Europe.

As a patron of the arts and with the advice of the legencary Alfred H. Barr Jr., Mr. 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. Mr. Cintas also collected manuscripts, and his acquisitions included the sole first edition of Cervantes’ Don Quijote, and the fifth and final manuscript of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, once owned by the family of Col. Alexander Bliss, and known as the Bliss copy. Mr. 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. The manuscript, the only one to which Lincoln added his signature, is exhibited in the Lincoln Room of the White House.