Three silver castles and a golden key on blue: the coat of arms of Havana put onto cloth, the symbol of the city since the 16th century.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
CivilFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.YesIt carries the coat of arms on the cloth.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a rectangular field with a 1:2 ratio, blue, with the figures of the city’s coat of arms: it is an armorial flag, the coat of arms put onto cloth.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
Every date in its story, at a glance.
It was already stamped on the wax seals of the cabildo, the old town council, between 1581 and 1588
In 1665 the regent queen Mariana of Austria confirmed to the city a coat of arms of ‘three castles…
Today’s drawing was approved by the city council on 11 November 1938
In 2010 the Museum of the City confirmed to the vexillologist Olivier Touzeau that the official…
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag on this page is the coat of arms of Havana put onto cloth: three silver castles in a row on blue and, below them, a golden key. It is the most repeated image of the Cuban capital, but it is not the only flag of the city.
The coat of arms is much older than any flag. It was already stamped on the wax seals of the cabildo, the old town council, between 1581 and 1588. In 1665 the regent queen Mariana of Austria confirmed to the city a coat of arms of ‘three castles and a key on a blue field’. Today’s drawing was approved by the city council on 11 November 1938, from a proposal by the historian Ezequiel García Enseñat.
Copying the inside of a coat of arms onto a cloth gives an armorial flag, like this one. The rule that approves it has not been found, nor the date it began to be used. In 2010 the Museum of the City confirmed to the vexillologist Olivier Touzeau that the official flag is another one: blue, ending in two points like a swallow’s tail, with the coat of arms in yellow, the inscription ‘La Ciudad de La Habana’ in white and a golden fringe.
No earlier versions of this armorial flag are known.
Blue
the sea of the Gulf of Mexico.
Three castles
according to the traditional explanation, the three forts that defended the port: the Real Fuerza, El Morro and La Punta.
Golden key
the strategic position of Havana, at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1634 a royal decree called Havana ‘Key of the New World and Antemural of the Western Indies’. An antemural is a forward wall that protects another: that is how the Crown saw the defensive role of the city.
Ezequiel García Enseñat, the historian who prepared the coat of arms of 1938, died on the eve of the city council approving it.
García Enseñat showed that a 19th-century colour version, which everyone took for the original coat of arms, was invented and had impossible details for its time.
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Text based on the article “Havana (Cuba) — Flags of the World” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
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