AN "EXOTIC" ABROAD: MANUEL SERAFIN PICHARDO AND THE CHICAGO COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION OF 1893.

Cuban Manuel Serafín Pichardo, the author of "La ciudad blanca: crónicas de la Exposición Colombina de Chicago visits the Columbian Exhibition held in 1893 in Chicago. The list of Cuban entries awarded medals and certificates at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893 represents a similar mixture of the progressive and the exotic. Models of "hygienic" corsets, photographs detailing the work of the Sociedad Protectora de Niflos de La Havana and the Escuela Provincial de Artes y Oficios-both of them instances of the preoccupation with warehousing and employing "the deserving poor" so typical of late nineteenth century social thought and copies of such journals as "El Pro greso Medico" and "La Abeja Médica, shared space with studies on current methods of police investigation, pamphlets on the island's meteorological conditions, and naturally, archaeological treatises on Cuba's earliest inhabitants, although, unlike Mexico, Cuba could not put any such actual native inhabitants on display. In Pichardo's description of the contents of the eleven-acre behemoth that was the centerpiece of the Chicago Columbian Exhibition,