Cuban Scientist Gilberto Silva Taboada Dies

January 17, 2022

The prominent Cuban researcher, Gilberto Silva Taboada, passed away on January 16, 2022. With a long and fruitful scientific career marked by relevant contributions to Cuban mammalogy, especially in the Order of Chiroptera, as well as in cave fauna, and in the museology of Cuban natural history. Silva recently received the National Cultural Heritage Award 2021.

Taboada was a founding member of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, and member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which granted him an Honorary Doctorate in 2016, of the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, of the Speleological Society of Cuba and curator emeritus of the National Museum of Natural History. He was a recipient of the Carlos Juan Finlay Order, the highest decoration conferred by the Council of State in the scientific sphere.

A possessor of encyclopedic knowledge about Cuban and Caribbean fauna, Dr. Silva Taboada treasured a vast bibliographic output expressed in hundreds of publications. With a long scientific output expressed in dozens of publications, his three classic works stand out for what they represent for Cuban zoology and the hemisphere: The Bats of Cuba, Synopsis of Cuban Cave Fauna and Compendium of Living and Extinct Cuban Land Mammals.

Likewise, his contributions to the museology of natural history are also notable, especially in the theoretical-practical area of exhibition creation and audience studies.

Born in Havana on November 21, 1927, Silva Taboada was among the group of founding scientists and intellectuals, in February 1962, of the National Commission of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba (ACC), presided over by geographer and captain of the Rebel Army Antonio Núñez Jiménez.

He was part of the Management Board of the then-called Cuban Museum of Natural Sciences, today the National Museum of Natural History of Cuba, serving there as curator and researcher of merit for more than five decades.