The Maine Monument (Malecón y Calle 17) was dedicated by the republican Cuban government to the memory of the 260 sailors who died when the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898, creating a prelude for U.S. intervention in the Wars of Independence.

Two rusting cannons tethered by chains from the ship’s anchor are laid out beneath 40-foot-tall Corinthian columns dedicated in 1925 and originally topped by an eagle with wings spread wide. Following the Revolution, the monument was a point for anti-Yankee rallies.

Immediately after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960, it was desecrated by an angry mob that toppled the eagle from its roost and broke its wings—its body is now in the Museum of the City of Havana, while the head hangs on the wall of the cafeteria in the U.S. Interests Section. The Castro government later dedicated a plaque that reads, “To the victims of the Maine, who were sacrificed by imperialist voracity in its eagerness to seize the island of Cuba.”