[a] A man so rich and powerful that, despite his ideas and pro Cuban views, Spain, far from punishing him, wanted to attract him with the offer of the title of marquis; Don Miguel refused.

In addition, there was another reason that prompted the most intransigent Spanish element, represented by the volunteers, to the looting of that mansion and was the insistent rumor that, by the will of its owner, that royal palace would be the residence of the future presidents of Cuba.

The looting of the Aldama Palace, three months after the start of the first war for independence, is linked to various events that took place under the command of Captain General Domingo Dulce y Garay, Marquis of Castell-Florit, whose main cause was the encounter between the Spaniards and the Cubans and the hostility that the volunteers felt for the ruler whom they held as weak, and whom they accused of complicity in events contrary to Spain, including, those of Miguel Aldama.

[2] Street riots had occurred on January 12 after the volunteers during a search had found a stash of weapons in a house on Calle Carmen during the burial of Camilo Cepeda, a young Cuban killed in jail.

In New York, Miguel Aldama assumed the direction of the General Agency of the Republic of Cuba in Arms and put at the service of his ideas what was left of his immense fortune.

After his death on April 11, 1870, a trial was commenced in Havana to determine if his heirs Miguel and Leonardo Aldama could inherit the property, it was an option denied by the colonial court, and as a result, the Aldana Palace passed on to the metropolitan government.

In 1932 after a bloody tobacco strike the company closed the building and in 1945 it was planned to be demolished; by protest of cultural and artistic societies, it was saved and declared a National Monument on June 9, 1949, by decree.

A few years later, when Del Monte was a twelve-year-old, his parents enrolled him into the Seminary of San Carlos, a catholic alma mater of Leonardo Gamboa in the novel Cecilia Valdés by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894).

The first house was designed by José Manuel Carrerá, an architect of Dominican origin and is linked to all his companies and the projects of the Alfonso family, which was his wife's, especially the railway network that both deployed in the province of Matanzas.

Las Cuevas Toraya notes that it is a masonry house, even the interior partitions, and draws attention to the main staircase, built with Carrara marble blocks, the treads are adjusted to each other without any added external support.

Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, generally rectangular cuboid, mentioned by Vitruvius as opus isodomum, or less frequently trapezoidal.