Bernardino Palacios: Trinidad, Cuba: Please help!

I am at my wit's end here. I know there are answers, but I'm having a very difficult time finding them. I don't have the money for a professional genealogist to help me, so here to hoping someone else can help me get even a little bit farther is the quest for my GGG-Grandfather! This particular person is very close to my heart, because one of my favorite relatives was his daughter and she spent her life searching for him after he left and I've never been able to find her answer.

Bernardino Palacios
Born: 28, May, 1839
   Trinidad, Cuba

Those are his basic details. His middle name looks as if it start with a P. I have a photograph of their wedding certificate, which I think was filled out later and kept in a family bible and it mentions his name as "Bernardino P Palacios". At some point in his life he moved to Portland, Maine where he married Mary Barney and worked as a "machinist". This is the 1860 census. In the 1870 census they appear in Philadelphia. Sometime after that they arrived to Colorado. The last document I found with him in is in a petition for land in Colorado. There were no exact dates on it, just a group of years. After this he disappears. According to a few different descendants I've come across, they have a similar story that he returned to Cuba. Some speculate that was put into prison once he arrived. We have no absolute truths though as to what happened to him. My gg-grandmother spent her life trying to find him and was apparently sending money to a church who told her they knew where he was and that they would help her, but they ended up taking a lot of money and never giving her any results. Now, I've been told on different occasions that the church was in Cuba and then on another occasion that it was in Spain. It was most likely in Cuba and the Spain part could have been from the fact that it's been passed down that he was of Spanish decent. Some say his family owned a plantation and he was shunned after marrying in the Protestant church because they were Catholic. That's hard to say, but out of all the family photographs and portraits I've gone through, I've found many friends and relatives, including one portrait of Bernardino himself, but none of any family member that could help me track where he came from or where he could have gone. I know that by the 1910 census his wife is shown living without him. I have not been able to find her in between 1860-1910. Though I did manage to find a document once that was not saved, it was an Adams County, Colorado census, I believe and their last names was spelled really different: Palatins or Palatians or something really off like that. I was able to see it was them by their names and date of birth, etc..

Another interesting fact: the name Juan pops up over and over. I find others who have listed him as Juan Bernardino Palacios, but I've never found any evidence that this was his name. On the back of the portrait I have uploaded, it does mention it, which I found interesting. But Bernardino P Palacios doesn't seem to be related to Juan, so what's the deal? I don't know! But many people seem to think there was a Juan in front of his name!

If anyone has any advice, can find anything or anything I would really appreciate it.