HAVANA BEYOND THE RUINS

Cultural Mappings after 1989

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5052-1

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixIntroduction: Beyond the Ruins ANKE BIRKENMAIER AND ESTHER WHITFIELD………………………………………………………………………..11. Visits to a Non-Place: Havana and Its Representation(s) VELIA CECILIA BOBES……………………………………………………………….152. The Bitter Trinquennium and the Dystopian City: Autopsy of a Utopia MARIO COYULA…………………………………………………………..313. Barbacoas: Havana’s New Inward Frontier PATRICIO DEL REAL AND JOSEPH SCARPACI……………………………………………………………..534. The “Slums” of Havana JILL HAMBERG……………………………………………………………………………………………………735. Havana and Its Landscapes: A Vision for Future Reconstruction of Cuban Cities NICOLÁS QUINTANA………………………………………….1066. The Illegible City: Havana after the Messiah RAFAEL ROJAS……………………………………………………………………………….119Havana: A Photo-Essay ORLANDO LUIS PARDO LAZO…………………………………………………………………………………………….1357. The City in Midair EMMA ÁLVAREZ-TABÍO ALBO……………………………………………………………………………………1498. Made in Havana City: Rap Music, Space, and Racial Politics SUJATHA FERNANDES………………………………………………………………1739. Urban Performance Pieces in Fragmented Form: A Reading of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Antonio José Ponte CECELIA LAWLESS…………………18710. Topographies of Cosmonauts in Havana: Proyecto Vostok and Insausti’s Existen JACQUELINE LOSS……………………………………………….20911. Touring Havana in the Work of Ronaldo Menéndez LAURA REDRUELLO……………………………………………………………………..22912. La Habana: City and Archive ANTONIO JOSÉ PONTE……………………………………………………………………………………24913. Bitter Daiquiris: A Crystal Chronicle JOSÉ QUIROGA………………………………………………………………………………..270Glossary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………287References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….297Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..315Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………319

Chapter One

Visits to a Non-Place: Havana and Its Representation(s)

VELIA CECILIA BOBES Translated by Elisabeth Enenbach

If the notion of a city first implies the idea of the citizen and cohabitation in a physically delimited space, no less important is its reference to a civic imaginary and the symbolic construction of the city itself. The representations of the city, along with the memories and dreams that are produced in and by it, constitute the city itself and are expressed as the familiar, everyday narratives of its inhabitants. Such narratives are fostered by symbolic representations of life in the city, as well as of political, economic, and physical and spatial relationships that constitute the everyday goings-on of the urban citizen. All of this appears in the writings, speeches, and the specific imaginary of every moment in every city.

Practices and their symbolic representations interact in a continuous process of feedback that contributes to the configuration of social meanings associated with the city. At the same time, the city is represented as an object and as a place of action, integrating—together with a sense of spatiality—a vision of temporality (past, present, future). This temporality, inasmuch as it incorporates the expectations of its subjects and future projects, relates the representation of the city with models of (social and political) action.

The city, then, as it can be seen here, is more than a physical space inhabited by people and groups who selectively appropriate its places; it is also a setting for language, evocation, and writing, a representation of the topographical and the human, of the space and its inhabitants: “the real part of a city is not just its economy, urban planning, or social conflicts, but also the imagined images that are constructed from these phenomena, as well as what is imagined outside of them, as a narrative exercise, as representations of its spaces and writings” (Silva 1992, 135). From this perspective, it is possible to see Havana as a “memory-city” (Augé 1995), a space (physical and symbolic at the same time) that is built upon collective memory and representations of its history. Such representations are simultaneously given on two levels: on the one hand, in the appropriation and modifications of its physical space; and, on the other, in the speech and narratives of its inhabitants. Thus, since the Havana that is shown today in literature, film, the visual arts, and the speech of its residents constitutes a “non-place” of civic and public space, the first question that presents itself to the researcher is how did this representation come about.

The answer to this question is not easy and entails a long genealogy that involves political rhetoric and decisions as well as its residents’ practices and imaginaries. The current image of the city can be said to be constructed upon a landmark moment of (re)foundation that radically modifies the previous representation; that representation, in turn, constitutes the minimum base for understanding the present.

The city and the perception of it reflect social intentions that are projected in the speech of its protagonists: in the case of Havana, the production of a particular sense of what today is urban or habanero comes from a lengthy process of selection and legitimation that originates, for the most part, in political discourse. The territorial self-representation reveals political strategies and perspectives about social life, also implying deep ties between these spheres (Silva 1992).

The social construction of an imaginary around the production of an urban sensibility, of a feeling of the city, is constantly updated through the different axes of mental maps representing the city’s space: inside and outside, public and private, center and periphery, interior and exterior, before and after (Silva 1992). Of all of these axes, none determines the makeup of Havana’s imaginary as much as the narrative and visual order of before and after; the rest of its dimensions are reshaped based upon these. Just as in other cities, self-representation endures some natural disaster (the earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City), some fatal accident (the Great Chicago Fire), or the implantation of urban models (Haussman in Paris)—for Havana, the parting of the waters occurred with the revolution in 1959. This moment defines a before and after in Havana. As we will see, this (before and after) axis leads to the transformation of representation on the rest of the city’s planes of meaning.

Political discourse and the practice of power are at the center of this reconfiguration of the urban imaginary. As I have argued in previous works (Bobes 2000), no speech has been of greater influence, nor more monopolizing of the social imaginary, in post-1959 Cuba than political rhetoric. Havana, as an imagined and real city, has been the center of many texts produced for and by it, texts of the most diverse natures (literary and artistic, colloquial speech, and urban legends), but if any discourse has been central for the representation of the revolutionary city, it would be the political discourse emanating from power—so much so that it can be said that it has managed to modulate, upon occasion, the rest of the city’s discourses and representations.

It is well known that the new revolutionary power declared from the beginning that the revolution’s objective transcended the defeat of Batista’s dictatorship and proposed to transform Cuban society to build a “better society”—one that was defined at the beginning in a rather abstract way. It entailed “overcoming the ills of the past” to guarantee a “greater happiness” for citizens. The Moncada program outlined a proposal for social change in terms of eliminating large plantations, unemployment, and the backwardness of the economy and, similarly, within the general framework of a program of industrialization, the defense of national products, the improvement of public administration, and an increase in technology. The first measures the government took were salary increases, the First Agrarian Reform of 1959, Law 135, which lowered rents by 50 percent and then led to the Urban Reform Law.

The justification of these nationalist plans for social justice was presented in the rhetoric as a fight to clean up the past and achieve a better society. In one of his speeches in the early years, Fidel Castro asked, “how are we as a people going to resign ourselves to that past of horror, that past of crime, that past of immorality, that past of abuse, that past of theft, that past of hunger, that past without hope, that past of submission?” (Castro 1960, 18). Within this panorama, the city of Havana appeared as the principal embodiment of the vices and problems that formed an obstacle for the desired society. In this new discourse, the city was represented as an environment of inequality, vice (gambling, prostitution), frivolity, and the reign of political and social corruption. The chosen discursive strategy depended upon showing the sharp contrast between the capital city, where all the modernity, political power, entertainment, glamour, prosperity, and development was concentrated (as is the case in the majority of Latin American capital cities), and the misery, underdevelopment, and helplessness of its rural countrymen. This begins to legitimate an investment strategy for development outside of the city.

The revolutionary government had to concentrate its efforts on making productive investments and on the development of the countryside. To support this decision, Fidel Castro said: “And it is not logical that the revolution would invest its resources, especially the resources it has in the midst of the embargo, to build small palaces, that it would invest them to bring in luxury cars, to maintain that whole bourgeois façade that is still maintained in our country and especially in the capital” (Castro 1960, 27). Affirmations such as this one decisively influenced the transformation of the city’s representation. A city that had been the pride of the nation during most of its history—for its architecture, its layout, its works of engineering, its modern technology, and its nightlife—will begin to be the living image of injustice, no more than a “bourgeois façade” to cover up the exploitation and backwardness of the rest of the country:

The revolution was not going to buy perfumes from Paris with the foreign exchange it needs to buy materials to fix the teeth of our nation’s peasants! No, the façade of the country had to change, the façade of luxury, the façade that revealed the life of that minority that always looked elegant, always gave parties, always went for trips inside and outside of the country in luxury cars, that façade had to change so that our country could acquire the appearance of a nation of workers, of a country of workers, of a nation without parasites, of a nation without exploiters nor the exploited. (Castro 1960, 27)

Now that the new society should be based on the responsibility and commitment of its members, the archetype of the urban subject is radically modified. As such, the city’s inhabitants suddenly saw themselves obligated to reformulate their place in history and, consequently, their own representation of the city. Against the frivolous, ludic, and elegant subject that had prevailed as the archetype of the habanero in the imaginary of the 1950s, the revolution would impose a proletarian Havana inhabited by the hombre nuevo (new man).

The glamorous Havana of the 1950s with its high-end shops, mansions, cabarets, and all of its great tourist attractions—the city portrayed in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers)—would become the antithesis of the better society; what is more, it is presented as a hindrance to development and social justice, as a remnant of the past. This is a starting point for a double symbolic and material process. On the one hand, the city is symbolically identified as the epitome of the worst aspects of the past, and on the other, its old splendor, far from making one proud, makes one ashamed and requires decisive action to be transformed.

Diverse actions are taken with the objective of getting rid of all of that, of ending the protagonism and centrality of the capital city. On the symbolic plane, images of change are disseminated: the people destroying the parking meters installed by the Batista government, or the gambling machines at the casinos; the guajiros invading the city to participate in the first big revolutionary gathering. On this occasion, for the first celebration of the twenty-sixth of July, one million farmers were invited to a massive event in Havana; messages, announcements, and posters appeared everywhere to welcome these “ambassadors of the authentic Cuba,” who momentarily populated the city (Guerra 2007). With this event, the inside and outside borders are changed, and the image of a guajira Havana multiplies, entering Cubans’ visual memory (for example, in Alberto Korda’s beautiful photo El Quijote de la farola [The streetlamp Quijote]).

At the same time, the old symbols of republican power are resemanticized. If before presidents had chosen public works in the city as their monumental objects, seeking to leave their imprimatur as the promoters of modernity and progress, then the new government takes recourse to the opposite strategy: it does not build palaces or buildings for its institutions; rather, it recycles those that already exist, erecting radical symbolic transformations instead of monumental works. At first barracks were transformed into schools (the most emblematic cases being the Oscar Lucero School City in the Fortress of Holguín and Ciudad Libertad in Columbia); the National Capitol, seat of the old legislative power, goes on to house the Cuban Academy of Sciences; the Presidential Palace is turned into the Museum of the Revolution; and the Civic Plaza built by Batista is transformed into the Plaza de la Revolución. Thus, the old physical space of politics is symbolically transmuted into the space of the revolution.

This strategy continues with the demolition of the statues on the Avenue of Presidents (which, years later, would exhibit at the top of Third Street the surprising image of a pair of bronze shoes, the only remains of what had been the statue dedicated to Tomás Estrada Palma), and the monument to the Maine loses its imperial eagle to symbolize the end of submission to the United States, the rejection of the old imagery of the relationship with our neighbor to the north.

Revolutionary Havana also transforms the boundaries between the public and the private; many of the great mansions abandoned by those who went into exile are turned into offices, schools, or lodgings for students from the countryside who are on scholarship; the old private clubs are opened to the public and become Workers’ Social Circles, with the most exclusive of all, the Country Club, turned into an area that houses the new National Schools of Art—open to the children of workers and farmers.

The process of the mass exodus of the upper and middle classes, produced in the early years of the revolution, also contributes to modifying the imaginary borders of the city in terms of interior and exterior relationships. Although the process involves the entire country, for Havana the emigration of a good part of its former inhabitants also signified the beginning of a relationship with its “mirror city,” Miami, where, ninety miles from the coast, those who left began to re-create and re-found the “lost city.” With that—and in a context of isolation, the end of tourism, prohibitions on temporarily leaving the country, and so on—imaginary relationships with the exterior are radically changed.

In the midst of this atmosphere, and with the escalation of the conflict with the United States, the National Revolutionary Militias are founded. The population is incorporated into them en masse, and constant military mobilizations surround events like the invasion of Playa Girón, the Missile Crisis, and other threats. Havana dresses in uniform, and traditional commercial propaganda is traded in for posters and slogans defending and reaffirming the nation and the revolution.

Finally, toward the end of the 1960s, Havana becomes ruralized. Extrapolating for the city what Fagen (1969) observed for the country, it can be said that after 1959 the hierarchies of social relations, habits, and manners of habaneros are reversed, and the new man liquidates the elegant bourgeois paradigm. Hence, while the use of private automobiles is anathema and use of the bus is encouraged, the city becomes a productive agricultural space with the Plan del Cord? de La Habana (Greenbelt Plan of Havana). Through large agricultural mobilizations and volunteer work on weekends, city dwellers also turn into producers and farmers.

Beginning in 1968, two other phenomena occur that transfigure the city: the Revolutionary Offensive in 1968 and The Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest. The first brings about the disappearance of the network of small commercial businesses, services, and so forth that were still in private hands. This is the culmination of the process of nationalization of the country’s economy, and with it the physical aspect of the city and the relationships of its inhabitants are changed (the neon lights of commercial advertisements are turned off, and neighborhood corners languish). In the meantime, with the objective of using the effort of the entire nation to reach ten million tons of sugar in the 1970 harvest, nightlife centers and restaurants are closed throughout 1968, 1969, and 1970, and the majority of “superfluous” activities are canceled to mobilize the majority of the capital’s students and workers for the agricultural labor of the harvest.

(Continues…)

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