Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba

In this article, I utilize assemblage theory to analyze the 35-year attempt to “save” one of Old Havana’s main squares, the Plaza Vieja, by remaking it into a traditional plaza and upholding it as a marker of Cuban patrimony and national identity. In doing so, I examine the role of heritage as a “mediator” that both configures and is shaped by human interactions. The process of assembling heritage sites, I argue, sets up new associations between heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things—including materials like buildings, documents, maps, and plans—which as part of the network of associations gain the ability to make other members of the network do unexpected things. I examine this process of reassemblage in two historical stages. These include: a socialist stage (1979–1992) in which the Cuban state promoted local history and traditional architecture alongside the classless, egalitarian dimensions of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary identity; and a post-Soviet phase (1993–2015), in which the reconstruction of the Plaza as an early 19th century square reflects a broader ideological shift that emphasizes local identity and colonial history in lieu of a de-emphasized Marxism-Leninism. The article concludes by examining how power operates through assemblages and questions their potential to become fixed as more stable apparatuses that contribute to processes of subjectification.