Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989

3. Barbacoas: Havana’s New Inward Frontier

................ 3 ................ Barbacoas: Havana’s New Inward Frontier patricio del real and joseph scarpaci The recent documentary Habana: Arte nuevo de hacer ruinas (Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins, 2006), by the German filmmakers Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler, examines the lives of habaneros inside the decaying buildings of a ruined city. The filmmakers bring to the foreground elegant works of eclectic architecture from the beginnings of the twentieth century that mirror the people living inside them. The Campoamor Theater, the Arbos Building, and the Hotel Regina serve as evocative spatial and figural backdrops for the personal narratives of Reinaldo, Magdalena, and Misleidys —local inhabitants who speak about leaving Cuba, death, history, decrepitude , beauty, resignation, resolver, and the overall sadness, which, in their view, envelops the city. As if these narratives were not enough, the filmmakers also deploy the Cuban writer and intellectual Antonio José Ponte, who serves as guide, interlocutor , and interpreter of the devastated landscape of the city alongside the personal narratives of common people. The presence of Ponte is crucial: his voice as an intellectual gives political meaning to the everyday narratives of average Cubans. In perhaps the most poignant of observations on the ruined condition of Havana, Ponte states: If in your private space you cannot rebuild what has fallen down, then you cannot do it any place else. That is why the rulers of the country have a purpose about these ruins: to show their subjects that they cannot change anything. If 54 patricio del real and joseph scarpaci you cannot renovate your house, you cannot renovate the kingdom. This private failure precedes public failure. And that spurs Cuban political discouragement , Cuban civil discouragement: the mindset that you cannot do anything about it. Let the buildings collapse, but you cannot change anything. And I think that has been the most important contribution of the revolution to urban thinking. The idea that nothing can be restored. Nothing can be repaired . Then the country cannot be repaired. Let it be. (Ponte in Borchmeyer 2006)∞ This is an insightful interpretation since it sees the ruined state of Havana as the morphological manifestation of the ideological manipulation of the city and its population by the power of the state. Ponte’s elucidation reminds us of the revolution’s distrust of the capital city, always depicted as more cosmopolitan than Cuban. Its ruined state is the punishment for its prerevolutionary success in the international concert of world cities. This is a discourse that the film systematically reinforces by the inclusion of black and white footage of late 1950s and early 1960s Havana and the music by La Lupe and others. The classic images of bars, beautiful women, and crowded streets were used in the beginnings of the revolution to construct a city of moral ruin, and they are now used in the film to construct a cosmopolitan city of beauty, wealth, and excitement that contrasts the current material ruin of Havana. The ruined city serves as a metaphor for the ruined political subject, which, as Ponte claims, cannot change anything. In the film, following Ponte, contemporary Havana is but a metaphor of the ruined lives of its inhabitants, ruined not because they lived in and among ruins, but because they are unable to rebuild themselves, their home, their city. These passive subjects, who escape only through dreams, nostalgia, or pets—like Omar and Totico who raise pigeons on the rooftop of the Arbos Building—are condemned to a static reality in which no meaningful emancipatory agency is possible. We believe that this notion of a passive subject is an ideological discourse supported by the misleading ideas of a heroic political subject, nostalgic views of a cosmopolitan capital city, and elite cultural perspectives. The film presents the harsh reality of everyday life in Havana, but it does so in an overly pessimistic way. By portraying its inhabitants as victims of a life in ruined houses, it casts a shadow over the entire city. We aim to bring to light another Havana, a city in which one can see, among the ruins, the melancholia of its people and the harsh reality of everyday living, not a happy, bright, and musical city but, rather simply, a city built by its inhabitants. barbacoas 55 A Complex Problem The question of minimal standards of inhabitation, defined either through biological, psychological, or rational means, frames the urban transformations brought about by the processes...