Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 5

 5 “mejores ciudades, ciudadanos mejores” law and architecture in the cuban republic ◾ tiMOthy hyDe T he Patronato Pro-urbanismo (Pro-urbanism association), a civic group organized in cuba in 1942 to advocate for national planning legislation, adopted a succinct slogan: “mejores ciudades, ciudadanos mejores”— better cities, better citizens (figure 5.1). the phrase bound together formal order and social order, cleverly employing grammatical symmetry to construe a reciprocal relationship between cities and citizens in which the latter are both the consequence and the prerequisite of the former. after winning independence from spanish colonial rule, cuba had struggled to establish a stable political environment ; corruption, partisan factionalism and violence, economic volatility, and the hegemonic pressure of the united states all contributed to a persistent instability in cuban politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Professionals and intellectuals dismayed by the circumstances of civic life in cuba diagnosed cuba’s condition as a decline into decadence. in essays and lectures on history and culture they attempted to discern the causes of this decline, and through active associations they hoped to arrest and reverse its effects . one such association, the Junta cubana de renovación nacional, was created by the sociologist fernando ortiz in 1924 to advance proposals for social and political improvement, and its agenda for reform forged links between the disciplinary perspectives of such members as the writer Jorge mañach and the architect Pedro martínez inclán. three years later, another association similarly composite in its membership, the grupo minorista, announced an explicit conflation of the aesthetic and the political in its declaration advocating modernism in one passage and denouncing imperialism in the next. out of these and similar activities, a narrative of social amelioration and political reform developed  “meJores ciudades, ciudadanos meJores”  figure 5.1. cover of Patronato Pro Urbanismo de Cuba prospectus, 1942. timothy hyde  alongside a nascent modernism’s aesthetic of progress. But as this movement for civic reform gathered pace, so too did political violence that culminated in the revolution of 1933. President gerardo machado was forced to resign, his dictatorial regime besieged by an array of opponents and the threat of u.s. intervention, and the rival political groups that had fomented the opposition to his rule contested power through a succession of provisional governments. now, in the late 1930s, the creation of a stable political sphere would require a difficult consensus of partisan groups divided into factions along numerous fissures, such as social class and generational difference. By the time the Patronato Pro-urbanismo coined its slogan, efforts toward political reform overlapped extensively enough with movements in other cultural domains for its proposed conjunction of urban form and social effect to possess considerable plausibility. in 1940 the drafting of a new cuban constitution had catalyzed the participation of an array of cultural, professional, and intellectual fields in a common project: reconstructing the civic sphere of the nation. disciplines such as architecture, law, or philosophy were already embedded within the contours of civic life but with the promulgation of a new national charter, a new discursive mode became manifest in their debates and accords. this chapter identifies that discursive mode as “constitutionalism,” a conceptual form that enabled expressions of prerogative and assertions of legitimacy within any one discipline to be engaged with those of another and also to be positioned as constitutive aspects of the civic sphere. constitutionalism existed not independently but through its various invocations in the objects and practices that it sponsored: a civic group’s advocacy for national planning, a Pilot Plan for havana, an essay on legislation, or the 1940 constitution itself. each of these depended for its expansive significance on the adoption of constitutionalism as a mode that enabled an instrumental conflation of politics and aesthetics, and thus constitutionalism opens a perspective on the potential agency of architecture. “Better cities, better citizens” could have served as the slogan of a number of other tendencies that married reformist intention to urban space—hausmannization, the city Beautiful, and urban renewal, among others. the contextual surround of the Patronato Prourbanismo —the confluence of nationalism, history, modernism, and, above all, politics—produced a specific situation in which a slogan conveyed not only its overt meaning but also the means of its discursive formation. the constitution of a nation while cuba was still a spanish colony, José martí, the iconic figure of cuban independence, posited the conjunction of a projected...