Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959

4 Public Works: Constructing the Urban Spaces of Civil Society

I n 1928 in Havana, in a small park ringed with palm trees and facing the south hemicycle of the Capitolio Nacional, a ceiba tree was planted and dedicated as the Árbol de la Fraternidad Americana (Tree of American Brotherhood ) to represent not only a union of nations, but the narrative of Cuba’s emergence into that community (Figure 4.1). It had been grown from a seed planted at ceremonies held in 1902 to inaugurate the new republic, a ritual that itself recalled the traditional founding of the city of Havana in 1519, the “tradition that, in the shade of the big ceiba that had been there before, the first mass and the first cabildo of the new city had been held.”1 The newest ceiba carefully placed within an urban landscape thus forged a lineage from the foundation of Havana, to the founding of the republic, to the entry of Cuba into the international community of American nations; it evoked also a parallel lineage of civil society, one whose significance varied as much as its visibility. The original ceiba tree had been located in Habana Vieja—a neoclassical pavilion called El Templete was built in 1828 to commemorate the spot—and in 1948, Bernaldo de Quirós revealed that that first tree had also served as an arbor infelix, a picota for the punishment of condemned slaves. In the eighteenth century, he wrote, the governor of Havana “erected, over the location of the old ceiba, . . . a commemorative column relating the historical complex with the memory of the dead ceiba (first mass, first cabildo, although these are hypothetical; real and e¤ective picota, supposed rollo jurisdiccional).”2 A picota was a post or stone column placed in the main plaza of colonial towns, used as a pillory and for capital punishments and serving as a symbol of the enforceable authority of the law. Subsequently described as 111 4 Public Works Constructing the Urban Spaces of Civil Society the rollo jurisdiccional, the stone column represented the law’s jurisdictional extent . Inheriting these significances, the successive markers described by Bernaldo de Quirós acted as condensations of the encompassing environment of civil society. The Árbol de la Fraternidad Americana, a living tree, was another such punctuation, a perpetuation and a constitutive act to be witnessed within a civic landscape, a landscape whose presence was only indicated by the tall circular railing of elaborately wrought iron that surrounded the ceiba, and a landscape which was itself the object of extensive processes of modernization that would also be drawn toward constitutionalism. By 1928, when the Árbol was dedicated, Havana had already undergone signi ficant transformation from its colonial form, with a pattern of growth established that would persist into the 1940s (Figure 4.2). The original walled district, known as Habana Vieja, occupied the projection of land facing the sheltered bay and its narrow entrance; the city’s nineteenth-century core, Centro Habana, had grown alongside, filling in the land outside the walls and establishing an urban edge on the northern coast. In the twentieth century, economic development had stimulated industrial growth, population increase, and real-estate speculation, 112 Public Works figure 4.1 Árbol de la Fraternidad Americana. Postcard, circa 1931. Author’s collection. which together had prompted further expansion in two cohesive fabrics of development that extended outward, one westward along the coast, and the other south, along the edge of the bay and reaching inland as the topography allowed. Between these two extensions, lying either side of the railway branch leading into the city, a large area of undeveloped land remained, some of which had been platted by American military engineers as part of infrastructural improvements carried out during the U.S. occupation. Continued expansion of the streets and blocks of the city both into this vacant area and still further along the western and southern arms was presumed by a few visionary plans of the future city: a thesis Public Works 113 figure 4.2 Map of Havana, 1940. Habana Vieja, the colonial quarter of the city, is in the foreground. Centro Habana is at the center of the map with the district of Vedado beyond at the upper right of the view. The undeveloped area within the city can be seen extending upward from the middle of the map. Courtesy of the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University. presented by Raúl Otero in 1905...