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7 The Experience of Civic Conscience: Designs for the Monumento a Marti
- University of Minnesota Press
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T he enactment of civil society undertaken by citizens during the republican period included both aªrmative and oppositional actions, the casting of ballots, for example, as well as participation in strikes. In the context of the revolutionary period that followed after 1959, the performances of civil society possessed a di¤erent valence entirely, bracketed by their political setting. As Fidel Castro would phrase it in a speech to intellectuals in the summer of 1961: “What are the rights of revolutionary or nonrevolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution: all; against the Revolution, none.”1 Immediately after Castro ’s coming to power, all of the institutions and mechanisms of civil society were scrutinized, challenged, manipulated, or abolished. The Junta Nacional de Plani ficación, for example, continued to operate, but with a new director, a changed mandate, and uncertain political sponsorship. Within such transformations, some considered and others capricious, the civic role of architecture was loosened from its prior foundations, yet it retained a relevance of civic connotation. One event might serve to illuminate the particular mutability of architecture’s role: organized by the church and held in Havana in November 1959, the Primer Congreso Católico Nacional began as thousands of participants arriving from around Cuba assembled in the vast space of the Plaza de la República—which would now be known as Plaza de la Revolución—to celebrate mass at a temporary altar designed by the architect Eugenio Batista. Above the crowd towered the newly completed Monumento a Martí, with its sculpture of the national hero. Here, conjoined acts of congregation marked a civil declaration of identity, prerogative, and desire on the part of the citizens who participated. Indeed, their participation as 213 7 The Experience of Civic Conscience Designs for the Monumento a Martí citizens was the salient gesture in an urban space and in front of an architectural monument designed to commemorate the possibility of Cuban citizenship by soliciting a focused civic attention. This monument was the belated result of Presidential Decree No. 1631 of June 2, 1937, which created the Comisión Central Pro-Monumento a Martí, an appointed body of government, military, and business leaders given responsibility for devising and executing a suitable national commemoration of José Martí. At its first meeting, the Comisión Pro-Monumento solicited and heard the opinions of prominent intellectuals and artists. Also in attendance was Colonel Batista, the authority behind the provisional government who was fawningly credited as the source of the idea and the key supporter of the process. Various proposals for commemoration were made, but it appears that the solution of a monument was preferred from the start, at least by Batista, whose opinion would have been decisive: “After an ample debate in which many speakers participated and presented diverse plans for said glorification, Colonel Batista . . . led the meeting to what was, really, in the minds of all present: the erection of a Monument, symbolic of the unique and polyfacetic personality of José Martí, a writer, poet, thinker, philosopher and orator, an Apostol and Martir of our struggle for Liberty, which culminated with Cuba’s Independence.”2 In further meetings following that decision, the Comisión Pro-Monumento selected as the site for the monument the Loma de los Catalanes, the location of the civic center proposed by Forestier in his Plano del Proyecto de la Habana. The new Monumento a Martí would be the central focus of that civic square, taking advantage of the rise of the hill amplifying the monument’s e¤ect. The ambition to erect a monument in Havana to the martyred leader of the Cuban independence movement arose as one aspect of the larger deification of José Martí (who was colloquially known as El Apóstol). Through his writings and political theories, as well as through recollections of his actions and demeanor and his death in battle, Martí served as a potent symbol of national consciousness during the early republican period. His written works, initially not widely read, were now rediscovered and republished; his image appeared in paintings and statues. The construction of a national monument was proposed and debated following the 1933 revolution, and authorized in December 1935, notwithstanding the opinion voiced by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda (an authority on Martí 214 The Experience of Civic Conscience [3.145.64.132] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:03 GMT) who was editing the writer’s collected works) that only a living monument would suitably re...