Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 ed. by Anke Birkenmaier and Esther Whitfield (review)

According to the editors, the rationale behind this excellent collection of essays is that the future of Cuba is necessarily linked to the future of Havana— its buildings, infrastructure and citizens. This poses an immediate difficulty, and Birkenmaier and Whitfield are well aware of it: how can one think of the future or the “beyond” of a city that derives its allure and identity to the fact that it has been “frozen in time?” One idea that recurs throughout the volume is Havana’s exceptionality. The city never experienced anything like the development of other Latin American cities after the 1960s, and it occupied a peripheral place in the Revolution’s imaginary and policies. From the start, Havana was forgotten by the socialist utopia and its futurity. This is one aspect behind the ruination of the city, but can also be viewed as an opportunity to think about future modes of urban development. However, as some essays show, the city is presently torn between two reactionary movements: destruction on the one hand, and the reconstruction of Old Havana on the other. Within this dialectic, the vexed issue is construction: It had practically stopped in 1959, and nowadays either lies on the speculative limbo of the debates about the future, or has been subject to the logic of foreign capital and political opportunism. In this regard, the plans of restoration and revitalization of the city led by the Office of the City Historian remain controversial. Some contributors convincingly argue that the renovation of the old city has effectively resulted in the segregation of one portion of Havana from its inhabitants in order to offer it as a commodity for tourism. Nonetheless, the collection would have benefited from a more thorough discussion of the issues of foreign investment and tourism.

The compilation gathers essays by specialists from diverse disciplines. Although there is a somewhat unbalanced emphasis on urbanism, architecture and literature, it is an important contribution to other fields like cultural studies, sociology and intellectual history. The book is divided into three parts plus a photo essay between parts one and two. Velia Cecilia Bobes presents a brief overview of the evolution of Havana from the 1950s until today. She explores how the Revolution regarded Havana as a “non-place”—bourgeois, decadent and counter-revolutionary—and geared most resources toward the development of rural areas. Mario Coyula charts the unraveling of professional architecture and urban planning that took place from 1965 to the early 1980s and its lasting effects. From the 1990s until today, lack of resources and investments that ignore the needs of the population are the norm. All these factors, according to Coyula, have contributed to the formation of a “dystopian” city. Informal construction is the subject of the next two essays. Del Real and Scarpaci outline a brief history of housing in Cuba to then study the use of the barbacoa, a small platform built inside a living space and one of the most common solutions to the housing shortage in the city. Hamberg’s contribution explores the types of substandard housing in Havana and the important differences between the slums of Latin American cities and the tugurios of Havana. The future of informal housing inside the city, Hamberg insists, is one of the greatest challenges policy makers will confront. Quintana discusses the “Havana and Its Landscapes” project he co-directed at Florida International University, and frames it under these principles: the city’s history, the necessity to harmonize it with its surrounding landscape, and his hopes for the transformation of Cuba into a liberal democracy. In the last essay of part one, Rafael Rojas uses Giorgio Agamben’s theory of messianic time to analyze various literary texts and interrogate what happens when the “messianic kingdom” of the Revolution ceases to exist. The answer is a total dislocation of time. A first manifestation of this was the coexistence of multiples nostalgias (for colonial...