Inventar: Recent Struggles and Inventions in Housing in Two Cuban Cities

Cuban cities are characterized by juxtapositions of Spanish colonial and U.S. capitalist heritage with the material and political culture of nearly fifty years of socialism; these cities have been transformed and retransformed by the daily practices of residents in noteworthy ways. This article will suggest that a fundamental philosophy and practice that shapes Cuban vernacular architecture is the concept of inventar, whereby new housing spaces and structures are quite literally "invented" through the improvised acquisition of goods and the expert negotiation of complex political and economic obstacles.

This discussion depends on research drawn from two separate field projects, undertaken by an architect (Patricio del Real) in Havana, and an anthropologist (Anna Cristina Pertierra) in Santiago de Cuba. Through the integration of our distinct research experiences it became clear that inventar is simultaneously a technical and a social skill, enabling Cuban citizens to improvise in adverse circumstances. Housing is consciously presented by Cubans as an important space in which such skills of inventar must be expressed in order to create not only material but also social well-being. The term inventar is commonly used in Cuban vernacular speech to describe processes of improvising creative solutions to everyday problems. Three short case studies taken from our field research demonstrate the particular significance of the notion of inventar to housing construction, showing how inventar practices have been both stifled and enabled by Cuban state policies in the post-Soviet period. The case studies presented show the relationship between technical and practical actions "on the ground" in Cuba and the broader social and political structures that influence such actions. Therefore, engaging in the strategies of inventar can be seen simultaneously as a set of technical practices, an engagement in micropolitical actions, and an assertion of the social significance of particular personal qualities and community values.

Our intention in examining how residents of Cuban cities develop practices and ideas to adapt their housing within the specific politico-economic conditions of the post-Soviet era is to provide an example of how scholars across disciplines might study the relationship between material landscapes and cultural and political processes. Such a study is timely, as Kingston W. Heath recently proposed that understanding this relationship between buildings, landscapes, and cultural processes lies at the center of contemporary vernacular architecture studies. ¹ Anthropologists are particularly well positioned to contribute to this discussion; many anthropologists have documented how housing is frequently a site in which political and social changes impact the material form of buildings and building interiors. Some have also proposed that housing forms can be understood as manifestations of social orders or cultural norms.² It would therefore seem likely that when social and political circumstances change, notable transformations of the material landscape will follow, and this has certainly been the case in Cuba. The process of inventar is locally understood as a specific response to economic conditions shaped (if not controlled) by government policies. As the discussion below will outline, within Cuban cities one can clearly see how changes to housing have taken place over time, in what Heath describes as "cultural weathering," and yet one of the advantages Heath's model of the relationship between cultural process and architecture offers for our study is the recognition that specific historical moments can dramatically alter residents' capacity to transform or adapt buildings.³ In order to account for both dynamics of continuity and of change that shape vernacular architecture in Cuban cities it is useful to consider a brief history of the political context of Cuban housing before returning to a deeper consideration of the contemporary practices we define as inventar.

In La Vivienda en Cuba, José Manuel Fernández Nuñez presents a series of statistical charts to illustrate the "disastrous" condition of housing in Cuba before the Revolution.⁴ For Fernández Nuñez, this "painful tragedy" of the state of housing in Cuba was the consequence of the structural crisis of the Republican period (1902–1958). A mixture of causes brought about this structural crisis: substandard housing conditions, a general lack of...