Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989

Preface

........................................ PREFACE ........................................ This collection had its origin in a double panel at the Latin American Studies Association Conference in Montreal in September 2007. We would like to thank the panelists and those who attended the two sessions for engaging in a productive discussion and giving us the impetus for this book in the first place. Since then, we have received assistance from many individuals and institutions. Our thanks go to the two reviewers of this book, Isabel ÁlvarezBorland and César Salgado, for their support and helpful suggestions; to Reynolds Smith and Valerie Millholland, our editors at Duke University Press; and to Sharon Torian, Rebecca Fowler, and Gisela Fosado, also at Duke. We are grateful for a translation grant from Columbia University’s Institute of Latin American Studies, under the leadership of Pablo Piccato and Tom Trebat, that paid for Elisabeth Enenbach’s and Eric Barkin’s wonderful translation work. Many thanks go to Pedro Valero Puente for crafting and researching the glossary, as well as to Bill Nelson for the map of Havana. For encouragement at crucial moments, Anke Birkenmaier wishes to thank Laura Redruello, Rafael Rojas, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Viviane Mahieux. Esther Whitfield would like to thank Rey Chow, Adrián López Dénis, and Caridad Tamayo for their advice and conversation. The following contributions were published originally in Spanish, and we gratefully acknowledge the authors’ permission to translate and publish them here: Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo’s chapter was published in Spanish as ‘‘La ciudad en el aire’’ in Íván de la Nuez’s anthology Cuba y el día después: Doce ensayistas nacidos con la revolución imaginan el futuro (Barcelona: Mondadori, Reservoir Books, 2001). A first, abridged version of Mario Coyula’s ‘‘El trinquenio amargo’’ appeared in Diseño y Sociedad (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Xochimilco) 21 (otoño 2006): 26–35. The entire lecture was x preface originally published in the anthology La política cultural de la Revolución: memoria y reflexión. Primera parte, edited by Eduardo Heras León and Desiderio Navarro (Havana: Centro Teórico-Cultural Criterios, 2007), 47–68. Margarita Zamora and Francisco Scarano also published Coyula’s lecture in Spanish in their anthology CUBA: Contrapuntos de cultura y sociedad (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2007). Parts of Rafael Rojas’s chapter for this volume were originally published in El estante vacío: Literatura y política en Cuba (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009). Antonio José Ponte’s chapter was published online in Spanish as ‘‘La Habana: Ciudad y archivo’’ at the Cuban Research Institute’s CubaInfo website, http://cubainfo.fiu.edu. Finally, José Quiroga’s ‘‘Daiquirís amargos (crónica de crístal)’’ was previously pulished in La Habana Elegante 21 (Fall 2000), http://www.habanaelegante.com. This book is divided into three parts. Chapters in the first part, ‘‘Mapping Havana: Citizenship and the City,’’ explore di√erent historical and theoretical perspectives on the city, how it has evolved as a symbolic site, how new groups of actors have emerged, and what kind of future they envision. Cecilia Bobes’s ‘‘Visits to a Non-Place: Havana and Its Representation(s)’’ analyzes the city as a place where the divisions between the private and the public, inside and outside, before and after, have been reconfigured repeatedly since 1959. According to Bobes, all major events in Cuban history since the revolution have been echoed by a change in attitude toward the capital: after 1959 rural development was emphasized over that of the capital, increasingly so after 1971; in the 1980s, the city was retaken by the younger generation of students and professionals; and finally, in the 1990s, it turned into a virtual city, a ‘‘non-place’’ or a ‘‘memory city’’ without a civic public space, where tourism and the advertising industry have become dominant. Mario Coyula’s ‘‘The Bitter Trinquennium and the Dystopic City: Autopsy of a Utopia’’ critically revisits the ‘‘gray’’ period of the 1970s, when Cuba became entrenched in conspiracy theories and bureaucratic maneuvering that led to the deposition and silencing of many writers and artists. Coyula draws the institutional history of architecture as a discipline that su√ered a climate of intolerance for at least fifteen years and shows Cuban architecture of the revolution as a history of failures due in part to moral issues. He views the globalizing trends in the architecture of the 1980s and 1990s as a chance to develop a stronger sense of place, yet also notes...