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........................................ INTRODUCTION ........................................ Beyond the Ruins anke birkenmaier and esther whitfield Havana, the twenty-first-century city that is home to over two million people and has captured the imagination of countless others, seems to stand at the brink of a new era. The impulse to read a city of rich and varied physical spaces from a temporal perspective is perhaps inevitable in the once utopian context of the Cuban Revolution, where history—as a past to be undone and a future to be built—weighs heavily. It is certainly through its relationship to time that many of the contributions in this edited volume read Havana; and in doing so they prise open what José Quiroga has called a palimpsestic city, one whose di√erent temporal, structural, and social layers allow one city to live as many. Havana’s architecture corresponds broadly to the three political orders that have governed Cuba: the Spanish colonial order, from the city’s founding in the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth; the Republican period of 1902–1958, a relatively short period but responsible for most of the city’s buildings and public spaces; and the revolutionary period, 1959 to the present. Rafael Rojas, in this edited volume, reads not from the heyday of these periods but from their moments of crisis—their transition from political utopia to urban heterotopia, in the terms of Manuel Cruz—to position Havana, its spaces, and its inhabitants as always subject to spectacular change. In choosing to focus on Havana after 1989, we are foregrounding an accumulation of crises and transitions; an accumulation, that is, of pasts to be interrogated and futures open to question. Indeed, the legacy of many pasts makes itself felt in 2 anke birkenmaier and esther whitfield these chapters: through the restored colonial spaces of Old Havana that for Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo are to be mined for their meaning to the present and that Antonio José Ponte critiques eloquently; and through the achievements and excesses of the republican city that was for decades subdued but is now reemerging, as Velia Cecilia Bobes says, not only in reinvigorated hotels but also in cultural practices and the ornamentation of private dwellings. Havana’s most recent past, or its most recently closed chapter, is one that bears particular importance for this collection. The period of close Cuban and Soviet relations and particularly the decade of the 1980s linger in subsequent decades in various ways. Laura Redruello reads in the fiction of Ronaldo Menéndez a decade of contention where art occupied public spaces and artists openly renegotiated their relationship to the state. Sujatha Fernandes sees in this same decade of public art the beginnings of a discourse of exclusion, social and spatial, articulated by a now transnational hip-hop movement. But to read post-Soviet Cubans’ recollection of the 1980s as nostalgic would be to simplify the intricate ways in which people relate to a political past, as Jacqueline Loss and Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo explore. It was as an architect practicing in Havana during the 1980s that ÁlvarezTab ío Albo, now a resident of Spain, recognized the importance of understanding and living the past of the city’s homes and buildings. Only through such understanding, she wrote in Vida, mansión y muerte de la burguesía cubana, will Havana cease to be a museum piece and instead become ‘‘an authentic meeting space for di√erent generations,’’ leading to a modern architecture suited to its inhabitants’ lives and needs (Álvarez-Tabío Albo 1989, 31). After decades of neglecting the capital city, a new generation of architects and urban planners practicing in the 1980s sought to define the potential social importance of a housing stock inherited from the colonial and republican eras. While Cuban writers such as Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, or Guillermo Cabrera Infante had glorified a Havana associated with a neoclassical grandeur and glamour that reached into their own present time, in the 1980s, architects, writers, and artists took note of the gap that had arisen between a city that had aged but fundamentally remained the same and a society that defined itself as revolutionary. Socialist housing in Havana had not produced great changes in the city, as most e√orts had been concentrated on developing new projects in the countryside and in Havana’s suburbs.∞ Also, in 1982 the historic center of Havana, La Habana Vieja or Old Havana, had been declared a unesco World Heritage...

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