Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959

Notes

Introduction 1. For condensed surveys of modern architecture in Havana, see Gómez Díaz, De Forestier a Sert, and Rodríguez, The Havana Guide. 2. The first instructions given by Ferdinand and his council of advisers to the conquistador Pedrarias Dávila in 1513 were further elaborated by Charles V in 1523 and supplemented by ordinances issued by Felipe II in 1573. The oªcial publication of these laws is Consejo de Indias, Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias. 3. Rama, The Lettered City. The text was first published in 1984, a year after Rama’s death. For an interpretation of Rama’s position in the cultural discourse of Latin America , see Campa, Latin Americanism. For a rich theorization of the significance of law and letrados in Latin America, see González Echevarría, Myth and Archive. 4. Rama, The Lettered City, 5–6; emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., 6; emphasis in original. 6. For accounts of the first decades following Cuban independence, see Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba, and Pérez, Cuba, both of which examine the events of the 1930s in depth. This period is also addressed in Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista, and Pérez, Cuba and the United States. A very evocative account of subsequent events from the firsthand perspective of a journalist can be found in Phillips, Cuba, Island of Paradox. In general, though with important exceptions, historical accounts of Cuba in the twentieth century tend to orient themselves in relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The marxist historiography of Cuban scholarship in the latter half of the century is only the most forthright instance, and this tendency has resulted in a noticeably flattened rendering of parts of the nation’s history, to which greater depth and definition are more recently being restored. For historical surveys of Cuba, including the colonial period, see Thomas, Cuba, or Gott, Cuba. 7. For the text of the manifesto and its list of signatories, see Larrazabal, ed., Mani- fiestos de Cuba, 85–97. The morphology of history proposed by Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West had a strong influence in Cuba and in Latin America. A Spanish translation of 1923, La decadencia de Occidente, was widely disseminated, contributing to theories that sought to define the relationship between global and local tendencies and to assert that Notes 303 Latin American nations were the vanguard of a new cultural formation. Several authors in Cuba appropriated Spengler’s trope of decline and decadence, using it as a rhetorical impetus for reform. On Spengler’s influence, see González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier, 52–57. 8. Carteles (May 22, 1927): 16, 25. That same year, members of the Grupo Minorista also founded the Revista de Avance, a journal committed to vanguardismo, political reform, and the cultivation of national civic conscience. See Masiello, “Rethinking Neocolonial Esthetics.” The political dimensions of modernist art movements in Cuba are discussed in Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity. (Here and throughout, translations are by the author unless noted otherwise.) 9. Cf. chapters 5–8 in Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista, and chapter 9 of Pérez, Cuba. 10. Quoted in Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista, 247. 11. Mañach, Indagación del choteo. Mañach published many of his prewar essays as a book, Pasado vigente. For Mañach’s intellectual and literary influence, see Díaz Infante, Mañach o la república, and Torre, Jorge Mañach. 12. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. The book was first published in English translation in 1947 and most recently reprinted as Cuban Counterpoint. The signi ficance of Ortiz’s argument and the more general intellectual milieu of the period is examined in Rojas, Essays in Cuban Intellectual History. 13. The term “modernism” as it will be used throughout this book references not the sum of projects realized in modern style, nor the calculated actions of certain individuals , but rather a compound of institutional intentions, aesthetic modes, and instrumental techniques produced and proposed in response to the contemporaneous situations of Cuba. Intentions, modes, and techniques were modern in that they were construed as appropriate to their contemporary moment and that insofar as they maintained traditional forms or practices, did so through deliberate choice; modern also because they were intended to accommodate the transformative modernization under way in material and immaterial registers—in the construction of urban infrastructures of transportation and sanitation, for example, but...