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

3 A Perfect Structuring: Representing the Nation as Plan and Purpose

H avana was among the first cities to be founded in the new territories of the Spanish empire, well prior to the 1573 compilation of the royal ordinances known as Las Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies), so it was not as a matter of causation that the Laws of the Indies would have caught the attention of twentieth-century Cuban architects or planners.1 But in their other respects—as historically contingent constitutive statutes, as reminders of the continuous presence of the law as a discursive form in Cuba, as earlier examples of attempts of the ruling elite to manage in advance the unfolding of social events—the ordinances would have resonated as a precedent for the latest legal instrument of order, the 1940 constitution. In the 1930s and 1940s, several historians of Latin American urbanism debated the instrumentality of the Laws of the Indies. The Argentinean historian Miguel Solá began his Historia del arte hispano-americano (History of Spanish-American art), published in 1935, with quotations from several articles of the Laws of the Indies that suggested their influence over the disposition of colonial cities. In 1942 and again in 1948, the architectural historian George Kubler discussed the “famous urban statutes,” arguing that existing settlements likely provided models of urban form incorporated into the ordinances.2 Other historians had taken up the genealogy of the ordinances and considered alternative possibilities, launching a study of the influence of the Laws of the Indies on urban morphology that continued through the 1950s and on to the present moment.3 The historical examination pursued during the 1940s and 1950s persistently sought to establish what had provided the model for the new cities of Spanish America, whether it was the physical 69 3 A Perfect Structuring Representing the Nation as Plan and Purpose forms of existing gridiron urban layouts in Spain or in pre-Columbian America , or the conceptual forms described in Renaissance treatises by Alberti and Filarete. Little consideration was given, however, to interpreting the ordinances themselves as a model. The Laws of the Indies were regarded either as a transcription of architectural theory or as a description of existing conditions, and the constitutive and mediatory properties of the ordinances—their projection of a programmatic plan, the motivations and potentials of their legal form—were not acknowledged. The progression of this historical research ignored the critical synthesis that the ordinances embodied: the discursive reciprocity of law and architecture.4 Writing in 1938 on the history of Cuban constitutionalism, Gustavo Gutiérrez adumbrated Ángel Rama’s later conception of two civic actualities, the real city and la cuidad letrada. Gutiérrez argued that every nation has two constitutions: “one theoretical or literary that lives in the formalities of the Fundamental Charter , and another real or practical formed by life itself in the development of national institutions.”5 The first category, which Gutiérrez also called the “formal ,” existed in the textual material of the charter; the second, which he called the “biological,” was the sum of interactions of events and institutions. The inherent potential of any historical moment, he claimed, was measured and revealed by the degree of correspondence between these two levels, between the two constitutions . Correspondence, not reduction or identity, was the goal: “While the constitutions separate themselves more, the more diªcult is constitutional life and more disposed to disturbances and revolutions. While they draw closer and mix more, the life of a nation is made easier, and social welfare [bienestar social] more likely and more lasting.”6 In 1952, Gutiérrez would reiterate his postulate of the coexistence of two constitutions, the formal and the biological, and conclude with regret that the “Cuban formal Constitution is in many aspects superior to and more advanced than the biological constitution.”7 At the same time Gutiérrez proposed his idea of constitutional correspondence , there was in fact a precocious awareness of the Laws of the Indies in Cuba among persons concerned with the overlapping spheres of law and architecture. This awareness may have originated in exchanges between Cuban and Mexican professionals, through events such as the sixteenth International Congress of Planning and Housing held in Mexico City in August 1938. Its organizing committee included a representative from Cuba, Francisco Carrera y Jústiz, professor 70 A Perfect Structuring in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Havana, who specialized in municipal law and...