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No prior scholarly work on Cuban architectural and intellectual history has yet focused on Arquitectura Cuba, a periodical published by the Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos, as an archive. However, issues of the publication from the early years of the Cuban Revolution (especially 1959 and 1960) provide an indication of state-sponsored views on architecture, urbanism and the interplay between these and the socialist project in Cuba. Using articles and editorials from Arquitectura Cuba alongside other contemporary sources, this article focuses on and critiques three themes that recur throughout these issues: the idea of architecture as a socially minded profession, the need for urbanisation of the countryside as a core goal of the new Cuban state and the interplay between global modernism and localised practices. Ultimately, this investigation illustrates potential methodological directions and archival sources for Cuban architectural and social historiography, revealing another lens to read the Cuban Revolution and its legacies today.
Abstract
No prior scholarly work on Cuban architectural and intellectual history has yet focused on Arquitectura Cuba, a periodical published by the Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos, as an archive. However, issues of the publication from the early years of the Cuban Revolution (especially 1959 and 1960) provide an indication of state-sponsored views on architecture, urbanism and the interplay between these and the socialist project in Cuba. Using articles and editorials from Arquitectura Cuba alongside other contemporary sources, this article focuses on and critiques three themes that recur throughout these issues: the idea of architecture as a socially minded profession, the need for urbanisation of the countryside as a core goal of the new Cuban state and the interplay between global modernism and localised practices. Ultimately, this investigation illustrates potential methodological directions and archival sources for Cuban architectural and social historiography, revealing another lens to read the Cuban Revolution and its legacies today.
Keywords: Cuban Revolution, history of architecture, urban planning, modernism, socialism
'¡Primero de Enero de 1959!
¡Día glorioso!'
The editorial opening the January 1959 issue of Arquitectura Cuba, the official periodical of the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cuba, started with a page-long paean to the revolution. Its nationalist language, typically foreign to architecture journals, had the usual propagandist overtones, calling that New Year's Day 'this glorious date' (3). Immediately, architecture and revolution are brought together; the authors of the editorial hoped that 'seeds of death [and] pain', which enabled the revolution and were 'taking root in the fatherland', would bring about 'united ideals of national reconstruction' (ibid.) Stone and cement first appear as metaphors and, ultimately, possible physical realities for the revolution's own eager process of moulding and constructing a 'New Cuba'. Proclaiming the revolution as a reality and condition took on a distinctly spatial approach, uniting the various physical and human geographic imageries of the lived Cuban experience: 'Cuba [is] born New in the peaks of the Sierras, in the hills, in the rivers,' - that is, the so-conceived 'natural' spaces of the island, where humans are subordinate to nature in the rural lived experiences of cultivating and engaging with the land - and 'in the streets of all the towns, of all the cities'. Yet the list of 'all the cities' suggests how architects in 1959 mentally constructed their definition of where Cuban urbanism lies: the six capitals (Santiago, Camagüey, Santa Clara, Matanzas, Pinar del Río and La Habana) of what then were the island's six provinces before a December 1975 law divided the island into twelve provinces with capitals offering social services (Landstreet and Mundingo 1982: 5; Edward 1998: 16).
But what exactly is this publication? Who wrote Arquitectura Cuba and what did they have to say about where their society was headed? In this article, I argue that issues of Arquitectura Cuba published in the early years of the Cuban Revolution (especially in 1959 and 1960) provide an indication of early statesponsored views on architecture, urbanism and the interplay between these and the socialist project in Cuba. To illustrate this, I will focus on three themes that recur throughout these issues and offer critical examinations: the idea of architecture as a socially minded profession, the need for urbanisation of the countryside and the interplay between global modernism and localised practices.
The periodical and its context
No other scholars have studied the contents of Arquitectura Cuba as a freestanding archive. This is not to say, however, that Arquitectura Cuba has been ignored in scholarly work. Roberto Segre, for instance, who served as the journal's editor-in-chief, often cited articles from Arquitectura Cuba in his numerous writings on modernism in Cuban and Latin American architecture and city planning. Patrícia Méndez (2011: 2; 2014: 33) of the Centro de Documentación de Arquitectura Latinoamericana [CEDODAL; Centre for Documentation of Latin American Architecture] also touches on Arquitectura Cuba in her reviews of Latin American architectural publications, mentioning that it has been published continuously since 1917 under eight different names without sacrificing the its explicitly institutional identity.
Yet Arquitectura Cuba as a whole offers a notable strand of architectural, urban and developmentalist ideologies of the early revolutionary state, even focusing on only the first two years of the revolution's 'triumph', 1959 and 1960. For Foucault (1969), an archive is defined by a positive discourse, or a consistent worldview that lends its materials a certain degree of unity, so that archives operate within 'a limited space of communication'. Archives present more than a passive corpus of texts; rather, they perform an active practice of collecting, 'form[ing] and transforming ...] statements' in a particular system of relations. Foucault labels these assumed systems of relations an 'historical a priori', which, distinctly from a formal-logical a priori, creates an environment of given 'truth', or a 'condition of reality for statements' rather than 'condition[s] of validity for [their] judgemen[t]'. Keeping this model in mind, we can use the social and political context of Arquitectura Cuba to situate the thoughts espoused in the publication and expand the pool of sources of Cuban architectural historiography.
Authorship in the journal comprises either of anonymous editorials and articles or articles authored by male architects, often publishing as sole authors. Thematically, the main aims and orientations are covering the social state of Cuban architecture, offering normative guidance for architects of the time and describing contemporary conferences and competitions. Articles published under an author's signed name, the journal's contents pages stated, reflect only their personal opinion, without any solidarity from the Divulgation Committee [Comisión de Divulgación], 'and much less from the Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos'; this notice continued to be found into at least the 1970s. The Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos (henceforth 'the Colegio'; roughly translatable as the National Institute of Architects) was the institutional body publishing Arquitectura Cuba. Functions of the Colegio at the brink of the revolutionary period included producing model contracts to standardise architect-client relations, publishing a professional code of ethics, studying and contributing to legal proposals for housing and urban planning issues, establishing health and safety codes, hosting conferences, publishing Arquitectura Cuba as a historiographical collection mechanism, and supporting the government and its offices as appropriate (Navarrete Serrano 1959: 183).
The question of professionalism
In Arquitectura Cuba, the professional status of architects was highlighted as key to enabling their contributions to the new socialist reality. The leaders of the Colegio (Navarrete Serrano and Castro y Jones 1959: 49) wrote that the feelings of all Cuban architects would be reflected in the Colegio's activities by responding directly to the needs and realities of society. Membership in the Colegio was limited to university-trained professionals,1 who were to apply their professional responsibilities consciously, with an awareness of their social role: promoting socialist democracy in Cuba as part of what was understood as a process of liberation to 'guarantee a dignified and adequate life for all'2 (ibid.). All Cuban architects were mandatory members of the Colegio, a quality which at the time was quite unique to Cuba (Navarrete Serrano 1959: 183) and which only added weight to architects' role in implementing and practising the principles of the revolution.
In addition to original entries written specifically for Arquitectura Cuba, the March 1959 (Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay 1959: 102-6) issue of the journal also reprinted a short fictional dialogue originally published in a leaflet by the Uruguayan Society of Architects [Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay] of two friends discussing the professional role of architects in society. A core theme of the dialogue - which, if the choice to publish it in Arquitectura Cuba is any indication, perhaps suggests that this was an issue Cuba was facing (after all, the editors made it clear that the ideas expressed in the dialogue were practical and backed by the Colegio) - is that architects were being approached with requests to provide services at no cost, which undermined their roles as trained professionals (Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay 1959: 102). The Vitruvian trinity of 'firmitas, utilitas, venustas' [firmness, utility, and beauty] surfaces indirectly (Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay 1959: 103) as properties which the trained architect in particular can mould, but they come filtered through the lens of Sullivan- and Loos-style appreciation of formal functionalism as well as the emotional qualities of Le Corbusier's nearly poetic writings on architecture, providing a glimpse into the global modernist intellectual environment in which Cuban architects sought to fit themselves. The dialogue also espouses a heavily functionalist view of cities, likening streets and avenues as just as much a functional part of the physical city as different functional parts of a building, each with its own components of circulation and function (Sociedad de Arquitectos del Uruguay 1959: 104). Fundamentally, the central implication here is that architects know how to see the moving parts within these complex, rationalisable systems in a way that the layperson cannot, which is what lends them the power to exert professional capacities and charge for services.
An alternative reading of the purpose behind publishing the Uruguayan dialogue might be not to reassert the architect's professional standing (or perhaps, if not instead of this point, in addition to this point), but rather to uncover the danger of obfuscating the intelligibility of the architectural profession to render it something which does not respond to its social context to as much as it could. Indeed, architects' centrality to achieving the primary initial social reform goals of the revolution comes across what Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 150) identified as the 'pillars of the revolution's program': urban reform, agrarian reform, industrialisation, and education. The support for this social comprehensiveness, covering both the base systems of production and social interactions which are non-productive activities that nonetheless support the continuation of the systems of production, drew from needing to respond to 'health [salud]' and 'rest [descanso - literally "untiring"]', both of which were threatened by the preponderance of capitalist industrial life (Cayado 1960: 33). Comprehensiveness as a notion manifested itself from overarching social schemes down to the scale of site plan designs, a characteristic which, per Enrique Cayado (1960), architect of the iconic mid-century Seguro Social building (Muñoz 2011), were distinctly a question of quality of life, as a holistic approach to urbanism which could 'protect the rights to life which all city inhabitants must have'.3 Professional architects, it seems presumed, would have the training to think comprehensively, so that every piece of design would reflect a cultivated system of thought that could make a built space more conducive to achieving the goals of the revolution.
Che Guevara (1964: 13), in a speech closing a meeting between students and teachers at the Seventh Congress of the International Union of Architects, also promoted self-esteem as an essential part of cultivating architectural professionalism. Following Guevara's reasoning, the revolution offered to architects-intraining the opportunity and tools to fully implement their vision and fully embrace their work. 'For the first time in Cuba', he proclaimed, 'professionals have felt themselves real builders of society',4 free from exploitation, lack of salary, or the burden of creating wealth for others via their own work. This position demonstrates how, in socialist understanding, exploitation of labour is the process through which one's physical efforts are employed to create wealth for others, and the revolution offered a way through which exchange-value of architectural production would match its use-value far more closely. Architects could therefore help society, with the prize of uncovering the disconnect between production and use of built environments as commodities.
The setting of this statement gives it particular weight. This conference, as Arquitectura Cuba ('El VII Congreso' 1964: 3-34) reported, hosted mostly participants from Brazil, Chile, France, and the USSR, with Latin American architects making up nearly half among the international attendees and Cuban architects made up more than half of total attendees. The theme was 'Architecture in countries en route to development',5 and articulates a then-emerging presence of institutional globalisation, likely because of the Bretton-Woods institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) that fed into Cuban revolutionaries' and architects' obsession over desarrollo, or development. Reading Arquitectura Cuba, one finds numerous references suggesting that architects in 1959 and the early 1960s were facing a global peer pressure to partake in the project of economic development. The celebration over the conference being held in Cuba made this concern especially palpable, since the other such congresses had been held in 'developed' capitals and former colonial metropoles. The unnamed authors suggested that architects have become involved in the project of achieving 'developed country' status because desarrollo as a subject found a passionate audience among the architectural profession in addition to all humanity.
In short, the composition of the Colegio and the authors who contributed to Arquitectura Cuba, publications asserting their professional status and the selfimage of architects as promoted by the 1960 international conference all demonstrate a concern for the importance of recognising architects as professionals for them to contribute productively to the socialist state's goals of economic development.
Fidel Castro's visit
Fidel Castro identified architects as key to carrying out his vision for a new communist Cuba, with communism as the future utopia in the teleological process and positive project of socialism (cf. Che Guevara 1964: 14). Castro visited the Colegio within the first quarter of 1959, and a set of photographs (Figure 1) depict moments of Castro resting his hands on architects Horacio Navarrete Serrano and Roberto Chomat, presidents of the National Colegio and the provincial-level Colegio de Arquitectos de La Habana ('El Colegio de Arquitectos recibe al Doctor Fidel Castro' 1959: 100-1). Castro's February 16 visit made the Colegio the first professional association to receive this kind of attention from the revolutionary government, and the event assembled 'the largest concentration of architects in our history' (though the author or authors make it unclear whether they meant this in the history of Cuba or of the Colegio). A major function of the gathering, under Castro's direction, was to proclaim an anti-capitalist sentiment and to stir the social consciousness of architects (Estévez Curbelo 1959a: 149). Castro called upon architects to discard the narcissistic pursuit of designing 'housing for a small few and instruments] for speculation,' referencing the need for increasing the supply of affordable housing and remembering the housing needs of low-income Cubans. The journal's ('El Colegio de Arquitectos recibe al Doctor Fidel Castro' 1959: 101) reported response to the president's call was unabashedly supportive: 'The cooperation requested by Dr. Castro was widely offered without reservations of any kind', seeking to support the revolution's egalitarian vision by creating 'opportunities for all Cubans' as well as to cultivate a triumphant nationalism of 'an honest and efficient fatherland'. Emphasising, then, the need for socially conscious architecture that sought to include all Cubans indiscriminately and deliberately fought exclusionary, self-satisfying tendencies of capitalist Havana, Castro used this notable and high-profile event to present a clear vision for what architects' social duties might entail.
Exemplifying published views of architects that publicly supported Castro's sentiment, Vicente de Castro (1960 [February 1959]: 40) similarly communicated a very socialist view for the social function of property, arguing that housing ought to overcome 'liberal capitalism'. Land and the resources fed therefrom into systems of production (the Marxist concept of 'base' in a holistic sense: the system of production and geographically contingent, material capacities which enable it) have great potential to benefit all Cubans at the scale of the nation; as such, he concludes, a property owner ought not simply reap benefits from owning land without increasing the common welfare '[bien común]' (the Marxist concept of the non-productive 'superstructure', which includes the cultural practices, habitual routines and general welfare of a society). Thus, Vicente de Castro's writing offers an insight into how architects might have processed the ideology put forth in Fidel Castro's speech, reflecting the social consciousness which the revolution sought to foment among the Cuban architectural community overall.
According to Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 150), Fidel Castro had also outlined three core urban issues plaguing capitalist Cuba, explored below. Each of these three ideas points directly to an attitude the idealised revolutionary architect should seek to embody or an issue he (the expected gendering at the time; I identified no mention of gender inclusivity in the material) should consciously allow to influence his work.
Urban disorder and speculation
First, Castro in 1959 identified the presence of 'urban disorder' (Estévez Curbelo 1959a), a notion which very easily plays into the modernist consciousness of how to 'fix' a city. We can understand what this might mean for the urban context by turning to the revolutionary reading of rural land ownership patterns. Fidel Castro's second claim concerned speculation on the urban property market. Restrictions which the revolutionary government imposed on private property and sale of real estate some years later were insufficient to address this issue; when trading property, the participant trading into a smaller or less well located property might expect under-the-table payments from the party moving into the 'better' property in compensation for the forgone opportunity of living somewhere more desirable. The pre-revolutionary condition to which the Castro and the Colegio urged architects to respond, however, occurred through the so-called 'urban latifundio [latifundio urbano]' system of extensive private property ownership which was left vacant or rented out. Both points articulate a consciousness that urban daily life in Cuba was intertwined with the country's rural realities and make it clear that architects should be aware of these to engage in socially relevant architectural practice.
Fidel (cited in Venegas Fornias 1979: 7) called it a 'chaos' that prior to the revolution, Yankee landowners would charge 'aparcería [sharecropping fees, whereby the owner of the land would earn part of the labourer's crop output]' and 'renta [rent]'. Almost two decades later, by May 1977, Castro would praise the fact that four-fifths of the island was under state ownership, calling it 'a tremendous change which responds to our realities and our necessities' (ibid.). Urban private wealth at the turn of the revolution, particularly as manifested in Havana through both material consumables and durable goods, was a result of agricultural production under the latifundio system, creating a 'monoculture' of land ownership patterns across the country (Acosta and Hardoy 1971: 10-1); that is, many people who owned large tracts of agricultural land across Cuba would have lived in Havana, but spatially this wealth was not distributed into the countryside. Much rural land ownership was concentrated in the hands of North American players in the sugar industry, or of Cubans who had fit themselves into the capitalist system. Urban commercial landowners, though, reduced in number since the start of the twentieth century (ibid.). A great source of social inequality in mid-century Cuba nationwide, then, came from land-owning entities (urban individuals or transnational corporations) that benefited disproportionately in comparison to the individuals who laboured upon and cultivated the land.
Vincenot (2016: 587) identified private property ownership as a key contributor to inequality: 'The country was deeply divided between a capital where a great part of the population benefited from the benefits of modernity and the countryside stricken by poverty, illnesses, and illiteracy.' Havana was where the wealth generated by sugarcane became transformed and commodified into bourgeois consumption by elites and transnationalism; the ghost of the peasantry became disembodied into the material physicality of the capital's riches. We might read this reality as a Neobaroque gesture of articulating a centre by pointing to it from a signifying periphery, to use Sarduy et al.'s (1972: 41-45) concepts. Equally important to acknowledge is that Cuban material wealth did not just concentrate in Havana as a mere fact, but also in part because of targeted 'North American salesmanship' (Thomas 1967: 255) with its urban biases.
Resulting from the large number of peasants which the latifundio system employed was a constant, rocking flow between urban and rural areas in rhythm with the temporal needs of agricultural production, so that 'rural communities' barely existed in a permanent sense (Acosta and Hardoy 1971: 12). 'Peasant dwellings' did not exist because the labour 'came from urban and semiurban centres' (Rodriguez cited ibid.), a side of the cities with which the wealthy refused to acquaint themselves: 'For numerous members of the middle class and the bourgeoisie, the countryside was an unknown world, as much as could be the miserable quarters in the south of the city' (Vincenot 2016: 588-9). Indeed, Venegas Fornias (1979: 101-2) also noted that a demographic reality of Cuban cities under dependence-based economies is that of ebbs and flows of population, growing or declining according to 'the necessities of the export economy', a distinct feature of Latin American cities compared with the 'more stable' economic conditions in the European metropoles. Such a characteristic, he argues, could even be a foundational impulse for the identification of a distinct Cuban nationality. Hence, we can conclude that the urban 'chaos' and 'disorder' which Fidel identified grounded itself quite concretely on the intertwined systems of urban-rural relations at society's productive base; the resulting superstructure further supported the oppressive rural system of production and made itself evident in the urban fabric through the high-wealth/low-wealth dichotomy.
The metabolism between the urban and rural quotidian and their roles in producing a revolutionary reading of the Cuban condition in 1959 also comes across in how Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 150) presents the Ley de los Solares Yermos, or the Law of Abandoned Solares [multi-story or multi-unit urban houses], paralleling the phenomenon of property-holding absentee landlords to that of the latifundio system of production in the countryside. Absenteeism breeds underproductive land - a problem for encouraging economic development - and the earlier 1958 Agrarian Reform Law identified this as an issue for economic productivity for rural land as well (Sorí Martín and Castro Ruz 1959: 58). Vacant rural land was not only a problem of privately owned land, but the revolutionaries also noted that much state-owned land was also left vacant; on top of this, latifundia belonged to 'stockholders, not individual^]', resulting in a singular land-owning high class whose main income was rent-based (Thomas 1967: 252). An anonymous Arquitectura Cuba article (potentially written by a committee) asserted that the so-called 'urban latifundios' were even worse than rural ones 'for it is totally unproductive, based on mere speculation and the detour of capital that could have been dedicated to raising national productivity'.6 This demonstrates that revolutionary thought understood urban vacancy as a comparable issue to underproductive rural land. In the 'glorious' year of 1959, then, architects had the opportunity to breathe new life into Cuban urban life given through new legal mechanisms in the Ley de los Solares Yermos.
Indeed, to connect this 'chaotic' condition more concretely to the work of architects, the goal of the Ley de los Solares Yermos was to extinguish speculation in the urban real estate market by the instruments of establishing a legal price, taxation and forced sales or eminent domain. Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 150) claimed that the passing of this law helped to energise new architectural projects, though whether this is really the case is a question of its own. There seems to be some sense to how the Ley de los Solares Yermos sought to create wealth, since among its primary goals was increasing the rate of property ownership among Cubans and moving away from a rent-based system of habitation. However, the law was only one in a trinity of techniques, the others being increasing credit availability and exempting taxation on private property ownership, to reduce renting deliberately. Other ways in which Estévez Curbelo proposes that affordable housing provision should be tied with other policies includes standardising 'materials, techniques, and designs' to facilitate 'production in mass', which would include 'self-help and mutual help' programmes (Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 152) that would eventually come to materialise in the form of the microbrigadas programme in the 1970s to 'complement the lack of public housing units' (Scarpaci et al. 2002: 141). For Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 152), however, the core socialist revolutionary goals for the housing programmes were always already present whenever social services and a form of community organising were provided within site plans. Reform efforts, then, targeted Castro's concerns about chaos and disorder within Cuban cities, and it was expected that architects would have new opportunities to right past urban wrongs through the possibilities which this new legislation was opening.
Housing affordability
Third, Castro pointed to the country's affordable housing crisis, chiding both the private sector and the preceding administration for not being able to provide an adequate supply thereof. Fidel Castro and Estévez Curbelo (1959a: 150) seem to have understood affordable housing provision as a central barrier to Cuba's economic development, cultivating 'parasitic investment' that even prevented wealth from flowing more broadly into the construction industry. Over a hundred architects in June 1959 spoke before the executive board of the Provincial Colegio of Havana [Ejecutivo del Colegio Provincial de Arquitectos de la Habana] in support of the Ley de los Solares Yermos because they supported how the law sought to address the unaffordable cost of urban and suburban land, 'the most serious obstacle for the construction of housing and the development of industrial buildings',7 seeking to use the state to attack speculation by assigning fair values to all land (228). The law established a maximum price for state sales at $4 per square metre, and tax instruments would seek to eliminate empty solares (ibid.), presumably being held waiting that the price would increase. Other authors, like Vicente de Castro (1960b: 40), hoped that the taxes could be even higher.
Vicente de Castro seemed particularly interested in the economics of housing and its relationship to development in Cuba, publishing two articles in 1960 on the topic. In one article, 'Análisis del estado mínimo de viviendas [Analysis of the minimum state of housing]', he (Castro 1960a: 76) published numbers for housing needed within 10 years, at the cost of $3,000 for rural units, $8,000 per urban unit (though the discrepancy in cost isn't specified), and with the need to build 6,000 new urban units to fulfil existing demand. He then listed several costs to be overcome - $168 million to build 21,000 urban units; $33 million to build 11,000 rural housing units; $201 million for 32,000 units overall annually to accommodate population growth - a litany of numbers not unlike José Martí's (1883) description of the Brooklyn Bridge. Writing from the point of view of a registered architect, Vicente de Castro was emphasising that the capitalist housing market had not supplied a sufficient quantity of units prior to the revolution, leaving 1960s Cuba with the task of 50,000 new housing units annually under the cost of at least $300 million.
Thus, Arquitectura Cuba's coverage of Fidel Castro's visit and related material offer insights into how the revolution reframed the societal role of architects, and the Colegio as an institution bound its official publication to the political needs of the revolution, publishing material in an attempt to cultivate architects' social awareness.
The vision of Arquitectura Cuba for rural settlements
Producing sugar, previously Cuba's largest export, placed Cuba in global and local contexts against which the revolution sought to respond. On the island, the Cuban context for Agrarian Reform was one of 'large sugar plantations aimed at the [articuladas al] export market and the excessive cattle ranching targeted toward the [vinculada al] domestic market' (García 1969: 153-54). Socially, the system of agricultural production in Cuba differed from other Latin American cases, since here property-owners in vast numbers 'did not directly cultivate their lands', in contrast to the Mexican, Bolivian, or Brazilian cases of 'small rural exploits and [larger] colonato farms'8 (ibid.), a smaller version of latifundios grounded in arguably 'pre-capitalist', pseudo-feudal social and productive relations (Byres 2005: 203). Thus, one source of the wealth concentrated in Havana entangled itself in terms of obscuring the rural human labour in the productive system behind urban wealth; Marx's commodity ghost, the separation of the worker from the object which they produce, here comes with the 'complete alienation of the worker from the land he [sic] farmed' (Acosta and Hardoy 1971: 12). Furthermore, sugar consumption marks increasing wealth in poor countries because of the dramatic flavour changes it offers to a diet (Thomas 1967: 250), and in another notable Cuban journal of the 1960s, Pensamiento Crítico,9 sociologist Andre Gunder Frank (1967: 162) was reprinted describing one possible model to read Latin American agricultural economies and their nested core-periphery relationships both within a nation and beyond it: 'each one of the satellites ... serves as instrument to extract capital [...] Each national metropolis serves to impose and maintain the monopolistic structures and exploitative relations of this system'. Responding to this subordinate nesting fell under the domain of the revolution. Indeed, Che Guevara (1960: 11) expressed the primacy of agrarianism at its core: 'With the Agrarian Reform as our banner, whose execution begins in the Sierra Maestra, these men came to run into [toparse con] imperialism; they know that the Agrarian Reform is the base on which the new Cuba must be built; they also know that the Agrarian Reform will give land to all the dispossessed[.]' How, then, did architects affiliated with Arquitectura Cuba understand this sudden collision between urban and rural cultures in revolutionary Cuba? What proposals did they offer as part of this newfound civic duty to design for rural centres as much as urban ones?
In the February 1959 issue, an unsigned article (suggesting this was an official opinion of the Colegio as an institution) contemplated how the Agrarian Reform of 10 October 1958 and the associated new needs for rural housing might be interpreted as an architectural and urban programme of special public-service interest to the Colegio ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 51). The authors points to Israeli settlements in Palestine as normative precedents for an appropriate built environment for agrarian reform, showing important elements that appear to influence the anonymous author's or authors' thinking. For instance ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 50-2), there is a defined centre with 'communal services' in all five illustrations (Figures 2 and 3 for two examples), houses have yard setbacks but are close to the street, and the site plan design is typical of pre-World War II garden suburbs such as those designed by American landscape architect and urban planner John Nolan. These 'rural centres' sought to contribute to a process of 'agricultural colonisation' of the countryside landscape; the ties to Israeli settlements, described as 'semi-urban and rural with the motive of [...] resurgence' ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 57), suggest parallels to process of physical, community-based occupation of land as a strategy to assert control and particular social norms in an environment.
In addition to the social aspect, this article describes the Agrarian Reform and its reconfigured relationships between the countryside and the city as one of efficient allocation of human capital at its foundation. The authors decry the continuing presence in Cuba of wooden bohío huts, a common self-built rural housing practice prior to the revolution,10 on the one hand, and the continuous arrivals into the countryside of the urban precarious and indigent on the other ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 53). As referenced earlier, two parallel demographic phenomena which the Agrarian Reform sought to address were the nomadic movements into the cities as well as the increasing numbers of independent small farmers in the countryside ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959); the latter was perceived as a problem because it implied dispersion, whose main difficulty was rooted in insufficient agglomeration for service provision.
Article 33 of the law defined requirements for Rural Centres (Centros Rurales) as needing to provide agricultural labourers with 'the most essential [social] services' which were typically not available in the countryside, among them playfields, a community centre for consuming radio and television broadcasts, health centres, and schools, among others ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 53). These kinds of settlements sought to undermine the primacy of Havana by strengthening the other provincial capitals (Ebanks 1998: 7, 15, 18). However, inadvertently preempting the horrors of the food scarcity during the Special Period,11 one of the reasons for yard setbacks that would not normally be found in cities (except for in the wealthier parts of Havana and the capitals) was to provide for subsistence cultivation in front yards.
The vision for these rural centres took the town-and-country idea to heart, providing a sufficiently dense social environment for residents to interact while still adopting a 'semi-rural' character alongside its urbanity, though with a maximum of '80 to 100 inhabitants per hectare' ('La Reforma Agraria' 1959: 54), or about maximum 207 to 260 people per square mile, which is a bit denser than Pinar del Río today. At its core, the goal of building these rural towns was to position them on the same cultural/political level as workers' cities/factory towns.
However, to apply a critique which Roberto Segre (1969) offered elsewhere, one can problematise the choice of the Garden City as the urban-design model of choice for new rural towns, saying that this would impose a traditionally bourgeois built environment on a population with a proletariat habitus. However, the means of production was that of cooperative farms, and that is reflected in choices made about site planning subsequently. In Cayado's (1960: 32) reading of Gropius, for instance, modern architecture and socialism go together because both must be imbued with an awareness of the contemporary industrial condition, though one might argue that this already occurred in the batey communities which were established around nineteenth-century sugar mills (cf. Landstreet and Mundigo 1982: 3). Estévez Curbelo (1959b: 201-4) also advocated similar design principles for expanding small-and medium-sized towns: neighbourhoods planned with a 'horizontal density' model (Figure 4) in mind would be reminiscent of Clarence Perry's neighbourhood unit model, being centred on a school and commercial area. However, he more explicitly cautioned about proliferating uses of the Garden City as a singular solution, warning that its detached houses and accompanying small gardens were only adequate for cities not exceeding 200,000 people. In larger cities, however, the result would be 'anti-economical and chaotic' (Estévez Curbelo 1959b: 201). The Garden City model, then, seems adequately suitable for this specific situation, and rather than being a large shift away from existing rural settlement practices, actually reflects patterns that had followed rural production systems prior to the Revolution.
Socialism, modernism and the Cuban architectural identity
A last theme to explore is how Arquitectura Cuba reflected the revolution's new opportunities for Cuban architects to negotiate their position in relation to pressures both on the island and from global modernism.
A first conclusion we can draw is that Cuban architects at the start of the revolutionary period were embedded in global networks of architectural thought, with modernist site planning principles coming across clearly in their writing. Examples include free-form, towers-in-the-park site planning with no rigid association with the urban block, or transportation planning based on discrete views of modality necessitating separation between walking or driving. Estévez Curbelo (1959b: 203-4), for instance, wrote in support of the benefits he saw in towersin-the-park plans, or 'vertical development plans [planta de desarrollo vertical]' (Figure 5), of the sort that came to dominate early large state-directed housing projects following the revolution. Among these benefits, he identified many, espoused even today by urban planning associations such as the Congress for the New Urbanism, that were driven by density: making metropolitan regions more compact by allowing for density to be concentrated while still creating privacy, further agglomerating infrastructural and supermarket service provision, lower costs of constructing at large scales, and providing large open spaces to improve temperatures and urban beauty.
Among the many modernist ideas which come across, Nicolás Quintana (1959: 168), a notable figure in Cuban modernism, makes clear - though uncited - references to Le Corbusier's aphorism that 'styles are a lie,' for instance, in a piece entitled 'Cuban Architecture: A Search for the Truth',12 where he situated Cuban architecture within a political and environmental lens. He also advocated a focus on cultivating the individual architect's cultural awareness, with the architect as a holistic synthesiser of contemporary culture, is an idea which architecture programmes elsewhere continue to promote, and which architectural theory as a corpus of publications seems to embody.
In looking forward to what the 1960s might offer architecturally, Cayado opened with an epigraph from Gropius, calling for comprehensive urban plans (though, in the mindset of the time, rarely taking socioeconomic change over time or considering adaptations to the site plan and usage). Comprehensive planning, as presented by Gropius, awakens citizens of the Americas to demand 'physical renewal of their environment',13 such as separating modes of transport like walking and driving (32-33). Advocating the separation of foot and vehicular traffic was very similar to ideas explored and implemented in Radburn or Brasilia - this principle which was practised to some degree in Camilo Cienfuegos but less so in Alamar, where mixed traffic and a surprising Jane Jacobs-like 'eyes on the street' condition exists (Figure 6) - and the focus on open green areas surrounding four- to eleven-story buildings with a density of '70 housing units [viviendas] per hectare' is very Corbusian, for instance (Estévez Curbelo 1959a: 153). In addition, Quintana (1959: 167) twice asserts functionalism as a normative preferable process for architecture, designing from the interior of a building to its exterior. This has phenomenological and social-organisational interpretations for both the architect during the design process and the person eventually inhabiting the building: by designing the interior use first, an architect can let go of a monumental, self-aggrandising impulse; in doing so, Quintana's writings also feed into Fidel Castro's calls to abandon vain architecture. As Quintana goes on to describe, architects ought to be 'very attentive to the reactions of the people that use [their works]', lending a tie between socially minded architecture and the domesticity which characterises so much of quotidian life in Cuban cities. Thus, 'the "monument-architect" [...] peasant of the ethereal, cultivator of the extremely subtle, he who lives on that of the Beyond, shall never integrate himself in this [socialist] movement'14 (Quintana 1959). Arquitectura Cuba therefore suggests that global architectural modernist thought was already assimilated into Cuban architectural practice, but its understanding was mediated through a lens of Cuban-revolutionary social consciousness.
Second, the revolution seemed to bring forth a challenge for these architects to work towards both socialist egalitarianism and cultivating a unique Cuban identity. Writing from this point of view as a practising professional architect at the stylistic and methodological forefront of mid-century modernism, Quintana described the revolution as an 'extraordinary moment' which sought both a 'total revision of [Cuban] values', while also acknowledging an 'enormous historical responsibility ahead' (166). With the revolution, he wrote, the Colegio had an opportunity to work and unify across the whole of the Cuban island, promoting a sense of national unity through its work. Ironically, as Díaz Olivarez and Riverón Díaz (2016) pointed out, many of the state-sponsored housing projects, like in Alamar, which sought to drive what a socialist architectural identity might look like, also worked to erase the individuality of the participating architects. This was unlike the playful (and eventually abandoned), National Art Schools [Escuelas Nacionales de Arte] (Figure 7), where the identities of the separate architects were initially celebrated (Consuegra 1965) until construction ceased due to the perceived anti-socialist playfulness of the buildings, even though they were conquering what was once a restrictive, high-end golf course.
In the context of a nascent revolution, Arquitectura Cuba offered architects a venue to explore how their work related to a context of past colonialism and imperialism. Quintana's description of Cuban architecture reflects a common sentiment expressed by national authors in the historiography of Latin American architecture: that their national architecture is insufficiently localised. In this case, connecting to Castro and Estévez's admonition of monumental architecture, Quintana (1959: 167-8) proposes that Cuba has no coherent architectural movement, but 'only isolated examples of Architecture' - a relevant pun (aislados [isolated] - isla [island] - islanded) which returns in a later criticism of architectural education that teaches students in 'isolated' ways rather than responding effectively to housing needs. Quintana loads his description underlying emotional motivations that might lead an architect vainly to design a monument-building with references to conquest and fame, creating a legibly colonial description of the act. Later in the article, Quintana (1959) again takes up this tone, proudly dismissing colonialism as a finished era in Cuba, and one which was no longer desired.
To problematise the influence of globalised architecture, one might argue that the site plan may be of its time, but whether it responds to its place is another question, especially in East Havana. An initial effort by I.N.A.V., the Instituto Nacional de Ahorros y Vivienda [National Institute of Savings and Housing], was to begin planning a 'pilot Urban Unit in East Havana' which would eventually come to be called the Reparto Camilo Cienfuegos (Figures 8 and 9). A core principle of this new neighbourhood, whose plans replaced those for a luxury community, was to 'convert the city of privilege into a city for all'15 (Estévez Curbelo 1959a: 153). The capitalist conceit of the original design came in its purely speculative character, and the resulting concentration of wealth, the author explained, would breed inequality and mismatched distribution of wealth and access to natural resources. Instead, the subsequent free site plan designed in a Soviet style would reflect 'our time [época]'. In the typical modernist attitude, he boldly asserted that this kind of architecture 'has a greater potential value than the West zone developed in a chaos of four centuries'16 (ibid.), which begins to create frame for understanding the full site and connects noticeably to Fidel Castro's earlier remarks.
Cienfuegos is certainly of its time, then, but how can we assess the degree to which it is place-bound? The site plan, after all, is broadly conceived as Soviet, with similar exemplars in East Berlin, for instance. In addition, at a visit to Reparto Camilo Cienfuegos, Díaz Olivarez and Riverón Díaz (2016) explained that, as with other Soviet-style complexes, like Alamar, the neighbourhood has a very poor design relationship to the water in terms of access by foot, even though the Straits of Florida are visible from a grand number of flats in the complexes (Figure 10). However, we can use Quintana's framework of Cuban distinction in architecture to argue that some features, such as sun-shading screen walls that still allow light to pass, or practices like obscuring the individuality of designers, place the complex squarely into the Cuban context. After all, in socially minded design, one might comprehend the object-buildings of Habana del Este as undermining the inherent vanity of object-buildings which stand freely in the landscape because of their repetition and egalitarian monotony.
Therefore, Arquitectura Cuba offers a reading of the intellectual environment in which Cuban architects of the early revolution found themselves, seeking both to include their work in the larger fabric of new architectural production and explore the implications of articulating a modernist idiom within a new socialist context.
Conclusion
As demonstrated and critiqued, Arquitectura Cuba offers an incredibly rich archive for beginning to think about and understand the socioeconomic, professional and political contexts in which architectural thought was produced and architecture practice was guided in the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The new government identified architects as key trained professionals with whom to work in addressing Cuba's most pressing urban problems, a part of which had strong parallels to the country's systems of agricultural production. Economic development was a core concern which reached from urban to rural settlements alike, with architects having the potential to establish a newfound, socially oriented position for themselves amid global trends in architecture. This investigation ultimately illustrates potential methodological directions and archival sources for Cuban architectural and social historiography, revealing a lens to read the Cuban Revolution and its legacies today.
Author's Note
In Cuban copyright law, all images reproduced here from Arquitectura Cuba are in the public domain; because they were published before 1997, their copyright expired 25 years after publication (from 1959 and 1960 to 1984 and 1985, respectively). Institutions housing the materials are recognised. Other photographs are original of the author.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a research and travel fellowship (Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities) from the Andrew D. Mellon Foundation and the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. The author would like to thank Dr. Tao DuFour (Department of Architecture) and Dr. Tom McEnaney (Department of Comparative Literature) for their instruction and guidance.
Notes
1. Profesionales universitarios
2. garanti[r] una vida digna y adecuada para todos
3. proteger los derechos a la vida que deben tener los habitantes de las ciudades
4. Por la primera vez en Cuba los profesionales se han sentido constructores reales de la sociedad
5. La Arquitectura en los países en vías de desarrollo
6. pues es totalmente improductivo, basado en la mera especulación y el desvío de capitales que pudieran ser dedicados a elevar la productividad nacional
7. el más serio obstáculo para la construcción de viviendas y el desarrollo de edificaciones industriales
8. pequeñas explotaciones campesinas y la hacienda de colonato
9. The journal's front matter reads, 'Pensamiento Crítico responde a la necesidad de información que sobre el desarrollo del pensamiento político y social del tiempo presente tiene hoy la Cuba revolucionaria' - 'Critical Thought responds to the need for information about the development of present political and social thought which is found today in revolutionary Cuba'.
10. Other authors attacked the bohío elsewhere for its 'primitive' indigeneity still being present as late as the 'modern' 1960s (cf. Housing in revolutionary Cuba, [ca. 1961-1963]).
11. One tearing-up gentleman described The Special Period in Times of Peace as 'those cursed years [aquellos maldichos años]'. We spoke at a block party on a street in El Vedado celebrating the anniversary of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution [Comités de Defensa de la Revolución], neighbourhood organisations established to prevent anti-revolutionary sentiment and to respond to basic service delivery concerns like waste collection.
12. Arquitectura cubana; una búsqueda de la verdad
13. renovación física de su medio ambiente
14. el 'arquitecto-monumento' ... campesino del etéreo, cultivador de lo extremadamente sutil, vividor del más allá, jamás se integrará a este movimiento.
15. convertir la ciudad del privilegio en la ciudad de todos
16. tiene un valor potencial mayor que la zona Oeste desarrollada en un caos de cuatro siglos
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Copyright Pluto Journals Winter 2017