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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'...