Havana Forever

Carlos Alberto Montaner

A presentation of the book Havana Forever written by Kenneth Treister, Felipe J. Préstamo and Raúl B. García, published in 2009 by University Press of Florida.
Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. Dec. 7, 2009, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

I begin by quoting some lines from the song Habáname by Carlos Varela: Havana, Havana,/ wish a song were enough/ to return to you everything/ that time stole from you;/ Havana, my Havana/ if you knew the pain/ I feel; I sing to you/ and you don't understand/ that my weeping springs from love.

I have been asked to present Havana Forever, a pictorial and cultural history of an unforgettable city; La Habana Para Siempre, una historia cultural y pictórica de una ciudad inolvidable, published by the University Press of Florida this year, 2009, written in English by Kenneth Treister, Felipe Préstamo y Raúl B. García, three magnificent architects united not only by their profession but also by their love for Havana.

To me, this is very pleasing, because it is a an important and very well-researched work that goes into the heart of a substantial part of Cubanness. Many fine history books have been written about Cuba and magnificent picture books have been printed about Havana – perhaps the most photographed capital in Latin America – but there was a need for this history of Havana's architecture, a key element of Cuban life. To learn about that evolution is to approach our history from a vital angle.

My Havana 

I was born, and lived the first 10 years of my life, in Old Havana, on Tejadillo Street, and have unforgettable memories of the city, its rank and briny scents, the tolling of the bells in the nearby cathedral, some of its streets, then paved with cobblestones, that were roadways for old and wonderful trolley cars. I even remember when the trams were replaced by buses, a timely but probably wrong decision.

Because my older brother and I were very mischievous and adventurous, we walked alone throughout those places since the age of seven and frequently hid in the neighborhoods where our friends lived, just to avoid the boring expedient of going to school.

Thus, quite naturally, I acquired life's only real nationalism: the emotional tie to the urban landscape where one grows up. Perhaps the only real nostalgia I feel, half a century after leaving Cuba, consists of those sporadic memories that come to me like unexpected flashes.

The motherland is a notion that cannot be grasped and evades us easily. One doesn't love the motherland in the abstract. Instead, one loves the landscape observed during childhood and adolescence.

Real patriotism, the only psychologically possible patriotism, is urban, city-bound.

Democracy and nationalism were born in Greek cities, in each one of them, not in the confederacy that eventually was forged. Strictly speaking, there were no Greeks. There were Athenians, Thebans or Spartans, who sometimes professed terrible hatred to each other.

Someone may love a certain alley where he skated. I love the Loma del Ángel, which I skated about on a wooden scooter until a car killed a kid we had nicknamed “Motoneta,” who used to take the same route.

I love the Amphitheater, where I learned to ride a bike, and the broad sidewalk of Cuba Street, in front of the park, where old Evencio had his bicycle rental store.

I also love the Cabaña Bar, where, at the age of 11, I foolishly drank my first beer and played my first game of dice, and where a famous actress greeted me with a warm, lascivious gesture that I've never forgotten.

The dead and the city

As an adult, I understood the importance of cities in the human spirit when I read Lewis Mumford's monumental work about the history of cities.

I was fascinated to learn that our true history began with the burial of the dead. The first cities were built to shelter not the living but the dead.

At some point in history, cemeteries, fertile land and agriculture came together. Thus, gradually, the adventure of society became more complex.

Near the cemeteries gathered the shamans, who spoke with the dead and conjured the demons of disease.

The cemeteries were guarded by strong men who exercised authority; above them were the caudillos spurred by the need to command – our Alpha monkeys.

In time, the city spawned the State, the laws and the institutions needed to organize coexistence.

The city needed roads and aqueducts, so it gave birth to engineering.

It needed food, so it fostered trade and navigation.

It created garbage, so the dogs, the pigs and the rats descended on the leavings. The dogs and the pigs became tame. The rats continued to be – and still are – surly and independent.

The city allowed women to help each other in the collective raising of their children, a gesture that facilitated survival.

The city opened reserved spaces for specialized workers. In Madrid, where I settled in 1970, I loved to walk the streets lined with wine stores, linen shops, rope and hardware stores. There were barrios for artists and writers. Also for impecunious street walkers and “arrecogías,” prostitutes who found shelter in nunneries.

When I moved to Madrid, I didn't rest until I found an apartment in the house that sat on the land once occupied by Cervantes' home. The old building, erected in the early 19th Century, had used the ancient walls of Cervantes' home on the very old street called León.

I loved crossing the street and greeting the ghost of Lope de Vega, whose charming residence has been kept intact. Or turning right and walking quickly past the home of Quevedo, very near the convent where Cervantes' bones lie in a pauper's grave because the family had neither the money nor the inclination to buy him his own grave.

I imagine that, had I lived in Havana, my fetishes would have been different: the house on Paula Street, neat and gracious, where Martí once lived, or the minipalaces where Aldana, Pinillos and Arango y Parreño spent their busy and fruitful lives.

I left Havana when I was much too young – 18 – an age when one doesn't know how to enjoy the value of stones. How often did I walk past the Forja Martiana, the San Lázaro quarries, without stopping to imagine what happened there while Martí served his prison term?

But the stones have an incalculable worth. They are a spiritual reference. They tie you to the land.

Once I wrote that Kafka would not have been Kafka without his urban experience, that marvelous Prague with the alchemists' alley where the writer once lived, in the shadow of the Castle.

Urban life is a two-way experience. The city builds us and we build the cities.

In the first chapter of my book Latin Americans and the Western Culture, I go back to the Greeks and the Romans because the most important urbanizational features of those civilizations still survive in our world.

Without knowing it, we carry within us ancient nomadic hunters, medieval warriors and humble Galician immigrants. But within us also live Hippocrates and Vitruvius, the two great theorists of civil construction in classic antiquity.

Havana is the result of all that. Of Greece, of Rome, of the quarrelsome and educated Moors, of medieval and Renaissance Spain. It is also the product of European baroque art, of the Italian military architects who built the Spanish Empire's defense lines, of the artists dazzled by the greatness of Paris and New York.

When Diego Velázquez became Governor of the Island of Cuba in the early 16th Century, he built in his new destination a Seville-style home and filled it with the refreshing Moorish tiles and mosaics that were still fresh in his memory.

The first thing an immigrant does when he manages to amass his first fortune is to buy a dwelling that reminds him of the house he owned, or wished he had owned, in his country of origin. You haven't triumphed until you obtain that dreamed-of residence.

That is why the American world is full of Italian houses, Spanish estates and even French minipalaces. The Latin American hacienda is the Spanish cortijo, which, in turn, is the Roman villa. The batey, the wooden walls and the cooling roofs of guano are an homage to the Arahuacs, who have disappeared, though not altogether.

In Havana, the sum and compendium of many worlds, you'll find all that.

As this book tells, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Havana and Santiago bourgeoisie was very Catalonian, it imported from Barcelona the rationalist esthetics of the time.

If ever two cities, or fragments of two cities, were truly sisters, they are the Barcelona expansion and the Vedado.

It is moving to learn, as the book that I present today tells,  how, amid the bitter bumblings of Machado's administration, 1925-1930, when Cuba was going through its first major republican crisis, the government invited a French architect, Forestier, to redesign the capital and fill it with gardens and avenues, something like Haussman did with Paris in the mid-19th Century under Napoleon III.

Although the United States' influence was big and growing, Paris remained the great esthetic reference for Havana dwellers. It is true that Forestier carried out only a small part of his plans, but the government's intention, its esthetic preoccupation, was very clear.

In sum, the Cuban ruling class during the republic knew, or intuited, that the capital should be filled with parks and beautiful buildings. It was the government's most obvious responsibility.

It was also a tradition that came from colonial days. In the mid-19th Century, Tacón built in Havana a huge theater that looked more at home in Madrid or Vienna and brought from France an enormous lamp to illuminate it. Why had he been sent to Cuba if it wasn't to aggrandize Havana?

Years later, also in the 19th Century, the engineer Alvear built the aqueduct that bears his name, a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering that still functions.

Menocal ordered a presidential palace that might recall the most harmonic French architecture. Through that palace walked 21 presidents, and if the Revolution used it only during the months that Urrutia governed in 1959 it is because Fidel Castro, thinking like a paranoid pistol-packer commanding the UIR, thought that the building would be hard to protect in case of an armed assault.

The art of making ruins

The book Havana Forever ends with a depressing vision of contemporary Havana, similar to the one shown in the extraordinary German-Cuban documentary The New Art of Making Ruins. The long government of the Castros, which practically has taken up half of the country's independent life, is the first one ever to leave Havana under circumstances infinitely worse than when it began.

This book serves to examine the capital that Cubans had in 1902, when the Republic was inaugurated, and to see the successive improvements made to the city, until El Comandante arrived and put an end to that glorious tradition.

The city that Estrada Palma left was better than the one he inherited. The same is true of the governments of José Miguel Gómez, Mario García Menocal, Alfredo Zayas, Gerardo Machado, Laredo Bru, Fulgencio Batista, Ramón Grau, Carlos Prío and, again, Batista.

In the 56 years the Republic existed, there were economic and political crises, insurrections, upheavals, revolutions, dictatorships, street riots. Everything happened, but there was also continued progress.

Havana in the 1950s, with its majestic residential neighborhoods, its parks and monuments, was a beautiful city, one of the most beautiful in Latin America and – why not? – in the entire world.

How could the city improve and grow beautiful in times that seemed (and were) tortuous?

Essentially, first, because there were two parallel sources of urban development. One was dictated by the government; the other was carried out by the civilian society.

Quite rightly, the successive governments built the Presidential Palace, the Capitol, the University and the central highway, but the civilian society urbanized the Vedado and Miramar, and built the Bacardi Building, the Tropicana, and the famous Focsa.

The foci of urban creativity numbered in the hundreds. Entrepreneurial impetus came from multiple sources. Architect Nicolás Quintana once wrote that there were periods during the so-called “dance of millions” when 10 buildings would be inaugurated in one day.

None of that is possible under socialism, which concentrates creativity in the tired hands of a handful of bureaucrats who lack imagination and entrepreneurial spirit, who are more interested in holding on to their jobs than in transforming reality in a beneficial manner.

The second aspect that explains communism's awful incurability is the lack of channels of communication with the world's creative sources. From colonial to republican times, Cuban engineers, architects and urban developers were linked with the world's finest intelligentsia.

All that may have started when Antonelli set the bases for military architecture in Cuba, but it continued uninterruptedly for centuries. It culminated in the mid-20th Century, when personalities like Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, and José Luis Sert traveled to the island.

Havana's intelligentsia, the so-called civilian society, living in a port city open to international commerce, was always connected with the best brains in the West. It was part of that world. It fed from its influence.

All that ended when the communist dictatorship cruelly severed all relations with the creative urbanizing sources in the world's greater cities and limited creativity to the tasteless Soviet influence, with its gray and graceless edifices, looking more like beehives than residences for humans.

The third element we must take into account to understand the Cubans' urban crisis and Havana's monstrous decadence is the communist system's chronic lack of productivity.

Beautiful and new construction, and the care and maintenance of patrimony, must rely on abundant budget surpluses. That is not possible in a collectivist economic model where production is in the hands of party bureaucrats, prices are set arbitrarily, and goods and services are assigned in a rigid manner.

Where there's no economic freedom, where there's no freedom to produce, poverty will inevitably reign. Where there is no private property, the willingness to maintain the houses, public parks and buildings is extinguished. That observation was made by Aristotle 2,500 years ago and remains true today.

One of the tragic verifications of economic science in the 20th Century is Pero Grullo's assertion that people take better care of their own goods than of shared goods, as shown by experience and common sense.

In socialism, that natural tendency is heightened by the hostile relationship that exists between the State and a society condemned to live in poverty because of its masters' ideological stubbornness. To many people straitjacketed by Marxism-Leninism, vandalism against community goods is a silent way to protest against the system – or at least to wreak vengeance.

In contrast, in societies where public spaces have been segregated by society, freely and through consensus, and where the elected or appointed functionaries are public servants who obey the law, not insensitive blowhards, people tend to look after the common spaces with a lot more dedication than in communist societies.

A citizen of Paris, Venice, Barcelona or Prague is proud of his city and will not damage it. The city is his and he belongs to the city.

A citizen of Havana, Santiago de Cuba or Matanzas experiences the uncomfortable sensation that he is an outsider whom the Party officials allow to live (graciously but miserably) in an urban center that doesn't belong to him. That accounts for the implacable growth of the intense practice of vandalism, so typical of communist societies. It is a secret reprisal against a cruel master.

The fourth element is a flatal flaw derived from the type of caudillism that afflicts Cuba. It's bad enough that Cuba was led for more than half a century by Fidel Castro, but that circumstance is made worse by the knowledge that Castro lacks esthetic refinement and that his platonic idea of a city barely rises above the remote hamlet of Birán, his parents' rural farm in Oriente province.

The urban esthetics of Fidel Castro, master and ruler of Cuba's fate and probably his brother Raúl's, have to do with the small countryside world of his childhood or with his adventures on the Sierra Maestra, the landscape that has made him happy all his life. This background translates into the astounding indifference with which he has witnessed the gradual destruction of a city that he was never able to appreciate.

What does Fidel Castro care about the collapse of thousands of beautiful homes or the growing decadence in Havana and all the other cities on the island, when he lacks the instinct to perceive the beauty around him because his scale of values has no room for urban esthetics?

Machado was also a dictator, a petty dictator, as Batista was, and neither was especially well educated. But somehow both knew or intuited that it was convenient to provide Cubans with an elegant, and sometime sumptuous, urban environment because the beauty of Havana was a collective patrimony that needed to be enhanced.

That is why Havana did not stop beautifying herself, even in the most tragic moments, like those proud old ladies who dab rouge on their cheeks to confront the worst illnesses with dignity.

Finally

What more can be said about this book? It can be said that it appears at a key moment, when the communist regime is in its terminal stage, when those who manage it are totally demoralized after half a century of unconcealable failures.

When the final moment comes, that glorious day when the prisoners are freed, the 11 million inmates who suffer in the big penitentiary, Havana will rise from the ruins the way European cities rose after the devastating bombings of World War Two. By then, reading this book will be an exercise in inspiration. The unforgettable city will regain its splendor forever. Forever, because that's its vocation and its destiny  encourages them.

December 18, 2009

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