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STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS
AESTHETICS AND
THE REVOLUTIONARY
CITY
Real and Imagined Havana
Series Editor
Maxine Molyneux
Institute of the Americas
University College London
London, UK
The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specific, cross-
disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of
Politics, Economics, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Anthropology,
Development, Gender, Social Policy and the Environment. The series
publishes monographs, readers on specific themes and also welcomes
proposals for edited collections, that allow exploration of a topic from
several different disciplinary angles. This series is published in conjunc-
tion with University College London’s Institute of the Americas under
the editorship of Professor Maxine Molyneux.
For all their help, ideas, and support, my thanks go to Alba Chaparro,
Ruth Cruickshank, Adrian Davies, Robin Davies, Alison Dean,
Edmundo Desnoes, Mark Gant, Leandro González Sánchez, Carlos
Marcel González Sánchez, Manolo Hijano, Jill Ingham, Tony Kapcia,
Par Kumaraswami, Maximiliano Francisco Trujillo Lemes, Brígida Pastor,
John Perivolaris, Giuliana Pieri, Eric Robertson, Danielle Sands, Rob
Stone, Philip Swanson, Olivia Swift, David Vilaseca, and Peter Watt. I
would like to express my sincere thanks to my Ph.D. advisor Abigail Lee
Six and my supervisor Miriam Haddu for her continued support.
The original research for my Ph.D. project was made possible thanks
to a full bursary from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(2007–2011). I am grateful to my colleagues in the School of Modern
Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of
London, the Cuba Research Forum at the University of Nottingham, the
Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies at New York University,
and the Facultad de Lenguas Extranjeras at the Universidad de la
Habana, whose students helped me begin formulating ideas relating to
foreign imaginaries and the representation of Cuba in the early stages
of my academic career. In addition to the support I have received from
these academics, centres and institutions, I am also grateful to the archive
and creative agency that have granted permission to use the images
found in this book. Many thanks also to the editorial team at Palgrave
Macmillan, especially the editorial director Anca Pusca, and the Studies of
the Americas series editor Maxine Molyneux.
v
vi Acknowledgements
7 The Music Film and the City: Our Manics in Havana 183
Index 211
vii
About the Author
ix
List of Figures
xi
CHAPTER 1
This has been exemplified over the course of the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries by the way the idea of Cuba in the Western imag-
inary has been constructed predominantly around North American
representations of the country. This resulted first and foremost from
the island’s portrayal in different (primarily visual) texts that included
film, literature, magazines, music, photography, and tourist guide-
books. As Louis Pérez Jr. observes in his book Cuba in the American
Imagination:
Havana Imaginaries
In his influential book The Image of the City, the American urban
planner and theorist Kevin Lynch describes our way of seeing urban
environments as one that is always experienced “in relation to its sur-
roundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, [and] the mem-
ory of past experiences.”9 In the case of Havana, the image of the
pre-revolutionary city was forged around its portrayal in foreign film,
literature, and photography from the 1930s–1950s. This was a period
in which the country developed a reputation as a type of “Pleasure
Island,” with its capital city becoming a sort of “tropical playground.”10
1 INTRODUCTION: REAL AND IMAGINED HAVANA 3
The images associated with this era determined a range of a priori assump-
tions and expectations about the country that thereafter influenced not only
foreigners’ ways of seeing Cuba and its capital city but also their interpreta-
tion of different Cuban “realities.” Furthermore, this was intensified by the
country’s political isolation from the early 1960s onwards (following the tri-
umph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the imposition of the economic
trade embargo on Cuba by the United States in 1962) and, specifically in
the US context, as a result of the way travel restrictions meant that the vast
majority of its population were restricted to imagining Havana from abroad.
In the contemporary context, Havana continues to capture the imag-
ination of a global audience but the image of the city has been for-
mulated around a complex visual order that combines different spatial
temporalities. Modern-day conceptions of Havana are thereby not only
drawn from Cuba’s pre-revolutionary past (symbolized by its colonial
architecture, 1950s American-made cars, and iconic bars popularized by
foreign writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene) but also
from the post-revolutionary period that followed (denoted by images of
the barbudo [bearded rebel], iconic figureheads [including Fidel Castro
and Che Guevara], Soviet era Havana, and so on). Since the 1990s, how-
ever, these representations have become entangled in foreign visions
of the city that emerged in the wake of the worst years of the “Período
Especial en Tiempo de Paz” (the “Special Period in Time of Peace”) fol-
lowing the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the cessation
of economic subsidies to Cuba from the Soviet Union.
The ensuing economic crisis brought the island and its capital city to
a literal standstill, thus leading to the mental projection of Havana as a
city “frozen-in-time”—the aforementioned pre- and post-revolutionary
imaginaries becoming fused with signs of the city’s ruin and decay.11
Consequently, the circulation of images of the city in a type of sus-
pended animation led to the development of what critics referred to as a
“Special Period aesthetic” and to Havana acquiring a “distinct aesthetic
quality.”12 This visual character has been entrenched in representations of
the city created by foreign filmmakers and photographers over the course
of the last two decades, thus resulting in the extension of what I refer to
in this book as a “post-Special Period aesthetic.”
Havana is representative of a “revolutionary city” in more ways than
one. On the one hand, this description of Havana’s character relates to
its turbulent history of revolution and rebellion, which has been rein-
forced through its portrayal in different visualities as a politically loaded
4 J. C. KENT
urban location. As the British geographer David Harvey has noted, the
city is made up of different iconic imaginaries that are “deeply embedded
in the pursuit of political meanings” and these belong to an ever-chang-
ing “spatio-temporal order” that not only endows the city with political
meaning, but also “mobilizes a crucial political imaginary.”13 However,
Havana may also be seen as “revolutionary” in terms of the way its image
has been constantly re-defined over the course of the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. This correlates with the cultural critic and the-
orist Giuliana Bruno’s reading of images of the city as “moving” enti-
ties that are formed collectively by our respective cultural experiences.14
She writes:
This spatiovisual imaginary can come into being only across the course of
time. An urban image is created by the work of history and the flow of
memory. This is because the city of images comprises in its space all of its
past histories, with their intricate layers of stories. … The urban imaginary
is a palimpsest of mutable fictions floating in space and residing in time.
Mnemonic narratives condense in space, and their material residue seeps
into the imaginative constructions of a place.15
including the Habana Hilton and the Parque Central), the chapter
also draws attention to a number of Glinn’s more “anti-iconic” pho-
tographs. Towards the end of the chapter, my discussion considers the
way filmmakers re-imagined images produced by photographers such
as Glinn in their fictional portrayals of Havana and the revolutionary
moment.
The fourth chapter (Chapter 4: “David Bailey’s Havana and the
“Post-Special Period” Photobook) explores the boom in production
of Cuba- and Havana-oriented photobooks since the end of the 1990s.
To illustrate this phenomenon, the chapter presents a detailed analysis
of the iconic British photographer David Bailey’s photobook Havana
(2006). It focuses on the sociopolitical context of the Cuban “Special
Period” and considers the impact that photobooks produced by for-
eign photographers had on the extension of a “post-Special Period” aes-
thetic. It also offers a series of close-readings of images from Havana
and considers the way that Bailey’s photographs are representative of a
variety of different genres and photographic styles (ranging from tour-
istic snapshots to black-and-white portraiture and documentary-style
images). The chapter also takes into account the way pre-existing images
of Havana appear to influence his portrayal of the city in his photobook.
Representative of the first extended discussion of Bailey’s Havana, the
chapter aims both to build on existing discussions relating to “post-Spe-
cial Period” photography and to contribute to the growing field of
scholarly research on the photobook.
In Chapter 5 (“Advertising the City: “Nothing Compares to
Havana””) my focus in this book shifts from the analysis of documen-
tary photography, photojournalism, and the “post-Special Period” pho-
tobook to an exploration of the way Havana has been marketed in the
advertising image. The chapter focuses on the representation of the real
and imagined city in the Cuban rum brand Havana Club’s “Nothing
Compares to Havana” advertising campaign, which launched in 2010.
Examining the representation of the city in advertising discourse, the
chapter draws attention to the way that pre-existing images of Havana
influence brand marketing aimed at Western consumers. It represents the
first comprehensive analysis of the campaign that helped turn Havana
Club into an “iconic brand” and explores the impact this had on imag-
inaries of the city in the “post-Special Period” context. Central to the
discussion in this chapter are ideas relating to the notion of the “myth-
ical city,” the campaign’s evoking of nostalgia for different Havana
1 INTRODUCTION: REAL AND IMAGINED HAVANA 7
Notes
1. For a thought-provoking discussion regarding aesthetics and the imagi-
nary, see: Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6–14.
2. Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities (London: Influx Press, 2015), 236.
3. Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan, “Introduction: For
Geographical Aesthetics,” in Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space,
Staging Encounters, eds. Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan
(Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1–2.
4. Phil Hubbard, City (London: Routledge, 2005), 59.
5. Helen F. Wilson, “Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and
Documentary Encounters,” in Encountering the City: Urban Encounters
from Accra to New York, eds. Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson
(London: Routledge, 2016), 203.
6. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Island People: The Caribbean and the World
(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), 6. Emphasis added.
7. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and
the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2008), 22–23.
8. For references to Havana as synecdoche for Cuba see: Lucía M. Suárez,
“Ruin Memory: Havana Beyond the Revolution,” Canadian Journal of
Latin American and Caribbean Studies 39, no. 1 (2014): 39; and Ana
María Dopico, “Picturing Havana: History, Vision, and the Scramble
for Cuba,” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002), 451. See also:
Antoni Kapcia, Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg,
2005), 3.
9. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960),
1.
10. For example, see: Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and
Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999); Peter Moruzzi, Havana Before Castro (Salt Lake City, UT
and Enfield, UK: Gibbs Smith, Publishers Group, 2002).
11. Wilson, “Encountering Havana,” 204.
12. Cristina Venegas, “Filmmaking with Foreigners,” in Cuba in the Special
Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, ed. Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
(New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46; Ariana
Hernandez-Reguant, “Writing the Special Period,” in Cuba in the Special
Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, ed. Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
(New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13.
13. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban
Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2012), xvi–xvii.
1 INTRODUCTION: REAL AND IMAGINED HAVANA 9
Bibliography
Anderson, Darran. Imaginary Cities. London: Influx Press, 2015.
Bruno, Giuliana. Surfaces: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Dopico, Ana María. “Picturing Havana: History, Vision, and the Scramble for
Cuba.” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002): 451–93.
Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
London: Verso Press, 2012.
Hawkins, Harriet, and Elizabeth Straughan. “Introduction: For Geographic
Aesthetics.” In Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters,
edited by Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth Straughan, 1–18. Farnham, UK and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.
Hernandez-Reguant, Ariana. “Writing the Special Period.” In Cuba in the Special
Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, edited by Ariana Hernandez-
Reguant, 1–18. New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Hubbard, Phil. City. London: Routledge, 2005.
Jelly-Schapiro, Joshua. Island People: The Caribbean and the World. Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2016.
Kapcia, Antoni. Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
Moruzzi, Peter. Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground.
Salt Lake City, UT and Enfield, UK: Gibbs Smith and Publishers Group, 2002.
Pérez, Jr., Louis A. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the
Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Schwartz, Rosalie. Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln,
NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Sheppard, Anne. Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987.
Suárez, Lucía M. “Ruin Memory: Havana Beyond the Revolution.” Canadian
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 39, no. 1 (2014): 38–55.
Venegas, Cristina. “Filmmaking with Foreigners.” In Cuba in the Special Period:
Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, edited by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant,
37–50. New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Wilson, Helen F. “Encountering Havana: Texts, Aesthetics and Documentary
Encounters.” In Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New
York, edited by Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson, 203–220. London:
Routledge, 2016.
CHAPTER 2
Havana and Photography
Havana’s relationship with photography is almost as old as the history
of the medium itself.1 As early as 1840, just months after Louis-Jacques-
Mandé Daguerre presented his new process at a joint event held by the
Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut
de France in Paris, the daguerreotype arrived in Cuba’s capital city. The
process was subsequently demonstrated to the Cuban public by Pedro
Téllez Girón, the Spanish-Cuban son of the island’s Captain General
and Cuban War of Independence hero Pedro de Alcántara Téllez Girón
y Alfonso Pimentel, who is believed to have taken the first recorded
photograph of the city from the balcony of the Palacio de los Capitanes
Generales (Palace of the Governors): a landscape photograph of the
Plaza de Armas that was later lost. In 1841, the American daguerreo
typist George W. Halsey installed the first photographic studio in Cuba
and Latin America on the roof of the Real Colegio de Conocimientos
Útiles (Royal College of Useful Knowledge) in Habana Vieja (Old
Havana, the city’s colonial quarter).2
In turn, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century,
Cuba’s first wave of professional photographers (including the pioneer-
ing Cuban photographer Esteban de Arteaga) imported photography
equipment and materials, set up galleries and studios, and began to teach
daguerreotyping.3 At this time, daguerreotypists moved freely between
Havana, New York and Paris, with Cubans, Americans and Europeans
part to the way he assumed the figure of a flâneur (an urban stroller and
observer of society) whilst working in the city, involving and at the same
time detaching himself from his surroundings. This method allowed him
to map out his own version of the city in his photographs—one that
would prove influential in the subsequent development of a pre-revolu-
tionary Havana aesthetic outside the island.
Various aspects of Evans’s trip to Havana continue to fascinate schol-
ars working in the fields of both Cuban and photography studies. One
area of interest to critics has been the way that this body of images
offers some indication as to how Evans came to develop his formalist
aesthetic in the years that preceded his more well-known work in the
United States for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935–
1936. By revisiting his work in the Walker Evans Archive (stored at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City), scholars have looked to
both learn about Evans’s time in Cuba and reveal more about his photo-
graphic development.10 Others have attempted to retrace Evans’s steps
in Havana in order to discover more about his encounter with the city
and the way he negotiated his route around the urban environment as
he captured different subjects and locations. What is clear from the sus-
tained interest in Evans’s photographs of Havana is that this influential
body of black-and-white images has captivated a broad range of different
audiences.
Part of the appeal of Evans’s Cuban photographs appears to lie in the
way that his photographic mapping of Havana allows the viewer to get
lost in his version of the city. This is illustrated, for instance, by the num-
ber of foreign photographers for whom a primary interest in capturing
Havana developed as a result of an encounter with images from Evans’s
Havana portfolio at some point in their career.11 The work of these prac-
titioners has often been described, either by the photographers them-
selves or by critics discussing their work, as a visual response to Evans’s
photo-essay, and their trips are commonly framed as photographic pil-
grimages (with straplines such as “in the footsteps of Walker Evans”) that
enable an imagistic conversation to take place between the photogra-
phers in question and Evans’s pictures from 1933.12
There is also evidence of Evans’s influence on a national level in Cuba
following the first publication of his images of Havana in Carleton Beals’s
The Crime of Cuba (1933). The book had a notable influence on Cuban
photographers such as Constantino “Arias” Miranda and José Tabío Palma,
and their respective portrayals of Cuban peasantry from the 1940s and the
14 J. C. KENT
squalid living conditions on the island in the 1950s are clearly redolent
of a number of Evans’s images of Havana’s poor.13 For example, photo-
graphs such as Arias’s Havana Slum (c. 1950)—an image depicting pover-
ty-stricken Cuban children living in Havana taken almost two decades after
Evans’s visit—brings to mind the American photographer’s evident social
concern in photographs such as Beggar, Woman and Children, Stevedore
and Woman in Courtyard Kitchen taken in Cuba in 1933. Evans’s focus
on these everyday scenes is emblematic of the way he appeared to con-
sciously avoid photographing the city’s more recognizable landmarks (such
as Havana’s new hotels and monuments). He preferred instead to work in
the surrounding areas of the city’s harbour terminal and its railway station
in streets that are distinguishable from the street names that appear in the
portfolio (including Bélgica, Sol, Luz, and Compostela).14
Whilst Evans took over 440 photographs during his trip to Cuba, only
a selection of these were shown to the public in the exhibition “American
Photographs” (1938) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.15
It was only much later, following publication of selected photographs
from the portfolio in a series of photobooks in 1989 and 2001—and in
subsequent exhibitions—that Evans’s photographs enterered the wider
public consciousness.16 These books included essays that explored the aes-
thetic and political forces that shaped Evans’s approach to photographing
Havana and stimulated conversations relating to his mapping of the city.
In these essays and the texts that followed their publication, crit-
ics were quick to identify that Evans’s photographic representation of
Havana held a significant place in the cultural and collective imaginary
of the period and it was clear that the growing interest in this body of
images in a contemporary context further illustrated its importance in
terms of its documentary register.17 Reflecting critically on the signifi-
cance of Evans’s photographs with respect to their documentary value
and the development of a pre-revolutionary Havana aesthetic throws
up a number of theoretical issues relating to photographic practice. In
turn, these are explored in this chapter in my analysis of a selection of
Evans’s Cuban photographs by considering the relationship between his
photography and psychogeography (the intersection of psychology and
geography), the act of urban wandering and the figure of the flâneur.
Understanding these different processes is fundamental to broadening
both our understanding of Evans’s relationship with Havana and the way
his foreign vision of the urban environment came to shape subsequent
real and imagined representations of the city.
2 MAPPING THE CITY: WALKER EVANS IN HAVANA 15
Pleasure Island
The first twenty years of Cuban independence resulted in an increase of
Spanish migration to the island and led to the emergence of a new work-
ing class that developed alongside Cuba’s modernized sugar industry.
However, inequalities between east and west Havana resulted in signifi-
cant racial division.18 Most significant in their impact on Cuban society
during this period were the Platt Amendment (1901),19 the Danza de los
Millones (1920–1921)20 and the emergence of the Communist Party of
Cuba in 1925. President Gerardo Machado developed into an increas-
ingly authoritarian figure during the 1920s but the economic crisis and
social strife caused by the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and plummeting
sugar prices weakened his political dominance. Havana became the “epi-
centre of Latin American dollar diplomacy in the hangover years after
the gaudy North American investment spree” and the country sunk into
an era of poverty and oppression.21 This eventually led to Machado’s
removal by the Cuban Army in August 1933, just months after Evans’s
trip to Cuba, following labour and social strife that began three years
earlier in 1930.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cuba had become a “no
place” onto which the United States projected its own fantasies of the
island.22 From the mid-1920s onwards, more images of Cuba appeared
in newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, travel articles and tour-
ist books, and in travel agency tourist advertisements, plus publicity for
railroad companies, steamship lines, and airline carriers.23 As the US
appetite for these fantasies developed, Cuban entrepreneurs, foreign
investors, and the country’s tourist commission began to market Cuba as
a “pleasure island.”24 These foreign visions of Cuba were also promoted
in film, literature, music, and radio programmes, enabling those with an
interest in the island to explore romanticized Havana imaginaries from
afar. American investment in Cuba and the period of Prohibition in the
United States led to the rapid development of Cuba as a top winter des-
tination for US tourists (“The Summerland of the World”), and Havana
was advertised as “The Paris of the Western Hemisphere.”25
Havana’s main landmarks such as its biggest hotels (including the
Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore and the Hotel Nacional) and attractions (includ-
ing the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club and the Havana
Country Club) took centre stage as the city was marketed to a US audi-
ence through advertisements and picture postcards. As Louis Pérez Jr.
16 J. C. KENT
Before Havana
Evans grew up photographing his family and his surroundings from a
young age and he soon developed a fascination with literature, maps and
the idea of “magically containing the vastness of the world within a for-
mal outline.”48 He moved to New York City after dropping out of col-
lege in the 1920s, and then worked in several Manhattan bookstores and
at the New York Public Library.49 During this time, Evans read the work
of writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Hemingway—all of whom
had a profound influence on the development of his photographic aes-
thetic.50 Many years later, just four years before his death in 1975, he
referred to the way that novels written by his favourite authors were “full
of photographs” and described James Joyce and Henry James as “uncon-
scious photographers.”51
In the mid-1920s, Evans travelled to France and spent time in Paris.
It was in the French capital that he began to develop his writing style,
later returning to New York City with aspirations to become a writer.
20 J. C. KENT
3.
Reuhtova lapsi
— Niin.
— Olisi.
— Tunnen.
— Osaan.
— Ei.
— Jotta ei mihinkään jäisi mitään! Ah, kuinka hyvä olisi, kun ei jäisi
mitään! Tiedättekö, Aljoša, minä aion toisinaan tehdä hirveän paljon
pahaa ja kaikkea huonoa, ja teen sitä kauan salaa, ja yhtäkkiä kaikki
saavat sen tietää. Kaikki ympäröivät minut ja osoittavat minua
sormellaan, ja minä katson kaikkia. Se on hyvin miellyttävää. Miksi
se on niin miellyttävää, Aljoša?
— Mutta eihän se ole vain sitä, että minä sanoin, minähän myös
teen sen.
— Minä uskon.
— Ah, kuinka minä rakastan teitä sen tähden, että te sanotte: minä
uskon. Ja tehän ette ollenkaan, ette ollenkaan valehtele. Mutta
kenties te luulette, että olen puhunut teille tätä kaikkea tahallani,
ärsyttääkseni teitä?
— Kaiketi se on.
— Se on totta.
— En tiedä.
— Hyväkö?
— Minä itse.
— Lähetitte hänelle kirjeen?
— Kirjeen.
— Teitäkin.
— Itken.
— Itken.
4.
Hymni ja salaisuus