What Is It About the Art Schools?

The buildings are justly famous. But are we overlooking the larger narrative of post-revolutionary Cuban architecture?


Vittorio Garatti, School of Ballet, Cuban National Art Schools. [Photo by Adrián Guerra Rey]

I dined recently with a Cuban friend; a highly educated and culturally sophisticated woman, now living in New York, who was an ardent Fidelista well into the 1980s — far longer than most in her circle of family and friends. After I mentioned attending a screening of the new documentary film, Unfinished Spaces, about the National Art Schools in Havana, Marilu burst out: “What is it about the Art Schools? Why do foreigners love them so much? There’s nothing Cuban about those buildings. They’re ridiculous architecture for Havana and I always hated them.” What is it about the Art Schools? Good question. Whatever one thinks about the quality or appropriateness of the design, there is no question but that the schools have captured the fancy of North American and European architecture aficionados, who have turned the complex into a pilgrimage site, an object of adulation and the singular emblem of post-revolution Cuban architecture.

The story of the Cuban National Art Schools (las Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, or ENA; I will use the Spanish acronym going forward) is compelling. In January of 1961 — two years after the military success of the revolution — Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, in an ostentatious act of political theater, went to the exclusive Havana Country Club to play a round of golf. Admiring the landscape, Castro declared that the club grounds would make an excellent site for an academy of the arts. The property was promptly nationalized and work commenced to create “the best art schools in the world.” 1 The task of designing the school was assigned to Ricardo Porro, a young Cuban architect who had produced a number of distinctive houses in Havana in the 1950s but had spent the last years of the decade in exile due to his run-ins with the Batista government, returning only after the revolution. Porro enlisted as collaborators two Italian architects whom he had met when working in Caracas: Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi. With Porro as lead planner, the trio and their clients in the Ministry of Culture decided that the five faculties of the academy would be housed in separate structures. Porro elected to design the buildings for the schools of fine arts and modern dance, Garatti the schools of music and ballet, and Gottardi the school of drama.

Work proceeded at unimaginable speed and ground was broken only two hectic months after the start of design. Architectural drawings were produced steps ahead of the construction crews. With steel scarce due to the U.S.-imposed trade embargo, the schools were built using locally produced materials, primarily brick for walls and tiles for Catalan roof vaults; materials beautifully deployed for the expressive, organic forms of the school buildings. The site teemed with creative activity. Then, abruptly in 1965, work on the art schools was halted. Money was running out and the government questioned the priority of an art academy among the country’s many pressing needs. Doubts were voiced as to the appropriateness of the architectural designs, which by this time were viewed by many in the official hierarchy as suspiciously individualistic. By 1965 the Cuban revolution had come under the patronage of the Soviet Union, and Russian advisors steered the Cuban Ministry of Construction towards industrialized building production and standardization — a model to which the Art Schools represented the polar opposite.


Ricardo Porro, School of Fine Arts, Cuban National Art Schools. [Photo by Belmont Freeman]

Porro, undoubtedly more sensitive to the shifting political winds, had rushed the construction of his two schools, and the buildings for painting and sculpture and for modern dance were essentially finished at the time of the project’s cancellation. The School of Ballet, designed by Garatti, was likewise very near completion, but the director of the classical dance program, the famed ballerina Alicia Alonso, refused to move from Old Havana to suburban Cubanacán, which left the building unoccupied but for intermittent uses and ultimately abandoned. Garatti’s School of Music and Gottardi’s School of Drama were each only about half finished, but the faculty and students moved in anyway to inhabit these sites of arrested construction. Disillusioned, Ricardo Porro left Cuba for France in 1966. Garatti segued into city planning, but after being accused of espionage he was expelled from Cuba in 1974. Only Roberto Gottardi, who married a Cuban, remains in Havana. With little funding for maintenance, most acutely during the “Special Period” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ENA slid into disrepair and became a jungle-choked ruin.

The art schools were virtually unknown outside of Cuba — and largely ignored within — until the publication of John Loomis’s ground-breaking Revolution of Forms: Havana’s Forgotten Art Schools in 1999. Loomis, an architect, had traveled to Havana and, like an explorer searching for the lost city of El Dorado, found his way to the ENA campus and was smitten. He spent six years photographing the buildings, researching their history, interviewing the architects and other protagonists in their creation, and writing a lucid text to deliver the story. The book was a revelatory introduction for the greater world to a neglected architectural masterpiece. In a new prologue to the updated edition, published in 2011, Loomis writes that “written history is usually a passive document.” Now we know that this is not really true (passive aggressive might be the correct term), but the influence of Revolution of Forms on the subsequent fate of its subject is impressive.

Even prior to the first publication of the book, the World Monuments Fund placed the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte on its Watch List of endangered sites. In March 1999 the three architects were reunited, in Los Angeles, for the first time since 1966, for the launch of the book and an exhibition sponsored by the MAK Center (and reprised days later in New York, at Columbia University). Apprised of the growing international attention focused on ENA, at a 1999 congress of the Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas Cubanas, Fidel Castro declared the schools to be a national treasure and announced his determination that they be restored. This led to the convening of the three architects in Havana to talk about the completion of their grand project, which effort is now underway (if slowly, due to the desperate state of the Cuban economy). Far from neglected, ENA is now a must-stop for every architectural tour group visiting Havana. John Loomis’s book also set off a minor industry of cultural production focused on the art schools — a veritable ENAmania.


Ricardo Porro, School of Fine Arts, Cuban National Art Schools. [Photos by Adrián Guerra Rey]

The documentary film Unfinished Spaces, by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, which made its recent debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has since been making the rounds of venues including, in December 2011, the Havana Film Festival, gives compelling voice to the tale of ENA as first told by John Loomis. The film is dense with content of value and beauty. Archival newsreels are effectively used to convey the sense of enthusiasm and optimism that prevailed in Cuba during the early, triumphal days of the revolution, and period photographs and film clips illustrate the history of the art schools, their design and construction. Interviews with participants in the creation of the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte including, most significantly, the three architects, are oral history documents of incalculable value, the opportunity for which, if Nahmias and Murray had not persevered with their multi-year project, would simply have been lost. As octogenarian Vittorio Garatti quipped about the stated desire to complete the schools while the original architects are still around, “Apurense.” Hurry up.

Unfinished Spaces also suggests how assiduously the record is being rewritten. The Argentine Roberto Segre was, in the 1960s and 70s, the quasi-official architectural historian and apologist for the revolution, and as such led the intellectual campaign to discredit the architecture of ENA as counter-revolutionary. So it is delicious to see and hear him backpedal to conclude that maybe the buildings aren’t so bad, after all. And, in a similar vein, it is remarkable to hear Fidel Castro, in a clip from his October 1999 speech at UNEAC, implausibly claim that he had no idea that the art schools had never been completed and was saddened to learn so. Interviews with younger cultural figures, including several well-known artists who studied at ENA, add the contemporary viewpoint and remind us that the campus is revered not just as an architectural artifact but also as a vital institution. These interviews and extracts from the archives are enough to justify high praise for Unfinished Spaces; but there’s more, in the form of beautifully filmed views that capture the extraordinary quality of the architecture but without (I am thankful to note) dwelling excessively on the romantic quality of the ruins.

Unfinished Spaces tells a compelling story of a heroic educational and architectural enterprise that fell victim to changing political and economic circumstances, but which may, in the end, prevail. Still, the film oversimplifies the story and gets some not-so-small details wrong. (Full disclosure: I served as an adviser to the project and my name is there in the credits.) When the narrator states that after work on the schools was cancelled, and the Cuban government shifted construction methods to “Soviet style prefabrication” — eliciting boos and hisses from the audience — the illustration that flashes on the screen is of prefabricated building components being craned into place; but this is hard to identify as “Soviet style,” and in fact looks like a cheery promo film from a contracting company that could be anywhere.


Roberto Gottardi, School of Dramatic Arts, Cuban National Art Schools. [Photo by Belmont Freeman]

In general I found the use of the phrase “Soviet style” to describe any architecture that was, well, not ENA, glib and pandering. To illustrate an interview with Porro in which he invokes the same term, we see a photo of an apartment building that is indistinguishable from any number of public housing projects built in the same era in the United States or Europe, and perhaps better for the inclusion of balconies. I grant that Cuban architecture hit abysmal lows in the 1970s and ’80s, but was it really all “Soviet style,” or indeed that far out of step with contemporaneous international ideas of urban development? And the closing words on the screen — “In 2009 … the Cuban government cut funding for non-productive architecture projects, including the National Schools of Art” (more boos and hisses) — I found to be gratuitously negative. As the final sequence notes, this happened in the context of a world economic crisis and two major hurricanes. In 2009 Harvard University suspended work on its planned expansion in Alston after its endowment plummeted. Might Cuba, additionally punished by natural disaster, not react similarly? 2

And now — after the book and its recent reissue, and the documentary film — we can look forward to an opera about the Art Schools. Charles Koppelman, a San Francisco-based film maker, inspired by the Loomis book, has undertaken the translation of the story of ENA for the operatic stage. Entitled Cubanacán: A Revolution of Forms, the project has gone through several iterations, as such things do. I attended a 2005 workshop presentation of an excerpt at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, in Southampton, NY, and a 2010 performance of musical selections as part of the New York City Opera’s VOX series. I didn’t really recognize the place or the protagonists, but these were just sketches of a work very much in progress, and the concept was compelling. At the time, Placido Domingo was said to be interested in playing the role of Ricardo Porro. I am told that the work is now progressing well as a joint Cuban-American artistic project, with Koppelman completing the libretto and working with an impressive team of Havana-based collaborators, including composer Roberto Valera and musical director Zenaida Romeu.The story of ENA certainly has the ingredients for operatic treatment: tumultuous social and political context, big egos, grand plans, tragic denouement. How many operas about architecture do we have? I can think of Daron Hagen’s Shining Brow, about Frank Lloyd Wright (and not exactly a staple in the repertoire), but little else — and an opera about a living architect? This is surely unique — and I can report that Sr. Porro, who is a close friend of mine, is duly impressed and not the least bit displeased.

I proceed with this essay with some trepidation, as all of the aforementioned protagonists in the story of ENA, its rediscovery and celebration, are (with the exception of Fidel Castro, whom I’ve never met) friends or acquaintances whose work I admire. My intention is not to deprecate anyone’s book, film or opera nor, certainly, the buildings of ENA themselves. Let me be perfectly clear: I consider las Escuelas Nacionales de Arte to be masterworks of extraordinary beauty and importance in the histories of Cuba and modern architecture. My interest here is in the interpretation and valuation of ENA by non-Cubans in ways that, I feel, have distorted the true narrative of the project’s genesis, demise and resurrection; a story that might be corrected by the provision of essential context. Moreover I fear that the excessive attention focused on the Art Schools has occluded our view of post-1959 Cuban architecture to the extent that a larger and richer story is ignored.


Vittorio Garatti, unfinished School of Ballet, Cuban National Art Schools, in 2001. [Photo by Belmont Freeman]

Let us recapitulate the story of ENA. Idealistic young architects come to Cuba to lend their talents to the revolution. Consistent with the optimism of the moment they design an academic campus for the arts of exceptional vision — a unique and fitting monument to the revolution. With heroic effort the designers and construction crew, which included students at the schools, forge ahead, only to be stopped short by philistine government bureaucrats in thrall to their new Soviet patrons, thus ending revolutionary Cuba’s short-lived support of progressive design. The expressive, humane architecture is labeled counterrevolutionary and condemned to languish, unfinished, for decades, until the schools are discovered by foreigners who lobby internationally for their preservation and restoration. This is the story related with some complexity and nuance in Loomis’s book, condensed with appealing visuals into the 86 minutes of Nahmias and Murray’s film, and sure to be pumped up to heroic dimension in Koppelman’s opera. Unfortunately this seductive and dramatic story is incomplete, oversimplified and misleading. It seems that in order to illuminate the story of the Art Schools the authors of these works felt it necessary to cast shadow on the activities and output of other Cuban architects working in this heady period. Whether this is active erasure or passive neglect — or the unfortunate exigencies of the publishing, filmmaking and opera industries, in which it’s the big story simply told that sells — the effect is the same.

In fact, in 1961, when construction on the art schools began, ENA was hardly the only project of social vision and architectural daring in the young government’s portfolio. Just months after Fidel Castro entered Havana in triumph in January 1959, his administration embarked on a construction program of extraordinary ambition, pledging, in fulfillment of political promises, the delivery of much-needed infrastructure and social service facilities. The pace of construction in Cuba during the first, heroic phase of the revolution was prodigious, the output impressive both in quantity and quality of design. It was a moment during which the socialist government and a major portion of the Cuban artistic and intellectual avante garde were in mutually supportive synchrony. A young, progressive cadre of architects — most of their elders in the profession having left the island along with their wealthy clients — was entrusted with building the new Cuba. The variety and quality of innovative designs that were realized across the island —including housing, schools, hospitals, clinics, agricultural stations, workers’ vacation villages and recreation complexes — are eye-popping. 3

It is difficult to single out just a few outstanding projects, but any survey would include the spectacular medical school campus in Santiago de Cuba by Rodrigo Tascón (1964), a delightful Havana primary school composed of round classrooms (Rafael Mirabal, 1963), Octavio Buigas’s bravura work in thin-shell concrete at the Parque Deportivo José Martí (1960) on Havana’s Malecón, Mario Girona’s much-loved Coppelia ice cream parlor (1966) in the Vedado district of Havana, the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas (1966) by Joaquín Galván, and several projects by Antonio Quintana. 4 But ultimately the construction boom of the 1960s proved unsustainable. The U.S. embargo, imposed by the Kennedy administration in 1964, achieved its objective of wrecking the Cuban economy (with help from some misguided policies on the part of Cuban government planners). Much had been accomplished but many visionary development projects were aborted, in most cases not because they had fallen into any ideological disfavor but, more prosaically, just ran out of money.


Top: Habana del Este, Hugh Dacosta, et al. [Photo reproduced from La Arquitectura en los Países en Vías de Desarrollo: Cuba; Séptimo Congreso de la Unión Internacional de Arquitectos, September 1963] Second: Rodrigo Tascón, Medical School, University of Oriente. [Photo by Belmont Freeman] Third: Octavio Buigas, Centro Deportivo José Marti. [Photo by Belmont Freeman] Bottom: Joaqin Galván, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cientifícas. [Photo by Adrián Guerra Rey]

Las Escuelas Nacionales de Arte was the smallest of the three Proyectos Grandes planned for the city of Havana by the Castro government (so identified by Roberto Segre in his 1970 book Diez Años de Arquitectura en Cuba Revolucionaria), the others being Habana del Este, a 1,306-unit, mixed-scale housing complex of intelligent design built at the eastern terminus of the harbor tunnel, and Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverria (CUJAE), a new campus built on the city outskirts to house the technical faculties of the University of Havana, including architecture, engineering and the sciences (and named after a martyred leader of the revolutionary student movement, who happened to be an architecture student). Unlike ENA, Habana del Este (1959-1961) and CUJAE (1964, first phase) were completed on schedule and have been gainfully occupied ever since.

CUJAE presents the most apt comparison to ENA, being an academic campus as well as the project most often cited — initially and positively by “official” historians like Segre and, later and negatively, by non-Cuban commentators — as representing the ideologically correct way to build in post-revolution Cuba. Designed by Humberto Alonso, Fernando Salinas, José Fernandez and others, the high-tech buildings were erected using an advanced system of prefabricated concrete components with expressively articulated joints and connections. Classroom buildings are single-loaded with exterior circulation, brises soleil and cross-ventilation; raised on piloti to create exterior walkways that protect students from the sun and the afternoon downpours. The beautiful complex is an exemplary model for a university campus in a tropical climate.

Industrialized construction? Yes, of course. Soviet-style prefabrication? Hardly. CUJAE was designed before Soviet advisors came to influence Cuban construction programs, and Cuban architects, in 1960, did not need the Russians to stimulate their interest in prefabrication. Industrialized construction methods were very much in the air in the 1960s, around the world. With good reason, progressive architects in Cuba felt that prefabrication might be the key to the expedited realization of a revolutionary utopia. Government-sponsored research on industrialized architectural production was particularly intense in the housing sector, with some wonderfully innovative schemes produced by Cuban architects in the 1960s. 5 John Loomis gives fair credit to Alonso and the quality of his design, but incorrectly concludes that CUJAE was a ”unique example, not to be repeated.” Construction techniques pioneered at CUJAE were repeated many times over in hundreds of secondary schools, technical academies and university campuses built across the island in the 1960s. To be sure, few of the simplified, provincial models display the finesse of CUJAE, but they accomplished the job of delivering superior educational facilities to communities that needed them.

Too often we allow geography to inform judgment. Prejudicial attitudes toward societies other than our own, lazy ignorance or innocent unfamiliarity can affect our interpretation and valuation of foreign cultural production. To the case at hand; when architectural prefabrication is essayed by, for example, Paul Rudolph in New Haven (Oriental Masonic Gardens, 1968-71) or Moshe Safdie in Montreal (Habitat 67), North Americans laud the effort as visionary experimentation (even if noble failures), while contemporaneous projects in Cuba (let alone the eastern bloc countries) are, without examination, condemned as “Soviet-style” regimentation (even if they succeeded). In rather the same way, the stripped classicism of the 1930s in Berlin or Rome is labeled “fascist,” but in the District of Columbia is seen as the appropriate continuation of the classical idiom of the capital of democracy.


Top: Antonio Quintana, Slip-formed concrete apartment tower, Havana. [Photo by Belmont Freeman] Middle and bottom: Humberto Alonso, et al., Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverria (CUJAE), entrance to Industrial Engineering Building; classroom building. [Photos by Belmont Freeman]

In fact, the unique example, not to be repeated, was ENA. Ricardo Porro idealistically sought a path to a new “Cubanidad” in architecture that would eschew North American and European paradigms and, in general, mainstream modernism. With real genius, he proffered a new design model based on organic form and polycentric planning, evoking tropical sensuality and the African ingredient of Cuba’s heritage. But the fact of the matter is that not everyone in Cuba thought then (or thinks today) that an African village is such a terrific model for a 20th-century academic campus — nor, for that matter, is a medieval Italian village, which was Roberto Gottardi’s stated inspiration for the School of Dramatic Arts.

Porro, today active on the lecture circuit as a happy consequence of Unfinished Spaces, delights North American audiences with his descriptions of the School of Fine Arts as the embodiment of Ochún, the Afro-Cuban fertility goddess; he notes the series of domes modeled on women’s breasts, and his infamous “papaya” fountain sculpture (“papaya” being crude Cuban slang for vagina), the water to which was turned off by prudes in the communist party. You don’t have to be a stern revolutionary feminist to find such talk problematic. The architecture of ENA is truly unique and it remains so. The low-tech, organic, expressionist model for a new Cuban architecture may have been stillborn on the island, but it clearly caught on outside of Cuba, among non-Cubans; a curious phenomenon that has worked to elevate ENA to a historically imbalanced position of importance and to preclude any deeper understanding of the larger architectural story of the time.

How does one explain this turn of historiography? Or, to return to my friend Marilu’s question: What is it about the art schools? To me it seems clear that we love the Art Schools because they are exotic. It is ENA’s uniqueness, difference and strange beauty that enthrall its international admirers. The buildings fit the outsider’s notion of what Cuban art and architecture should be. CUJAE, in contrast, looks like a thoroughly modern campus that could have been built, to excellent reviews, in any country with an advanced architectural culture — which Cuba in the 1960s most certainly was. ENA, however, is perceived and embraced by outsiders as being somehow more authentically, indigenously Cuban, never mind the fact that it is the product of a cosmopolitan Paris-educated Cuban and two Italians. Don’t try this kind of architecture here in the USA; but for those emotional, sex-crazed Latins, it’s fine; we love it.

The architecture of ENA is seductive, but our North American obsession with its primitive nature betrays a disturbing trace of latent colonialism, condescension and — dare I say? — racism. Far from being representative of the heroic construction efforts associated with the Cuban revolution, ENA is a magnificent anomaly, a masterpiece stranded by time, place and politics. The unique character of the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte heightens the urgency to preserve and rehabilitate them (in all senses of the word) but it makes them an imperfect vessel for all of the meaning that outside observers want to pour into them.

Editors' Note

Revolution of Forms, by architect John Loomis, originally published in 1999, has recently been reissued by Princeton Architectural Press. Unfinished Spaces, a film by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, released by AJNA Films, had its world premiere in June 2011 at the Los Angeles Film Festival and its Havana premiere in December 2011. For more on Havana, see Nostalgia Is a Dangerous Business, by Belmont Freeman, published in May 2010.

Notes
  1. Words attributed to Fidel Castro by Selma Diaz in Unfinished Spaces.
  2. I was in Havana the first week of January 2012 and I spoke with an architect involved in the renovation work at ENA, now on hold for budgetary reasons. He had just seen Unfinished Spaces at the Havana Film Festival and he felt that the documentary belittles the Cuban restoration effort and ends on an unfairly pessimistic note.
  3. The remarkable architectural production of this era was presented in the exhibition Architecture and Revolution in Cuba, 1959-1969 at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City in 2004, curated by the Cuban architect and historian Eduardo Luis Rodríguez and co-produced by this author and Sarah Herda.
  4. Antonio Quintana, one of the most talented modernists of the 1950s generation, was one of the few established architects to remain in Cuba to work for the revolutionary government. He was known as “Fidel’s architect” and became minister of the Department of Construction. Unfinished Spaces tries to depict Quintana as a villain; the chief bureaucrat who ordered the termination of the ENA project — but it’s hard to make charges of retrograde philistinism stick. Quintana designed some of Havana’s most impressive projects of the period, including a muscular slip-formed concrete apartment tower on the Malecon (1967) and the vast Parque Lenin (1972).
  5. Barry Bergdoll included a radical proposal for factory-built housing modules by Hugo Dacosta and Mercedes Alvarez, the lead designers of Habana del Este, in the 2008 exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art.
Cite
Belmont Freeman, “What Is It About the Art Schools?,” Places Journal, February 2012. Accessed 28 Mar 2024. https://doi.org/10.22269/120227

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Past Discussions View
  • 02.29.2012 at 11:10

    That's fine, and thanks for the extra history, but the book and the documentary were not about these other buildings, they were about las ENA. Mr. Freemont's stories on this site seem to rely solely on the tactic of chiding non-Cubans for their attempts to appreciate Cuban architecture. Bully for him that he is Cuban and therefore has innate authority for commentary, but taking the stance of a sort of Cuban hipster, sneering at everyone else's attempt to understand and appreciate the island's incredible architectural offerings, is exhausting to read. Great writers can educate readers without needing to rely on tearing down others' work and opinions as a crux.

  • 03.01.2012 at 13:45

    I don't really understand the vehemence with which the previous commentator tries to trash Mr Freeman's excellent article. Mr Freeman's subject is complicated -- surely one can love a set of buildings yet regret people's tendency to make it an exemplar of something it's not (which could encourage people to overlook the work that really is emblematic of a time and a movement). I love las ENA too but what the article argues was an idea that had never occurred to me; an eye-opener. As far as I can see there's nothing "hipster," "sneering," or "tearing down" about anything Mr Freeman is saying.

  • 03.02.2012 at 15:21

    Didnt this same basic thing happen all over the world?
    Governments in the late 50's and early 60's wanted to seem "modern", and hired name brand first world architects to build signature projects, usually in a design idiom that bore little resemblance to the historical local architecture.
    Meanwhile, local architects labored away outside of the spotlight, and build hybrids of modern architecture and local realities.
    It took decades for architecture tourists to look beyond Corbusier, and Kahn, and the Eames, for example, in India, and see that people like Balkrishna Doshi had been building truly Indian modern buildings for a long time.

    Large projects like this are flashy and attract attention, often deserved- its kind of the "Brasilia" phenomenon. But the true architectural heritage of any country is not the exception, but how well the average buildings and mundane necessities are designed.

  • 03.03.2012 at 17:26

    This is an informative and important article for understanding the built environment of post-revolutionary Cuba. I couldn’t agree with CBryan more when he states, “ I love las ENA too but what the article argues was an idea that had never occurred to me; an eye-opener.”

    However, I think Freeman misses the mark when he makes statements such as: “The architecture of ENA is seductive, but our North American obsession with its primitive nature betrays a disturbing trace of latent colonialism, condescension and — dare I say? — racism” or “Don’t try this kind of architecture here in the USA; but for those emotional, sex-crazed Cubans, it’s fine; we love it.” While it may be true that a seductive exoticism is what attracts North American and Europeans to las ENA, he irresponsibly decontextualizes Porro stating that as a trailblazer, “idealistically sought a path to a new “Cubanidad” in architecture that would eschew North American and European paradigms and, in general, mainstream modernism”. It may be that the qualities that are attractive about las ENA are colonialist, condescending, and racist, but these very same qualities have been constitutive of Cuban cultural thought and practice since the colonial period: Alejo Carpentier famously stated in his 1927 novel Écue-Yamba-Ó, “The bongo, antidote to Wall Street!” For instance, the eroticized black or mulata female body has been an important, if problematic, symbol for Cuban national identity, a point Dorris Sommer makes about Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1839). In some ways Porro’s brown domes are a continuation of this unfortunate trope, but nonetheless one rooted in Cuban intellectual tradition. As for evoking Cuba’s African heritage, that is standard fair in Cuban cultural production (Lam’s paintings, the Afro-Cuban poetry of 20s and 30s, or Lydia Cabrera’s (another Paris-educated Cuban) masterwork El Monte (1954). What about tropical sensuality? One need only look at a painting by Amelia Palaez or read one of the more luxurious passages from Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966) to realize that Cubans themselves have long exploited this motif.

    Rather than reading the interest in las ENA as betraying a “disturbing trace” neo-imperialism, it would have been fruitful had Freeman positioned the project within the context of Cuban thought, a context can also be accused of colonialism, condescension, and racism. It may be that in architecture las ENA was “stillborn”, but it came from somewhere that immediately recognizable in Cuban thought not simply an experiment for, to use the Brazilian phrase, an Englishman to see.

  • 03.03.2012 at 19:46

    I just read your article, and it was certainly a pleasure to read. You rightly mention the film's tendency to oversimplify the history (which in my opinion follows the history that Porro tends to tell over and over again - of course in my opinion this is due to Alyssa being close to Ricardo. When I wrote my critique on Loomis's book, I had a bit of trouble being as critical as I wanted to because I too felt to close to Porro after conducting the Oral History. Perhaps it is his Cuban charm??? Hehe.

    At any rate, you give just praise to Antonio Quintana, who I felt was severely maligned in the film. For me, I have always enjoyed the articulation of the facade that he did for the Seguro Medico Building, and I had always understood that he continued part of the functionalist discourse that was already present in Cuba since the early post-war period. Do you know if he was involved in the urban planning of the late 50's as well? I haven't found any documentation of him dealing with Sert during his involvement in the National Plan with the JNP, but the buildings that he completed during that period - the Seguro Medico and the Edificio Odontologico always displayed strong influence from CIAM affiliated architects. Which leads me to the second question - do you know if Antonio Quintana was in any way affiliated with ATEC? Save for considerable mention of his individual buildings, I've never found anything that would tie his involvement in with urban planning and the larger modernist discourse at the time. Would this have implicated his involvement with the previous regime? (which the affiliation with the Junta Nacional de Planificacion probably did for other architects, considering that they all received their posts through official appointment). I've always wondered if there was a connection that was missing from the histories that Rodriguez or Segre have written. A new history (sort of....contains many of the old biases) came out a couple of years ago - De Forestier a Sert - have you seen it?

  • 03.11.2012 at 15:31

    I think your point is that it's condescending to imply that architects in Cuba were divorced from modernist currents after Jan 1 1959, or cut off from the world at large, for that matter. A similar unexamined reputation attaches itself to SOY CUBA (I AM CUBA), often cited as a classic of Cuban revolutionary filmmaking, when in fact it was a Russian film, directed by a Russian, shot by a Russian crew, in a determinedly Russian experimental style. Like the Art Schools, it's an odd duck--a brilliant work of cinema, by a great director, just not a Cuban film made by Cuban filmmakers. Meanwhile, during the heady first decade of ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos), authentic Cuban cinema, drawing liberally from Flaherty, Rossellini, Visconti, the French New Wave and other international influences, was percolating. But most of those films are unknown here. When people here think Cuban film of the 1960s, they think SOY CUBA...

  • 03.12.2012 at 11:39

    David's comment about SOY CUBA is on target. In fact it is the comparison I always use when commenting on the reaction of the Cuban government to the Art Schools. SOY CUBA ran in Havana for a very very short time---before it was pulled by the government. Although the lack of respect for freedom of expression portrayed by both acts is deplorable---neither reaction is rooted in ideology but in the outrage the cultural condescention expressed in both provoked. This article puts the controversy over the Art Schools in its proper historical and cultural context.