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Overview
Since its founding in 1519, Havana has drawn people from all over the world, including explorers, immigrant, refugees, and the exiled, to create a melting pot of influences and cultures––and a very distinct history.
From its colonial roots to its communist revolution, authors Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández examine not only the ruptures in the city's life, but its continuities as well. The traditions that make the city unique, like its idiosyncratic combination of territorialism and hospitality or its proclivity for protest, are as much a drive for change as an integral element of its character. Drawing on oral histories and cultural artifacts alike, this history acknowledges the rich and artfully selected stories of the citizens, from their fascinating exploits to their grand successes, to be as significant to the very fabric of the city as its dynamic culture and intriguing politics, making it a superbly well-rounded account of the most alluring city in the Caribbean.
With grace and precision, in this updated and revised second edition of their classic history of the city Cluster and Hernández offer the divergent but productive perspectives of the American and the Cuban in lyrical and accessible prose on Cuba's magical capital. Generously illustrated with black-and-white photographs and maps.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781944869670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OR Books |
| Publication date: | 03/13/2018 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
RAFAEL HERNÁNDEZ is the editor of Temas, a Cuban quarterly in the field of history, culture, economics, and politics. Hernández graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in French literature, and from the Colegio de México in political science. He has oriented, guided, and taught many American visitors to Cuba, whether students, academics, or travelers, and been visiting professor and researcher at Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tulane, and the University of Puerto Rico, and lectured at numerous other schools and academic conferences. His publications include three books of poetry and ten books of essays. His essay collection Looking at Cuba won the Cuban Critics Award in 2000, and was published by the UniversityPress of Florida in 2003.
Read an Excerpt
Near the docks and custom house of Old Havana, in front of the meticulously restored basilica of the convent of San Francisco de Asís, stands the life-size bronze statue of a figure with long, flowing hair and beard, wrapped in a D'Artagnan-style cape which seems to drift in the wind as he walks. This statue is one of the very few erected in Havana since the revolution of 1959. It does not portray a rebel hero, a patriotic general, a famous writer, a great architect, or the composer of some unforgettable song dedicated to this city on the bay. Rather, it is the statue of the Parisian Gentleman, El Caballero de París.
The French themselves would have called him a clochard, a vagabond. From the 1920s to the 1970s he slept where he could, on one corner or another as he moved about the city, feeding himself on what he found or was offered by street vendors or passers-by, holding up his pants with a rope belt from which dangled pencils secured by strings. Yet, dressed in his signature cape over a tattered set of tails, the self-styled Parisian Gentleman projected an aura of dignity and majesty. The European aristocrat washed up on the shores of this New World—or so he presented himself—made speeches to the crowds in seventeenth-century Spanish or busied himself arranging his mysterious bags and bundles and masses of newspapers and magazines.
He was, by most accounts, a Spanish immigrant who had come to Cuba as a teenager and found work in Havana's sophisticated stores and hotels. Some said he had gone crazy for love, while others said he'd been jailed for a murder or a robbery he did not commit. Over the course of decades, he became an institution. Ageless, capable of appearing at any hour of day or night, attached to no neighborhood in particular, white but poor, both comic and tragic, he became a sort of essential citizen of Havana, to whom the city's residents have dedicated songs, poems, memoirs, imagined biographies, and plays. "Un tipo muy popular," one such song calls him—which suggests "popular" and "of the people" all at once.
The Caballero died in 1985 and was buried in an obscure grave on the city's outskirts. When the ruined colonial church and convent of San Francisco (turned to civilian uses since the mid-nineteenth century) was restored in the year 2001, the city historian requested the transfer of the Caballero's ashes to that sanctuary beside the city's earliest marketplace. The reception this vagabond received sums up the spirit of his adopted city; throughout his lifetime on the streets, even those who laughed at him protected him. They conversed with him and accepted the quill pens and colored papers he gave out as gifts to those who offered him alms. He once buttonholed a Cardinal, who listened politely as the Caballero explained that the church should sell all its goods and distribute the proceeds among the poor. By the 1940s, he was such an institution that he was interviewed in the press. In the 1950s, he appeared on television alongside two similar itinerant characters, La Marquesa and Bigote de Gato. In the 1960s, he was afforded carte-blanche for free food from the kitchens of the newly state-run restaurants.
The courtesy and protection afforded to the Caballero testifies to something about Havana that every visitor notes—this city is the most welcoming place. The people of Havana welcomed the Caballero as they welcome almost everyone, with hospitality and compassion. It doesn't take much to strike up a conversation, even if you are a stranger, or strange.
We believe this characteristic stems from the city's origins. Havana began as a port and a crossroads, and it has been that way ever since—a melting pot of transients and immigrants and refugees, of slaves and freedmen and freedwomen, as well as conquistadors and plutocrats, a confluence of the four points of the compass, of Spain, Africa, China, and the Levant, of the Caribbean islands and the Americas on both sides of the Rio Grande. The name of the city, La Habana or La Havana, comes from Spanish transcriptions of an indigenous word. But in ensuing years many came to believe that the name derived from haven and harbor, which the city has always been in both a physical and a social sense. Exiles adding to city's mix in various eras have included Irish Catholics, French Protestants and Bonapartists, South American royalists and revolutionaries, Haitian ex-planters and ex-canecutters, Indonesian communists and South African guerrillas, and American fugitives ranging from Black Panthers to gangsters and millionaires. Through it all, Havana has been a city that takes what comes—and assimilates it. Comparisons of the Cuban capital to the French one have been frequent, and will appear in what follows, but what made El Caballero de París beloved was that he was quintessentially Havana—and being quintessentially Havana did not rule out naming himself after someplace else.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Un tipo muy popular1 Key to the Indies
2 The Hour of the Mameys
3 Paris of The Antilles
4 Cecilia, Cabildos, and Contradance
5 Stirrings of Nationhood
6 Revolutions and Retributions: From the Teatro Villanueva to the Maine
7 Many Happy Returns? U.S. Occupation and Its Aftermath
8 Symbol of an Era: Alberto Yarini y Ponce de León
9 Catch a Ford on the Malecón: Republican Havana's Growth and Decay
10 The Battle of Havana, 1933–35
11 Radio Days
12 City Lights: The Fabulous Fifties
13 Havana in Revolution
14 Revolution with Pachanga: Havana Transfigured
15 Russian Meat, Miami Butterflies, and Other Unexpected Adventures
16 The Blackout: Havana in the "Special Period" and Beyond
Epilogue: 2006-2017