“A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed, it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses.”
(p. 54, Lefebvre)
Fragmented and delicate, present-day Havana indexes a deep uncertainty for space. Walking the streets of Havana today, one will encounter castles and fortresses from the late sixteenth century, French, Spanish, and English colonial townhouses, neoclassical buildings, art deco, abstracted modernist buildings, make-shift favelas, as well as constructivist and Stalinist soviet social housing projects. There is a moment at the beginning of Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968), a film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, where the protagonist, a wealthy writer named Sergio, looks through his telescope on the balcony of his luxurious Havana apartment just after the revolution takes place. “Todo sigue igual,” [Everything’s the same] he says as he scans Havana’s cityscape in closeup. “Sin embargo todo hoy parece tan distinto… ¿He cambiado yo, o ha cambiado la ciudad?” [However, everything looks so different today… has the city changed, or have I changed?]. This question exposes the fundamental anxiety which would inform the dialectical struggle in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution – the race to define Cuba’s new ‘revolutionary’ space. In the post-revolution shift of power structures, space, and ideology, architecture and cinema stood in dialogue with each other in the pursuit of defining the new Cuban spatial grammar – both proposing different modes of occupation. I will be looking at two important products of post-revolution optimism: Soy Cuba (1964) and the architecture of the National Schools of Art (ENA), and will be comparing the propositions that they make, and the flaws that ultimately led to their oblivion. In doing so, I will be tracking Havana’s transition from freedom, movement, and euphoria, to discipline and control.
In La Ciudad Letrada (1984), Ángel Rama takes a closer look at the architectural code of Spanish Colonial town planning and architecture in the sixteenth century, revealing its highly organized and hierarchical fortified construction. With the discovery of the New World, the ‘conquistadors’ recognized an opportunity to move away from the disorderly medieval city and establish a new, highly organized city. In the words of Rama, they looked for, “una nueva distribucion del espacio que encuadraba un nuevo modo de vida…” (p. 35, Rama) [a new distribution of space which framed a new mode of living...]. In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre reflects along the same lines, stating that, “the very building of the towns thus embodied a plan which would determine the mode of occupation of the territory…” He continues, “geometrical urban space in Latin America was intimately bound up with a process of extortion and plunder serving the accumulation of wealth in Western Europe…” (p. 152, Lefebvre). The organization of space through architecture therefore became the principal means for the execution of power and control. According to Lefebvre’s analysis, Havana was therefore built, from the beginning, “as an instrument for the violation of an existing space.” (p. 152, Lefebvre)
In the sixty years that elapsed between its independence from Spain in 1898, and the revolution of 1959 – often referred to as Cuba’s last war of independence – Havana was moulded by the neo-capitalist spatial practices of the United States; spatial practices which were inextricably linked to profit and capital. Seething tensions boiled into a full-on revolution, and in its turbulence, the opportunity arose to redefine space as one which benefited the people equally as opposed to exploiting the masses incommensurably, in the name of profit for the bourgeoisie. In this moment of instability, Cuba found itself compressed between the dialectical deadlock of the Cold War. Lefebvre speaks at length about social space, and – more reluctantly – about spaces produced by a socialist government, and their relationship to capitalism. He outlines the compulsion for Socialism to be Capitalism’s mirror image. In his words, “state socialism would aim to do no more than perfect capitalist strategies of growth…” (p. 55, Lefebvre). This question produced deep anxieties in the new government, who were in a rush to legitimize themselves. Essential to this legitimization was the creation of a new ‘revolutionary’ Cuban space.
Soy Cubawas the first film made in collaboration with the Soviet Union. It was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, with camera work by Sergei Urusevsky – both of whom spent three years in Cuba to research for the film. Soy Cuba follows the stories of four distinct narratives which describe the suffering of the Cuban people immediately before the revolution. It is wildly schizophrenic in its cinematography, replete with extremely long takes, dramatic moments, and aesthetically astounding imagery. In discussing Soy Cuba, Rosalind Galt states, “Above all, this is a film about spaces: the social spaces of the tourist hotel and the shantytown, the university and the sugarcane farm, the street and the mountains. Soy Cuba understandsCuban space as the prerequisite for revolution…” (p. 224, Galt). Soy Cuba, as Galt states, retrospectively describes a typology of pre-revolution Cuban spaces – through a Soviet perspective – and the discomfort that those spaces inflicted on their inhabitants.
Cuba, in its state of post-revolution flux, produced an overwhelming sense of optimism in which many artists initially found immense creative freedom and inspiration. In the immediate wake of the revolution, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro decided to commission the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte [National Schools of Art] (ENA) which were to be built on a former country club, a natural reserve surrounded by the wealthy neighborhoods of pre-revolution Havana. Built between 1961 and 1965, the Utopian schools were meant to incubate the best artistic talent from developing and communist countries all over the world. Above all, the ENA architecture formed as a distillation of the spatial discourses that were happening between 1959 and 1965 – the desire to create a new ‘revolutionary space’. A constructivist and Utopian project from the beginning, their art school would be the foundation of the post-revolution Cuban spatial practice. It would serve as a physical manifestation of that new direction, for as Lefebvre continues, “[a] social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space…” (p. 54) The ENA would serve as a heterotopia of sorts. Michel Foucault, in his essay, Of Other Spaces (1984), states, “they are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form…” (p. 24, Foucault). The golf course served as the perfect place to perform their heterotopic pursuit of the new, revised spatial grammar of post-revolutionary Cuba. At its core, the ENA project was meant to ‘solidify’ the widespread tumult into a physical diagram for revolutionary space – the theoretical framework upon which the new Cuban society would be formed.
The decades leading up to the revolution witnessed massive real-estate developments in financial districts such as Vedado. Lefebvre describes that, “capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state” (p. 53, Lefebvre). Near the beginning ofSoy Cuba, there is a long, highly calculated, yet delirious travelling shot which describes an opulent pre-revolution party atop a tall building in the then-newly developed Vedado district. Kalatozov and Urusevsky harness cinema’s potential to stretch the image beyond realism in order to depict the ‘abstract’ spaces of pre-revolution Havana. An ultra-wide-angle lens is used, and the subjects are incredibly close to the lens, allowing the image to capture a closeup of the people in the party, as well as the entirety of Havana in the background – both in focus. The camera is unhinged from normal trajectories of human movement as it moves over the edge of the balcony and floats down the side of the building, revealing the masses of people partying below. It gradually lands on the balcony, where people are sunbathing around a swimming pool, and ends by entering the pool entirely, going underwater, where people are swimming around. Enveloped in water, gravity no longer plays a part in their movement. The water fills any void where space could be to the point where, within the image, space becomes equatable to the water. Further along in Soy Cuba, there is a sequence following revolutionary student Enrique up the staircase of a modernist building with the intention of assassinating the chief of police, the staircase seems to engulf him in his transitory placelessness – or rather, his out-of-placeness (see fig. 1). Spatial logic is thrown askew by the spherical distortions of the ultra-wide-angle lens. This modernist space – the likes of which were prevalent throughout the Vedado district of pre-revolutionary Havana – is liquified by the camera. Through the camera, it shapeshifts, surrounding and consuming the characters that pass through it, drawing a direct link to the swimmers in the rooftop pool. It is, as Lefebvre continues, “capitalism’s absorption of the entirety of space for its own purposes…” (p. 95, Lefebvre). People caught within these abstract spaces are permeated by the logic-systems of commodity and profit. Abstract space, as represented in Soy Cuba, is therefore liquid architecture.
fig. 1, Enrique Climbing Up Stairs; Soy Cuba; 1964
Italian architect Vittorio Garatti, one of the three architects commissioned to design the ENA, describes the experience of designing and building the schools in the documentary Unfinished Spaces (2011):
It was done in a very informal and spontaneous way… as we walked around the golf course, we picked the sites we liked the most. We were given two months, one month to finish the design. Normally you design the project, and then you build. Once you build it, the [art] students arrive. But instead all three things happened simultaneously.
Roberto Gottardi, another architect who worked on the schools, describes, “early in the morning I would bring the plans to the construction site, because the construction began with the first drawings.” What they describe is a general sense of the schools being formed as a kind of improvisation in the wake of the revolution. The architects continually refer to the designs of the ENA in vertical form – both in the present, and in their descriptions of the past – by referring to drawings from above, or aerial photographs of the finished buildings. When the architects pull out their drawings, it becomes clear that the designs themselves are linked to the anatomical congruencies between the paper, pencil, and radius formed by the arm the architects themselves. The gestural, flowing forms of the ENA in their physical manifestation are enormous magnifications of the architect’s bodily use of pencil on paper. This exposes a highly problematic relationship between the forces that create space, which in this case are highly grounded in the political, in addition to the individual hand of the architect. In other words, the art school, from the start, was a space intended to spark creativity, but it was also plagued by a prescribed space produced by essentially one person’s attempts to define what ‘revolutionary’ space would be. Just like the abstract spaces in Soy Cuba, the ENA vision was a space which was liquid in form, but instead of catering to logic-systems of commodity and profit, it would aim to cater to the artist’s creative pursuits – albeit problematic in nature.
fig. 2, Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, Aerial Photograph; 1960s; silver gelatin print
Gradually, as the ENA were being produced brick by brick, the movement and gesture solidified into the physical buildings which remain today. Looking at the architectural forms of the ENA in birds-eye view – the point of view of the architect – it appears as though the liquidity of its initial concept solidified amidst the revolutionary turbulence. Like cooled lava, which retains its liquid appearance in its solid form, the ENA was designed and realized in the heat of the revolution but tempered and solidified as the country aligned politically with the Eastern Bloc and entered the dialectical standstill that was the Cold War. The ENA buildings are therefore indexical of the ideological and political uncertainty that followed the revolution.
fig. 3, Escuelas Nacionales de Arte; Unfinished Spaces; 1960s; silver gelatin print
Ricardo Porro, the third architect working on the schools said,
I see my school as an initiation ritual. You don’t enter the theatre directly. No, there’s a whole initiation process that needs a series of passages to arrive… some paths seem somewhat labyrinthine, somewhat mysterious and tortuous. It was born from many experiences. From life experiences that we felt very strongly back then.
This points to one of the main contradictions within the schools. Were they meant to liberate the artist; free them from constrained movement? Or, were they designed to control the flux of people? The walls of the schools, which appear fluid and improvisational when looking at an architectural drawing in birds-eye view, become implacable obstacles at 1:1 scale – the perspective of the prospective art student. Formally, the solidified schools managed the flux of people through massive compressions and expansions of space, and long, sweeping corridors. The curved walls, in their solid form, cut off lines of sight, creating more of a sense of uncertainty than of orientation. Thus, the spaces of the ENA became something more analogous to doctrine and constraint than freedom. The dancers and the artists are limited, and therefore shaped by the space dictated by the architects, forced into a particular spatial practice which did not necessarily induce any revolutionary thought or activity. In fact, formally, the Porro’s design resembles the colonial fortresses built by the Spanish in the sixteenth century (see fig. 3). Not only do they resemble them in form, they also resemble them in seeking to establish the ‘mode of occupation’ of the colonizers. In this light, the schools seem more archaic than revolutionary. To use the words of Lefebvre, the architecture of the ENA solidified into a, “consistent ‘reality’ which is perhaps more definitive than well defined.” (p.111, Lefebvre)
In contrast to the ENA, Soy Cuba understands the inevitable solidification of spaces constructed in reality, and instead, uses the medium of cinema to explore how space is inhabited, the ways that spatial practice is both a product of and the producer of space itself. The cinema provides viewers with the illusion of movement as a result of its own architectonics. As a medium inextricably linked to impermanence, it can represent ideas and space virtually, without imposing them onto the physical word where solidification and doctrine are inevitable. Cinema offered a virtual, heterotopic alternative to exploring the new space of post-revolutionary Cuba. It is a heterotopia in the sense that the spaces represented in Soy Cuba were physically present – iconic, even – in the physical reality of post-revolution Havana, but they were transformed, rather, transmediated, through the cinematic apparatus. As a result, the architecture takes on a life of its own through the movement that the film allows. The spatial narrative of the abstract spaces is continued as a result of its transmedial form. The ability of cinema to capture architecture in movement, of course, is not limited to abstract space, the inherent flux of its own apparatus was also able to conform to the foundational, ideological struggles that the new Cuban government, and its people, were grappling with. Simply in its ephemerality, cinema proves to be a more ‘revolutionary’ medium than architecture. It is therefore through the cinema machine that architecture can transmute and become liquid once more.
fig. 4, María dancing; Soy Cuba; 1964
Another significant abstract space in Soy Cuba is the club which caters to wealthy foreigners. The club itself is an open-plan space, interrupted throughout by curved rows of large, suspended sugar cane stalk. These suspended natural rods outline spaces, curating the movement of people throughout the bar. It is designed to be a chic ‘Cuban’ inspired environment for the clients (see fig. 4). Within this space, we followthe narrative of a young woman, María – referred to as ‘Betty’ in the club – who works as an escort. In the first moments of the sequence, the suspended cane incarcerates her. The sugar cane represents an appropriation of nature, and its transformation into a product. This symbol returns and is clarified later on in the film, in the narrative of the cane farmer, Pedro. The cane is the product of Pedro and his family’s labor, it represents their livelihood, and their survival. It also represents one of Cuba’s most important national exports. This is visually augmented by the use of infrared film, which turns the sugarcane to white on screen. When the land is taken away from Pedro by the landowner, he loses the right to the cane, as well as to his own home. Having lost everything, he subsequently burns down the fields in defiance of the bourgeois social structure. Linking this back to the club in Havana, the floating stalks used as decorative objects gain more meaning – stolen fruits of the toil and the labor of landless, illiterate farmers. In other words, the sugar cane turned decorative object and commodity represents the oppression of the rural Cuban communities.
María, along with some other women, is called over to entertain a group of American businessmen, who decide to get up and dance with them. The businessmen proceed to harass her, pushing her around violently, laughing. She is overwhelmed and consumed by the situation, flails about, out of control, pushed through the suspended cane repeatedly. Gradually, and ambiguously, she regains her autonomy as the flailing becomes wild dancing. The Americans retract, while she goes off on a long, borderline psychotic dance, by herself. The club is an explicitly capitalist space of consumption and commodity dominated by American businessmen which is briefly transformed through the gesture and movement – the spatial practice – of María. Momentarily, María producesa new space out of the pervasive abstract space that surrounds her. In her movement, she mirrors the function that the cinematic apparatus serves for the revolution. It is movement which emancipates María, not her transfer to a new, ‘revolutionary’ space like the one that the architects of the ENA proposed. Soy Cuba calls for a foundational shift not in the spaces that post-revolution Cubans inhabit, but the way in which those spaces are inhabited. It istherefore in diametrical opposition to the architectural mission of the ENA. Where Porro describes the enforcement of a, “mysterious and tortuous,” space onto the artists looking for freedom of movement, Soy Cuba shows an appropriation of existing space, and the transformation of that space through spatial practice – a transformation which we witness with María’s private and momentary transformation of the club space through her dancing. Soy Cuba proposes revolutionary space as one which is not the literal creation of a new space, but rather the solidification, adaptation, recontextualization, and reinterpretation of existing spaces through the way they are used and distributed.
fig. 5, Funeral Precession; Soy Cuba; 1964
Further on in Soy Cuba, there is a funeral sequence where the spectator witnesses thousands of people walking through the streets of Havana, carrying the body of a student murdered by the police (see fig. 5). This awe-inspiring moment of solidarity shows the incredible flux of people through the streets of Havana during the actual advent of the revolution. In one shot, Kalatozov’s camera moves from a closeup of the face of a woman in the crowd, then, like magic, floats upwards, capturing people on the balconies as well as the thousands walking the streets. Continuing up to the top of the building, it floats over the street and through a window, revealing a cigar factory and the people working within it. The camera then moves through the cigar factory and flies out the window, to reveal the precession continuing below. The single shot of the precession unifies the characters on the street to the characters inside the buildings, and out on the balconies, revealing the culmination of Soy Cuba’s contribution to the dialectical struggle surrounding the spatial practice of post-revolution Cuba: an appropriation of the entirety of Havana – permeating everything outside, and inside the buildings – through the adoption of a unified, collective shift in spatial practice towards the social betterment of the post-revolution Cuban.
In the five years that elapsed during the construction of the schools, they came to be seen as a bourgeois endeavor, which resulted in state funding gradually being taken away, leaving the spaces unfinished and partially abandoned.By1965, Constructivism fell out of favour entirely, replaced by a preference for social realism – Structuralism, Stalinist pre-fabricated architecture.Soviet-style mass-production of architecture was introduced, and the ENA were regarded as both a waste of money, as well as an elitist and ‘reactionary’ project. Indeed, as we have seen, they were misguided in their pursuit of a new space through the abstraction of architectural space. The shift was motivated by a pursuit of social equality, which placed homogeneity above individual creativity. For the vast majority of people, social housing signalled a substantial improvement to their everyday lives. Homogeneity in form allowed for the buildings to be produced in mass, and also meant that there would not be individuals with more material wealth than their neighbours. This was augmented by the introduction of ration cards, which further standardized, and equalized the daily routines of the Cuban people. The designs of the ENA buildings encountered the unavoidable solidification of their form as a limitation – indeed, it was ultimately their downfall. Soviet prefabricated buildings used the solidification of architecture to their benefit, establishing a standardized system of discipline and control through organized space. In their form, they mirror social housing of capitalist countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States. This mass-produced architecture introduced a cost-effective social space which would enforce a new spatial practice on the Cuban people. Lives and routines were fragmented, organized, and standardized. Unlike the sweeping curves and interrupted lines of sight of the ENA, Soviet-style social housing provided an organized platform upon which to elicit transparency and control.
As was described earlier, the ENA are indexical of the confusion and desperate search for a ‘revolutionary’ spatial grammar, and in the same way, Soviet-style, prefabricated architecture is indexical of the stagnation, and the discipline enforced in the period following the post-revolution turbulence. As Michel Foucault describes it in his book, Discipline and Punish (1975), “discipline is a political anatomy of detail.” (p. 139). It produces a, “calculated constraint,” which, “runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable… turning silently into the automatism of habit…” (135, Foucault). Homogenized architecture provided a platform to administer ‘calculated constraint’ because it was designed to use space as a means to shape the ‘formless clay’ that was the post-revolution Cuban. In its absorption of the daily life of the individual, social housing enforces a spatial code onto them. The walls that surround them obstruct their freedom of movement, becoming what Lefebvre would describe, “as a resistant ‘objectality’ at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall…” (p. 57, Lefebvre). The architectonics of the social housing constructions elicit a dominant force over daily routines over a long period of time exposing the plasticity of the individual’s spatial practice. Soviet prefabricated architecture was, in essence, the fragmentation and restructuring of Cuban spatial grammar.
This prefabricated social housing recalls the Spanish Colonial town planning described by Rama and Lefebvre. The revolution presented the new Cuban government and its people with a space free from neo-colonialism and capitalism to be ‘colonized’ by their own revised and updated spatial grammar and methods of control. A new opportunity arose in Cuba with the opening up of spaces which could be organized and distributed to the Cuban people – a contrast to the colonial occupation of space designed to perpetuate the accumulation of wealth for the colonizing country. The major difference between the two was the objective of control and the products of that control. Where the colonial towns were established to execute power, and extort a massive, yet-to-be-claimed space, the post-revolution government would seek to control the masses through the execution of power on a domestic level. Simultaneously, the abstract spaces depicted in Soy Cuba would become empty architectonic shells open to be ‘colonized’ and appropriated by the spatial practice of the new Cuban. The soviet-style prefabricated architecture mirrors the establishment of colonial towns in that it is a predetermined and highly organized architectural space intended to execute power and control, but it signalled a shift away from mere domination of the exterior to the domination of the interior of its own spaces – therefore its own people – resulting in a more wholistic control over the country. Through its systematic fragmentation and homogeneity, Soviet-style social housing ‘embodied’ a mode of occupation which used architecture as a means of shaping and establishing control over its people.
Cuba’s revolution thus became defined by its repetition, and repetitive spatial practice – a revolution through repetition. Although Soy Cuba and the ENA exhibit aesthetic similarities, they are antipodal at their core. They are astoundingly daring works of art – both problematic in nature – which blossomed in the turmoil of the Cuban revolution and succeeded in inspiring the feverish discourses that were had in the years following. In the transition from post-revolution optimism, which produced these works, to the construction of a homogeneous, repetitious spatial grammar – and therefore a homogeneous new-Cuban – a spark of that imagination and creativity was lost. Of course, it is certainly curious that in recent years both the ENA and Soy Cuba have attracted significant international attention in the Global North. Soy Cuba went unreleased outside of the Eastern Bloc until its re-discovery and restoration in 1995, and subsequently attracted an astonishing amount of attention as a result of its unusually high production value. Equally, the ENA has recently garnered a lot of attention as a result of it being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, as well as Carlos Acosta’s campaign to restore, and finish the schools. Perhaps in the years following the revolution, the rush-in of Communism, and the rush-out of Capitalism sprouted a utopic and paradoxical synergy of unparalleled creativity, which dissolved into the stagnancy of the Cold War.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Penguin, 1977.
Galt, Rosalind. “Forms: Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty.” Pretty - Film and the Decorative Image, Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 213–236.
Gutierrez Alea, Tomas, director. Memorias Del Subdesarrollo. Instituto Cubano Del Arte e Industria Cinematográfica, 1968.
Kalatozov, Mikhail, director. Soy Cuba. ICAIC/Mosfilm, 1964.
Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.
Loomis, James. Revolution of Forms: Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools. Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
Nahmias, Alysa and Benjamin Murray, directors. Unfinished Spaces. VHX, 2011, unfinishedspaces.vhx.tv.
Rama, Angel. La Ciudad Letrada. Tajamar Editores, 1984.
Riverend, Julio Le. Breve Historia De Cuba. Editorial De Ciencias Sociales, 2007.