CU HAV arch future
17 September 2003

The Guardian - Cuban architects and planners point to the years leading up to the revolution in 1959, which saw the last major wave of foreign investment in Havana real estate. At the time, Havana was looked on as a giant playpen, casino and money-laundering machine for US business. Of the three major hotels opened, or planned, in 1958 as Castro's guerrillas began their march on Havana, two were the playthings of US mobsters. The Capri was owned by New York's Santo Traficante, and the Riviera, to its west along the Malecon, by Miami's Meyer Lansky. The third, designed by the Spanish architect Jose Luis Sert, was for an artificial island off the Malecon planted with high-rise residential blocks, hotels and casinos. Thankfully, it was never built - but this is very much the type of development Havana feels threatened by today. What did Castro have to offer Havana instead of hotels and casinos? In January 1961 he and Che Guevara were playing golf at the abandoned Havana Country Club, when conversation turned to how Cuba might invest in culture. Before long, the young revolutionaries had outlined the programme for a new national arts school to be built on the site of the derelict golf course. Ten years ago, Vincent Marin, one of the architects charged with the restoration of Old Havana, took me to see a grand, if faded, 18th-century house on the corner of Plaza Vieja, one of the most venerable city squares in the Americas. I raised my camera, pressed the shutter, and the building fell down. Luckily, this beautiful palacio had been abandoned some months before. No one was hurt. Old Havana had been declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1982. The coral stone cathedral and the historic Castillo de la Real Fuerza, not far from Plaza Vieja, were beautifully restored. A decade later, when the withdrawal of subsidies from the former Soviet Union really hit home, it was remarkable that any restoration work was being carried out in the city. Yet it was - and had to be. If Cuba was going to survive as an independent socialist state, it would need to generate foreign currency by persuading European tourists to visit this incomparable architectural gem of a city. And tourists would expect decent hotels, and would want to be able to wander safely through city streets without neglected buildings crashing down on them. Tourists have come: two million visitors are expected in Havana this year. However, the special city they have come to see is in danger of vanishing - not simply because of age, humidity, termites and general lack of maintenance. The word in Havana is that when the president, Fidel Castro, dies and the US finally lifts its longstanding economic embargo, Havana will be transformed, and not necessarily for the better. Over the past few years, I have had a number of conversations with Mario and Miguel Coyula of the Instituto de Desarollo Integrativo, an influential planning body, who suggest that any new large-scale development is most likely to be in Havana's plush western suburbs, Miramar, Mariano, Playa and Cubanacan - already home to joint-venture businesses, embassies, clubs and dollar-only shops. Even so, on my most recent visit to the city last month, crumbling, once ice-cream-coloured buildings along the Malecon - Havana's ocean boulevard - were pointed out to me as the likely future outlets of US junk food chains. There is also a widespread belief that old housing in central Havana will make way for postmodern hotels, shopping malls and apartment blocks for wealthy foreigners. Cuban architects and planners point to the years leading up to the revolution in 1959, which saw the last major wave of foreign investment in Havana real estate. At the time, Havana was looked on as a giant playpen, casino and money-laundering machine for US business. Of the three major hotels opened, or planned, in 1958 as Castro's guerrillas began their march on Havana, two were the playthings of US mobsters. The Capri was owned by New York's Santo Traficante, and the Riveria, to its west along the Malecon, by Miami's Meyer Lansky. The third, designed by the Spanish architect Jose Luis Sert, was for an artificial island off the Malecon planted with high-rise residential blocks, hotels and casinos. Thankfully, it was never built - but this is very much the type of development Havana feels threatened by today. What did Castro have to offer Havana instead of hotels and casinos? In January 1961 he and Che Guevara were playing golf at the abandoned Havana Country Club, when conversation turned to how Cuba might invest in culture. Before long, the young revolutionaries had outlined the programme for a new national arts school to be built on the site of the derelict golf course. The result - national schools of modern dance, plastic arts, dramatic arts, music and ballet - were designed by Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. They were to take the form of five beautiful parkland pavilions. Only three were completed, and these have only ever been partially used. After Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and turned Washington firmly against him, the ministry of construction attacked Porro for his bourgeois background and for the decadent sensualism of his designs. In 1965 the project was put on hold. Porro left for Paris and Garatti, ultimately, for Milan (having first been charged with espionage and imprisoned). Only Gottardi stayed in Cuba. The dream, it appeared, was over. In 1991, however, Gottardi took the Californian architectural historian John Loomis to see the remains of the schools. Loomis was struck by the "magic-realist architecture and landscape"; the book he published at the end of the 1990s, Revolution of Forms: Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools, rehabilitated Cuban revolutionary architecture at a stroke. When Castro read it, he called a meeting of the artists' and writers' union and berated officials for undervaluing the art schools - by now listed by the World Monument Fund as one of the world's 100 most endangered monuments - and allowing them to fall into a state of disrepair. In December 1999 the three architects were invited back to Havana to finish the job. The work is progressing, if slowly. Money is tight, and the priority in Havana today, tourist hotels aside, is for housing. In fact, it was partly the urgent need for housing that had brought the National Schools project to a halt in 1965. At that time, cadres of young architects and workers were bussed around the country to build Soviet-style concrete accommodation in what were meant to be Corbusian urban parklands. The results were patchy, and many of these hasty designs, no matter how well-intentioned, need to be demolished or rebuilt today. Havana, then, does have a social and architectural alternative to US-style retail and leisure culture. And it isn't too late to save the city from banality - although, in recent months, the Cuban president has been a little less than helpful. The EU's criticism in June of the mass arrest of 75 Cuban dissidents, and the execution of three ferry hijackers trying to reach the US, encouraged the president to call the Europeans "fascists" and stage demonstrations outside the Spanish and Italian embassies. The EU, however, is Cuba's most important trade and investment partner, as well as the source of half its tourist revenue. Still, if Europeans are now the bad guys in Castro's eyes, he might yet make friends with a number of American architects, not all of whom are bent on turning Havana into a shopping mall. One, Jeffrey Horowitz, a Californian architect and planner, is determined that Havana should not turn into another bland island resort. Nor does it have to: take a look at the restored Plaza Vieja and the re-emerging National School of Arts, and it's easy to imagine a future Havana worth having.