Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces

Description

Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces examines Havana as a center where urban and literary spaces often come together. The idea for this collection of essays grew out of an international conference on Cuba, Cuba Futures: Past and Present, held by the City University of New York's Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at CUNY's Graduate Center in 2011, but evolved out of a collaboration with scholars in the fields of literature, architecture, urban planning, and library science. The topics addressed peek at a dynamic Cuban nation through its cultural interstices at a crucial moment in the island's evolving history. This conference proceeding opens with a piece on the intersections between Havana's colonial built environment and the literary aesthetic of the Baroque in the Caribbean. The collection continues with the following areas of study: urban gardens, urban planning, architecture, literary projections on space, international relations and cultural institutions, access to books, and social policies.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Part I. Introduction

Cuban Intersections of Writing and Space: Colonial Foundations and Neobaroque Orígenes
Carlos Riobó

Part II. Urban Spaces

1. Urban Gardens: Private Property or the Ultimate Socialist Experience?”
Marina Gold

2. Absence Makes the State Grow Stronger: Preliminary Thoughts on Revolutionary Space, Spectacle, and State Legitimacy”
Thomas F. Carter

3. Between History and Modernity: Searching for Lo Cubano in Modern Cuban Architecture
Gabriel Fuentes

Part III. Havana as Nexus: Privileged Literary and Architectural Sites

4. A Look at the Style of Great Houses of Havana, 1860–1960
Hermes Mallea

5. Hacia una estética de lo violento en Las bestias de Ronaldo Menéndez y en La sombra del caminante de Ena Lucía Portela
Elena Adell

Part IV. Cuban Libraries and Culture on the Move

6. Cuba Book Project: Innovative Ways to Support Cuban Libraries
Kenneth Schlesinger

7. Impact of the Bookmobile to Cuba Project on Library Outreach Services in Granma Province, Cuba
Rhonda L. Neugebauer and Dana Lubow

8. Reading and Researching: Challenges and Strategies for Cubans
Peter T. Johnson

Index

Sujets

• History of architecture

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438442570
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces
Edited and with an introduction by
Carlos Riobó

Cover photo of Archivo Nacional de Cuba (Cuban National Archive) in Havana. Photographed by Carlos Riobó, 2009.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cuban intersections of literary and urban spaces / edited and with an introduction by Carlos Riobó.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4256-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cuban literature—History and criticism. 2. Public spaces in literature. 3. Cities and towns in literature. 4. National characteristics, Cuban, in literature. I. Riobó, Carlos, 1968–
PQ7372.C86 2011
860.9'97291—dc23                                                                                                                                    2011030212
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Illustrations Figure 1.1 The Red Garden. Photograph by Marina Gold. Figure 1.2 Everything is recycled in urban gardens. Photograph by Marina Gold. Figure 1.3 “To have more, we must produce more,” Raúl Castro. Photograph by Marina Gold. Figure 1.4 Roof top garden, Cerro. Photograph by Marina Gold. Figure 3.1 Competing architectural magazines, El Arquitecto , May 1929, and Arquitectura , April, 1945. Archival Research, Avery Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Scan by Gabriel Fuentes. Figure 3.2 Eutimio Falla Bonet House, Eugenio Batista, 1939. Photograph by Gabriel Fuentes. Figure 3.3 Exploded Axonometric Diagram, Eutimio Falla Bonet House. Drawing by Gabriel Fuentes. Figure 3.4 Threshold and transitional Space Diagram of traditional Colonial Cuban House. Drawing by Gabriel Fuentes. Figure 4.1 The dining room in the mansion of former President José Miguel Gómez was designed for a show of power, providing the setting for the formal dinners that were an important element of the Republican era's social life. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.2 Ionic columns supporting a frieze of garlands are part of the Beaux Arts decorative repertoire employed by Carrère & Hastings in the front hall of the house of the Marqueses de Avilés. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.3 The towers, terraces, and balconies of newspaper magnate Alfredo Hornedo's Spanish colonial revival style house are raised above the urban life of the Paseo de Carlos III. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.4 The monumental loggia of the mansion of Mark A. Pollack is an Italian Renaissance style indoor/outdoor space that acts as a transition between the formal living room and the gardens beyond. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.5 A fairly traditional exterior belies the dynamic structural expression of the interior of Santa Rita de Cassia church in suburban Miramar. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.6 A wrought iron and marble stair is framed by columns in the double height front hall of the French eighteenth-century style palace of the Countess of Revilla de Camargo in Vedado. Photograph by Adrián Fernández. Figure 4.7 A bedroom in the Pérez Farfante house features the distinctive design elements employed throughout the house: cement block walls, terrazzo floors, cast concrete ceilings and columns, and varieties of adjustable wood louvers. Photograph by Adrián Fernández.

Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the support of Dr. Mauricio A. Font, director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center in Manhattan. He is the life force that animates both the center and its unparalleled international conference on Cuba. He has the sincere gratitude and profound admiration of this new colleague. this year's symposium, Cuba Futures: Past and Present , provided the kernel of the idea that grew into this collection of essays. I would also like to thank my other colleagues, Cuba Project Fellows and conference organizers at the Bildner, for having put together such a sterling and convivial symposium, which allowed me to organize more than a dozen speakers into three separate panels. Veronica Karpoich, special projects coordinator at the Bildner Center, has proven to be a true factotum, but, more importantly, a colleague and friend. Both she and Mauricio took time away from their extraordinarily busy days to help me round up superb and interesting prospective essay contributors. Veronica made sure my three conference panels, where parts of most of the pieces in this collection were first presented, came together organically; she did not have to provide most of the help she provided, but she did so with a smile. I am impressed by her intellect and work ethic. I am in her debt.
Most importantly, I dedicate this book to my boy, Louis Hamilton Riobó Alter. It is the token fruits of the labor that took me away from his side for so many hours. I missed you, Louie.
Part I
Introduction
Cuban Intersections of Writing and Space
Colonial Foundations and Neobaroque Orígenes
Carlos Riobó
Cuban intersections of writing and urban space have been apparent since Spanish colonial days. The Spanish adelantados and other conquistadores brought with them to today's Americas orders to implement Renaissance models of urban planning and defense, based on the public square, gridiron, and fortress, thus creating a space for public discourse and the public display of power. The Baroque aesthetic arrived in the so-called New World about a century after Columbus as el Barroco de Indias , and found a fertile ground for a new artistic and urban reality. In the new and marvelous New World combinations resulting from the mixing of cultures and peoples, the Baroque found some of its most compelling and remarkable expressions. Two of the Baroque's most noteworthy modern practitioners were the twentieth-century Cuban writers and intellectuals, José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy—a representative of Neobaroque literary notions. Lezama's use of gnostic gaps married space and writing, or art. He revived the Baroque aesthetic in his work and personified it as the “Señor Barroco,” or Sir Baroque. Sarduy represented the Baroque's excess in his novels, as an aesthetic for combining written discourses and cultural spaces. The Baroque was one of the aesthetics most preoccupied with space.
The founding of settlements and cities was synonymous with civilization during the Spanish colonization of today's Americas. The equation of ordered space with good government cemented the psychology of space in art in the colonies. In general, Spanish colonial urban planning used the gridiron layout and the central plaza , elements of space that were prefigured and prescribed in written laws issued by the Spanish crown during successive periods of colonization. Empire, for Spain, therefore hinged on a conception of writing and town planning.

The Grid
The origins of the urban grid are tied to its ancient functions. 1 The grid was significantly used in some of the world's most important cities, including in pre-Columbian Mexico's major cities, where it was quite well developed by 150 C.E. Gridiron benefited the economy and warfare as well. From the seventh-century B.C.E. on, various Greek cities in the Asia Minor city-states of Ionia developed into commercial outposts, which found the regular and systematic pattern of an orthogonal grid both economically beneficial as well as easy to replicate quickly after numerous destructions in cyclical wars. This layout was known as the Milesian layout, after Miletus, in southwest Asia Minor. 2
The Miletus plan introduced streets of uniform width and city blocks of fairly uniform dimension—certain blocks were left empty to serve as an agora (open assembly place, marketplace) or temple. The agora was a rectangle surrounded by a wall of shops on at least three sides. In later centuries, the plan provided an easy and fare way to divide land in a newly colonized city.
The Roman Empire also used this method of dividing the land in its military encampments, or “castra,” which were later transformed into cities. This layout was used as well during the European Middle Ages in southern French garris