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Havana's Architecture
Sergio Baroni

Introduction
The following article was written in what was probably the darkest moment of the "Special Period"--a time of unparalleled uncertainty about what the future would hold. Now, seven years later, I don't think it's necessary to add anything; I prefer to leave the text as it was. These were my reflections then, and they remain a testimony to what people were thinking and feeling at the time. I've added a brief epilogue in order to orient the reader, however superficially, to the current situation in Cuba.

Thinking, speaking, and writing about what's happening in Cuba today, in whatever field of activity, is a risky business to say the least. Time seems to have speeded up on the island, with the result that cycles that once took years to run their course now take only months, and writing a paper that attempts to establish points of reference in a situation as complex and dynamic as Cuba's entails a number of risks. One such risk is a loss of depth caused by an overlapping of events of quite frightening impact--almost as if they were natural catastrophes. A second risk is a sort of inverted perspective which makes recent events seem less immediate in the collective consciousness than more distant ones, with the result that the issues and insights of the early years of the Revolution have returned with extraordinary force.

A third is the dimming of hope and expectation: although the social project still stands as an ideal, its actual contours, laboriously defined with almost maniacal zeal until only recently, have been lost sight of. With a past still in need of interpretation, a present that changes from day to day, and a shadowy, uncertain future, the wisest course would probably be to suspend one's judgment. And yet it seems essential to stop more frequently now to take stock, if only to jot down diary notes or monitor developments which, in many ways, remain extraordinarily real and special. This is very much the spirit of this report. No attempt is made here to offer a complete survey of present-day architecture in Cuba. The aim is simply to reflect on certain aspects of it, on the things that seem the most likely indicators of how it will develop in the future.

The Socio-Political Context
As often happens during major public events--celebrations, fairs, festivals--1991 was an important year for architecture in Cuba, with the Pan American Games in Havana and Santiago, and the Fourth Party Congress, also in Santiago. These events expedited the completion of works that typify current trends. It may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely these extreme conditions that are enabling Cuban architecture to start coming to terms with its past.

In the case of architecture, the past is not divided, as elsewhere, into pre- and post-1959. Instead, the initial period of revolutionary architectural research and experimentation came to an end in the mid-Sixties.

So these works allow us to take stock of what has happened over a period of twenty-five years--an entire generation--during which architects in the developed world have exhausted, betrayed, or squandered the inheritance bequeathed to them by the masters of the Modern Movement.

The "greenhouse effect" of Cuba's dual isolation has made this generational shift from Modern to Postmodern totally different here. On the one hand, the outside world has tried to sever all economic, political, and cultural links with a Caribbean nation that has dared to challenge the established order in the United States's backyard. On the other hand, a sometimes unconscious process of internal isolation has rejected external influences as a possible source of ideological contamination, or at least as a source of messages that are indecipherable precisely because of the nature of their source. Among other negative effects, this has drastically reduced Cuba's traditional links with its natural environment--the Caribbean, Latin America, the USA--and encouraged the development of systematic relations with other socialist and Third World countries. Only on the cultural front has Cuba been able to maintain anything like normal contact with its immediate neighbors, especially Latin America. This has somewhat reduced Cuba's isolation and ostracism, for better or worse.

In this situation, the island gradually came to be seen as a huge laboratory where scientific social principles were being used to build a new society in a country emerging from underdevelopment.

Cuba's strategy was two-fold. On the one hand, there was an almost mystical faith in the potential of technological and scientific development. Massive investment programs were seen as indispensable to the country's modernization, so Cuba neglected to encourage the kind of productive new relationships that would have given individuals the dominant creative role in the process they should have had. On the other hand, there was Cuba's internationalism, which was attempting to establish systematic relations with the rest of the so-called socialist world. This generated a broad spectrum of political, economic, diplomatic, military, and cultural commitments that could not be separated out and managed independently.

These circumstances help to explain some of the things that have happened in Cuba over the last 30 years, and to establish links between architectural development and cultural, economic, and political contexts. In the decade immediately prior to the Revolution, Cuba's more committed architects were engaged in assimilating the International Style, suitably modified to take account of the local climatic and environmental variables that had shaped Cuban architecture in the past. This distanced them from a state commissioning machine still heavily committed to monumentality, as well as from the mediocrity of the commercial architecture favored by property speculators and even private clients. Another factor was a social commitment that added a political dimension to their work. The mission of architecture--indeed, its raison d'être--was to show solidarity with the great mass of the island's dispossessed. This duty was felt especially by young people in general and by those in the Architecture Faculty in particular. Its student movement made little distinction between commitment to the political or the cultural avant-garde. It is no accident that the president of the Student Federation, José Antonio Echeverría, who died during the storming of the Presidential Palace in 1957, was an architecture student. Obviously, it was this body of largely uneducated young people that took charge after the triumph of the Revolution.

From then on the sheer amount of work that had to be done became a decisive factor. The "brain drain" in the months immediately after the Revolution halved the number of architects in Cuba, and the three hundred or so who remained not only had to cope with mushrooming demand, but also master fields of activity they had never worked in before: the planning of industrial complexes and farming units, the design of huge agricultural and sheep-farming estates, and graphic and industrial design. At the same time, traditional issues like schooling, health, sport, and the home had to be tackled en masse on a national scale, while practically all the nation's planning capacity (including that of the university) remained in the capital.

The only response to a challenge on this scale was a radical socialization of activity. Architects agreed to become state employees, the entire student body divided its time between the university and planning centers, lecturers in new disciplines made good the deficiencies left behind by the brain drain by working part-time alongside practicing professionals, and new graduates moved to the interior of the country. Cuban nationals were aided by substantial numbers of foreign technicians, especially from Latin America, who thus found a practical way of expressing their militant solidarity with the Revolution.

Architecture of the Revolution
This was the moral, political, and economic climate in which Cuba's so-called "Architecture of the Revolution" began to emerge. The architecture which even now provides an obligatory yardstick for new architecture in the country dates from this period. Three key models for future development were handed down from this period: the East Havana residential development, the University campus, and the National Art Schools.

The first of these, completed in 1960, was the first large-scale residential complex (8,000 inhabitants) ever built in Cuba. It was designed virtually overnight, in response to emergency housing needs. In the wake of the Urban Reform project that had abolished land and property speculation, the collapse of private commissioning made large-scale building work an urgent necessity. The East Havana project embodied contemporary European urban planning concepts, especially from Britain and Scandinavia, which in Cuba had never before penetrated beyond the confines of university lecture halls. . . .

The other two works were both teaching institutions. The University campus was designed to meet the long-standing demands of the progressive student movement, and the Art Schools to provide an appropriate environment for the artistic education of thousands of Latin American, African, and Asian students in the form of a large cultural center that would become one of the earliest manifestations of the Third World solidarity to which the Revolution had always been committed.

The two projects were built at the same time, but adopted virtually opposed languages and styles that soon came to symbolize what the future of Cuban architecture would bring. The Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE), built between 1961 and 1964, was based on a modular grid, with specialized buildings connected by covered walkways unifying its open ground floor areas. When filled in with large adjacent or integrated areas of lush horizontal or vertical vegetation, the buildings formed a coherently organized ensemble incorporating the basic principles of vegetation, patios, porticoes, and shutters that had shaped the environmental and stylistic acclimatization of the Modern Movement since the '30s. The complex's beautifully simple construction system used the lift-slab, the most advanced building technique of the day, for the first time ever in Cuba. Since then it has been used in industrial construction, but getting it accepted was by no means an easy business. In short, the complex resulted from enthusiastic though orthodox adherence to the functional, stylistic, and technical principles of Modernism, which led to the decision to build the university campus in the outskirts of the city and obviously weakened the cultural impact the university might have had were it situated in the city center.

A typology was thus established that would be reproduced on a massive scale ten years later in the school building project that represented the country's most important social building program to date.

The National Art Schools
The Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) was also sited outside the city center, but this time at the very heart of Havana's most exclusive district, the Country Club. The chosen site was the Club's beautiful golf course, surrounded by the capital's most luxurious houses, many of which had become student residences when their owners abandoned them. With an already desecrated site as the basis of their brief, the architects faced the challenge of creating a stimulating, metaphor-rich environment in which rather unusual students--young people committed to appropriating art as personal expression and raison d'être--could receive the education they needed.

There can be little doubt that the only possible response to the political decision to build the Art Schools, motivated by solidarity and the libertarian ideologies of the time, was an architectural project of the highest artistic and cultural standard. The idea of a single compact building to house the five faculties envisaged for the Schools--Theatre, Dance, Ballet, Plastic Arts, and Music--was quickly abandoned, for planning and technical reasons, in favor of a kind of garden complex of five separate buildings around the edge of the site that would leave the beautiful central open space and existing Country Club installations intact. At the time, both in Cuba and abroad, much was spoken and written about the ENA. If we go back over the old ground again here, it is because the project is an unusual example of the kind of transculturation that has always been a prominent feature of Cuban culture. It is worth considering here some of the things held in common by the architects commissioned to do the job; doing so offers special insights into the scope and significance of what they achieved. The three architects--the Cuban Ricardo Porro (b. 1925), and the Italians Vittorio Garatti (b. 1927) and Roberto Gottardi (b. 1927), were barely thirty years old at the time and had built very little. All three had been closely involved in the debate over the limitations and frustrations of the Modern Movement in the Fifties. However, they had also been able to relate their experience to the dramatic and contradictory events of a primitive Venezuela, where the talented Carlos Raúl Villanueva was even then bringing his vision of architecture to maturity. It was the grafting of this rich conceptual and imaginative inheritance onto a program already original in itself, in a highly stimulating and extraordinarily (and justifiably) optimistic natural environment, that produced these exceptional works (in all senses of the word)--unique achievements totally different from the general run of architecture at the time.

Their effect on Cuban culture was to broaden the horizons of routine planning and design practice in the country. In addition to climatic and environmental research, the will to create, and better understanding and use of the site and nature, experimentation proceeded at an almost breathless pace. New spaces and forms were derived from a wide range of factual and metaphorical input that was reprocessed in various ways--changes of scale, exaggerated or broken rhythms, slopes and overhangs, complex or intersecting force and direction lines, fragmentation of volumes--to produce an approach that rejected the abstract geometrical linearity of a supposed rationality in favor of a realism founded on the complexity of a society bursting with contradictions. In this sense, the Art Schools still provide an indispensable, if controversial, point of reference for future architecture in a changing society that professes to be building a world different from the homologous uniformity created by conventional ideologies.

Much of the controversy over the ENA was misguided. It would be mistaken to see the arguments that emerged as forerunners of Postmodernism unless we decide first which of Postmodernism's many aspects they advocated or opposed. In point of fact, the right to reinstate the validity of architecture as an artistic medium based not on historical "signs" but on the expressive potential of its various elements--the wall, the arch, the dome, window, and door frames--was widely asserted. It would also be mistaken to see the outcome of the project (three of the five schools have never been finished and the concept has never been repeated) as a political and cultural choice that seemed to condemn an elitist, hedonistic concept of architecture. That the Schools never entered the mainstream of Cuban architecture was due to factors which have continuously shaped the development of Cuban architecture since then, and have only very recently shown signs of changing.

One of these factors, perhaps the least important, was simply the program's loss of relevance. Once Cuba had been isolated from the outside world, the scale of the complex was considered disproportionate to the country's internal needs. Also, the shortage of skilled labor needed to cope with urgent, large-scale building projects--it would eventually become chronic in the building industry--was beginning to make its presence felt. The ENA site required valuable reserves of manpower which it was decided could be usefully deployed for more urgent work elsewhere. Finally, a growing scarcity of essential finishing materials on the site--wood, ceramics, brick, electric, and sanitary installations, etc.--made it increasingly difficult to bring the project to completion. Work virtually stopped, and the tangled web of arguments that would eventually be used to demonstrate the project's impracticability and justify abandoning it was gradually woven. This is now acknowledged to have been a grave mistake. It is becoming increasingly evident that the failure to finish the Schools was a setback in a revival of Cuban architecture that had been having trouble in making headway since the pre-Revolutionary days. The Schools project, it is now realized, had speeded up the process considerably and had linked it to the country's new social project.

In the event, understandably enough, what prevailed were simplistic pseudo-rational procedures for coping with the imbalance between the nation's huge demand for construction and the minimal resources available to meet that demand.

Environmental Ideology of the '60s
The Fifth Congress of the International Union of Architects, held in Havana in 1963, provided a platform for the basic principles of the "environmental ideology" Cuba was itself proposing to adopt and which it considered appropriate for the whole of the Third World, in open opposition to the models offered and imposed by the larger community of nations Cuba was laboriously disassociating itself from. The idea that it would and should be possible to control directly the shaping of all constructed space, from projects on the smallest scale right up to the industrial design of consumer objects, was enthusiastically welcomed and approved by the whole profession, which assumed responsibility for its implementation with a mixed sense of liberation and prophetic awe, and with no illusions about the actual scale of the undertaking. This attitude reflected an extremely generalized approach to doing things--one that has often produced unforeseen or unlikely results when examined in a strictly rational way.(1)

In the building industry, modernization was imposed in the form of industrialization, standardization, and prefabrication, a strategy which took little account of the time needed for ideas to develop and mature, or of other unavoidable connections with other areas of the economy, technology, and culture. As situations became increasingly complex, the solutions adopted to deal comprehensively with all the country's problems were gradually simplified, in a process of retrenchment that inevitably lowered the standard not only of projects but also of materials, workmanship, and the coordination of all the work that was going on. Since there were no technicians, standardization was extended from construction components to entire buildings available from catalogues, free-standing units that could be inserted into any context once the functional basics were taken account of. By far the most convincing outcome of this situation was the building of hundreds of secondary schools as part of one of the country's most ambitious social programs. Situated in the countryside, the schools were intended to assist in the technological and social transformation of entire regions given over to cultivation of vegetables, citrus fruit, and tobacco for which the pupils themselves provided a significant proportion of the work force.

As an indication of the spirit of the times, we might recall that a few years earlier, in 1962, Giuseppe Samoná ended a fruitful period of teaching at the Architecture Faculty in Rome by outlining a futuristic reorganization of the school system:

"There will be large concentrations of secondary schools that will be much more important than the universities because they will bring to maturity the minds that will contribute to the formation of an extremely dynamic society. These school complexes will exist independently on the open land, isolated from the general population and cities they will have no material need of...."(2)

In Cuba this prophecy became almost literally a reality and is still far from having yielded its full potential. But the fact remains that, precisely because they are a recurring element in an overall strategy designed to transform the country, the Schools in the Fields have become a linguistic and typological symbol of the Revolution's boldest attempt yet to transform Cuban culture.

At a regional level, weaker central control still left room for operations of this kind, but relations with the city were more conservative and schematic out of economic considerations. Existing structures were seen as capital to be utilized to the full, and it was more pragmatic to add new structures forming part of the programs entering the social life of the country.

The resulting urban landscape--with a center perceived simply as old rather than historical and outskirts built entirely from a central, standardized repertoire--is disconcerting to say the least in its obvious rejection of cultural and environmental continuity, in open contradiction to a political stance that had located the origins of the Revolution in a hundred-year history of a struggle for liberation and had used its own cultural identity as a weapon of resistance.

Architectural Renewal in the '80s
It was from just these paradoxes that the first signs of architectural renewal began to appear in the Eighties with a series of factors that produced widely differing results, many of them confused and contradictory. The impetus toward renewal came from a variety of sources. One was the Faculty of Architecture, where groups of students (egged on by faculty gurus), dissatisfied with the forms of pragmatism then in force, reaffirmed the transcendental nature of architecture which led them to rediscover forms of architecture their fathers had rejected. They began to look more closely at eclectic typologies, rather than the colonial ones that were already taken for granted, and also at various forms of Postmodernism. They were not above reactivating some of the "tropicalizing" tendencies of pre-Revolutionary Modernism. The result was a new ethical and aesthetic stance that rejected, in the name of popular culture and in contrast to the cultural policies then in force, the demagogic slovenliness that had justified and condoned the increasing disfigurement of the country's architectural environment.

Another source was Havana's Architecture and Urban Planning Office which, under Mario Coyula Cowley's shrewd management,(3) made possible research into alternative ways of constructing and reconstructing the city--specifically, Havana itself, a jewel threatened as much by the effects of time as by the actions of man. His work in preserving the historical fabric of the city was fundamental in re-establishing urban planning principles in both the university and the planning offices.

Still another source was the office of the City Historian, an outdated institution which Eusebio Leal had transformed into a dynamic, constructive enterprise that had initiated the reconstruction of Old Havana. UNESCO had declared Old Havana part of the Heritage of Man, and this had in turn given more clout to the Conservation, Restoration and Museum Center (CENCREM), which had become one of Cuba's key architectural and urban planning institutions.

From the mid-Eighties on, more widespread and increasingly coherent discussion of the organizational procedures, technical assumptions, and cultural principles that had informed almost twenty years of architectural design work added extra impetus to these processes. Although it all remained very much a matter of argument and debate, and relatively few points were ever agreed on, some projects were realized which enable us to assess the scope and validity of the changes taking place.

First and foremost, there was the work of the young generations who had graduated in the Eighties. It is they who have contributed the most to the debate, mainly through competitions, conferences, and exhibitions, with wide-ranging projects that identified them with the cultural ferment that has gradually spread from the plastic arts to other areas of intellectual activity.(4) Their finished work is allied to the process of urban renovation triggered off by the re-emergence of the microbrigadas, worker organizations in all areas of activity who were brought in to make good the shortfall of manpower needed in a capital desperate to build new homes. In the earlier phase during the Seventies, the microbrigadas had intervened at city level and had so been responsible for the construction of large suburban districts. More recently, they have worked within each of the fifteen municipalities that make up the city, which has meant that the problem of how to fit new buildings into the city's historical fabric has had to be faced. This enabled project groups to be decentralized at local level, where the new generations of architects have found the most room to work in. And it is precisely here that the contradictions and deviations produced by the absence of what might have been a fruitful exchange between large-scale planning and experimentation with individual works and the eternal dialectic between quantity and quality, tradition and innovation, theory and practice, are most apparent. . . .

The Family Doctor Clinic
Eduardo Luis Rodríguez (1959) is one of the younger architects who has contributed most to this collective enterprise. In addition to being an active exhibition organizer, lecturer, writer, and researcher in relatively unknown areas of Cuban architectural history, Rodríguez has to his credit one of the projects that had the greatest impact on the already tottering structures of placid institutional life in the late Eighties. In Cuba, the state "family doctor" is responsible for bringing health care to 120 families, or around 500 people. He is the essential link in an increasingly complex and comprehensive network of services which is beyond question one of the most remarkable and widely known achievements of Cuba's social policy. His role is more preventive than therapeutic, so his work in the community involves systematic observation of the environmental, social, and domestic conditions of the families he is responsible for. The need to live in the community means that the "clinic" has to be integrated with the homes of the resident doctor and nurse, so a new architectural typology had to be devised that could meet the needs of the moment. One way of doing this might have been to make a "mark" on the territory, especially since most of the top-priority areas in the program were situated in rural or mountainous regions. This solution would have been a repetition of the Schools in the Countryside project whose architectural forms successfully embodied the philosophy of the project itself; indeed, the first project to be proposed was very much of this type. . . .

The clinic-home designed by Eduardo Luis Rodríguez for Old Havana in 1988 has tackled the problem by avoiding uncritical imitation and making a careful survey of the forms and structures of the district. This is one of the city's most composite areas. It has been continuously renovated, and sixteenth- and seventeenth- century fortifications, eighteenth-century Baroque churches, nineteenth-century "religiocratic" palaces, and twentieth-century American banks rub shoulders with each other amicably enough in a broader eclectic fabric of modest, dignified vernacular houses that constitute the most visible and representative face of Havana's architecture. In Rodríguez's building, the central idea of the patio--which land speculation has significantly reduced in size and function to become little more than a small courtyard--is reinstated and becomes the heart of the building once again. The rooms of the clinic are located around the patio, with the two sets of living quarters above them. The large glazed wall projects whatever light there is in the narrow side street outside into the patio; from there, it spreads with varying degrees of intensity into the corridors and rooms of the building to produce, in minimal space, a striking range of light, color, and environmental contrasts typical of the modern approach to the living space. Outside, the building reproduces many of the characteristic features of the district--sloping roofs, small balconies, the ratio between filled and empty spaces, the proportions of the rooms, the use of moldings and colors--and becomes one of the best examples in Cuba of contextualized architecture still in the process of completion.

The Pan American Village
Another work in Havana--the Pan American Village, completed in 1991 to coincide with the Pan American Games and designed by a group of architects under Roberto Caballero (1949) to provide accommodation initially for 7,000 athletes and then for a similar number of permanent residents--marks a turning point in urban housing design and planning in Cuba. We have already looked at how projects of this type developed in Cuba and, briefly, at some of the results they have achieved. It should be added here that everyone now knows and agrees that the housing problem has to be tackled with strategies that go beyond exclusively state intervention to involve a much broader range of interests, including, first and foremost, the population itself, which has already proved its adaptability and skill in exploiting situations that escape the notice of heavyweight state structures. If this happens, it will entail radical changes not only in the country's productive system but also in its planning procedures, which have so far been organized from highly centralized offices.

Local initiatives promoted by People's councils--elected bodies to which many local administrative functions are now being transferred--represent a trend toward decentralization in which substantial decision-making powers are being handed over to local communities. In association with these Councils, "integrated change workshops" have been created to provide local planning assistance and social security services at the local community level.

This marks an entirely new subdivision of planning levels in Cuba that will promote real grass-roots participation in decision-making and meaningful dialogue between state agencies and the citizenry. As a result, architecture will have to take on new and far-reaching cultural commitments and responsibilities. The Pan American Village also represents, in terms of state planning, a focal point for the reappraisals now taking place in Cuba's administrative as well as teaching institutions of how the functions of the city's street grid can be restored--the concept of the commercial street, clearly articulated collective space with precise environmental connotations and functions, a hierarchical axis that will structure the entire grid in the tradition of Old Havana's tree-lined Paseo.

Although the finished project does not entirely eschew facile imitation of fashionable themes, the fact remains that it has redeemed an urban area that had disintegrated into a mere container for mechanical functions and traffic, abandoning its role as a catalyst for social contact and cohesiveness in streets, promenades, square, and along the seafront--a need that is felt especially strongly in an essentially extroverted country like Cuba, where people tend to be open to any kind of social contact.

Recent events have drastically reduced the amount of building work going on. Everyone agrees that the only way out of the present situation--in which the first priority is sheer survival--is to draw on the nation's resources of courage, imagination, and creative talent. The fact that architects who completed their training only a few years ago are already able to envisage an architectural rebirth commensurate with the new conditions that will determine the future life of the city, leads us to hope that Cuba's eventual recovery will also provide a new opportunity to resume the architectural debate that began so well thirty years ago.

Epilogue
Some seven years have passed since the foregoing article was written--a long time, given current conditions in Cuba, and long enough to confirm some of the tendencies that were part of the task of architecture at that time, though not long enough to stabilize the processes of change that were already underway then in terms of organizational structures, production methods and techniques, and the whole investment game.

Some of the personalities I mentioned have by now consolidated their positions in the Cuban architectural panorama; new talents have appeared and are beginning to impart a more hopeful color to the architectural scene, especially where building for tourism is concerned. New typologies are being discussed, and restoration of the country's historico-cultural patrimony is accelerating. The once-somber landscape of historic city centers is taking on new life--life that once seemed to be escaping through the cracks that had developed in an aging, dilapidated urban fabric.

The magazine Arquitectura-Cuba has resumed publication with a new look and a new focus; it remains an indispensable source of information, stimulating debate about change in the profession and also serving as an expression of new trends and concerns among the members of the National Union of Architects and Construction Engineers (UNAICC).

The recent Second "Salón de Arquitectura Cuba '99" made plain some of the differing points of view within the profession but also gave cause for optimism; it highlighted a range of Cuban architectural practice sufficiently representative to make current tendencies clear. There is a certain persistent complacency about the use of Postmodern pastiche, especially in buildings designed for tourism (some of which appear to be undeservingly destined for a public suffering from an overdose of Disneylandia) but we are also beginning to see carefully conceptualized architecture and an effort at contextualization full of sophisticated historical references that go well beyond the easy mimicry of colored mediopuntos [half-circle stained glass arch windows] and balusters.

University faculties and architecture schools are rethinking their general approaches and, in particular, showing a renewed interest in the pre-existing city; this interest is stimulated by the country's growing capacity to undertake the task of protecting and validating a patrimony that has already become an integral part of its collective conscience. Bureaucratic structures and approval procedures are still complicated and slow but there is a growing preoccupation with the image of the city and with the risks inherent in an uncontrolled avalanche of investments. The debate that took place a little more than a year ago, in November 1998, at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), was an eloquent expression of this concern, and it was evidence of the fragility of the recovery process now underway, in which the recapturing of high-quality architectural and urban design is left in the hands of less talented members of the profession or--worse--in the hands of people whose principal loyalty is to investors, foreign or local, and whose priorities are all too clearly focused not on design quality but on securing a quick return on their investments.

The climax of that debate was a decision fraught with symbolism: in March of last year, in a meeting of the National Council of the Union, it was decided that a portion of the earnings of tourism in Old Havana will be dedicated to the maintenance and completion of the National Art Schools, which have become an emblem not only of national recovery but also of the importance the country ascribes to culture--the shield of its identity and the armor of its resistance.

This led to a meeting in Havana of the Schools' three architects, along with a large group of admirers--some old, some new. All agreed that putting skepticism aside and trusting in this good omen was the best course for Cuban architecture to pursue at the beginning of the third millennium.

Footnotes
1. The late Fernando Salinas (1930-1991[?]) and Roberto Segre (b. 1934) are undoubtedly the architects who have done the most to keep discussion about the cultural aspects of architecture and urban planning in Cuba going. They have played an especially active role in formulating and popularizing the principles of "environmental design." Both have produced essential theoretical, critical, and historical work at the university and elsewhere. Salinas was also responsible for one of the most important planning and research works of the period.

2. G. Samoná, "Conclusioni," in La cittá, territorio (Bari, 1964), p. 99.

3. Mario Coyula Cowley (b. 1935), lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, is currently the director of GDIC (the "Capital Integrated Development Group") founded to coordinate and encourage activities that can contribute to the development of Havana. The Group plays an important part in coordinating administrative, teaching, and research functions in conjunction with the Provincial Government (the City of Havana is in one of the country's 14 provinces).

4. Most of these young architects have received support from the Fratelli Saiz Association, a cultural body that has sponsored competitions (the one for its own new headquarters was especially important), debates, exhibitions ("Young Cuban Architecture" early in 1990 was representative) and prizes for works by young architects (one recent example was the Walter Betancourt Prize linked to the Fourth Havana Biennial.

The main body of this article first appeared as "Rapporto dall'Avana" [Report from Havana] in Zodiac 8, Milano, September 1992-February 1993, published by Editrice Abitare Segesta Spa. The introduction and epilogue were provided by Baroni for publication in CUBA Update.