Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana

摘要

On 24 February 2018, Cubans gathered to hear President Raul Castro commemorate the reopening of the national capitol building in Havana: El Capitolio, built in 1929. The Office of the City Historian of Havana had just completed its restoration of the grandiose building's main hall, exterior, and gardens, and Castro's speech marked a new chapter in the history of Cuban architecture. His panegyric to a near replica of the U.S. Capitol would have been almost inconceivable fifty years before, during the early years of his brother Fidel's reign. The New York firm Purdy & Henderson created Havana's Capitolio during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of GerardoMachado y Morales-el machadato, which ran from 1925 to 1933. The French ur-banist Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier (1861-1930), working with a team of French and Cuban architects, designed the building's Beaux-Arts tropical gardens (Figure 1). Thus, well before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and even more so afterward, El Capitolio carried the taints of foreign imperialism and bourgeois excess. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its financial support, however, the Cuban state became newly interested in restoring and promoting such problematic architectural icons. Amid Cuba's economic decline in the 1990s, the Castro regime began restoring colonial structures as part of an effort to attract tourist dollars. Today, as Havana reenters the itineraries of luxury cruise lines, the government is reinterpreting architectural sites funded during the machadato by U.S. banks and designed by French, American, and Cuban architects.These include the Presidential Palace and the Beaux-Arts Avenida de las Misiones; the city's iconic oceanfront drive, El Malecon; El Paseo de Marti, also known as El Paseo del Prado, or the Prado; the nationally symbolic Parque de la Fraternidad Americana; and El Capitolio.