IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

Heritage is a flexible and composite concept in post-colonial Cuba, manipulated through political means, economic forces, or both. Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air, however, reveals the logic of a destabilizing social and physical space where individuals, culture, and political regimes destroy the meaning of structures and public space for ultimate freedom from a traditional society. Earlier concepts of the city still exist, reappearing with complex and contradictory signs. Modernity, the go-to utility for post-colonial urban and political environments, participates in the creative destruction and cyclical uneven geography of the urban landscape instead of delivering liberation. The city is a visible record of the struggle for modernity, filled with inequalities and ironies. One intersection of one street in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood illustrates a particular condensed complexity of culture and heritage in flux as a result of imperial plans layered with a non-linear and repeating combination of independence, modernity, violence, revolution, and capital. Avenida 23, or La Rampa as the street slopes to the coast between Calle L and O, reveals an adaptation of existing structures, technologies, and urban space for their own messaging and means. Everything is kept, everything changes meaning. Starting in January 1959 at La Rampa and Calle L, a timeline in space reveals cinema, broadcasting, hotels, radical office and living space, wifi, and milk conspire to illustrate a web of modernity, revolution, capitalism, and inequality, all visible in one location today.