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By NICK MADIGAN
Standing before an evidently enthralled audience in a Coral Gables
bookstore, Michael Connors was delivering an illustrated presentation
about Havana’s pre-Revolution architecture and interior design when he
noticed a woman a few rows back lower her head and cry.
“She was wiping her eyes as I was talking,” Connors said afterward, as he signed copies of his fourth book on Cuba, Havana Modern: 20th-Century Architecture and Interiors, whose publication last month prompted his presentation at Books & Books.
The
woman’s tears said all they needed to about the yearning Cuban exiles
feel for the island of their birth, which many have not set foot upon
since leaving in the wake of Fidel Castro’s assumption of power in 1959.
Beamed
onto a screen behind Connors as he spoke were photographs — most of
them stunning — of public buildings and houses in Havana from various
architectural periods, most notably Art Nouveau, Beaux Arts and Art
Deco, as well as every other Western architectural style “that exists
from the past 500 years,” including the French and Spanish Renaissance,
the book says. The Cuban capital houses a confluence of distinct styles
that Connors said “exists in no other city in this hemisphere.”
“There
was plenty of money down there — everybody wanted to build,” Connors
said, referring to the first few decades of the 20th century, when
Havana’s modernist look evolved during a construction boom fueled in
large part by immigrant Spaniards.
“Some of the best architects
in the world went to Cuba,” said Connors, who points out in his book
that among the half-million immigrants who arrived in Cuba during the
first quarter of the century were architects, artisans, builders and
sculptors “who had cultivated their trades, talents and tastes under the
mantle of the European moderne movement.”
But, as has
long been clear to anyone with an interest in Cuba, the vagaries of
time, hurricanes and politics have done much to impede the maintenance
and care of many of Havana’s most outstanding buildings.
“It’s
preservation by neglect,” Connors, a historian and Caribbean design
expert, told the audience. He was alluding to the fact that many
exceptional buildings have survived for decades only because there was
no money to either modernize them or tear them down. In some cases,
mansions turned to slums, disintegrating while filled with families.
Other
remarkable structures have been restored to their former glory, an
effort spearheaded by Eusebio Leal, Havana’s official historian, who
found a way to use revenue from tourists to finance the restoration of
hundreds of buildings in the colonial section of the city, which dates
to 1519.
One of the first edifices Leal focused on was the Palace
of the Captains General, an 11-year project that resulted in the
building becoming the City Museum. It is one of many buildings that drew
Connors’ attention, but his favorite is the former headquarters of the
Bacardí rum empire, an Art Deco marvel completed in 1930, to which he
devotes a dozen pages.
Connors is fond too of the Teatro América,
another Art Deco structure that is pure elegance. Shown to great effect
in a two-page photo is a ladies’ cloakroom with upturned brass lamps
and worn, green leather armchairs that the author surmised have not been
renovated in decades. “It’s like walking back into a time capsule,” he
said.
Of the private homes shown in the book, the one built for
Pablo González de Mendoza in 1916 in the Pompeian style was the first in
Havana to have an indoor swimming pool. His grandson, Gonzalo
Valdes-Fauli, a retired investment banker, attended Connors’
presentation and told him afterward that he recalled as a child carving
his name with an icepick on a wall in the kitchen. Thirty-five years
later, in the 1990s, he went back to the house — which now serves as the
British embassy — and found the carving undisturbed.
Connors’
book makes note also of Havana’s hotels, some of which were playgrounds
for glamorous visitors such as Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra before the
Revolution.
The Habana Riviera, a 21-story hotel and casino built
by the American crime figure Meyer Lansky in 1957, was nationalized by
the Cuban government three years later and looks just as it did then. It
has not been well maintained, Connors said, with a general air of
neglect and mold plainly visible in one of the rooms he visited.
In
the hotel’s heyday, the actress and competitive swimmer Esther Williams
performed in the Riviera’s saltwater pool, which was surrounded by 75
changing cabañas, each with a private telephone.
Although
the hotel’s restaurant, L’Aiglon, retains a vivid mural of Cubans
dressed elegantly for a carnival, “the food is terrible,” Connors said.
“The plates are the same ones they were using in 1957, and I have a
feeling they’re using the same napkins, too.”
The author
acknowledged that he had not expected to enjoy Cuba when he first went
there 15 years ago as part of his research into another book, Caribbean Elegance.
“But
my whole perception changed, with the music, the rum, the cigars,” said
Connors, who estimated that he has visited Cuba more than 50 times. He
usually stays in a rented apartment in Havana. “I consider it my second
home,” said Connors, who has owned a house on St. Croix, in the U.S.
Virgin Islands, for 40 years.
“We thank you so much for bringing
Cuba to us,” Sebastian V. Paris, a 53-year-old paralegal in Miami who
left Cuba with his parents in 1970, said to the author during a
question-and-answer session. Later, Paris said Connors’ book made it
possible for Cubans like himself to “enjoy things that we never would
have seen” otherwise.
“We couldn’t get inside to see those
beautiful houses, or especially their furnishings,” said Paris, who
recalled walking past some of Havana’s imposing private homes as a child
and wondering what they were like behind their walls.
The Paris
family’s own house in Marianao, a Havana suburb, was nothing to sniff
at. “It was a three-story mansion,” said Paris, whose father sold
agricultural machinery and whose mother was involved in two businesses,
jewelry and textiles. When the family left for Miami, they were
permitted to take nothing from their house but a single piece of luggage
each, and even the suitcases were searched for cash and jewelry.
Shortly thereafter, the house became a school and remains so, Paris
said.
He returned in 1979 and again in 2000, when he noticed in
one of Havana’s less prominent neighborhoods some balconies that were
“falling down piece by piece.” He raised his camera and took some
photographs, and was almost immediately set upon by a police officer,
who forced him to delete the images.
“They did not want me to take
pictures of the devastated, falling-down Cuba,” Paris said. “They want
the tourists to see the other Cuba.”
It is clear that Cuban
authorities recognize the value of Havana’s old-world charm and of
restoring its crumbling structures, said Roberto Suro, director of the
University of Southern California’s Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, the
oldest think tank on Latino issues in the United States.
“In
Havana, there are whole blocks, whole neighborhoods, a whole city of
buildings constructed before 1960, and it is the cumulative effect that
creates an urban landscape like no other,” said Suro, who has visited
Cuba many times. “It is not that they are so extraordinary on their own.
They are extraordinary together.”
For centuries, he said, the old
center of Havana — La Habana Vieja — has been a distinct place with its
own look and feel. “The restoration has not just rescued the churches,
forts and palaces, but it is in the process of preserving everything
that was inside the old city,” Suro said. “The glory of it is the
feeling of being in a world apart. The worry is that it turns into an
artificial place for tourists and the lucky Cubans with money to spend,
but no real life of its own.”
A person in the audience at Books
& Books spoke up to say that the parts of Havana that have been
restored “have turned it into a kind of Disneyland,” implying that it
was done for the sole benefit of tourists.
But the consensus at
the book store seemed to be that it was infinitely preferable to see
some action at last, and to stave off the decay that seemed so endemic
only a few years ago.
For Connors and the Havana-based
photographer Néstor Martí, who took most of the pictures in the book and
who accompanied him to Miami and elsewhere for a U.S. book tour,
recording the beauty and uniqueness of Havana’s houses and public
buildings was not just a scholarly study — it was an appreciation of the
talent and creativity that went into Havana’s buildings.
“The quality of construction was very good until the ’60,” Martí said. “After that, not so much.”
The Havana Modern
book also amply illustrates that, whatever the Revolution’s
pretensions, virtually nothing of significance was built in Havana after
1959. All the beauty in its buildings came before.
“No one has
been able to bring to life the architecture and design of Cuba and the
Caribbean the way Michael has been able to in this book and in his
previous books,” said Mitchell Kaplan, who runs the Books & Books
stores and is something of a literary institution in Miami.
In
the audience, Dora Vidal watched the slides with wonder. “I left in ’61
and I haven’t been back,” said Vidal, who is 70 years old and whose
parents’ home in Havana’s Miramar district was designed by Max Borges,
who was also responsible for the famous Tropicana nightclub.
“We
left when Cuba was a gem,” Vidal said. “But we Cubans live with our
memories, with the romance of Cuba. I always thought of retiring there.
That was my dream. But I’ll keep living with my memories — until things
change.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/home-garden/article3599351.html#storylink=cpy
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