Aesthetics and the Imaginary
The imagination plays a central role in the way we perceive and understand the world around us. We create cognitive maps of places and spaces according to a vast range of different visual cues associated subconsciously with our own and shared experiences. 1 In his book Imaginary Cities, the Irish author Darran Anderson describes this phenomenon and how it relates to our encounters with real and imagined city spaces:
There are collective mythologies and there are personal mythologies. … All begin in the lives and imaginations of individuals. We inhabit our actual cities through these personal mythologies, walking the ghost trajectories of earlier events … The city is a memory theatre. 2
The aestheticization of space and place (both in terms of the creation of broader spatial imaginaries and the representation of specific locations) has long been the focus of study for scholars working across different disciplines, yet the field of geographical aesthetics represents a relatively new and under-explored area of research. 3 In recent years, this work has built on the “cultural turn” in human geography in the 1980s and 1990s, which encouraged a new “interpretive approach” of the city’s image and the urban landscape’s symbolic meaning. 4
Studying Havana in terms of a range of different yet related aesthetics involves examining the imaginative encounters we have with the city from a distance. 5 As the American geographer and writer Jelly-Schapiro points out:
The Caribbean, as much as it is a place, is also an idea. … The ways that we humans develop our sense for place–the ways in which we vest location with meaning–have to do always, in some sense, with experience and memory … our conception of a place is also always shaped by the stories we hear about it. 6
This has been exemplified over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by the way the idea of Cuba in the Western imaginary has been constructed predominantly around North American representations of the country. This resulted first and foremost from the island’s portrayal in different (primarily visual) texts that included film , literature, magazines, music , photography , and tourist guidebooks. As Louis Pérez Jr. observes in his book Cuba in the American Imagination:
The Americans came to their knowledge of Cuba principally by way of representations entirely of their own creation, which is to suggest that the Cuba Americans chose to engage was, in fact, a figment of their own imagination and a projection of their needs. 7
These representations of the country have become inextricably linked to the visual narration of Havana (as synecdoche for Cuba) that have circulated widely in the global context, thus influencing the way the city has been imagined outside the island. 8
Havana Imaginaries
In his influential book The Image of the City, the American urban planner and theorist Kevin Lynch describes our way of seeing urban environments as one that is always experienced “in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, [and] the memory of past experiences.” 9 In the case of Havana, the image of the pre-revolutionary city was forged around its portrayal in foreign film , literature, and photography from the 1930s–1950s. This was a period in which the country developed a reputation as a type of “Pleasure Island,” with its capital city becoming a sort of “tropical playground.” 10 The images associated with this era determined a range of a priori assumptions and expectations about the country that thereafter influenced not only foreigners’ ways of seeing Cuba and its capital city but also their interpretation of different Cuban “realities.” Furthermore, this was intensified by the country’s political isolation from the early 1960s onwards (following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the imposition of the economic trade embargo on Cuba by the United States in 1962) and, specifically in the US context, as a result of the way travel restrictions meant that the vast majority of its population were restricted to imagining Havana from abroad.
In the contemporary context, Havana continues to capture the imagination of a global audience but the image of the city has been formulated around a complex visual order that combines different spatial temporalities. Modern-day conceptions of Havana are thereby not only drawn from Cuba’s pre-revolutionary past (symbolized by its colonial architecture, 1950s American-made cars , and iconic bars popularized by foreign writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene) but also from the post-revolutionary period that followed (denoted by images of the barbudo [bearded rebel ], iconic figureheads [including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ], Soviet era Havana , and so on). Since the 1990s, however, these representations have become entangled in foreign visions of the city that emerged in the wake of the worst years of the “Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz” (the “Special Period in Time of Peace”) following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the cessation of economic subsidies to Cuba from the Soviet Union .
The ensuing economic crisis brought the island and its capital city to a literal standstill, thus leading to the mental projection of Havana as a city “frozen-in-time” —the aforementioned pre- and post-revolutionary imaginaries becoming fused with signs of the city’s ruin and decay. 11 Consequently, the circulation of images of the city in a type of suspended animation led to the development of what critics referred to as a “Special Period aesthetic” and to Havana acquiring a “distinct aesthetic quality.” 12 This visual character has been entrenched in representations of the city created by foreign filmmakers and photographers over the course of the last two decades, thus resulting in the extension of what I refer to in this book as a “post-Special Period aesthetic .”
Havana is representative of a “revolutionary city ” in more ways than one. On the one hand, this description of Havana’s character relates to its turbulent history of revolution and rebellion , which has been reinforced through its portrayal in different visualities as a politically loaded urban location. As the British geographer David Harvey has noted, the city is made up of different iconic imaginaries that are “deeply embedded in the pursuit of political meanings” and these belong to an ever-changing “spatio-temporal order” that not only endows the city with political meaning, but also “mobilizes a crucial political imaginary.” 13 However, Havana may also be seen as “revolutionary” in terms of the way its image has been constantly re-defined over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This correlates with the cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno’s reading of images of the city as “moving” entities that are formed collectively by our respective cultural experiences. 14 She writes:
This spatiovisual imaginary can come into being only across the course of time. An urban image is created by the work of history and the flow of memory. This is because the city of images comprises in its space all of its past histories, with their intricate layers of stories. … The urban imaginary is a palimpsest of mutable fictions floating in space and residing in time. Mnemonic narratives condense in space, and their material residue seeps into the imaginative constructions of a place. 15
In this way, therefore, the title of this book—Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City —has a double meaning relating both to a series of different critical (and revolutionary) ...