Urban space as heritage in late colonial Cuba ...

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2015.1101946

BOOK REVIEW

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Urban space as heritage in late colonial Cuba: classicism and dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828, by P.B. Niell, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2015, 362 pp., US$55 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-292-76659-4 Niell addresses the fascinating topic of Cuban heritage and urban change in Havana in the period of political upheaval in the Spanish empire between 1754 and 1828. While the stated objective of the book is to analyse the transformations in the monument of El Templete and Havana’s Plaza de Armas, it encompasses a much wider range of topics and processes. The theoretical framework draws strongly on critical heritage studies, using a broad – although elusive – definition of heritage as the uses of the past in the present, and in particular the author builds on the idea of dissonant heritage elaborated by Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996). The book develops the argument that the Bourbons used urban transformations in Havana – particularly in the Plaza the Armas – to impose their reformist agenda together with a more rigorously colonial society. Heritage was fundamental in the negotiation of these transformations, and Greco-Roman neoclassicism became the authorised language of what Niell defines as ‘cultural modernity’. As conveyed in heritage discourse and practice this allowed both Spanish authorities and local Creole elites to negotiate their interests and identities, while disinheriting Afro-Cubans from the national narrative and excluding them in practice from Havana’s political community. Yet, Niell tells us, ‘this heritage reveals dissonance, a lack of agreement as to who possessed the most authority over the heritage site’ (238). Based on a mixture of cultural and art history methods and data, interpreted through a heritage lens, Niell’s work addresses the largely ignored topic of late colonial transformations in architecture and art in the Bourbon empire. This perspective contributes to the heritage literature by looking at the emergence of heritage as a process in a key moment for nation-state formation in Spain and the way this is closely connected with the development of capitalism, religious reform and Enlightenment thought. Niell rightly connects this process, via Trouillot’s (2001) anthropology of the state, with the need to incorporate the emerging civil societies made of individualised subjects – the rational and efficient producers of wealth – into the state apparatus through collective symbolic identification. For Niell, the neoclassic canon imposed by the Bourbons to better manage its subject colonial population could gain greater power through its association with a prestigious past – real and imagined – that Spain was revisiting within its state-building agenda. However, Niell argues that this heritage process was ridden by dissonance due to different uses and interpretations of the past in the present by an increasingly educated Creole civic society. Niell uses Ong’s (1999) concept of a ‘flexible citizenship’ to argue that Creoles stood half-way between peninsular, Spanish and imperial allegiances, and their local interests, thus employing the link with European heritage through neoclassicism in different ways according to changing circumstances. The case of the Basque Bishop Espada, a reformist with constitutional tendencies, provides Niell with an opportunity to analyse the tensions between reformism and Catholicism, engaging in comparisons with similar processes taking place in Mexico at the time as analysed by Larkin (2010) and Voekel (2002). While the Bourbons attempted to impose new colonial meanings and reassert their authority


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Book Review

through interventions in Plaza de Armas, actors such as Bishop Espada subverted these efforts by celebrating the ceiba tree, planted in the square to mark the founding of the city, as a symbol of freedom. Niell’s focus on botany as scientific endeavour and symbol is one of the strengths of the book. The relation between nature and what comes to be naturalised influences the heritage processes that establish which social patterns are natural and which unnatural, implicitly or explicitly associating the latter with vice and corruption. In the context of cultural modernism and Enlightened reform, Creole intellectuals like Felix Varela equated Baroque architecture associated with Catholic flamboyance with vice and corruption, a past to be overcome, while praising neoclassic forms for being ‘closer’ to nature and symbols of good taste (buen gusto). Niell’s work thus lays the ground for scholars researching later periods of Cuban heritage. Firstly, it explains the reluctance of Creole elites to include Afro-Cubans in the national narrative, while they comfortably incorporated the indigenous past and heritage, an issue that lingered long in the republican and revolutionary attempts to build national narratives based on heritage. The long-standing identification of Havana’s elites with European cultural modernity would lead them to replicate Western heritage policies and policies until the present, reproducing the colonial divide between the civilised and barbarians even under the Marxist rhetoric of the Revolution. Secondly, Niell’s work evinces the late colonial roots of heritage processes in the early Republic (1898–1930). This applies particularly to the elite character of monuments and museums – usually created and sustained by public fund raising campaigns – and the key areas of contestation about heritage. The book sheds light on both the strong association of Spanish interests with the figure of Columbus and monuments to him during the post-colonial Republic, and the defence by Havana’s intellectual elites of monuments devoted to Bourbon kings when attempts were made to demolish them. It also acknowledges the strong commitment by these same elites to build a neoclassic temple to commemorate José Martí, a hero of Cuba’s independence movement. The current restoration of Old Havana by the Office of the Historian of Havana led by Eusebio Leal can also be interpreted in the light of Niell’s analysis. Indeed, it could be said that the Havana being rebuilt by the Office is an image of its late colonial identity. More importantly, the logic behind the restoration is based on a middle-class aesthetics concerned with buen gusto that emerged after the Soviet collapse in 1990. This corresponds with ‘bourgeois’ and individualistic behaviours and the search for buen gusto that coincided with the emergence of bourgeois mentalities and individualization patterns after the Bourbon Enlightenment reforms. Despite the scholarly contribution of the book, three areas could have been explored more in-depth. Firstly, there could have been a more systematic engagement with the literature on the different strands of Spanish modern political tendencies, namely constitutionalist radical liberals, moderate liberals and absolutists, and how this relates with civic and ethnic nationalisms in Spain. The empirical material presented in the book allows for greater theoretical engagement with these issues. Sometimes, the Spanish empire is depicted as a monolithic entity, read as a disciplinary machine in Foucauldian style, and this results in less attention paid to Spanish actors in Cuba in comparison with Creoles or Afro-Cubans. Secondly, although the author’s avoidance of the northern European ‘black legend’ concept of Spanish empire’s traditionalism and backwardness is welcome, there is a tendency to portray it as a modern and robust empire without addressing the ideology and practice of Catholic corporatism as discussed by authors such as Wiarda (2003), which lingered long in imperial politics and policies. Thirdly, the focus on Empire and its practices of racialisation and subjectivation through the creation of a colonial matrix of social hierarchies, makes the absence of any discussion of Latin American decolonial theory noticeable. Authors like Quijano, Mignolo, Grosfoguel, Dussel or Castro Gómez could provide a solid theoretical framework from which to interpret Bourbon reformist policies and bring together issues of corporatism, Spanish politics and colonial domination. The lengthy discussions of botanic science and descriptions of portraits could have been cut down to add more interpretative depth in this sense. Finally, the concept of heritage remains at best elusive throughout the work. Heritage is described as a communicative act, a bourgeois ‘gaze’ or a process whereby actors use the past in the present.


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The decontextualised critique of Bourdieu’s interpretation of heritage as the imposition of a dominant ideology confuses things even more. There is a tension between the analysis of heritage as a ‘given’, something that is inherently valuable and deserves analysis for its own sake, and heritage as a discursive and practical ‘construct’, a present process (see Alonso Gonzalez 2014). Probably, the first view derives from the influence of art history: otherwise, why such a strong emphasis on describing paintings and aesthetic details in such depth in just a few monumental features of Plaza de Armas? A processual understanding of heritage would broaden the study to examine the wider uses of material culture from the past, as well as newly created material culture with reference to the past, in present contexts. Indeed, the best parts of the work are the accounts of social power relations and their entanglement with baroque–renaissance aesthetic tendencies in relation with the cultural modernism promoted by Bourbon’s Enlightened reformism, and how these relations both reflect and condition the role of actors in the field. Similarly, the emphasis on the intrinsic dissonance of heritage presented to a ‘heterogeneous audience’ (163) leads to some unnecessary over interpretation, such as in the chapter on ‘Sugar, slavery and disinheritance’, where it is asserted that Afro-Cuban communities might have contested the meaning of new heritage interventions in Plaza de Armas, without any empirical data from the period to confirm this extent. Overall, however, Niell addresses an important gap in the research on Cuba’s heritage and promising interpretations will emerge from his work. Scholars and students interested on Latin American cultural, art and urban history, heritage studies, and those looking at the transition from the former Iberian colonialism to the modern colonial episteme will find this work enlightening and useful. References Alonso Gonzalez, P. 2014. “From a given to a Construct: Heritage as a commons.” Cultural Studies 28 (3): 359–390. Larkin, B. 2010. The Very Nature of God Baroque: Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ong, A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Trouillot, M.-R. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42 (1): 125–138. Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Voekel, P. 2002. Alone before God. Durham: Duke University Press. Wiarda, H. J. 2003. The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pablo Alonso González Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK Institute of Heritage Sciences, CSIC, Spain [email protected] ©2015 Pablo Alonso González http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2015.1101946