Arquitectura Cuba

Just months before Castro's new year's day revolution, the memorial to nationalist poet José Martí was finished in Havana. The competition for its design, however, started in 1939 and the June 1953 issue of Arquitectura Cuba describes a forum dedicated to this most protracted of processes. The final winning entry was by a team led by architect Enrique Luis Varela, a personal friend of Batista. Varela had come second in the original competition of 1939, but the changing political powers meant a final decision was impossible and after four stages, a mish-mash of several schemes was ultimately built. The editor of Arquitectura Cuba, Jose Maria Bens Arrarte, who sat on the juries throughout, was desperate for a solution: ‘The best minds have been broken searching for heroic solutions,’ he exasperated, finishing with, ‘I hope that you architects of the forum can find a solution, because I cannot.’ Visiting the impressive Plaza de la Revolución today, you would never guess the labour endured, hours wasted, battles fought, and compromises made. The only traces left of these are ink marks on the pages of a magazine.


It's now 50 years since Fidel Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Shortly after seizing power, Castro visited the Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos (the National School of Architects, the official body of Cuban architects at the time) indicating how important he considered architecture in the creation of the new state. Work was no longer to be done for private clients, but exclusively for the government. Private architectural practices closed and reputedly two-thirds of Cuba's architects fled the country.


The immediate effect on the Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos's magazine, Arquitectura Cuba, was minimal, but after a golden age of Cuban modern architecture in the 1960s, publication had slowed to every quarter and by the end of that decade, as Cuba became economically dependent on the USSR, Arquitectura Cuba had become more of a technical construction manual. In 1997, new editor Eduardo Luis Rodriguez revived the flagging Cuban journal with a new format and improved, contemporary printing. Baptised La nueva época (the new epoch), it still exists today even though there were 5 years between the last two issues.

© The Sesquipedalist, MMIX
Appeared in the Architects' Journal 23.01.09

The following covers are from the 1960s and 1970s and were kindly supplied by Raúl at the fantastic Arquitectura Cuba but arrived too late for the AJ column and are really the reason for this post here.