Havana The Making of Cuban Culture

This is the first sweeping account of Havana and its cultural history in English. The author introduces us to a marginal city with roots in the sixteenth century, taking us through the periods when it was a sugar boomtown, pulled between empires, a decadent metropolis, a site of both cultural revolution and relative stagnation during the development of the Revolution to its revival in the 1990s. Cosmopolitan playground and nationalist vanguard, Havana has developed its own original style while at the same time both reflecting and directing the complicated politics of the whole of Cuba. This book offers a concise guide to one of the most intriguing cities of the twenty-first century.

Antoni Kapcia is Professor of Latin American History, University of Nottingham.

Introduction: The Havana Mosaic: Sweetness and Light * The Colony, 1550s-1902 * Part I: The City in the Shadows - Havana before Sugar, 1550s-1760s * Part II: The Boom City: Sugar and the Evolution of a Capital, 1760s-1901 * The Republic, 1902-1958 * Part I: A Nation without a Capital, and a Capital without a Nation, 1902-1933 * Part II: Havana as the Cultural Problem, 1934-1958 / Part II: Case study: Bohemia * The Revolution * Part I: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Revolution: A New Marginalization of Havana, 1959-71? * Part II: The Grey City - Conformity, Stagnation and Brutalism in the 1970s and 1980s * Part III: Case study: Bohemia and Granma * Havana as a Living City, 1990 till the Present * Part I: The Rebirth of a Cultural Space * Part II: Case Study: the Casas de Cultura * Conclusion: Havana as Chiaroscuro