Routes/Rutas
Follow the link to read this post in Spanish.
This essay was translated with the assistance of Boris X. Martín, graduate student in history at Tulane University.
This year marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Havana. The city’s success—according to its many chroniclers—can be traced to Havana’s proximity to water and the natural harbor that became the site of one of the most productive ports of all of Spanish America (figures 1, 2). Colonialism gave form to the city’s geography and architecture, and today the crumbling facades of Havana are still associated with bygone fortunes built on sugar and slavery and facilitated by the commercial exchanges of the port. Commemorations of the city’s founding, however, have overlooked the complex legacy of slavery in Cuba. Havana is a city that was shaped not only by the economic exchanges of the port and the transatlantic slave trade, but also by the institution of slavery itself, although much less has been said about the ways in which slavery produced and then recast Havana’s physical environment.
Figure 1. Scale model of Havana, Cuba (1:1000), May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
This collective erasure around slavery in urban space began decades ago. The city and its infrastructure catapulted to international prominence most recently in 1982, when UNESCO declared Havana a World Heritage Site. The area covered by the designation includes the formerly walled perimeter of the city and the extensive system of defenses built “by the Spanish empire” (a euphemism for the enslaved people who rebuilt Havana after the French corsair Jacques de Sores sacked and burned the town in 1555). Since 1982, UNESCO has worked collaboratively with the Cuban government and the Office of the Historian of the City—an institutionally powerful and active body—to preserve Havana’s most historically significant sites. At the time of Havana’s historic designation, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a private preservation group based in France, cited the rapid, heterogenous, and uncontrolled pace of urbanization in Havana as one of the primary reasons behind the 1982 move to preserve and restore areas of the city. Concerns over the integrity of Havana centered around its uncontrolled internal migration and the economic downturn that left few resources available for either urban renewal or historic preservation.
Figure 2. Plan of the City and Port of Havana, 1838. Image courtesy of Cuban National Archives, Havana, Cuba.
In reality, however, the old areas of the city scheduled for preservation are a colonial invention in more ways than implied by the literal origins of the city. While colonists built the core of Havana in proximity to the bay (per Spanish regulations and colonial common sense), the city always encompassed a much larger and diverse geography than the one we celebrate as Old Havana. Free and enslaved people, as well as indigenous inhabitants of the area, lived in and around the colonial core. The city that is now enshrined within the 1982 UNESCO designation, however, disentangles Havana from this history and elides the lived reality of Havana’s slave past. By not only reproducing the walled perimeter of the city, but also by excluding historic areas outside of this precinct and failing to account for the ways in which profits from slavery and the transatlantic slave trade financed Havana’s expansion, the contemporary image of the city perpetuates the idea of a landscape shaped solely by European planners. This version of “Old Havana” is a tourist draw for the more than four million yearly visitors that come to Cuba expecting to experience an authenticity marked mostly by Spanish and North American architectural styles and the lure of a struggling socialist society (figures 3, 4).
Figure 3. National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba, May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
“The old areas of the city scheduled for preservation are a colonial invention in more ways than implied by the literal origins of the city.”
Figure 4. Centro Habana neighborhood, May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
This is not to suggest that slavery goes unacknowledged in Cuba. On the contrary, efforts to document and preserve its history have been underway for decades in the form of research initiatives and the mandates of state-sponsored cultural institutions. Cuba is also one of the founding member-nations of the Slave Route Project. This is a UNESCO project proposed by Haiti and launched first in Benin. It seeks to identify “sites and itineraries of memory related to the slave trade and slavery” and “preserve written archives and intangible heritage related to this history.” In Cuba, the Proyecto de la Ruta del Esclavo is an ambitious undertaking involving NGOs and state institutions such as museums, schools, universities, and academic research centers. One of its crowning achievements in Cuba is the Slave Route Museum located in the sugar-producing province of Matanzas and dedicated specifically to documenting Cuba’s history with slavery. The museum is housed in the San Severino Castle, which was initially built during the first half of the eighteenth century as part of Spain’s extensive system of maritime defense. It was subsequently damaged during the British occupation of Havana in 1762 (in part as a result of the Spanish commander’s decision to destroy the fort before it could be captured by the British—but it was captured nonetheless). This prompted authorities to rebuild it several years later, and the castle became a site for unloading slaves during the late eighteenth century. Its restoration in 1997 was part of the UNESCO effort to document and preserve important sites of slavery around the world.
Figure 5. Remnants of the old city walls, Havana, Cuba, May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
The Slave Route Project in Cuba is one of several remembrance projects across various continents that are spearheading global and collaborative research efforts to identify, document, and mark sites linked to the transatlantic slave trade, including the origin points of slave voyages. Such projects document the Black Atlantic through their ability to make visible nodes of transit and movement; they further point to the vast internal economies that resulted from slavery. Unfortunately, many such remembrance projects, while pointing to the ways in which local and global economies were linked through slavery, rarely point to the ways in which such towns and cities were undergirded by the institution. The importance that colonial administrators placed on the port and the city’s system of defense, for example, has been reproduced through UNESCO’s designation. It overshadows the spaces of the city outside of the “colonial” grid and elides the lived reality of slavery and unfreedom.
Figure 6. Plaza de San Francisco, May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
“Havana’s built environment bears almost no official acknowledgement of slavery’s past.”
Figure 7. Sierra Maestra Cruise Ship Terminal, Havana, Cuba, May 2014. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
Figure 8. Cruise ship and row boats in Havana harbor, April 2018. Photo courtesy of Kuhnmi/Flickr/Creative Commons.
In part, this omission results from scholars who insist on looking out—and towards the Atlantic—to mark enslaved people’s points of departure and entry, and then immediately pivot to rural sugar-producing areas like Matanzas, to trace Cuba’s enslaved past. This point of view has obscured the impact that slavery had on towns and cities that relied on industries such as shipping, shipbuilding, cloth manufacturing, and, of course, sugar (the sugar aristocracy around Havana moved between city and countryside, conducting business in one place and often maintaining homes in both). In Havana, as in many colonial ports, slavery and the slave economy facilitated urban development in tangible ways from its founding moment forward: many of Havana’s plazas were spaces where enslaved and free black people conducted business, streets were colloquially referred to by names that referenced both creole and African pasts, and the city’s system of defense (including the historic forts and city walls) are a testament to the ways in which enslaved people’s forced labor contributed to the literal building of the city and its economy (figure 5). Today, Havana’s built environment bears almost no official acknowledgement of slavery’s past. The Plaza de San Francisco in Old Havana, one of the oldest sites of the transatlantic slave trade in Cuba where Spanish galleons and slave ships convened, now opens to a wharf where cruise ships dock—a sign of Cuba’s expanding tourism industry (figures 6, 7, 8). During its long history the plaza housed, at one time or another, some of the most important markers of Spanish colonial rule: the municipal city council, the customs house, the jail, and a Franciscan convent. The plaza underwent a full restoration in the 1990s, and today the former Cuban Stock Exchange—symbols of Spanish colonialism and U.S. dependency—stands prominently restored (figure 9). A few blocks away, the former Casa de los esclavos is one of the few markers that acknowledges Havana’s slave past. Once a slave-merchant’s home, the building is now part of the offices of the City Historian, and is among the physical reminders of how cities wrestle with the complicated legacies of slavery in urban space, and how space and structures bear testimony to this history.
Figure 9. Former Cuban Stock Exchange, Havana, Cuba, May 2014. Built between 1907 and 1909, the building served as the Cuban stock exchange until the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Photograph by Guadalupe García.
