Heritage and Urban Sketch

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Pánfilo de Narváez, under the direction of Diego de Velázquez, Founded Havana, originally named San Cristóbal, on the Caribbean coast of Cuba in the year 1514. It was one of the first seven settlements, villas, established on the Island: Baracoa (1512), Bayamo (1513), Trinidad (1514), Sancti Spíritus (1514), Havana, Puerto Príncipe (1514), Santiago de Cuba (1515). This makes it one of the oldest cities of the New World that was under the domination of the Spanish Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1519, Havana was moved from the site of its founding on the Gulf of Batabanó to its present location.
 

The geographic position of the island, between North and South America, with shores on the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and its physical configuration — long and narrow— determined its strategic value and Spain's commitment to control it and defend it. No wonder that, together with Puerto Rico, Cuba was one of the last two possessions of Spain's four centuries of imperial presence in America.
 

In addition, Cuba was favored by the excellent bays required for the grand enterprises of conquest and domination of other lands in the New World: the golden Mexican chimera resulting from the capture of Emperor Moctezuma and his capital city Tenochtitlán or the less golden but just as fanciful Terra Florida, where in 1512 Ponce de León believed he found Bimini.

In 1519, the vessels of Hernán Cortés' famous expedition stopped at Havana on the way to Mexico. From Havana's ample bay, other renowned (and unfortunate) Florida expeditions sailed, such as those commanded by Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and by Hernando de Soto in 1539. The Bay of Carenas at Havana, as well as the Bay of Jagua on the southern coast, had already been much praised by Sebastián de Ocampo when he circumnavigated the Island in 1508.

The conquest and colonization of the geography and the peoples of the New World was an enterprise made for giants — stubborn, courageous, ambitious and unmerciful giants. In encountering more and more lands, peoples and possibilities for gold, explorers were propelled to greater efforts, and this led to changes of continental significance. Hispaniola, an island where the Viceroyalty of America was established, lost its important initial value when it was overtaken by Mexico, where the opulent Viceroyalty of New Spain was secured.
 

In that historical context, until well into the eighteenth century, the island of Cuba did not have an important economic value, but its strategic worth was significant. Particularly the Bay of Havana gained more and more importance at the expense of Santiago de Cuba. It was the bay that determined the historical character of the city as well as the idiosyncrasies of its inhabitants.

Throughout the centuries, travelers from all over the world praised the beauty and the political, strategic and economic usefulness of the Bay of Havana. Although Cuba did not enjoy the relevance of the Viceroyalties, General Captaincies and the Courts of the continent, Havana itself compared favorably as one of the most active and populous cities of the Americas. Its spacious deep-water bay, surrounded by hills and opened to a fertile hinterland, provided ample shelter, while its limited access through a narrow opening facilitated its defense. The serenity of its waters, and the nearby Gulf Stream, determined its selection as the meeting place for the fleet of the Indies, charged with carrying the riches of the New World to the Old one. Havana was the threshold and starting point for the Spanish Empire in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was an acknowledged and coveted "passage place" requiring fortifications for its defense against possible attacks from pirates and corsairs of other European powers like France, Holland and, above all, England. All these factors transformed Havana into an outpost for Spain in America and, at the same time a dependency of its Viceroyalty of Mexico.

The task of fortifying the colonial capital city, along with other cities on the island threatened by foreign greediness, was a priority for the imperial interests and lasted until almost the end of the eighteenth century. Since revenues in poor Cuba were insufficient, the crown resorted to the so-called situado, a kind of allowance, coming from the safe boxes of New Spain, thus transforming the Spanish colony into a sub-colony of Mexico; Spain always avoided withdrawing funds from its own treasury.

From the Metropolis they brought the architects and builders, with the corresponding labor force for construction, composed of convicts, Indians and, mainly, "slaves of the King" blacks. Big bastions were erected in harbors such as Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas and Cienfuegos. But none of them exceeded the defensive system surrounding Havana harbor whose shield, representing its geographic significance in the Gulf/Caribbean, was composed of representations of the fortified towers of the three essential fortresses: La Real Fuerza, San Salvador de la Punta and Los Tres Reyes Magos, better known as El Morro de La Habana.

The Castle of La Real Fuerza, built in the middle of the sixteenth century, replaced a primitive facility destroyed by pirates. With solid stone walls, it covered one of the sides of the Plaza de Armas, the first urban square, where the first church, which has not survived, was built on another of its sides. Its urban architecture is typical of the character of Spanish conquest of the Americas, by way of iron and gunpowder, and with the cross in the forefront. The military and ecclesiastical powers shared constructive priorities, facing each other across a central square. For centuries, the Governor and Captain General lived at La Fuerza, or rented residences.

La Punta and El Morro, erected between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at both sides of the entrance to the bay, were supposed to defend it from enemy forces and ships. Faced with imminent danger, a thick chain of solid links was extended across the mouth of the Bay between both fortifications to prevent internal access to the harbor and the city. The two castles, built after La Fuerza, show a greater baroque influence. Above all, the imposing El Morro is irregular and complex, for it served many functions as a barracks, a prison, various other quarters and a lighthouse.

With its bulwarks, hundreds of vessels at the interior of the harbor and surrounding exotic landscape, Havana, a noisy seaworthy and mercantile city, astonished its numerous visitors, who then praised it in writing and painted it for its beauty or for its military conquests. It remained impenetrable until 1762 when the English showed that its defenses were insufficient. Since the sixteenth century it was argued that La Fuerza, and later on El Morro, as well as the harbor and the city, were vulnerable from the hill of La Cabana and its poor military installations. Spain did not pay attention to the warning and, thus, a very powerful English war fleet, loaded with occupation troops, attacked Havana and its neighboring regions by sea and by land, mainly through La Cabana, until the square capitulated.

The occupation lasted only a very short time, until 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Britain in order to recover Havana and gain possession of Louisiana from France. Spain again acquired control of Florida through the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. In subsequent years Spain maintained control over the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico at both ends: Cuba to the South and Florida and its Keys to the North.

Spain paid a high price for Havana and decided to make it unconquerable. Castles were rebuilt and new fortifications erected at the principal sites from which the English had penetrated. The Castle of El Príncipe was built at an elevation of its name, at the outskirts of what today is the University of Havana. The Castle of Atarés was erected to the west of the city and the gigantic project of San Carlos de la Cabaña was begun on the hill that had made Spain so angry and ashamed. La Cabaña became the most colossal military construction of Spain in America. It was so financially onerous that an anecdote is told about King Carlos III who, overwhelmed by its cost, when asked what he was looking at with a telescope through the window of one of his palaces, said he was trying to determine if the walls of La Cabaña could be seen from Spain.

With this defense system, to which other minor edifices and batteries aiming toward the sea were added, Havana became the most protected city in the continent. But another important construction was also added: very extensive rampart walls that surrounded the large city and that, together with the fortresses and squares, provided a distinctive urban setting.

Little is left today as a reminder of those ramparts, but during the nineteenth century those walls still surrounded Havana, causing more trouble than benefit by dividing it into two sections: the one within the city - intramural-limited in its growth, and the one outside the city — extramural — that became much more extended and populous through the years. One custom, preserved by tradition, was el cañonazo de las nueve ("the nine o'clock cannon shot”). At that hour every night a cannon shot advised the Havana population that the bridges allowing entrance and departure through their gates to intramural Havana were being lifted, leaving the inner city totally isolated from the extramural section, but protected by the sea, the ramparts and the open ditches. At daybreak the next day the bridges were brought down and the whole city recovered communication. Today the cannon shot, now part of a colorful spectacle and re-enactment, makes it easy for people to adjust the time on their watches and clocks.

That defensive military complex required a vast portion of the revenues of the colony, including the above-mentioned Mexican situado, and is one of its most expensive patrimonies. Another legacy came from the ecclesiastic constructions, with remarkable architectonic monuments, as we shall see, and its influence in the urbanizing process of the capital city. The social, cultural and ethical physiognomy of the people living in Havana, the habaneros, in colonial Cuba owe a great deal to these two components of city life: the military and the ecclesiastic. Much of the city's character is due to the permanent or itinerant garrison soldiers and officers, seamen and all those related to the sea (including a few smugglers) and monks. Mainly between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries they shared a violent and dissipated lifestyle, in the worst possible socio-economic frame: that of slavery with its sequel of depravation and abuse. Havana, feared for the mortal presence of yellow fever, was for centuries a propitious place for quarrels, assaults and multiple injustices in its growing number of gaming houses, taverns and brothels.

Fortification of the city was essential, not in order to hold the neighboring and the floating population at bay, but to prevent the loss to another country of what had been conquered and blessed in the name of God and King. The church's constructions were a priority in order to tame the aborigines through promises of evangelization, through fear of God and mention of a possible future life in Heaven. This was a complementary colonial policy that conceived education within the official frame of scholars associated with the Fathers of Roman Catholicism: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

Along with their military companions, friars and priests — especially friars — built convents and churches that were some of the biggest and best buildings of the colonial church in Cuba. All of these clerics were also Velázquez's attendants. The secular clergy, tied to the episcopates, would only begin to become more important in Spain and in the rest of Hispanic America after measures to secularize the liberal Spaniards began in the second half of the eighteenth century with the expulsion of the Jesuits.

Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the main monastic orders in Cuba, all located in Havana, were the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the religious order of Mercy, the Juaninos (followers of St. John), the Augustinians and the Bethlehemites. With the exception of those of the Dominican friars and the Juaninos, majestic monastic constructions remain in Old Havana, or intramural Havana, attesting to the church's power and wealth. Since the seventeenth century, the friars were joined by nuns of the Orders of St. Clare, St. Catherine and St.

Theresa, with their magnificent churches and convents, although the Cuban colonial baroque did not show the opulence and excess of the altars of Mexico, Guatemala, Quito or Lima.

Of Franciscan origin is the solid and austere convent of San Francisco, on the side of a square of the same name and, for a long time the site of the province of Santa Elena de la Florida, which was the only province created by the monastic orders in Cuba, not as much to benefit the island's inhabitants but to organize and control the missionary work of the seraphic monks in the Florida peninsula. Its construction began at the end of the sixteenth century, with its back to the bay. From its quarters many monks departed with the mission of converting the rebellious Florida Indians, an undertaking in which some monks lost their lives.

Not very far from the Franciscan convent, next to the parish and to the Plaza de Armas, the Dominican friars started to erect their own monastery, under the appellation of St. Juan de Letrán, also towards the end of the sixteenth century. The Dominicans had the honor of establishing the Royal and Pontifical University of San Jerónimo in 1728 within their convent and under the command of the scholastic regency of the monks. Many generations of Cubans studied there until 1842, when it was secularized to become the Royal and Literary University of Havana. The University remained there at the former convent until the end of Spanish rule in Cuba, when it was transferred to the Loma de Aróstegui (Arostegui's Hill), near the Castle of El Príncipe. In spite of its historical glories and its cultural and architectural value, the convent was demolished in the 1950s, which was an irrecoverable patrimonial loss.

Noble buildings were also bequeathed by other orders. Old Havana owes a beautiful church to the Augustinians since their convent was demolished in order to build the Royal Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century. The hospital of the Order of San Juan de Dios, whose name bears today both an intramural park and a street, was also demolished, but the charming chapel of Paula's hospital is still preserved. A better fate awaited the architectural monuments of the Mercedaries and the Bethlehemite friars: from the former remains their convent and their beautiful temple, which is one of the jewels of Cuban colonial architecture; and from the latter remains the extraordinary structure which served as their lodging and for praying, and as a hospital by ordained responsibility of their Order. The Colegio de Belén, of the Compañía de Jesús, is a particularly important place to which we will return later.

Among convents for women, that of the St. Clare nuns of the seventeenth century stands out with its roomy cloister and interior courtyards (patios). The Order of St. Clare, and to a lesser degree St. Catherine of Siena, became very rich thanks to the dowries of the Cuban women who entered the convent.

The history of the Jesuits (Compañía de Jesús) in Cuba with regard to the architecture and urban design of colonial Havana is linked both to the Bethlehemite Order and to the Bishopric of Havana. The Jesuit presence in Hispanic America began in the City of Havana, between 1568 and 1572, when the Governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, operating from Havana, succeeded in convincing his friend Alejandro de Borja, the Jesuit General, to send some friars to help him in the task of converting and taming the Florida Indians.

The enterprise failed when the combative Indians killed some of the Jesuits. Since they also did not find gold in Florida, the Company decided to substitute Florida with Havana, where a school was founded. They also settled in Peru, Mexico and other places in the continent where much more favorable conditions existed to obtain both the power and the riches that would facilitate their objectives.

The earnest desire of the capital city's cabildo (municipal council), as well as of some of the bishops of Cuba and legates made by important families, were insufficient to sustain the Compañia de Jesús. They returned to the island in the eighteenth century, already in possession of "real estate" in the amount they required, and established the great Colegio San José for rich children and youth, near the place then known as La Plaza de Ciénaga. But the Company was out of favor for being too rich, too powerful and too independent to please the eighteenth century European absolute monarchies. France, Portugal and Spain expelled the Jesuits from all of their dominions in 1767 and attached and sold at auction all of their belongings and real estate to private persons, or bestowed them to other institutions.

A few years later, the bishopric of Cuba was divided. A bishop was assigned to Havana while the one in Santiago de Cuba was promoted to the rank of archbishop. Between 1789 and 1803, the new ecclesiastical dignitary at Havana was in need of priests as well as a cathedral and a large building to serve as a seminary to prepare their ranks. Therefore, Dr. Felipe José de Trespalacios, the first bishop of Havana, was given the huge structure of the Colegio San José, which met the requirement for the seminary, and also the church of San Ignacio de Loyola, still under construction and annexed to the college, which served as a cathedral.
 

Since the seminary incorporated lay people with principal studies in Civil Law up to a bachelor's degree, the most outstanding teaching institution of Cuba in the first decades of the nineteenth century was organized in the former San José as the Colegio Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio. The institute was in homage to King Carlos III and St. Ambrosio, and incorporated a small seminary devoted to this saint that had been established between 1688 and 1689. The college (San Carlos and San Ambrosio), under the wise tutelage of the liberal bishop Juan J. Díaz de Espada y Fernández de Landa, known as Espada y Landa, amply exceeded academically the Dominican university in subjects like Philosophy and Law, and it became a podium from which to forge national sentiments during years when differences between the metropolis and its overseas colony were intensifying. Among the brilliant professors who joined the faculty was the presbyter Félix Varela Morales, a nineteenth-century true mentor for the youth, who possessed ideals of independence and who died in exile in St. Augustine, Florida in 1851, the year in which the most brilliant heir to his preaching and example, José Martí, was born in Havana.

As for the cathedral, the end of its construction gave Havana one of the most valuable exponents of Baroque art in Cuba. Its two uneven towers, the overloaded cornice of its façade and its porticos and arcades, created a charming display of light and shadow under the dazzling tropical sun. The cathedral blocks one of the four sides of what became known as Plaza de la Catedral, surrounded by the eighteenth century mansions of some of the richest men in colonial Cuba, men possessing noble titles from Castilla. A fourth square, La Plaza Vieja, was attached to the square of La Plaza de Armas, and along with San Francisco and La Catedral, jointly created the varying urban context of intramural Havana, justly deserving of the designation of "Patrimony of Humanity" by UNESCO.

Occasionally the capital of Cuba has been called the "Paris of America," largely due to its colonial quarters, which are marvelously adapted to its geographic environment, in particular its bay, as well as for the monumental quality of its open spaces. It is recognized for its diversity, not only for the harmony of its medieval design but also for embracing twentieth-century buildings. Its spaces are cherished not only for the large squares but also for its streets and alleys, parks, walkways and promenades, and the great number of smaller intimate squares. A noticeable indication of the nature of Spanish colonialism in Cuba is that, unlike European cities, the dominant structures in Havana are not religious in function, but are the two military fortresses, El Morro and La Cabaña, protecting the harbor at the other side of the bay.
 

To such a mosaic of forms, to such a universe of diverse interests, another one was added: huge private mansions where numerous household slaves lived together with the extended families of grandparents, children and grandchildren. Since the seventeenth century these distinctive mansions were characterized by three levels: the ground floor for the warehouse, stables and lodging for the slaves, a mezzanine with the owner's office and an upper floor reserved for the residences, which were inaccessible to strangers, a traditional Moorish influence. These mansions opened to big interior courtyards surrounded by galleries, first made of wood and then of stone, with ceilings that were built higher from the 34 seventeenth into the nineteenth centuries; the areas were not only spacious but full of light and fresh air.

Façades were generally built flat and plain with the exception of some inner front doors surrounded by wood moldings. Among their decorative elements were outstanding work in wood and iron for stairs and balconies - the front door gratings and folding screens open to the light — and stained glass with brilliant colors in the semicircular arches that opened to courtyards or patios. Moorish influence is also seen in the many buildings that used carved wooden ceiling beams, whose function was to support the loads of these stone structures.

Two important and huge buildings tied to the government of the country deserve particular attention: the Palacio del Capitán General the palace of the Captain General and Governor of the Island) and the Segundo Cabo, or Quartermaster, both facing the square La Plaza de Armas. They were built at the end of the eighteenth century when, after concluding the defensive system we already discussed, resources became available for other projects. Both architectural structures, though at a greater scale, were based on the use of the big central patios from which their different quarters were interconnected, embellishing their atmosphere. Unlike most of the private residences, their exteriors included long colonnades, or balconies, and beautiful inner front doors in Carrara marble. At present, the palace of the Capitán General is the city museum, while the Segundo Cabo serves as offices and exhibition halls for special cultural exhibits.

Like every city, colonial Havana is a product of historical time, from the sixteenth century to the present. Its architecture and urban outline is an artistic reflection of that time. Historical time is present in every stone. It is a cherished Legacy of the Nation and of the Americas. With its diversity of structures, colonial Havana escapes the present to offer itself as a symphony in stone where epochs blend and harmonize. It is a place for communion, aesthetic pleasures and study. It is a school, a workshop, a promise and a recreation zone.