By the 1940s the modern architectural movement had shed all traditional reminiscences of the Mud? jar, Romanesque, gothic, and baroque influences Cuba had experienced, and another housing boom resulted from capital investment accumulated after World War II. Because of the technological advancement of reinforced concrete, apartment buildings started springing up in the late 1940s and through the next decade for the middle classes Modernism came into its glory and peaked in the 1950s. Thousands of Cuban homes were designed in the contemporary fashion in the suburbs of towns and cities throughout the island.
Houses in Havana’s Miramar and Cubanacan districts illustrate the last phase of Cuban modernism before the Communist Revolution. In the Miramar district Casa de Eutimio Falla Bonet was designed by architect Eugenio Batista and broke radically with the traditional grandeur and opulence of Havana’s elite. Constructed in 1939, the single-story modernity employs concepts that Batista developed to achieve a style influenced by traditional Cuban colonial architecture but defined by the latest modernism in aesthetic composition. The Cubanacan district was originally called Country Club Park and was Havana’s equivalent to Beverly Hills.
First developed in the 1920s by Alberto Mendoza with winding tree-lined streets and enormous lots, the district housed the most ostentatious and grandiose mansions built by Havana’s wealthy classes. In the character of country estates, the United States ambassador’s residence was built in this area in 1939 in the twentieth-century neoclassical “garden city” style. Designed and built with a collaboration of American and Cuban architects and builders, the residence has a total of sixty-five rooms and covers more than 31,700 square feet of living space. The first-floor state dining room seats forty people.
The second floor has seven bedrooms each with its own loggia from where the grounds can be viewed. The residence is surrounded by seventeen acres of beautiful formal gardens, with fountains, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and an orchard of fruit trees. At the end of a long promenade, overlooking a reflecting pool, is a huge American eagle sculpture. It once stood atop the Monumento del Maine on the Malecon, Havana’s ocean promenade.
It was placed to commemorate the battleship Maine, blown up in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 266 of the crew members—? he incident that ignited the Spanish-American War. Today, with the exception of the few ingenios and cafetales that have been made into government restaurants, all of Cuba’s once large sugar and coffee plantation great houses (haciendas) lie in ruins, destroyed during the wars of independence as part of the scorched-earth policy carried out by the Mambi (independent) army or by the reorganization of agricultural systems under the communist regime in the last half of the twentieth century.
Most of the wealthy homeowners fled Cuba in the 1960s, and their country villas, palacios, and mansions were dispensed to government officials or their appointees who live in the lap of luxury behind closed doors and are unavailable for research or photography. By the 1960s, Cuba’s architectural revolution abruptly ended. Following the Communist Revolution, most of the leading architects left the island; in 1965 the School of Architecture closed, signifying the end of Cuba’s glorious era of architecture.
In the words of the Publisher: An unprecedented tour of stunning and architecturally significant Cuban palacios, mansions, and private homes that have been meticulously preserved, previously un-photographed, and inaccessible to visitors. At a time when more travelers are rediscovering Cuba, this lavishly illustrated volume offers a different view of the island’s cultural achievements.
It presents not the picturesque Cuba of Castro’s era, with its derelict buildings and peeling paint, but the opulent world of the Spanish Creole aristocracy of the colonial period, with its Mudejar craftsmanship and baroque palacios, the sugarcane plantations (ingenios) and coffee plantations (cafetales), and classically inspired grand mansions.
Exceptional preservation work has kept these villas in the magnificent state in which they were first envisioned. The photographs, shot exclusively for this book, show examples in each area of the island-from the interiors and exteriors in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, and Pinar del Rio to close-up details of courtyards, balconies, galleries, balustrades, grilles, and louvered doors in Trinidad, Matanzas, and Holguin.
One featured home is Finca Vigia (“lookout house”), the former residence of Ernest Hemingway. About the writer Michael Connors, an expert in Caribbean antiques, is a contributor to numerous publications, including Art & Antiques, Antiques and Fine Art, and The Magazine Antiques. He has written many books, including British West Indies Style and Caribbean Houses: History, Style, and Architecture.
