Classical Architecture and the Cultural Politics of Cemetery Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba

Abstract

CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CEMETERY REFORM IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY HAVANA, CUBA Paul Barrett Niell University of North Texas Introduction In an Exhortation of 1805, the bishop of Havana, Juan José Díaz de Espada y Landa condemned the “disastrous effects that have always been produced by the abuse of burying corpses in the churches.”1 The following year, the city inaugurated a new public cemetery for its extramuros, the area outside the city walls [Figure 1]. Designed by French architect Stephen Hallet, the General Cemetery of Havana was built one mile west of the city near the sea on a frequented road in a location between the piers of La Tierra and El Arsenal. The distancing of the cemetery from the lived city was consistent with the belief of reformers that myriad human illnesses were caused by living in close proximity to the deceased.2 Stephen Hallet conceived the new public work as a rectangular space enclosed from the surrounding landscape by a high masonry wall entered through a neoclassical gateway evoking a Roman triumphal arch. Inside the cemetery, graves were organized rigorously in a grid-like pattern and extended from the gateway to a chapel at the far end, designed to appear like a Greco-Roman temple. Architectural historians have noted that this cemetery was perhaps the first mature example of Cuba’s relatively late neoclassical movement.3 Scholars have also studied the work in relation to its principal patron, Havana’s Bishop Espada (served 1802-32), a man of the Spanish Enlightenment who sought to bring aesthetic reforms to the city.4 What is missing from the scholarship, however, are broader considerations of where the cemetery fits in the late colonial material culture of Cuba. The project was promoted by senior clerics, Spanish officials, and local elites through the rhetoric of enlightened reform as equitable, universal, and dedicated to “all classes of persons.” However, few studies get beneath this rhetoric to examine the interplay between imperial objectives, international forms, changing identities, and the requirements of colonial representation in early nineteenth-century Havana. How, for example, was this “general” public cemetery, intended for all classes of persons, conceptualized locally in a colonial environment maintained by the repetitive political and social performances of the Church, State, and nobility? How did the local elite and the general population react to an institutional practice and its formal representation that rudely interrupted C 2011 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 57 The Latin Americanist, June 2011 Figure 1. Pierre Toussaint Frédéric Mialhe, View of the General Cemetery of the City of Havana, c. 1860’s, lithograph, Courtesy of the Charles W. Tebeau Library of Florida History, Historical Museum of Southern Florida. their traditional funerary rituals and sites of interment? Furthermore, how was the work and it appropriation of Euro-American classical architecture and imagery related to changing socio-economic identities? This article proposes to examine the General Cemetery of Havana of 1806, also known as the Espada Cemetery, as the transcultural product of the late colonial period in Cuba. This approach aims to open strategies for interpreting the material culture of Bourbon cemetery reform in the Americas in general by looking at the complex ways in which classicism was integrated into the colonial scene. The focus on classicism is an effort to study the cultural politics of cemetery reform in Havana. By “cultural politics of cemetery reform” in this article, I am referring to three overlapping ways in which classicism was used in the cemetery: 1) it was deployed to promote the legitimacy of this new Bourbon institution based on assumptions about the exemplarity of classical forms, 2) classicism began to assume a cultural authority over other artistic styles in colonial Havana from the perspective of the local elite and thus reinforced church, state, military, and social hierarchies, and 3) classicism embodied the reform ideals of the cemetery, in particular, the mastery of the self and the embrace of “enlightened” piety. Thus as a formal and rhetorical idiom, classicism became part of elite representation as well as elite cultural capital.5 While examining the relationship between classicism, cemetery reform, and the representation of...