Havana, Cuba: Cultural Melting Pot

Abstract

city profile notebook Reading Havana José Raúl Bernardo, The Wise Women of Havana (Rayo, 2002) Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers (1967; Marlowe & Co., 1997) Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (1949; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment (1965; Latin American Literary Review Press, 2004) Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Adiós Hemingway (Canongate, 2005) Zoé Valdés, Dear First Love (1997; HarperCollins, 2002) photo : ed yourdon W hile Havana may be best known as one of the favorite residences of Ernest Hemingway, the city today has a rich artistic culture. With its population of over two million, it is not hard to find artists, authors, dancers, and musicians among the crowds that inhabit the city. In fact, visiting the city without meeting an artist is nearly impossible. Havana is situated on the northern coast of the small country, where cultures constantly collide and merge into the broader Cuban mixture. Cuba itself is known as the “crossroads of the Caribbean,” where Spanish, African, French, English , and Asian populations converge. The city has a tumultuous history, with accounts of violence and siege beginning as early as its founding in the sixteenth century. Because it was originally founded as a trading port, pirates and buccaneers would often attack and burn the city, seeking to gain control of the riches that flowed into and out of the city through the docks. Throughout the next centuries, the Spanish empire would bolster the city with fortifications to ward off attacks, which continued to occur up until the twentieth century. Havana was the site of the sinking of the Maine, which ignited the Spanish-American War and would ultimately lead to Cuba’s independence from Spain. Just as no visitor can leave the country without having met an artist of some capacity, similarly no one can leave Havana without learning about José Martí, dubbed the “literary lion” of Cuba. Born in Havana in 1853, Martí helped pave the way for Cuban independence from Spain through his writing. His various essays, newspaper articles, and poems helped ignite revolution, and his legacy deeply influenced Cuba’s newly independent national identity. Notable contemporary authors include José Lezama Lima (1910–76), one of the most widely read Cuban authors of the twentieth century; Rogelio Riverón (b. 1964), winner of the 2008 Italo Calvino Award for his novel Bailar contigo el último cuplé (Ediciones Unión, 2008); and Ena Lucía Portela (b. 1972), who was chosen in 2007 as one of thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine. – Kaitlin Hawkins Havana, Cuba Cultural Melting Pot march–april 2012 | 5 ...