The ruins of Havana: Representations of memory, religion, and gender

Abstract

The city of Havana and the island of Cuba are two important sites in the cultural cartography of the Atlantic world whose significance has been felt from at least the sixteenth century on. This piece investigates how the trope of the ruins of Havana in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature create notions of space and time that both rupture and create a transnational idea of Cuba. The layering of memory, identity, and history onto the image of the ruins of Havana allow for several cartographies of meaning to be located in these specific sites of decay. This kind of locating operates in a Havana imaginary that embeds the ruins within a contiguous transatlantic project that necessarily includes Afro-Atlantic ways of understanding the world, magic and religion. In this essay, I look at how representations of the ruins of Havana and Afro-Cuban religion work together in especially literature by Cuban and Cuban diaspora authors to signify a process of re-working history, place, and the nature of time that destabilize linear narratives of the past and reaffirm the metaphysical potential of place. In other words, both the trope of the ruins of Havana and the representation of Afro-Cuban spaces here illustrate the transformative power of imagining Havana. This imagining takes on many different forms over time and in overlapping transatlantic projects that are contextualized here in a postcolonial historical framework that also takes into account Cuba's Caribbean, Latino/a, Afro-Atlantic, Asian, and Mediterranean influences. Also central to this investigation of the ruins of Havana is a critique of the role that gender plays in creating a paradigm for understanding the city and Afro-Cuban religious cultures in ways that are under examined.