Timothy Hyde Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933–1959 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, x + 371 pp., 11 color and 67 b/w illus. $31.50, ISBN 9780816678112 Through times of democracy and dictatorship, revolution and rebuilding, cultural actors in twentieth-century Cuba self-consciously constructed national traditions, synthesizing colonial anachronisms left after the island’s independence from Spain in 1898 with imported modernist innovations. Between the ouster of the infamous president-cum-dictator Gerardo Machado in 1933 and the revolution of 1959, a complex set of historic, social, and aesthetic conditions emerged that set modern architecture in dialogue with a developing discourse of civil society and constitutionalism. These were years of military rule under Fulgencio Batista, an autocrat who haunted the Cuban political landscape as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer, quasi-legitimate president, and eventually an unfettered dictator until Castro’s coup. Alongside politicians and civil servants, writers, artists, urbanists, and architects simultaneously struggled to define Cuba’s national identity. The resulting urban forms and social and legal histories are the subject of Timothy Hyde’s Constitutional Modernism . The book focuses in particular on modernist architecture and urbanism as forms of civic expression, and it deals almost exclusively with the capital city of Havana, which is understood as an urban metonym for the nation as a whole. It brings welcome complexity to discussions of mid-twentieth-century Cuban art and architecture, which are often framed in terms of design typologies. Bringing the social, civic, and architectural realms into dialogue with one another, Hyde asks, “How does architecture make its appearance in civil society?” (2). His thorough and scrupulous study charts the confluence of politics and architecture, anchored by the discourse of constitutionalism. The Cuban Constitution of 1940 aimed to establish a stable, independent republic, enacting a historical transition from colony to nation, a transition that many still believed incomplete. It is no small thing, then, for Hyde to claim that the principles and intentions of …