Havana’s Hidden Monuments

Cuba’s revolutionary Escuelas Nacionales de Arte are being threatened by the jungle

In January 3, 1961, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara took a break from the business of their two-year-old revolution to hit the links. As they were playiing golf in an affluent Havana suburb (formerly known as Country Club Park), they were struck with a utopian vision. On that very spot. they would create an art academy in the service of a "new culture" for the "new man."

A place where Third World students would learn to create and propagate the socialist esthetic, it would be as experimental in form as it was in spirit. Three architects were commissioned to design the academy's five schools: for the plastic arts, modern dance, ballet, theater, and music. Castro pronounced their plans stunning. The Escuelas Nacionales de Arte would be, he said, "the most beautiful academy of arts in the whole world."

"It was the romantic moment of the revolution, a feeling of a kind of emotional explosion," is how architect Ricardo Porro describes his inspiration for the School of Modern Dance. He was speaking from his home in Paris, where he lives in exile—for the romance soon soured. As Soviet influence on Cuba intensified, these exuberant, blatantly nonconformist buildings were deemed ideologically incorrect. The architects were accused of individualism, monumentalism, historicism, formalism. One received criticism in the form of a decapitated chicken and other objects of the Santería religion. Two were forced to emigrate. And everyone else who worked on the project was sent to be reeducated…..

Read more in ARTnews, June 1999.