Heritage and City Foundations in Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba

Summary

According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, my paper investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order. Yet, this heritage process at the ceiba tree contained a dissonance or a lack of agreement as to the significance and use of heritage based on the cultures of multiple constituencies that comprised the colonial city and its signifying forms. In this presentation, therefore, I am calling into question the utility of Heritage Studies for Spanish colonial contexts in the Caribbean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage