Cuba - Lonely Planet [37]
Cuban townscapes in the 17th and 18th centuries were dominated by ecclesial architecture, reflected initially in the noble cloisters of Havana’s Convento de Santa Clara, built in 1632, and culminating a century or so later in the magnificent Catedral de San Cristóbal Click here, considered by many as the country’s most outstanding baroque monument. Some of the best architecture from this period can be viewed in Habana Vieja, whose peculiar layout around four main squares – each with its own specific social or religious function – set it apart from other Spanish colonial capitals.
With a booming economy and cash raked in from a series of record-breaking sugarcane harvests, plantation-owners in the small town of Trinidad had money to burn at the start of the 19th century. Ideally positioned to the south of the verdant Valle de los Ingenios and heavily influenced by haute couture furnishings of Italy, France and Georgian England, the city’s enterprising sugar merchants ploughed their vast industrial profits into a revitalized new city full of exquisite homes and businesses that juxtaposed popular baroque and neoclassical styles with vernacular Cuban features such as wooden rejas (grilles), high ceilings and tiny postigos (doors). Isolated on the southern coast and protected by law as part of a Unesco World Heritage Site, the unique and beautiful streets of 19th-century Trinidad remain one of Latin America’s most intact colonial cities.
By the mid-19th century sturdy neoclassical buildings were the norm among the country’s bourgeoisie in cities such as Cienfuegos and Matanzas, with bold symmetrical lines, grandiose frontages and rows of imposing columns replacing the decorative baroque flourishes of the early colonial period. The style reached its high-water mark in a trio of glittering theaters: the Caridad in Santa Clara (see boxed text,), the Sauto in Matanzas and the Terry Tomás in Cienfuegos Click here. In the 1920s and ’30s a neoclassical revival delivered a brand new clutch of towering giants onto the Havana skyline, including the Washington-influenced Capitolio, the monumental Hotel Nacional and the Athenian Universidad de La Habana.
Eclecticism was the leading style in the new republican era post-1902, with a combination of regurgitated genres such as neo-Gothic, neobaroque, neo-Renaissance and neo-Moorish giving rise to a hotchpotch of groundbreaking buildings that were as eye-catching as they were outrageous. For a wild tour of Cuban eclecticism, check out the Museo de Ciencias Naturales Sandalio de Noda in Pinar del Río, the Presidential Palace (now the Museo de la Revolución) in Havana or the Byzantine-meets-Arabic Palacio de Valle in Cienfuegos Click here.
Bridging the gap between eclecticism and modernism was art deco, a lavish architectural style epitomized in structures such as New York’s Chrysler building, and best manifested in Cuba in Havana’s opulent Bacardí building Click here or some of the religious iconography exhibited in the Necrópolis Cristóbal Colón Click here.
Modernism arrived in Havana in the 1950s with a rapid surge of pre-revolutionary skyscrapers that eliminated decorative flourishes and merged function rather harmoniously with form. Visitors can observe this rich architectural legacy in the cubic Hotel Habana Libre or the skyline-hogging Focsa building Click here, an edifice that was constructed – legend has it – without the use of a single crane.
Painting & Sculpture
Painting and sculpture are alive and well in Cuba, despite more than four decades of asphyxiating on-off