Erica Morawski - The Hotel Nacional de Cuba: Making Meanings and Negotiating Nationalisms
The Hotel Nacional de Cuba was meant to be a jewel in the crown of President Gerardo Machado's building campaign, a physical object and space that symbolized the greatness of the Cuban nation achieved under his leadership. However, even a cursory glance into the history of the project reveals how this message was undercut by U.S. intervention and influence in the island nation. Instead, it is useful to understand the Hotel Nacional as the embodiment of Cuban-U.S. entanglement and issues of sovereignty during the republican period through the historical context of the period, namely the conditions that contributed to the revolution of 1933 and the tourist industry. This is not to deny the power of patrons and architects in shaping the built environment—their voices are certainly present here too—but to enrich the conversation by moving into the life of the building as a means to understand the complexity of architecture. Through this approach that focuses on the multiplicity of agents that engaged with the hotel in diverse manners, this research reveals the multiple meanings ascribed to the hotel that belie the simplistic message of the Machado government. By considering the meaning of the hotel for locals and tourists and resituating the hotel as a key site and symbol in the revolution of 1933, we can understand the Hotel Nacional as integral to the debates over sovereignty and national identity.
The Hotel Nacional as Symbol of Corruption and Site of Conflict
Part of the complexity of the Hotel Nacional lies in the fact that it is a hotel meant primarily for foreign visitors. While the Machado government wanted it to represent a certain image the Cuban nation, this image had to be balanced with the need to create a design that spoke to a foreign audience. As U.S. visitors composed the majority of tourists to Cuba (and perhaps, we might even argue, because the design came from U.S. architects), the design had to speak to predominant constructions of Cuban in the U.S. imagination. This next image situates the hotel within the sphere of tourism.
The Hotel Nacional as Exotic Luxury
In the end, the Hotel Nacional, a project meant to underscore the idea of nation, only served to highlight the lack of a consensus about what nation was, the Machadato's tenuous grasp of power, and the overwhelming desire for a nation defined by sovereignty and popular representation. By considering the Hotel Nacional from the point of view or tourists and locals, as well as the patrons and architects, we can start to suss out the multiple meanings of the hotel.
This essay is also meant to be something of a cautionary tale of entanglement, intention, and reception in light of recent movement to reinvigorate relations between Cuba and the United States. The recent years have witnessed a growing number of U.S. tourists to Cuba. They travel primarily to Havana, and their itineraries, values, and conceptions of Cuba are strikingly similar to those of the U.S. tourists of the 1920s. The fifty plus years of strained relations has done little to shift understandings. U.S. tourists flock to the Hotel Nacional--if they aren't staying in one of the rooms, they visit to drink a mojito in the patio, look out over the ocean and city, and soak in the local charm in the architecture. Unaware of the history and symbolism of the hotel in terms of the politics of sovereignty and nationalism, these contemporary visitors raise pertinent questions. As we look forward to future relations, are we apt to see new relationships and systems that mimic those those conditions that led to the revolution of 1933? Thus, by considering the Hotel Nacional, and the architecture in general, from multiple perspective, we can consider the ways in which the built environment provides us with material evidence of a past that should be considered in the present and future.
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