Beyond the Walled City is a fascinating study of urban expansion in Havana from its establishment in the early sixteenth century through the period of United States military occupation in the early twentieth century. Employing the city’s physical development as the principal lens of analysis, historian Guadalupe García offers an original account of the entwinement of empire and urban life in Cuba’s capital. Drawing on research in Cuban, Spanish, and U.S. archives, she argues that Spanish colonialism functioned not only through the institutions and discourses that historians typically examine. It “also entailed a distinctly physical component in which spatial relationships were central to the exercise and proliferation of colonial power” (11). Indeed, Havana offers a compelling case study for interrogating the dynamics of Spanish colonial power. After the decline of Spain’s first permanent Caribbean settlement in Santo Domingo, Havana quickly rose to prominence as an early hub of Spanish power in the Caribbean. Moreover, the city’s singular status as the long-time capital of one of Spain’s most enduring colonies offers an unparalleled opportunity to examine the evolution of colonial power over four centuries.
García documents the parameters of inclusion and exclusion within Havana’s urban community. The book’s first chapter explores the relationship between urban space, imperial design, and local interests from the very inception of the city. The constant threat of piracy led to the proliferation of military fortifications and city walls designed to defend an inwardly oriented urban population from piracy as well as from perceived threats from within, such as disease and racial unrest. Importantly, not all urban dwellers enjoyed these protections. Rather, García elucidates the ways the city walls inscribed ethnic and racial exclusions onto Havana’s physical landscape. The categories of intramuro and extramuro (within the walls, and beyond the walls) emerged as critical pillars of the urban social hierarchy, physically separating the privileged Spanish elite from the waning native population and growing free black population. The result was a legal urban body that largely relegated black and brown populations to marginal spaces and erased them from cartographic representations of the city.
The book’s greatest strength lies in García’s nuanced treatment of Havana’s urban development—a discussion contained in Part I. She convincingly demonstrates that exclusion from the walled city remained a key concern driving the Havana’s urban expansion between the construction of the walls in the seventeenth-century until their demolition in the nineteenth century. As the urban population expanded beyond the city walls in the eighteenth century, urban administrators implemented projects to modernize these formerly marginal spaces. Throughout this process, black residents faced physical marginalization, as these exterior zones gradually became part of the privileged urban center. During the nineteenth century, with the demolition of the city walls, investment in infrastructure remained a mechanism through which urban administrators enforced racial exclusions in urban space. Ultimately, García builds on recent work by Alejandro de la Fuente and others by demystifying Havana’s racial landscape and elucidating the mechanisms of exclusion that defined its urban core.
The second part of the book offers an excellent starting point for exploring the ways that urban space reflected imperial power at the end of the Spanish colonial period and the neocolonial period, encompassing the first three decades of the Cuban republic. García examines the interplay between urban development projects and Havana’s urban population during the final years of Spanish colonial rule in the late nineteenth century and under U.S. influence in the early twentieth century. The two chapters in this section tackle two of the most monumental developments of the period: the policy of reconcentration during Cuba’s final anti-colonial struggle (1895-1898), and the massive wave of public works projects during and after the first US military occupation (1899-1902). García shows that the historic distinction between legitimate (white) city residents and outsiders continued to inform urban policy and elite attitudes during reconcentration, as thousands of peasants from Havana’s demographically blacker hinterlands were forcibly relocated to the urban outskirts. Most interesting of all is the author’s assertion in the final chapter that U.S. rule did not substantially transform the urban project in Havana (200). García points out that “space and the promise of urban renewal” remained central to urban planning under U.S. rule and beyond (193).
Certainly, García is right to call out the exaggerated depiction of 1898 as a watershed in Cuban history. Moreover, it is difficult to dispute that space remained a central pillar of U.S. imperial administration in Havana. Such rich evidence over such an expansive period of Spanish colonial rule, not to mention the author’s careful attention to shifting political, economic, and social processes provide an ideal roadmap for future research on Havana’s urban development under U.S. rule, which would in turn enable scholars to interrogate this bold claim of continuity systematically. The book’s final chapter provides a good point of departure for such research, and prompts a flurry of questions that might help guide future inquiries. Future scholarship should pay attention to the contentious transition in local power, how these emergent local elites envisioned urban development, and how these visions evolved in response to shifting relations with U.S. officials. Another possible trajectory for future research might be to explore the ways that former Cuban soldiers—whether they were privileged enough to assume urban authority or constituted the masses excluded from the post-war structures of power—navigated the city after the war, and how this may have reinforced or subverted the established urban order.
In sum, Beyond the Walled City is the most comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of Havana’s urban development to date. García contributes an unparalleled discussion of the historically evolving entwinement of urban development and colonial power, and in so doing, significantly advances the historiographical conversation on urban studies in Cuba. Her book will be of interest to student and experts of Latin America, the Caribbean, the African Diaspora, history, geography, and urban studies. The insights gleaned in those pages, moreover, will surely inspire subsequent scholarship on these important topics.
Author: Guadalupe Garcia
Title: Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana.
Publisher: Berkeley: University of California Press
Year: 2015
Pages: 296
ISBN 9780520286047
PDF/PRINT/EMAIL