Sightseeing In La Habana
When I started this blog, I didn’t want it to be just a travelogue, a recitation of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. That just didn’t seem interesting to me. If I was going to write a post, it seemed like there should be something to say about what we’d seen beyond documenting that we’d seen it. Some perspective or point of view that made the experience worth both writing about and reading about.
I think for the most part I’ve stayed true to that notion, but I’m starting to soften a bit. It started after Mexico City. My final post from CDMX was ostensibly about large scale art and architecture, but that was just a fig leaf. Truthfully, I just wanted to share some random cool shit that hadn’t found a home in any of the other posts, and I shoehorned them into an ill-fitting rubric to make it so.
I don’t think that fooled anyone, certainly not me, so I’m throwing off my fig leaf (with apologies for the image) and just admitting that everywhere we go there will be random cool shit that doesn’t have a home and isn’t part of some larger sociocultural framework. So the last post from each stop will likely be a Sightseeing in... post, wrapping up all the bits worth sharing that didn’t fit elsewhere.
I’m also open to branding these as Random Cool Shit in…. Please vote in the Comments.
Art
Cuba has an incredibly vibrant arts scene. We found it richest in graphics and painting, weakest in handicrafts. Other than some truly beautiful crochet and embroidery, most of the handicrafts tended towards the touristy. A notable exception was the ceramics studio we found in Trinidad.
Taller Experimental de Grafica
At least so far, everywhere we’ve been has had an especially active graphics scene. I think it’s because the tools are pretty available, the materials aren’t particularly expensive, and the finished product can be sold at an accessible price. Whatever the reason, Cuba was no exception. The highlight for us was Taller Experimental de Grafica, a huge shared studio space featuring the work of dozens of artists. Dorothy and I each picked out a piece.
La Fábrica de Arte Cubano
The Cuban Art Factory is a one-stop-shop for everything hip and happening in Habana. I was too distracted to take a lot of pictures, so I’ll just have to explain.
The Art Factory is a strange hybrid, halfway between an art gallery and a nightclub. There are multiple small restaurants and bars scattered about both indoors and out, several shops selling prints, books, jewelry, and such (like a museum gift shop), multiple gallery spaces, a theater, a dance floor, a live band performance space, and a high-end restaurant.
The rooftop restaurant.
The frippery notwithstanding, the Factory is first and foremost an art gallery. There are gallery spaces on all three floors, both large and small, and everywhere you might go that isn’t an art gallery is gallery adjacent. You may come for the nightclub bits, but you’ll never forget you’re in a gallery.
And it’s a very good art gallery. This is not your local yogurt shop that lets the guy who paints landscapes use its walls. This is the real deal. When we visited, the main galleries were taken up by a massive show, a collaboration between Enrique Rottenberg, an artist whose medium is photography (it seems wrong to call him a photographer) and a painter (whose name I can’t seem to find). Rottenberg provided the large-scale digital prints and the painter went to town on them. It was exhilarating, and would have fit in any major gallery in any major global city. Where art is concerned, Cuba is no one’s little brother.
The Art Factory operates on an interesting model I haven’t seen used elsewhere. There’s a cover to get in (250 CUP, or about $1.50 US) which gets you a paper card. If you spend money anywhere inside, it gets added to your card, so you don’t have to cash out every time you get a drink or a snack. When you leave you cash your card out. If you lose your card they charge you 5,000 CUP, about $30 US, so that discourages trying to cheat. It’s a clever model, and I think it would be easy to implement elsewhere.
Honestly, I think the entire thing, not just the billing model, should be adapted and recreated. If you just airlifted the whole building anywhere else in the world, it would be an amazing resource wherever you set it down. It wasn’t merely cool for Cuba, it was just plain cool.
Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana
Plaza de la Catedral, unsurprisingly, hosts the Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana, a great Baroque beast that was completed in 1777. While there’s plenty of age-appropriate architectural filigrees inside, the predominant style of the religious art is a surprise. I’m used to seeing paintings, and I’m used to seeing sculptures or effigies of saints and such. What I’m not used to seeing is dioramas, with a strong narrative sense created by staging statues in front of paintings.
The Catedral seems to have had several updates in the intervening centuries, so it’s not at all clear when the current artworks were created and installed. They seem very modern, but who knows? Whatever their era, they are supremely weird and wonderful.
Museums
We visited two art museums in Habana. The first was the Museo de Artes Decorativas, which is housed in a restored Colonial. Based on the name, we expected contemporary crafts: ceramics, wood, furniture, and the like. We got the content right, but not the era. It was all European artifacts purchased with sugar money. Or, as one of the architects who worked on Museo Anahuacalli in CDMX put it (not referring specifically to this collection): “a servile veneration of European stupidity.”
Personally, I’m not particularly interested in Colonial-era European hoohah. But beyond my disinterest in the subject matter, I was confused by the Cuban government’s interest. On the one hand, good for them for preserving all of their past. Successful revolutions have a habit of tearing down the bourgeois artifacts of the Ancien Régime, and the Cubans avoided that. On the other hand, though, this particular thing seemed like an odd choice for preservation and celebration. Maybe it would make sense if it had been presented with an overlay of “This is how the wealthy wasted the value they extracted from the land and the workers.” But it was presented straight up as “This shit’s cool, no?” Neither the first nor last time I’ll be baffled on this trip. It’s keeping me young.
The second museum we visited was the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, which features art from throughout Cuba’s history, from the 17th century to modern times. About half the museum is contemporary, from the 1930s on, and we made it through a little more than half of that section. What was clear even from that fraction of the museum is that thinking of Cuba as isolated is just wrong. Cuban artists have been engaged in a dialogue with the global artistic community all along, up through what the Cuban Art Factory is doing today.
The interior courtyard. 
The mosaic mural over the entrance. 
Resin sculptures in the lobby, Gabriel Cisneros Báez, 1990. 
Tomás Sánchez has been a major Cuban artist for his entire career, from the 70s to this day. La levitación de San Marcos, 1974. 
Tomás Sánchez, La virgen del melón, 1973. 
Tomás Sánchez, Basurero, 1986. 
Tomás Sánchez, Relación, 1986. 
Tomás Sánchez, La tormenta, 1987. It was fascinating watching his evolution over time. 
Benjamín Duarte, Testimonio 70, 1970. 
Cosme Proenza, El rey de las flores, 1974. 
Manuel Mendive, Cristóbal Colón, 1984. 
I couldn’t figure out what a pair of Gerhard Richters were doing in a Cuban art museum. Except, of course, they weren’t Richters. Proof positive of the contemporaneous dialogue with artists well outside of Cuba. Flavio Garciandía, Todo lo que Ud. necesita es amor, 1975. 
Flavio Garciandía, Nada personal, 1977. 
This just cracked me up. Lázaro Saavedra, Detector de ideologías, 1984.
LP Art
The Prado is a wide promenade running from the Malecón at one end to the Capitolio building at the other. Local artists set up pop-up shops along the Prado, and we found someone there making mandalas by using acrylic paint on old LPs. Not only were they beautiful in their own right, they seemed quintessentially Cuban to me, riding the line connecting scavenging and art.
On The Street
Callejon de Hamel
Callejon de Hamel is a unique spot. The entire alley (callejon) is an art installation that’s the brainchild of artist Salvador Gonzáles Escalona. Starting in 1990 and over decades, he added murals and sculptures until the entire alley was completely covered in his work.
Today, the Callejon functions as an arts and community center, and is one of Habana’s core spaces keeping traditional Yoruban Santeria alive. We got a guided tour from one of their docents, who was able to explain the meaning of much of the art. But appreciating it doesn’t require knowing which piece celebrates Chango and which celebrates Yemaya. It’s all just swell.
Barrio Chino
Plaza Vieja
Literally Old Square, it dates back to 1559, when it was called, unsurprisingly, Plaza Nueva. The buildings around the Plaza are some of the best restored buildings in Habana Vieja.
The Most Random Of Shit
This is, and you can’t make this shit up, the Monument to Barbers and Hairdressers (Monumento a los Barberos y Peluqueros). The little scissors welded to the big scissors are actual used scissors donated for the monument by barbers. 
Another of the ridiculous Xoloitzcuintle dogs, like we saw in Trinidad. 
We saw this motif a few times in Habana, with faces sketched using minimal metal pieces. 
Not a lot of street murals, so this one stood out. 
A wall near our casa particular that nature had reclaimed. 
Habana Vieja is full of little pocket parks, this one featuring a beautiful fountain. 
We thought Dorothy knew every plant on the planet, common and Latin names, habitats and sun requirements. The tropics have ruined that conceit. We’d constantly see something amazing, like this, and I’d ask Dorothy what it was, because I have been trained to believe she knows everything. We’ve both been disappointed.
Vistas
No deep meaning, just some beautiful views of Habana.
The Paseo del Prado is a new hotel in Habana, right on the Malecón. It’s pretty fancy, and you can’t even get up to the rooftop bar/restaurant without a reservation. Of course, our local friend Jenn took care of that, and we met her and some of her friends for drinks and snacks one night on the rooftop, which had spectacular views.
The beautiful Rio Almendares, which runs from the Malecón through the middle of Habana, and about 30 miles inland. This view is from a bridge connecting the Miramar and Vedado neighborhoods. Cuba is nothing if not lush.
