El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 344-365, 2011.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 344–365, 2011 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory PAUL NIELL University of North Texas, USA In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth-century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthetic discourse of Spanish colonial power, El Templete underwent a process of local assimilation, whereby classical forms and academic aesthetics were adapted to the self-representation of a heterogeneous colonial city. Keywords: art, Bourbon Spain, colonialism, Cuba, neoclassicism, visual culture. Introduction Each year on 16 November, a crowd gathers in the Plaza de Armas of Havana, Cuba, to honour the city by circumambulating the legendary ceiba tree three times in a counterclockwise motion. Located on the eastern side of the plaza, the tree (perhaps the fourth tree on the site) is celebrated as the place where the Spanish conquistadors founded the city in the sixteenth century, performing the first Christian mass and cabildo (council) meeting under the tree’s generous shade. When this annual tradition began is unclear; however, at two moments in Havana’s colonial history, civic monuments were built to honour the memory of the site. The first was in 1754, when Captain General Cagigal de la Vega erected a commemorative pillar as compensation for having ordered the unruly tree cut down. Engineers reported that the tree’s roots had damaged the nearby fortification wall (see Figure 1). Again in 1828, a much more complex monument, incorporating the Cagigal pillar of 1754, was erected on the site and named El Templete (the small temple or pavilion). This second memorial reveals an active attempt by civic elites to (re)invent the origin myth of the city, appropriating the past to serve multiple representational needs in the present. In spite of the monument’s apparent coherence as a work of classicism, however, its complex imagery and site reveal Cuban responses to the Spanish Bourbon Reforms and local society and thus the multivalence of this late colonial work. 344  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 1. Anonymous, Cagigal pillar, Plaza de Armas, Havana, Cuba, 1754 (photo, author). El Templete consisted of a small Tuscan Doric temple situated on axis with the Cagigal pillar. It was embedded into a rectangular wall of coral limestone, which forms a square enclosure around the Templete, the pillar, and the tree (see Figure 2). Cuban military engineer Antonio María de la Torre, attributed with the monument’s design, conceived the dimensions of the monument’s interior to house three history paintings executed by French expatriate artist Jean-Baptiste Vermay. At the time, Vermay was the director of Havana’s art academy of San Alejandro, founded in 1818. The three Vermay paintings narrated the history of the site and included one scene of the first mass, one of the first cabildo, and one of the inaugural ceremony of the shrine itself in 1828.  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 345 Paul Niell Figure 2. author). Antonio María de la Torre, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, Cuba, 1828 (photo, The emergence of a new, more rigorous classicism in Havana grew initially from the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms, which escalated after the end of the Seven Years War (1756–1763) . The British, who had occupied Cuba for eleven months, returned the city to the Spanish in exchange for Florida. The Bourbon Reforms, as enacted throughout the empire, included measures to reverse Spain’s stalling economy, associated with the previous Austrian Hapsburg rule (1521–1700). Specifically in Cuba, reformers intended to secure the colony against another invasion by a rival European power (Kuethe, 1986; Brading, 1991; Pérez, 1995; Johnson, 2001). Spanish administrators launched various building campaigns in Havana in the early 1770s, which included the erection of additional fortifications at vulnerable points around the city and the creation of more rationally planned public buildings. Spanish officials and Peninsulars (individuals born in Spain) generally perceived the American colonists as inferior and in need of cultural modernisation, including public education and technological advancement. The monarchy promoted geometrical urban planning and grand classicism as reform agents intended to propagate the mythology of the Bourbons as victorious (re)civilisers of the Crown’s overseas territories (Gutiérrez-Haces, 2002). After the 1762 British occupation, the reforms in Cuba included the organisation of local militias for the defence of the island, an increase in taxes and the reordering of public spaces, such as the city’s Plaza de Armas. The Captain General Marqués de la Torre (the island’s senior colonial official) initiated the reconstruction of the plaza in 1772 to reshape the space into a geometric configuration. Such regular planning stood in contrast to the irregularities of the original conquistador layout. It was defined by the Laws of the Indies codified in 1573 by Phillip II and used by the Bourbons as a model of rational city planning (Crouch, Garr and Mundigo, 1982). The plan introduced 346  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 3. Antonio Fernández de Trevejos and Pedro Medina, Palace of the Captain General, Havana, 1776–1791 (photo, author). two administrative palaces to frame the plaza’s northern and western sides, a project which ended in 1791 (see Figure 3). As mandated in the Laws, portals fronted the palaces, which incorporated certain baroque elements such as curvilinear ornament on doors and windows (Weiss, 1996). However, the prevalence of classical detailing and regular bays conveyed the sense of order and permanence that the monarchy hoped to project. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the island’s hacendados (landowners, many of them sugar planters), predominantly of the Creole elite (wealthy, propertyowning individuals of Hispanic descent born in Cuba), enjoyed increased economic prosperity from the growth of the sugar industry and Spain’s relaxation of certain trade restrictions. However, Cuban-birth in the Spanish colonial system meant that Creoles of all social ranks, including the elite, possessed limited political rights in the island’s Spanish administration. Yet, as powerful members of the ayuntamiento (city council) and through nascent civic organisations and Freemasonry (introduced during the British occupation), Creole elites in the early nineteenth century found new forms of sociability and developed common commercial goals. They began to assert influence over, and sometimes direct patronage of, civic buildings, incorporating more rigorous classicism (Pérez, 1995; González-Ripoll Navarro, 1999). While Ibero-American scholarship often operates on the assumption that neoclassicism in Latin America was exclusively a language of Bourbon colonial power, fewer studies consider the complexities of local responses to these reforms and the potential reconfigurations of such classicism for local purposes. The erection of El Templete, a monument that appropriated neoclassical aesthetics and commemorated the city’s  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 347 Paul Niell founding in 1828 on the Plaza de Armas can be seen as a local strategy of selflegitimisation. Furthermore, social messages within El Templete suggest a desire to preserve the colonial status quo, a social dimension that united Spanish Peninsulars with the city’s Creole elite. Civic memorials frequently draw on the visual culture of the masses to make their statements of commonality more effective (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991). Thus the symbolic aspects of El Templete should be examined more with an eye to the local-imperial dynamics of the late colonial period in Cuba, including the incorporation of local colonial culture. However, an appreciation of El Templete’s multivalence is built upon earlier attempts to grasp its meaning, efforts that should be briefly addressed in order to locate a point of departure. Historiography of El Templete The scholarship on El Templete from the era of the early Cuban Republic reveals a substantial degree of anti-Spanish nationalism, framing nineteenth-century neoclassicism in Cuba as an imperial instrument of the Spanish state. Cuban historian Antonio Miguel Alcover (1900) contextualised the memorial during the North American occupation of the island (1899–1901). He cited nineteenth-century historian José María de la Torre in noting that the ‘original’ ceiba tree, long thought to have died a natural death in 1753, was actually ordered to be cut down by the Spanish Captain General Cagigal de la Vega (BMCH, Colección Facticia 107, fo. 700). Alcover framed this act as one of imperial oppression, rather than a practical solution to the problem of the tree’s interference with the nearby fortification wall. The tree’s legacy had thus been tainted by the Spanish, according to the author, rendering it inauthentic for contemporary Cubans of the new republic (Guiteras, 1865–1866; Pezuela, 1868; Alfonso López, 2004). The work of Havana historian Manuel Pérez Beato (1936) likewise reveals nationalist overtones in his interrogation of the merits of the tree as an adequate Cuban symbol. Pérez Beato pointed out the uncertainty of the foundational event and its date, suggesting that a tree or an axial element in a colonial plaza better recalled the use of the public picota (a vertical pillar for public punishments found in many early Ibero-American plazas) (Pérez Beato, 1936: 36). Havana’s first municipal ordinances, the Ordenanzas de Cáceres (1573) stated that negros (blacks) caught with weapons upon their second offence ‘will be given twenty lashes at the ceiba or picota or at the door of the jail’ (Pichardo, 1984: 111–112). Given that these laws were meant for many towns combined with the seemingly interchangeable option of using a ceiba, picota or the door of the jail, it is possible that a ceiba tree was located in the main plazas of many early colonial towns in Cuba and that it was used for public punishments. Rather than exploring this possibility as a partial explanation for El Templete, however, Pérez Beato declared that the ceiba was no dignified symbol of civic pride, but an infamous reminder of Spanish colonial repression. Several decades after the nationalist fervour of the early Cuban republic, Havana historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring brought more objectivity to the historical debate in 1963. Roig de Leuchsenring pointed out that if the ceiba tree tradition was inauthentic, it was because the site of Havana itself had actually been moved three times. Thus, the first mass and cabildo, which established the city, would have taken place elsewhere, on the island’s southern shores. Roig de Leuchsenring also noted that the Plaza de Armas had, likewise, been transferred at least three times within the current city between 1559 and 1577, dating after the supposed 348  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism consecration (Roig de Leuchsenring, 1963: 59–60). Nor, according to the historian, did any documents exist to verify that this foundational event ever happened. He thus concluded that the monument was a colonialist invention, built during the governorship of Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives (r. 1823–1832), who was dispatched to Cuba after the rebellion in New Spain and its declaration of succession in 1821. According to the historian, Captain General Vives conceived of the construction and inauguration of El Templete as a distraction for Havana’s colonial population because of his knowledge of a revolutionary plot in South America in 1827, related to Simón Bolivar’s movement, to liberate Cuba from Spanish control. The captain general thus intended the work to stimulate imperial solidarity, dedicating it to Spanish Queen Josefa Amalia on her birthday and to Spanish King Ferdinand VII’s victory (during the resurgence of Spanish absolutism) over a liberal faction in Catalonia. (Roig de Leuchsenring, 1963: 9–14). While the work of Roig de Leuchsenring on El Templete argued for the monument’s status as an invented tradition, the author placed too much emphasis on a Spanish invention and not enough on a Cuban one (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). The first scholar of Havana’s history to focus due attention on the impact of local culture and more complex transcultural processes in El Templete was the scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, Fernando Ortiz. He focused on the involvement of Havana’s Bishop Juan José Díaz de Espada y Landa (1756–1832) in the commission, construction and inauguration of the memorial (Ortiz, 1943: 3). Born in Spain’s Basque country and educated at the ‘enlightened’ University of Salamanca, the bishop was appointed to the see of Havana in 1800 and arrived in 1802. While upholding Catholic orthodoxy, Bishop Espada opposed the Inquisition and was drawn to the practical and aesthetic reforms associated with the European Enlightenment (Ortiz, 1943; García Pons, 1951; Torres-Cuevas, 1990, 2002). Supportive of constitutional monarchy and frustrated by the persistence of absolutism in Spain, Espada invested himself at Havana in aesthetic reform as an iconoclast of the baroque style. He had baroque altarpieces in the cathedral replaced with neoclassical equivalents and preferred what he himself referred to as a ‘noble simplicity’ in the arts (Torres-Cuevas, 2002: 199). Involved in many art and architectural projects in early nineteenth-century Havana, the bishop was an important patron of El Templete and appears prominently in the painting of the inauguration ceremony conducting the formal benediction of the work. Fernando Ortiz rejected the attacks that Pérez Beato had levelled against the authenticity of the ceiba tree, declaring that the ceiba of El Templete was the emblem of the municipality of Havana, and the oldest and most permanent symbol of civic liberties in Cuba (Lescano Abella, 1928; Ortiz, 1943: 3; Torres-Cuevas, 2002: 123–124). Ortiz drew a parallel to the oak tree of Guernica, Spain, under which the Castilian monarchs were obliged to swear an oath to preserve Basque fueros (traditional laws) in medieval times. As the Basque tree of Guernica was an emblem of local liberties, so the bishop, born in the Basque region, had conceived of El Templete as a reconfiguration of this tradition in Havana (Torres-Cuevas, 2002: 124). This reading of subversion introduced a counter-current to the scholarship, which had previously characterised El Templete strictly as a statement of Bourbon colonial power. Ortiz never furnished any empirical proof for this claim, but in terms of material evidence, a temple-like structure with a Greco-Roman revival portico was erected adjacent to the Tree of Guernica in 1826, two years before El Templete in Havana. A connection between these two memorials seems likely, as though the bishop hoped to fuse old traditions in Cuba with new ‘enlightened’ realities, perhaps similar to what he knew the Basque had done in Guernica.  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 349 Paul Niell Ortiz’s theory of subversion has been sustained by the more contemporary Cuban historian Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, a current biographer of Bishop Espada. TorresCuevas carefully examined the familial and social origins of the bishop in Spain’s Basque country and concluded that his background would have shaped an ideology of regional autonomy. The Cuban historian characterises El Templete as ‘a work made in absolutism and against absolutism’ (Torres-Cuevas, 2002: 124). The bishop, disapproving of Ferdinand VII’s abolition of Spain’s constitution in 1823, had thus constructed a subtle protest against the contemporary monarchy. Recent works have also pointed to the significance of the painter Jean-Baptiste Vermay and his connections to local Creoles. French art historian Sabine Faivre D’Arcier’s monograph on the artist opens questions about his local alliances and his desires to assist his Cuban acquaintances by constructing Cuban identity through painting (Faivre D’Arcier, 2004: 133–160). Despite the increasing rigour found in the early twentieth-century work of Ortiz and the recent nuances added by Torres-Cuevas and Favire D’Arcier to our understanding of El Templete’s significance, these approaches are marked by similar flaws: in general, a narrowing intentionality argument focusing on an absolutism-liberalism struggle located in the political tensions between captain general and bishop. What these perspectives lack is an interest in dealing with the monument as a whole, including its expression of an emerging sense of Cuban identity, growing differences between Creoles and Peninsulars, and escalating social tensions, such as those felt by elite whites towards Cuba’s population of African descent. If we consider El Templete as colonial visual culture, it becomes apparent that the monument created and sustained colonial ideologies and cut across myriad forms of colonial discourse. Rather than being subject to a binary interpretation, El Templete signified in diverse ways to multiple audiences within a broader socio-political spectrum in early nineteenth-century Havana. Classicism and Creole Agency Bishop Espada’s initiatives as patron of the arts were interwoven with his connections to the city’s Creole elite. Havana’s patriciate (mostly landowning Creoles), powerful since early colonial times, dominated Havana’s ayuntamiento (town hall) and began to receive special trade concessions in the reforms of Charles III, which escalated after the British occupation of the island in 1762. In exchange for accepting a higher tax burden, the decrees of 16 October 1765 opened Cuba’s trade to eight additional Spanish ports, loosening the older mercantile system, which restricted trade to Cádiz only (Kuethe, 1986; Pérez, 1995; Johnson, 2001; Gott, 2004). Spanish export duties and taxes on slaves were lessened, both of which were favourable to Cuban planters. Late eighteenth-century military reforms brought increased prestige to Creole elites as they began to fill out the officers’ corps of local colonial militias (Kuethe, 1986). Following the slave insurrection of 1791 on the neighbouring island of Saint-Domingue, and the subsequent loss of French dominance over the West Indian sugar trade, Cuban planter and intellectual Francisco de Arango y Parreño succeeded in convincing the Spanish Crown to invest heavily in the island’s sugar industry. In 1793, 27 Cuban landowners chartered the Royal Economic Society of the Friends of the Country, a local reform society and special interest group based on Spanish models (Pérez, 1995). The Economic Society, also known as the Patriotic Society, allowed Havana’s patriciate to become more active in local educational and cultural initiatives, economic 350  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism policy and technological modernisation. The society took control of the first colonial newspaper in Cuba in the 1790s, the Papel Periódico de La Habana, a bi-weekly covering cultural and commercial issues. As Benedict Anderson has argued, the habitual readership of the printed press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to forge a sense of community and collective identity among subscribers (Anderson, [1983] 1991). Such a phenomenon is discernable in the early nineteenth-century Hispanic world, where Shafer has suggested that Economic Societies and their local publications contributed to ‘organised opinion’ (Shafer, 1958: 439; Jensen, 1988: 3–7). Articles in the Papel Periódico carried items on culture, history, science, etiquette and the arts. The leading periodical at the time of El Templete’s inauguration was the Diario de La Habana. Articles ran from early March to late April 1828 about the monument and instructed readers on El Templete’s forms and significance. Soon after his arrival in 1802, Bishop Espada became director of the Economic Society of Havana, joining forces with the city’s Creole elite and contributing his rational knowledge and power as patron of the arts. In 1806, the bishop commissioned the General Cemetery of Havana, located in the extramuros (the area outside the city walls). The Society became actively involved in this project, as can be gleaned from the extensive writings of Tomás Romay Chacón, a physician and leading member (López Sánchez, 1965). An architect’s fee of 500 pesos was paid by the Society to French architect, Stephen Hallet, who had been at work on the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC in the 1790s. Hallet designed a chapel for the cemetery in the form of a Tuscan Doric temple that may have provided a model for El Templete twenty years later. The chapel also contained paintings: frescos depicting the resurrection of the dead, commissioned by the bishop from Brescian painter José Perovani (López Sánchez, 1965: 136–141). On issues of style, Bishop Espada, in an exhortation of 1806, exalted the cemetery for its ‘noble simplicity and seriousness’ (Torres-Cuevas, 2002: 199). In 1818, the Economic Society established the visual arts academy of San Alejandro in Havana, and financed the appointment of French expatriate artist JeanBaptiste Vermay as director, a former student in France of Jacques-Louis David who arrived in Havana in 1815 (Janson, 1977). Vermay legitimated the academy through his high-profile European training and initiated a curriculum based on life drawing (Faivre D’Arcier, 2004). By the early nineteenth century, records indicate that local elites had begun considering the ceiba tree site on the Plaza de Armas as an opportunity for another civic monument. On 5 February 1819, the ayuntamiento received a report from Francisco Filomeno that the area around the Cagigal pillar of 1754 honouring the ceiba tree had deteriorated, having been employed by the neighbours for common uses. The resulting petition by Bonifacio García called for an intervention and the construction of a casilla (hut) to clean up and re-memorialise the site (BMCH, Colleción Facticia 107, 774r–775v). Later, in the minutes of the ayuntamiento meeting of 15 June 1827, Havana’s alcalde (mayor) noted that all of Havana, ‘even the uncultured’, reckoned and respected the significance of this historic place (BMCH, Colección Facticia 107, 795r–796v). In December of that year, ground was broken for the new monument with its completion in March 1828. The press gave credit to the captain general (as was customary) and the colonel of engineers, Antonio María de la Torre, was lauded for the architectural design of the structure. Spanish regidor Francisco Rodríguez Cabrera coordinated the project and wrote a detailed summary of the construction process in the Diario de La Habana of 16 March 1828 (Rodríguez, 1828a). Cabrera credited local artisans for various aspects of the monument and paid tribute to Bishop Espada for  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 351 Paul Niell sponsoring the Vermay paintings. El Templete thus resulted from collaboration between Bishop Espada, Spanish officials, the ayuntamiento (dominated by the Creole elite), and the academy’s lead professor whose annual salary was paid by the Economic Society. Such complex patronage involving local elites provided an avenue for the expression of Creole identity. Historicism and Cuban Legitimacy The historicism in El Templete and the involvement of the city’s Creole elite in public works paralleled a growing concern for employing classicism to represent things Cuban in public space. Cuban engineer Antonio María de la Torre may have appropriated some of the architectural ideas introduced by French architect Stephen Hallet at the General Cemetery of Havana in his design for El Templete. The Cuban engineer surely knew of the Spanish neoclassicism of Juan de Villanueva from the late eighteenth century. High classical ideas in architecture diffused from the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid down to Spanish military academies and out to colonial cities in the Americas (AASF Junta Preparatoria 1744–1752, fos. 17–63; García Melero, 1992). Cuban elites owned architectural treatises privately and made them available publicly through the Economic Society library, which opened in Havana in 1792. Creole planters frequently travelled to and/or sent their children to be educated in the United States, where a Greek Revival movement in architecture was developing by the 1820s. Liberal Cuban priest and author Félix Varela was living in Philadelphia by 1824, where his student, Cuban intellectual José Antonio Saco met up with him. A pioneer of 1830s cubanidad (the literary celebration of things Cuban), Saco resided in the North American city from 1826 to 1828 (Whalen, 1970). He would thus have returned to Havana with first-hand exposure to Greek Revival monuments in Philadelphia, such as Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Bank of Pennsylvania, 1799–1801 or William Strickland’s Second Bank of the United States, 1816 (Middleton and Watkin, 1980). Both structures projected imposing Greek Revival facades and constructed an architectural language of free trade and capitalism in the United States, values that Cuban planters were eager to assimilate. Although El Templete incorporated characteristic imperial signifiers, such as a bronze triumphal arch entryway topped by the city’s arms and a symbolic crown, the work reveals the engineer’s inventive adaptation of neoclassical architecture to the local context. By the rules of such architectural treatise writers as Vitruvius and Andrea Palladio, de la Torre’s interpretation of the Doric aspects of El Templete deviated from ancient models in a number of significant ways. While designing the portico on a modular system, the architect departed from the suggested intercolumniations of the Doric order (see Figure 4). He positioned the columns one-half diameter apart at the portico ends. In an effort to centre the triglyphs with the columns, as mandated by both Vitriuvius and Palladio, the two lateral metopes had to be stretched horizontally. The treatise writers had mandated that metopes should always be square (Vitruvius, 1960; Palladio, 1997). These departures from a doctrinaire, Vitruvian perspective on the rules of classical architecture, may have been an effort to denote function and solve the practical problems of the work. De la Torre’s design matched the intercolumniations to the three entry doors of the Templete and opened routes in the small portico for easy circulation into and out of the structure. It, furthermore, created openings, combined with the doors, that allowed for increased light to the interior to help render detailed history paintings, at least by the light of day, more legible. 352  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 4. Detail: Portico, Antonio María de la Torre, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, Cuba, 1828 (photo, author). Such adaptations to local function co-existed with various aspects meant to assert imperial authority. Eleven metopes between triglyphs contained carved symbols of Spain’s dominion over the ‘New World’, including such emblems as ‘F’ and ‘7’ for reigning monarch King Ferdinand VII, and two crowned orbs, symbolising the union between Old World and New. A metope relief of an Amerindian bow, arrows and headdress, situated the conquest of Cuba and the island’s indigenous inhabitants firmly within a Spanish imperial history (see Figure 5). Further tensions between the local and extra-local could be found in the building’s cornice lines. While long stretches of cornice possessed clean and precise lines, two areas immediately behind the portico revealed the  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 353 Paul Niell Figure 5. Detail: Metope relief sculpture of Amerindian bow, arrows, and headdress, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, Cuba, 1828 (photo, author). curvilinear tendencies found in Havana’s baroque cathedral. Tensions between styles mirrored the semantic tensions of certain symbols. Where the monument met the plaza along its front length, great piers supported a continuous iron fence and lofted bronze cast pineapples set on urns. The pineapple, employed by the Spanish to signify authority over American land and agriculture, began to appear in late colonial poetry as a symbol of Cuban identity (Zequeira y Arango, 1852: 9–10). With Havana’s elite so involved in public works at this time, El Templete generated a compelling statement of local pride, identity and myth within and somewhat without the imperial mythologies also sustained by the monument. Of the Templete’s visual programme, the paintings by Jean-Baptiste Vermay constructed perhaps the most lucid statements about the local context. The artist’s scenes of the first Mass and cabildo narrated the traditional story of the site, translating historical discourses into detailed academic history paintings (see Figures 6 and 7). The works contained images of sixteenth-century Spaniards, such as conquistador Diego Velázquez, who led the conquest of Cuba from the neighbouring island of Hispaniola in 1511. Vermay included figures of the native inhabitants of the island that were first encountered by conquistadors and missionaries. Cuban historian José Martín Félix de Arrate wrote in his late eighteenth-century history of Cuba: the memory of the nature and customs of the Indians in [Cuba], on which our chroniclers speak with uniformity, writing down, without substantial discrepancy, that they were of peaceful, docile, and bashful humour, very reverent with superiors, of great ability and aptitude in the instructions of the faith, healthy and of good character, and of graceful form and beauty. (Arrate, 1964: 18) 354  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 6. Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The First Cabildo, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1826, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with the permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana). Vermay’s depiction of Amerindian figures seemed to parallel this passage, as the graceful, sensuous, and passive forms of the natives contrast the upright and angular stances of the Spaniards. Both scenes contain a combination of standing and kneeling figures. As various figures turn their backs to the viewer in skillfully rendered foreshortening, the scenes posses a quiet immediacy that lends itself to both neoclassical and romantic trends. In attempting to monumentalise these epics through history painting, the most prestigious genre in the academy, Vermay infused them with a relatively soft painted palette that he perhaps absorbed in Cuba, viewing the works of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cuban artists in Havana such as José Nicolás de la Escalera (1734–1804) and Vicente Escobar (1757–1854).  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 355 Paul Niell Figure 7. Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The First Mass, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1826, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with permission of the OHC). A painted depiction of the ceiba tree dominates the paintings of the first mass and cabildo, reinforcing the tree as the primary purpose for the monument and revealing a taxonomic awareness of the island’s flora and fauna. In the scene of the first Mass, a red parrot perches in the ceiba’s branches and below, along the foreground, Vermay renders vegetal specimens in lucid detail. The historical actors further unite the scene and give it narrative specificity. The Spaniards, dressed in an approximation of sixteenth-century finery, stand with lances raised, symbolising victory in the conquest. The Amerindian figures, by contrast, are semi-nude and crouching below, indicating their submission to European civilisation. Through the presence of the Indian figure, among other signs, Cuban history was legitimated within the imperial history of Spain, in the face of numerous attacks by Europeans on the moral qualities and rational capacities of 356  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Americans (Katzew, 2009). Indeed, the Diario de La Habana of 27 March 1828 declared that upon completion of El Templete, Havana ‘continued to be elevated to the rank of the towns of Europe’ (Rodríguez, 1828b). In addition to such attempts to establish continuity and solidarity with Spain, frustrated elites in Cuba rallied around their status as criollo (island-born), thus expressing their difference from Europeans. Given that Vermay, an academically trained European artist, had rendered Creole civic ancestors through history painting, these elites gained a sense of local cultural authority. The conquistador figures, for example, testified to the noble traits of city’s first rulers, from whom many local elites claimed direct descent in support of their status and possession of prestigious titles. Creoles had dominated the cabildo since early colonial times, yet the cabildo’s right to distribute public lands was revoked by the Bourbons in 1729. The painting of the first cabildo affirmed this historical agency. The two sixteenth-century scenes thus conditioned the public memory of the site by reinforcing historic Creole civic rights and claims to legitimacy before the Spanish authorities. Race and the Ideal City Vermay’s inauguration painting, finished several months after the event took place, depicted the ceremony in which Bishop Espada performed the benediction of the new monument (see Figure 8). Gathered around the bishop are the city’s ecclesiastical authorities standing as a group to the right of Captain General Dionisio Vives, himself flanked by the city’s administrative and military officials (see Figure 9). All are officially dressed and regard the ceremony in unison, their individualised portraits being legible to a contemporary audience. A group of women and children stand and sit below the level of the men, thus effectively communicating the gender and age hierarchy of the colonial city. As one entered El Templete to view the paintings, the First Cabildo was immediately visible on the left (northern) wall, followed by the inauguration painting to the right and against the larger (eastern) rear wall. To the right of this painting, The First Mass was mounted on the right (southern) interior wall. The inauguration painting was flanked and, therefore, symbolically reinforced, by the two sixteenth-century scenes. The three canvases were clearly meant to be read and experienced together. For local elites, this arrangement affirmed that the city was modernising towards a Cuban realisation of a European cultural paradigm. As a product of the colonial social process in Cuba, Creole pride rested on a paradoxical quasi-European/non-Spanish ethnic cultural identity and a pure racial lineage in comparison to local individuals of ‘mixed’ and/or African descent. Social standing as a blanco (white) helped Cuban elites to maintain an image of prestige among their peers, with the assurance of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). This preoccupation with pure Spanish and Christian blood, a centuries-old obsession among the Ibero-American elite, took on greater significance with the rising African slave population in nineteenth-century Havana. A white family’s social standing was in jeopardy if one of its members married into the lower social echelons. The Crown even passed ordinances prohibiting ‘mixed-marriages’ within the nobility in the interest of public order (Martinez-Alier, [1974] 1989: 20–41). The figures of white men, women and children in Vermay’s inauguration painting connected this paradigm of blood purity to the city’s deepest traditions and central myth of origin.  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 357 Paul Niell Figure 8. Detail: Ecclesiastical Group, Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1828, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with permission of the OHC). Creole and Peninsular weariness of blacks and people of mixed ancestry was interconnected with nineteenth-century slavery. As early as the 1790s, as import taxes were lifted on the slave trade, Cuban planters became apprehensive of the rising population of people of African descent in Cuba. The Spanish system of coartación (slave self-purchase) contributed to a large population of gentes de color (free people of colour) in colonial society. To concerned whites, this increase in people of African descent indicated the development of the same conditions for slave insurrection in 358  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 9. Detail: Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives, Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1828, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with permission of the OHC). Cuba that had ruined the neighbouring French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Captain General José Cienfuegos and Economic Society director Alejandro Ramírez had established the Junta de Población Blanca (Council of the White Population) in 1817 to search for solutions to the rising African population. The Council moved for the establishment of new towns for white immigrants to offset the growing number of blacks (López Sánchez, 1965: 139–171; Gott, 2004). The city of Cienfuegos, realised in 1819, was an urban community settled by white immigrants from New Orleans and designed with strict classicism, including a gridiron layout and buildings with classical features. Thus, in contemplating the politics of urban life while  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 359 Paul Niell Figure 10. Detail: Afro-Cuban Woman, Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1828, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with permission of the OHC). standing within El Templete and viewing the paintings, Havana’s patriarchs received a constructed predominantly white, and thus mythical view of Havana in concert with actual and developing ‘white cities’, such as Cienfuegos. Amongst the large group of white figures in the inauguration painting, two figures of African descent appear as foils to whiteness. At the bottom left of the canvas, furthest from the Templete, an Afro-Cuban slave woman kneels and seems confused at the scene before her (see Figure 10). Her reaction prompts a white woman beside her to turn and give the black woman a stern look, raising her right hand in the direction of the new monument. This figural exchange reinforced the status of blacks as perpetual minors and the perceived divide between white reason and black irrationality. To ground this racial statement in civic precedent, the viewer needed only to look at the paintings of the first mass and cabildo, where Amerindians were, likewise, tamed by noble Spanish conquistadors. At the centre of the inauguration painting, near the figure of Captain General Vives, an officer in Havana’s pardo (mulatto – Spanish and African mixed-blood) militia stands in military dress (see Figure 11). In late colonial Cuba, free black populations acquired considerable prestige from military service, including the fuero militar, the right to bring trial cases before a military tribunal (Kuethe, 1986). These populations had also 360  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism Figure 11. Detail: Afro-Cuban Militiaman and Captain General Vives, Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete, El Templete, Plaza de Armas, Havana, 1828, oil on canvas (photo by author, reproduced with permission of the OHC). distinguished themselves in the trades of Havana, in some cases becoming quite wealthy, although ever confined to a lower social rank because of their race (Childs, 2006). As the monument constructed the image of the ideal colonial society by ordering social types (past and present), Vermay included the pardo militiaman to signify black prestige, including – while socially circumscribing – these populations. The epic history paintings in El Templete, viewed within a neoclassical framework, were intended to teach and morally uplift the colonial masses. The Diario de La Habana of 27 March 1828 declared that ‘the histories, the traditions, and the same oratory would almost remain mute, if these large monuments did not speak to man in indelible signs and characters’ (Rodríguez, 1828b). As eighteenth-century theory considered nature the foundation for all cultural language, so El Templete affirmed for Cubans that the structure of colonial society was rooted in the order of nature. Cuban priest and intellectual Félix Varela, appointed chair of constitutional studies at the Seminary of San Carlos in Havana by Bishop Espada in 1821, had educated early nineteenth-century Cubans on such issues as the ‘Imitation of Nature in the Arts’ (Varela, 1992: 82–89). Thus, by its position on the main plaza in conjunction with the theme of town founding,  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 361 Paul Niell the monument articulated and reinforced a natural social trajectory (Rykwert, 1976; Bjelajac, 1997). In considering a broader spectrum of local production and reception of the colonial city and its symbols, the ceiba tree’s significance may have been interconnected with a substratum of African-American colonial culture. In the neighbouring island of Jamaica, Scottish botanist James Macfadyen (1800–1850), a member of the Linnaean society of London, noted Afro-Jamaican reception of the ceiba tree on that island: Perhaps no tree in the world has a more lofty and imposing appearance . . . Even the untutored children of Africa are so struck with the majesty of its appearance that they designate it the God-tree, and account it sacrilege to injure it with the axe; so that, not infrequently, not even fear of punishment will induce them to cut it down. Even in a state of decay, it is an object of their superstitious fears: they regard it as consecrated to evil spirits, whose favour they seek to conciliate by offerings placed at its base. (Macfadyen, 1837: 92) Scholar of Afro-Cuban culture Lydia Cabrera’s seminal work El Monte (1954), and the subsequent scholarship of Migene González-Wippler, reveal continuity between Macfadyen’s early nineteenth-century observation and twentieth-century findings in Cuba (Cabrera, [1954] 1975; González-Wippler, 1994: 133–135, 242–243). Cabrera and González-Wippler reported the perception of the ceiba tree as sacred to people of African descent in Cuba, an apparent fear of the tree and the use of the tree as an object in ritual practice. More broadly, scholarship on the African diaspora in the Americas has noted a distinct and quite widespread pattern of ceiba tree veneration in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil (Desmangles, 1992; Voeks, 1997; Omari-Tunkara, 2005). The ceiba tree, as a polysemic sign in nineteenth-century Cuba, may have, therefore, evoked the very types of non-orthodox Afro-Cuban Catholic practices that the authorities were seeking adamantly to suppress from the 1790s onward (Lachatañeré, [1942] 1992; Barnet, 2001; Miller, 2001; Reid, 2004). The public processions of cabildos de nación (mutual aid societies of African slaves in Cuba), particularly the annual 6 January celebration of the Epiphany, known as the ‘Day of Kings’, engaged Afro-Cubans in the colonial city in an active way (Howard, 1998; Brown, 2003). Cabildos would process from the extramuros to the Plaza de Armas and meet with the colonial governor at the captain general’s palace to receive a monetary donation from the Spanish state. Such practices, including the hybridised clothing styles of cabildo members, allowed people of African descent the ability to reconfigure the meaning of colonial urban objects and urban spaces in Havana. If Afro-Cubans so habitually engaged the city, it opens questions about what powerful and knowledgeable patrons, such as Bishop Espada, knew of Afro-Cuban symbolism. If the ceiba tree’s significance for these populations was known to Espada, then El Templete may have been another method of including, while circumscribing, the identities of Afro-Cubans. As scholars on Cuban culture have long noted, El Templete is one of the most important colonial monuments in Havana. However, interpretations have been split between a Spanish imperial and a Cuban subversive contextualisation. More productive in light of contemporary cultural analysis would be to attempt to understand how local and extra-local signification functioned together. The stylistic context of international neoclassicism and the local Cuban situation were clearly interconnected in this monument. 362  2010 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research  2010 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 30, No. 3 El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism A willingness to confront such tensions could open new directions for the interpretation of neoclassical art throughout Latin America. Issues of stylistic and semantic ambiguity, of the coexistence of older and newer artistic and political forms demand more nuanced interpretations. El Templete was not simply a case of imperial expression or stylistic rupture. Rather, through memorialisation, the monument constructed and reinforced different messages for disparate audiences, becoming a multivalent work of neoclassicism in a heterogeneous colonial city. References Alfonso López, F. J. (2004) La ceiba y el templete: historia de una polémica. Unpublished article manuscript given to the author in March 2007. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 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