Colonial Latin American Review ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20 Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba. Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828 Victor Deupi To cite this article: Victor Deupi (2016) Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba. Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828, Colonial Latin American Review, 25:4, 581-583, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2016.1281026 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2016.1281026 Published online: 17 Mar 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccla20 Download by: [University of Miami] Date: 03 April 2017, At: 12:07 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 581 appeared to be coalescing around a consistent policy in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Peninsular War and the constitutional debates of 1812 would take the discourse over race and citizenship in new and different directions. Overall, Twinam shows that gracias al sacar were far from common. While their existence does demonstrate that race in Spanish America could be mutable, the endless debates they engendered among bureaucrats and the vicious personal struggles that accompanied the solicitants remind us that racial distinctions remained powerful social markers throughout the colonial period. In the end, Twinam’s work adds to the growing body of research that has revealed that successful social mobility among colored subjects often relied on deliberate, persistent efforts to form social networks with powerful elites, acquire valuable skills and enter prestigious professions, and to consciously display personal and familial honor in the face of social stigma and discrimination. Purchasing Whiteness is a must read for scholars of race in Latin America. Graduate students will be well served by her archival methodology and her innovative interpretive framework. The length precludes the use of this work in most undergraduate courses. Nevertheless, the accessible prose and clear historical arguments make this work useful to scholars of all levels. Overall, this work fills a long-standing lacuna in our understanding of race in late colonial Spanish America and in so doing reminds us how much more we have to learn about the racial experiences of Spain’s colonial subjects. Robert C. Schwaller University of Kansas © 2017 Robert C. Schwaller http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2016.1281025 Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba. Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828, Paul Niell, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015, xvi, 326 pp. (ISBN 9780292766594) The recent frenzy surrounding renewed U.S. relations with Cuba has been coupled with a considerable amount of new research on almost every aspect of Cuban life and culture. Intellectual exchange across the Straits of Florida is now so common that Paul Niell’s excellent new book, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828, comes as a very welcome relief from all things related to Cuba’s here and now. As the title suggests, Niell’s book is concerned with heritage, which he describes on page four as ‘the process by which people use the past— a “discursive construction”—with material consequences,’ referring to the definition given by David C. Harvey in the The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (2008). More specifically, he considers the urban, architectural, and artistic configuration of the Plaza de Armas in Havana as a vehicle to explore the entangled histories, memories, and identities of late-colonial society in Cuba. Throughout the Americas, the colonial plaza was a space that reinforced royal and ecclesiastical authority through imagery and ritualized performance, and by the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Plaza de Armas in Havana was among the few main plazas in the New World that remained faithful to the Spanish Crown. Niell’s book then is a probing account into the many layers of heritage that reframe the plaza mayor of Havana as the preeminent space for the expression of power and social appropriation at a time when the smell of revolution was in the air of nearly every other country in the Americas. 582 BOOK REVIEWS Havana’s Plaza de Armas is the site where in 1519 the founders of the city presumably held the first mass and cabildo (town council) meeting, both underneath the protective shade of a highly symbolic ceiba tree. Over three hundred years later, in 1828, a small Doric temple—El Templete—was constructed on the site of the sacred and secular events to memorialize and fix the city’s founding myths. By doing so, the city’s royal, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic societies could locate a predictable past, and render their identities as stable and anchored to a specific place. The Templete was also the name given by Spaniards to Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome, the diminutive round temple commissioned by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel in 1502 to mark the purported site of Peter’s crucifixion. Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the conquest of the kingdom of Granada and inaugural explorations of the New World, Bramante’s Templete became a symbol of Spanish political and spiritual ambition in Europe and America, and its many imitations throughout the Spanish world reinforced Spain’s role in the quest for Christian hegemony. The Havana Templete, though rectangular, protected the Spanish image of triumph with statuary around its perimeter enclosure that included a Virgin and Child on a Pillar, a bust of Columbus, and a ceiba tree memorial. Like the Erectheion in Athens that celebrated the city’s founding myth and Athena’s olive tree donation, the Templete completes the transatlantic rhetoric of Spanish spiritual supremacy and colonial governance. Niell’s book begins with the reconfiguration of the Plaza de Armas after the Seven Year’s War (1756–1763) ended in Europe, and Spain ceded Florida to England in return for Cuba. The author considers the Bourbon promotion of buildings throughout the plaza and the many figures and institutions who patronized the space. Wherever possible, he discusses architects, engineers, and artists in detail, demonstrating the transnational character of the plaza and the many Spanish, French, and Italian variants of Classicism associated with it. The book then shifts to the early nineteenth century when the Templete was built to fashion the complex heritage program of Cuba within a larger process of modernization. Niell posits that the ceiba tree ‘may have been appropriated […] based on its significance to Amerindian religious beliefs, spatial practices, or urban planning during the process of colonization’ (103). Its re-presentation as a memorial pillar on the site where the original tree stood spoke to the intertwined cultural memory of the Spanish, Amerindian, African, and Creole populations of the island. The book proceeds from the richly layered analysis of the plaza and its many monuments to an inquiry into the dissonance of colonial heritage in multicultural Havana. The lack of agreement and consistency over the question of heritage—who owns it, who reconciles its ownership, and whether or not it can even be owned—is discussed in relation to the independence wars of the Spanish colonies in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. The book ends with a careful look at identity and race in late-colonial Havana, and how creating heritage from multiple perspectives speaks to the plurality of the phenomenon. The idea of a forged reconstruction of the past—however noble in its cultural and spiritual aspirations—will always leave those who demand greater archaeological and historical rigor uneasy. But it is important to remember that some of the greatest artistic achievements of Western society have emerged from such reconstructions. A case in point may be the many interpretations of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem by Spanish architects and writers, a topic that Niell also takes into account. He points out how the Templete’s front porch and perimeter enclosure recall the Basilica of the Escorial’s tetrastyle portico and atrium (Courtyard of the Kings). Perhaps more than any other monument in the Spanish world, the Escorial recalls the Solomonic prototype, if not St. Peter’s in Rome. That the Templete forged genealogical links between Havana, Madrid, Jerusalem, and even Rome, is much more than just a conspicuous attempt to advance the political and religious ambitions of Spain in Cuba, for the monument still stands today, and every year it serves as a backdrop for the city’s 16 November COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 583 birthday celebrations. The ritual festivity in the plaza, as Niell notes on the first page, ‘allows the city to reactivate its foundational narrative in an apparent effort to reuse the past for agendas in the present—specifically, to underpin civic, regional, and national identities.’ More than anything, Niell’s absorbing book reminds us that urban space as heritage is a potent vehicle for negotiating the here and now. Victor Deupi University of Miami © 2017 Victor Deupi http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2016.1281026