Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba

SPECIAL COLLECTION WORLD HERITAGE AND THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN: NEW MATERIALITIES AND THE ENACTMENT OF COLLECTIVE PASTS Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba Matthew J. Hill, University of Massachusetts Amherst ABSTRACT In this article, I utilize assemblage theory to analyze the 35-year attempt to “save” one of Old Havana’s main squares, the Plaza Vieja, by remaking it into a traditional plaza and upholding it as a marker of Cuban patrimony and national identity. In doing so, I examine the role of heritage as a “mediator” that both configures and is shaped by human interactions. The process of assembling heritage sites, I argue, sets up new associations between heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things—including materials like buildings, documents, maps, and plans—which as part of the network of associations gain the ability to make other members of the network do unexpected things. I examine this process of reassemblage in two historical stages. These include: a socialist stage (1979–1992) in which the Cuban state promoted local history and traditional architecture alongside the classless, egalitarian dimensions of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary identity; and a post-Soviet phase (1993–2015), in which the reconstruction of the Plaza as an early 19th century square reflects a broader ideological shift that emphasizes local identity and colonial history in lieu of a de-emphasized Marxism-Leninism. The article concludes by Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 4, p. 1235–1268, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2018 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved. 1235 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba examining how power operates through assemblages and questions their potential to become fixed as more stable apparatuses that contribute to processes of subjectification. [Keywords: Actor network theory, assemblages, materiality, heritage, Cuba, socialism, urban spaces] I n 1979, one of Old Havana’s five preeminent squares, the Plaza Vieja, reached a critical turning point in its status as a Cuban heritage object. Accidentally saved from urban renewal by the Cuban Revolution (1959), which in conjunction with the US economic embargo froze real estate markets on the Island, it was subsequently left in a state of benign neglect for the next 20 years. Coupled with socialist housing policies and over a century of bourgeois flight and capital disinvestment, its deterioration threatened to erase the remaining traces of the 450-year old Plaza’s colonial past. From the perspective of Cuban conservationists, most of the Plaza’s decline took place in the Republican period, with the early 1950s construction of a massive underground parking structure in the center of the Plaza. This symbolic act of “imperial aggression,” meant to accommodate the growing presence of US automobiles, dealt a precipitous blow to the Plaza’s traditional morphology and cultural identity. The revolution’s 1960 ley de reforma urbana (urban reform law) added to the Plaza’s decline, as its once noble mansions were nationalized and turned into collective public housing. Then, filling with migrants from the rebel army in the countryside seeking opportunities in the capital, these tenements became further subdivided and turned into solares (i.e., single or multi-story buildings opening onto a central courtyard with shared toilets and communal water taps and entire families living in single room apartments). Over the next decade, three of these buildings became so overcrowded and neglected that they collapsed. Reversing this trend, Cuba’s first heritage protection laws (1977) were passed along with laws that created the first municipal government in Old Havana (Fornet Gil 2011:304). These new laws created the conditions that in turn enabled local, state, and international heritage actors to step into the fray, ultimately reassembling the Plaza and its mansions as “authentic” Cuban heritage. It was also in this context that a group of young Cuban architects created the Plaza’s first (1981) preservation plan, as well as a broader plan for the restoration of Old Havana. 1236 MATTHEW J. HILL In this paper, I utilize assemblage theory to analyze what has happened since then—the 35-year attempt to “save” the Plaza Vieja by remaking it into a traditional Plaza and upholding it as a marker of Cuban patrimonio (patrimony) and national identity.1 In doing so, I draw on Macdonald’s injunction that we view heritage as a “mediator” that “shapes the social interactions in which it is enmeshed” (2009:117). The process of assembling heritage sites, I argue, sets up new associations between heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things, including materials like buildings, documents, maps, and plans. As part of the network of associations, these human and nonhuman actors gain the ability to make other members of the network do unexpected things (Latour 2005:106). The inclusion of material objects in the network doesn’t imply that things act in place of human actors, or that they possess intentionality—only that they can shape the course of action once a new chain of associations (what is called an assemblage) is set up (Latour 2005:72). For instance, once incorporated into a heritage assemblage, the material remains, or composition of a building, as well as its symbolic associations, can shape decisions about whether it can or should be restored. Similarly, conflicting ideas about “conservation” versus “restoration” or “reconstruction” of historic buildings and structures can also shape decisions about how to intervene. The key point, then, in taking an assemblage approach to heritage is “tracing the courses of action, associations, and definitional procedures and techniques” that are involved in assembling particular heritage sites (Macdonald 2009:118). Once this idea of an assemblage is recognized, including Macdonald’s emphasis on the role of nonhuman actors and their symbolic associations as mediators, it is important to interpret it using an institutional orientation (cf. Pendlebury 2013). This is the approach taken here to understand the Plaza Vieja as a heritage assemblage. Building on DeLanda’s (2006) notion of assemblage as a “non-essentialist, non-totalizing social entity, constructed through specific historical processes and heterogeneous parts,” Pendlebury demonstrates that assemblages embrace institutional organizations, norms, objects (e.g., laws and regulations), and normalized practices as well as the “buildings and environments” that are “involved in conservation practice,” which can also acquire agency as part of the assemblage (2013:711). Pendlebury shows how assemblage theory can conjoin various human actors, including individuals, organizations, and their discourses with nonhuman actors such as legal and policy 1237 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba frameworks, planning documents, and buildings and environments in a “complex and non-static social entity” (2013:711). Analyzing the heterogeneous, multiply-scaled institutional actors and discourses, and how they interact with one another illuminates how heritage networks emerge, what does and doesn’t belong to them, and the courses of action taken by the members of the network (see Gershon 2010).2 In addition, I draw on Latour in viewing sites like the Plaza Vieja as technological projects that are in the process of seeking to become stable objects. In keeping with this emphasis, I examine the restoration plan for the Plaza Vieja as a “framework” in which a diverse array of “groups, interests, intentions, events, and opinions” converge as part of a “collective dream” that seeks to return the Plaza to its 19th century form (1996:18). Rather than treat the Plaza as a stable object, I view it as a “fiction,” conjured by preservation professionals, urban planners, and architects. In the process, I explore how they seek to move the reimagined Plaza from the level of signs—embodied in “paper, departmental memos, speeches, scale models, and occasional synopses”—to an actual thing (Latour 1996:24). Moreover, I see this project gaining a foothold in existence through a process of recruitment in which an increasingly diverse array of institutional actors are combined in an “interlocking of interests,” making the project weightier over time, while giving it greater solidity, durability, and bringing it closer to reality (Latour 1996:45). At the same time, I explore how the setbacks suffered by the project become moments in which its actors, both human and nonhuman, are reassembled, leading to a new iteration of the imagined Plaza, and its incorporation into the broader heritage project of Old Havana itself. Engaging Assemblage Theory Rodney Harrison has demonstrated that applying assemblage theory to ethnographic museums shifts our perspective from viewing the artifacts in them as naturally co-existing to seeing them as objects that are “out of context” and “shuffled together in convoluted and confusing ways” (Harrison et al. 2013a:19). This raises the related question of how the artifacts made their way into the collection in the first place and “what it means for them to be assembled in particular ways” (Harrison et al. 2013a:19). In previous work, Harrison has similarly used assemblage theory to restore needed attention to the materiality of heritage landscapes. 1238 MATTHEW J. HILL In this case, he has shown how assemblage approaches enable us to attend not only to individual and group discourses about heritage, but also to the “arrangements of materials, equipment, texts, and technologies“ by means of which heritage is produced (2013:35). While his emphases on the heterogeneous nature, lack of internal coherence, and continuous processes of assembling involved in heritage inscriptions, ethnographic museums, or cultural landscapes are significant for denaturalizing heritage objects, and showing the range of human and nonhuman actors involved in constructing heritage, he pays less attention to the process of assembling an urban space like a public plaza. Drawing on his work, I look at how the range of living human actors in a historic city introduces distinct variables that operate differently from those in a museum environment or cultural landscape. In other words, the sort of heritage object being assembled in the case of the Plaza Vieja requires preserving structures with people residing in them, which sets up deep social conflicts at the outset between “insiders,” who reside in such structures, and “outsiders,” who seek to restore them. Moreover, the size, physicality, and sociality of such built heritage sites imposes limitations on how the heritage object can be reassembled. The options for its reassemblage are therefore more constrained, since buildings cannot be easily relocated, and communities with histories in the buildings resist their remaking by preservation professionals. In addition, the scale and cost of these restorations, and the time required to carry them out—often decades—means they are subject to fluctuations in capital, changes in governance structures, new technologies, and shifting planning imperatives.3 Several anthropological treatments of urban heritage are particularly useful in so far as they address its social, political, and economic dimensions, though they pay less attention to its assembled nature. Authors such as Herzfeld (2006, 2010), De Cesari and Herzfeld (2015), Totah (2014), and Harms (2012), for instance, have shown how urban heritage processes are complicit with processes of gentrification and spatial “enclosure” by states or neoliberal urban forces. Franquesa (2013) has similarly drawn attention to what he sees as the “economic logic” that underlies the hegemonic character of urban heritage, showing how diverse actors including developers, gentrifiers, and preservation organizations draw on the same “objectifying idiom” of heritage in turning it into a commodity. Finally, theorists such as Collins (2008, 2015), De Cesari (2010), Dines (2012), and Hodges (2009) have pointed to the 1239 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba biopolitical or governmental dimensions of urban heritage processes and their role in shaping human behavior and discourse.4 While these studies highlight the larger economic and structural dimensions of urban heritage, the assemblage approach explored here adds an emphasis on networks of people, interests, and goals which do the work of “contextualizing” heritage projects, in conjunction with the array of things (e.g., buildings, maps, plans) that must be successfully mobilized for such projects to succeed (Latour 1996:127, 142). Recent anthropological work on the conservation of historic buildings draws on this assemblage approach in order to highlight the range of human and non-human actors, forms, and processes involved in building maintenance and repair. Edensor (2011), for instance, has shown how buildings—rather than existing as stable, unified objects—are continuously being “assembled” and “reassembled” based on continuously shifting stone supply chains and changing maintenance and repair techniques. Jones and Yarrow further this analysis by showing how the different practices and tools of a diverse range of heterogeneous experts (curators, stone masons, architects) give rise to different approaches to building conservation and notions of authenticity that are “refracted through specific material contexts” (2013:24). I extend these studies by shifting the level of analysis from that of individual buildings to an entire plaza, focusing on it as an assemblage that is constantly enrolling new actors in the process of its stabilization as a heritage object. I also draw on anthropological discussions of neighborhoods and public spaces in Latin American cities as symbolically and racially coded. Particularly important is Low’s (2000:35) discussion of the Latin American Plaza as a center of symbolic and civic power. Yet the assemblage perspective I use here seeks to reintegrate her different levels of analysis (macro-level factors that physically create material settings, and micro-level factors that impose cultural meanings on them) by replacing a structural explanation with one that emphasizes actor networks.5 In addition, I draw on theorists such as Fernandez (2010), Berg (2005), Hill (2007, 2011), and Hearn (2008) who emphasize the complex nature of Cuban neighborhoods in Havana’s former colonial urban core as racial formations, and the uses of heritage to “whiten” the city by silencing the historic role of actors such as urban slaves. In sum, an assemblage perspective highlights the way in which sites like the Plaza Vieja possess the ability to be assembled in new ways through the intertwining of a network of differently scaled 1240 MATTHEW J. HILL (heritage) actors like UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, international heritage NGOs, national-level planning and conservation bodies, and local government functionaries in conjunction with preservation technologies, legal frameworks, and the buildings and environment of the Plaza itself. In analyzing urban spaces like the Plaza Vieja, I move beyond viewing such sites as organic wholes, or over-emphasizing the agency of single human actors and discourses, while highlighting the combined roles of human and non-human actors in transforming lived space into a heritage object. From a New to an Old to a New Old Plaza The Plaza Vieja is a unique site to examine processes of assembling and reassembling due its dynamically changing character. The shifts in the Plaza’s symbolic role and material form derive from the fact that it served as a multi-faceted civil, commercial, and residential center. This stands in contrast to the singular identity that characterized Old Havana’s other main plazas with their more distinct political, military, or religious buildings and uses. Such traditional functions gave these other plazas a more monumental significance and made them the objects of earlier historic conservation efforts that began in the 1920s and 1930s (Rigol Savio and Rojas 2012). The lack of official institutions in the more residential Plaza Vieja contributed to a continuous process of destruction, alteration, and repair based on shifting architectural fashions, building techniques, investment cycles, and local politics. In what follows, I briefly chart the Plaza’s metamorphosis from an elite residential square and civic center to a marginal, and largely forgotten, working-class residential area. At the same time, I show how restoring the Plaza to its colonial, or early 19th century form, required overcoming the increasing physical and architectural heterogeneity that characterized the Plaza as a built environment at the turn of the 21st century. The Plaza Vieja began as a zone of residential expansion beyond the original town center (the Plaza de las Armas, which possessed military and government functions) located five blocks to the north. In its original incarnation, it consisted of a swampy area with crude single-story houses made of boards and guano that later gave way to better homes constructed out of clay with tiled roofs. In spite of these humble beginnings, the Plaza Nueva or New Plaza (1559–1632), as it was originally called, eventually served as an elite residential area for governing officials, commercial 1241 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba elites, ship owners, and military officers. By decree of the Town Council, this elite area was complemented by important market and ceremonial uses, such as bull fights, public executions, the proclamation of kings, and religious processions, which couldn’t be celebrated in the nearby Plaza de las Armas due to its predominantly military role (Venegas Fornias 1983, 1987; Venegas and Peraza 1981). In its second period of development, the Plaza became the most important square in the city, and was renamed the Plaza Principal or Main Plaza (1632–1772). During this period, the town council raised public monies for the leveling and draining of the Plaza, and the collection of garbage left by vendors of meat and produce. In 1708, the government also erected a small decorative fountain in the center of the Plaza to provide water for the market and its residents, and to serve as an ornamental feature during public celebrations. But the most significant transformation to the Plaza came about with the construction of portales (columned archways) and loggias (covered balconies) off the front of the pre-existing residences, as well as the increasing use of ornamentation and the addition of second levels. While the loggias were reserved by their aristocratic owners for observing public events, the portales in front of the building were occupied by itinerant merchants of quincallerías (trinkets). The ground floor, in contrast, was used for warehouses and quarters for domestic slaves (Peraza and Venegas 1981:90–108). A lithograph entitled “A View of the Market Place in the City of Havana” (1762), by the English traveler artist Elias Durnford, depicts the hierarchical ordering of the Plaza during this period through an idyllic rendering of the square shortly after the British invasion of Havana. In the foreground of the image, members of the native aristocracy engage in a variety of social and commercial activities, while a company of British troops conducts a military exercise in the background. The only hint of the Plaza’s association with slavery appears in the form of two women servants who blend quietly into the local scenery; one is carrying a basket on her head, while the other retrieves water from a small, circular fountain in the square. As the art historian Adelaida de Juan notes, the slaves appear merely as “picturesque elements,” part of the “local color,” in keeping with the colonial ideology that viewed them as leading a happy and carefree existence (de Juan 1980:23, 46). Sixty years later, during the third period of the Plaza’s development (1772–1900), as its name alternated between Fernando VII and Plaza de 1242 HTTPS://WWW.LOC.GOV/RESOURCE/PGA.03671/ MATTHEW J. HILL Figure 1: Elias Durnford, A View of the Market Place in the City of Havana, 1762. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. la Constitución, the French artist Hippolyte Garneray’s lithograph, “View of the Plaza Vieja” (1824), presented a very different image of it—what urban historian Guadelupe Garcia refers to as a “cauldron of social and racial mixing” (2006:56). Garneray portrays the Plaza as a well-kept square surrounded by the enlarged and more ostentatious palaces of the colonial elite, with a much larger fountain than the earlier one portrayed by Durnford. In folkloric and satiric fashion, he depicts the animation of the Cristina market unfolding in its midst, with representatives of different social classes—the elegant caballero (gentleman), priest, soldier, peasant, and urban slave—recognizable by their distinctive forms of dress (Sarmiento Ramírez 2002:231). From the balconies of the colonial residences, women in traditional mantillas (a silk or lace head scarf) look down on the Plaza below, while the elegantly dressed caballeros congregate in front of the market’s casillas (wooden huts) where the market vendors, i.e., blacks and rural peasants, sell an assorted variety of fruits, vegetables, and meats. Garneray’s lithograph depicts the beginning of the reversal of the hierarchical ordering of the square from a Spanish, colonial, elite space into one dominated by lower-class habaneros (native residents of Havana), and a growing sense of disorder that troubled colonial officials. The Spanish military governor Miguel Tacón (1834–1838), subsequently addressed this disorder and the Plaza’s unhygienic conditions by reconstructing the 1243 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba Figure 2: Hippolyte Jean Baptiste Garneray, Vista de la Plaza Vieja o Mercado Principal de La Habana, 1824. In Pintura Española y Cubana y Litografías y Grabados Cubanos Del Siglo XIX: Colección Del Museo Nacional de La Habana. La Habana: Ministerio de Cultura, Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1983. Cristina Market (1836)—replacing its wooden structures with a rectangular masonry building with arcades and galleries that almost completely filled the surface of the square. While the enclosed market improved its hygiene and “decorum,” it resulted in the loss of the Plaza’s recreational and civic functions. This contributed to the increasing isolation of the upper classes, who enclosed their covered balconies with Persian blinds and decorative, fan-shaped windows. Eventually, it also contributed to the flight of the elite beyond the boundaries of the walled city. During this period, then, the Spanish colonial administration attempted to separate Habana extramuros (the portion of Old Havana located outside of the Old City’s defensive walls) as a space for colonial elites, while Habana intramuros (the area inside the defensive walls), including the Plaza Vieja with its colorful markets, was increasingly given over to lower-class habaneros (Peraza and Venegas 1981, Garcia 2006; cf. Hazard 1873:87–90) The gradual demolition of the city walls (beginning in 1863), and the flight of the bourgeoisie to the extramuros Republican Center (the Prado) and the Western suburbs of Vedado and Miramar coincided with the distinction between the old and new cities, and the renaming of the Plaza as the Plaza Vieja (1900–1996). During this period, the demolition of the Cristina Market and its replacement by a Republican era park (Juan Bruno 1244 MATTHEW J. HILL Figure 3: Laureano Cuevas, Mercado de Cristina, 1841. Habana. Litografia de la serie Paseo Pintoresco por la Isla de Cuba. Imprenta de Soler y Comp. Zayas Park, 1906–1952) with grass and trees, once again transformed the character of the Plaza. In addition, private investors tore down three of the original colonial buildings to make way for a five-story eclectic office building with a lookout tower (the Gomez Mena), an art nouveau hotel with an immense clock tower (the Palacio Cueto), and a smaller building that was used for offices. In the 1940s, developers demolished two more colonial structures to construct an apartment building and a cinema in a more subdued neo-classical style. As with other post-colonial Latin American societies, architects used such neo-classical architecture to emulate the ideals of the French Enlightenment with its ideological emphasis on bourgeois civil society and secular education. In doing so, they intentionally distanced themselves from baroque architecture, which symbolized the unity of church and state under the Spanish colonial regime (Bethell 1985:806). During a final phase of construction, in which the Plaza was renamed Parque Habana or Havana Park (1952–1996), the Republican era government undertook the most dramatic and controversial change to the Plaza. In order to accommodate the large North American autos circulating through the narrow streets of Old Havana, they raised the height of the park several feet and built an underground parking structure. On its roof they placed an open-air concrete amphitheater. Other fragmenting elements included the deterioration of the remaining colonial palaces. The revolution’s nationalization of small businesses (1968) further accelerated this process by eliminating ground floor retail shops and encouraging their conversion into housing units or warehouses. During this period, the lack 1245 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba of resources invested in building maintenance, illegal construction, migration to the city, and a growing population brought further subdivision, deterioration, and overcrowding to the precipitously declining solares in the Plaza. Figure 4: Parque Havana or Havana Park, 1952. Archives of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana. In short, this brief history demonstrates that the Plaza was a dynamic, lived space, whose urban form, materials, and practices continuously fluctuated in response to social, political, and economic changes. The most important shift in the 19th and early 20th century involved the transformation of the Plaza from an elite, civic center to a marginal, working-class square, and from a Spanish colonial era plaza to a heterogenous Republican era park. This coincided with the introduction of several incompatible architectural features including an eclectic office tower and art nouveau hotel, neo-classical apartment buildings, and the modernist underground parking structure and amphitheater. During the socialist period, the nationalization and further subdivision of the mansions of the former bourgeoisie, and their transformation into government-owned, tenement housing and industrial workshops meant that it was indistinguishable from many other parts of Havana. This history highlights the fact that the Plaza Vieja was not a stable unified object but rather an assemblage of bodies, materials, technologies, and spaces that were continuously combined in new 1246 MATTHEW J. HILL ways over the course of its 450-year history (Edensor 2011, Farías 2010a). These combinations, in turn, were organized in such a way that they structured and hierarchized urban life in unequal ways—as evinced by the 18th century loggias which separated elite women from the market activity in the square (McFarlane 2011). Yet the potential of urban assemblages to be reorganized also resulted at times in the overthrow of these hierarchies, as in the case of the urban slaves who transformed the public space of the Plaza Vieja into a colorful market and an arena of social and racial mixing. The Soviet Era Reassemblage of the Plaza (1976–1992)6 The first attempt to transform the Plaza into a heritage object began in the late 1970s. During this stage, the Plaza’s restoration took place largely through the agency of an urban conservation plan that created a nostalgic vision of the Plaza as a 19th century square. This plan was developed in the wake of the failure of the ten-million-ton sugar harvest (1970), which spurred the government to search for new sources of national unity and pride in continuity with its past (cf. Tanaka 2012:27). It subsequently passed the first heritage protection laws (Nos. 1 and 2) in 1977 and established a registry of national landmarks and guidelines for their conservation and safeguarding (Comisión 1984:8,18; Fornet Gil 1997). One year later, Cuba’s National Monuments Commission passed Resolution No. 3, designating Habana intramuros to be part of the “Cultural Patrimony of the Nation,” while the Departamento de Monumentos (Department of Monuments), a division of the Dirección de Patrimonio Cultural (Office of Cultural Patrimony) of the Ministerio de Cultura (Ministry of Culture), undertook its first comprehensive study of the intramuros District and drafted a set of proposals for its restoration (Departamento de Monumentos 1981, Rigol Savio 1994, Capablanca 1983a:6, Arjona 1986:104). These actions reinforced a nationalist trend, in which the Revolution appropriated the low-rise Spanish architecture of Old Havana as a symbol of Cuba’s “authentic” roots that stood in contrast to the North American high-rise architecture and California style beach houses of the much maligned Republican period (Rodríguez Falcón 2009). The reassemblage of the Plaza Vieja as an early 19th century square was not the outcome of a simple process of invention or a policy decision made by an individual or single institutional actor (cf. MacDonald 2009). Rather, it amounted to a technological project in which several 1247 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba local, national, and global heritage organizations and individuals with heterogeneous interests and competing visions combined with an array of nonhuman factors (material, legal, symbolic). One of these actors was the Instituto de Planificación Física (IPF), a dependency of the Ministerio de Economía y Planificación (Ministry of the Economy and Planning), responsible for incorporating a geographic dimension into the centralized planning priorities of the socialist state at the regional and urban levels (cf. Morales 1981:6). It advocated an “urban renewal” approach to the historic city, undertaking a clareo (clearing or demolition) of vacant parcels and partially collapsed buildings on degraded city blocks to create room for green areas and new constructions that would blend harmoniously with the traditional urban fabric (cf. González Couret 2015:95).7 Through such “restructuring,” the IPF hoped to expand the amount of “open space” in the densely settled historic center, while inserting new constructions that maintained the continuity of the existing facades. It proposed one such project, known as “el proyecto de manzana 98,” for the northwest corner of the Plaza Vieja (Fornet Gil 2011:305, Plan Maestro 2008:8).8 This approach was also motivated by IPF’s tacit view that, as one planner put it, Old Havana was “overcrowded” and filled with “problematic people” and that there was a need to remove people in order to create a better ambito (atmosphere).9 In sum, the IPF’s urban renewal orientation combined the socialist mandate of social development through new collective housing, with the imperative to restore the historic environment. It developed this conservation approach in the 1980s as an alternative to its prior focus on constructing alienating Soviet-style housing blocs on the urban periphery in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. González Couret 2015). In contrast to this urban renewal orientation, the Departamento de Monumentos took a strictly historicist and conservation-based approach to the built environment, seeking to avoid radical changes to the image of the traditional city and the social fabric that had emerged within it. It focused on the restoration of exceptional monumental structures in the old city for cultural uses, like museums. These included large buildings such as the former palaces of the colonial governor and vice-governor (Palacios de los Capitanes Generales and Segundo Cabo), a military fortress (Fuerza Real), and a monument to the founding of the city (El Templete). In 1980, the Departamento de Monumentos carried out its first restoration in the Plaza Vieja, the Casa de los Condes de Jaruco (ca. 1737), the house of a former plantation owner. The miraculous survival of the building after 100 1248 MATTHEW J. HILL years of neglect, and its symbolic value as an exemplar of Cuban baroque colonial architecture, shaped the Departamento’s decision to make it the first building they would restore. Through temporalizing procedures, such as the reconstruction of the building’s original archways, balconies, and tiled roof, and the rebuilding and subsequent “antiquing” of part of its façade, which had been marred by an illegal cinder block construction, Departamento architects recreated a 19th century image of the building— though not without accusations of it being a “false patrimony” (Galeano Mastrángelo and Fornet Gil 1998:35). Such model restoration projects played an important role in the state’s attempt to create a sense of national unity during a period of instability, while also distancing itself from the hierarchical social relations that characterized Cuba as a plantation society (cf. Tanaka 2012:52). Once completed, the building served as an important reference point for the subsequent restorations in the Plaza (Plan Maestro 2008:7).10 In contrast to the IPF and the Departamento de Monumentos, a group of young architects from a third entity, the Centro Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museología (National Center for Conservation, Restoration, and Museology or CENCREM)—Cuba’s first conservation school created in 1981 in a former convent with funds from the UNDP and UNESCO— developed an “integrated” conservation plan for the entirety of the Plaza Vieja that gradually “gained in existence” as the dominant model for how restoration should take place in Havana’s historic center on a larger, urban scale (Capablanca 1985; cf. Latour 1996:48). CENCREM’s vision merged the traditional conservation interests of the Departamento de Monumentos and the urban “renewal” concerns of the IPF. It did this by showing how historic preservation could serve the dual purposes of “restoring” historic buildings while also addressing social needs with new housing, and in the case of partial ruins, combining restoration with new construction, rather than demolishing and clearing, to create what it deemed to be both a socially beneficial and traditionally restored image of the city.11 In keeping with this approach, coined desarrollo integral (integral development), CENCREM developed a restoration plan that encompassed each of the 20 buildings bordering the Plaza, including tenements and partial ruins, and the public space of the Plaza itself. In describing this plan, one CENCREM planner differentiated it from the conservation approach of entities like the Departamento de Monumentos and the Oficina del Historiador. These 1249 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba entities were guided by what she called “cultural criteria” alone, meaning that they did not have a clearly articulated social agenda: [W]hat they recuperated was for a cultural destination, the cultural function of the territory. In addition, they were houses of great significance (mucha envergadura), highly important. In contrast to this, CENCREM was linked closely to the concerns of UNESCO, its Congresses, and the [new] theorization about these things. It defended integrated development, the importance of housing, of not emptying the historic center.12 CENCREM architects embodied this philosophy by proposing to restore and reconstruct the partially collapsed and badly dilapidated solares, for use as viviendas sociales (social housing) or state-subsidized housing. They thereby carried out an integrated form of restoration that would “solve the housing problem” in the Plaza and “insure the permanence of its resident population” while also returning the historic character of the Plaza through conservation (Plan Maestro 2008:8; cf. Rigol 1994). This emphasis on conservation contrasted with steps residents had taken to improve their housing situation independently of the centralized state. A focus on one of the Plaza’s largest solares, known pejoratively as the ratonera (rat trap) illustrates the “participatory” forms of urbanism that residents engaged in to meet their needs (Schwenkel 2014). Their activities typically meant paying off building inspectors, already in short supply, or working behind the scenes with scarce materials at hand. For instance, residents walled off rooms for kitchens, and installed water pipes, and in some cases even sewers, along the building’s interior walls for private toilets, ultimately connecting plumbing fixtures to the building’s downspouts. Taking advantage of the 14-foot-high ceilings, they built loft-style mezzanines known as barbacoas (literally “ovens”) for use as sleeping quarters. As families grew, or couples divorced, and the state failed to provide promised replacement housing, they divided one-room apartments with cement partitions, walled in columned archways, and constructed stairways, while also erecting additional apartments on the building’s rooftop. After a fire ignited in a ground floor warehouse, destroying several apartments, displaced residents built two rows of single-room replacement housing in the inner courtyard out of cement blocks and tin 1250 MATTHEW J. HILL roofs. Residents in the front of the building, with a view of the Plaza, used the former loggias for hanging laundry, and raising chickens. In order to address such substandard housing conditions, CENCREM planners hoped to align historic restoration with “adequate” social housing known as viviendas adecuadas, replete with private kitchens, bathrooms, living areas, and bedrooms (Capablanca 1985; cf. Collado et al. 1998:25, 35). In addition to social housing, they sought to replace ground floor industrial uses with cultural, gastronomic, and commercial ones, potentially creating a hotel in the former Palacio Cueto, and reanimating the Plaza with cultural events (theater and dance groups) and an artisanal market (Capablanca 1985:78). In other words, they hoped to use historic restoration to improve not only the quality of the housing, but to add cultural amenities in the Plaza for local residents and potentially a few tourists. The CENCREM plan also called for the conservation of an “urban ambience” that characterized the Plaza’s early 19th century form. The plan sought to recover the original fan-shaped windows and carpentry in the ground floor arcades, as well as the restoration of the original balconies, ironwork, and tile roofs; eliminate contemporary modifications and additions that constituted “deteriorating elements”; carry out, where possible, new constructions; recover the original area of the square, eliminating the underground parking structure, and replacing it with cobblestone pavement; and promote pedestrian activity in the Plaza, linking it to San Ignacio and Mercaderes, Old Havana’s future commercial streets (Capablanca 1985:79). What such growing regulation of “color, form and ornament” (Herzfeld 1991) points to is an attempt to overcome the “progressive disarticulation” of the Plaza as it evolved over time, replacing it with a uniform idea of the colonial city as a “governing norm” (Geertz 1989:293).13 Yet in spite of its seeming unity, the plan acted as a vehicle to recruit a variety of different planning entities that were not in themselves united, as well as actors from the municipal government, the socialist state, and UNESCO (which launched an international donor campaign to raise funds to help save the Plaza Vieja). The plan then created a new actor network that involved multiple institutional actors, urban forms, and processes that gained in existence over time, but not before suffering several setbacks. These setbacks in turn became moments in which the actor network was reconfigured, leading to new iterations of the Plaza project, which 1251 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba gradually gained acceptance, until its inscription and objectification as a 19th century square was realized. An assemblage approach, then, focuses on the acts of recruitment and modification that are required to make the entities that participate in an assemblage like the Plaza Vieja act as a “durable whole,” attending to the role of human as well as nonhuman actors like CENCREM’s conservation plan in stabilizing the Plaza assemblage (cf. Latour 2005:72). Upon completion of the restorations of the three partially collapsed buildings, CENCREM architects hoped to use them to house residents from the other solares in the Plaza so that they could restore the remaining structures. However, because they weren’t in charge of assigning replacement housing units—the responsibility of the municipal government’s Oficina de Vivienda (Office of Housing)—the units were ultimately given to residents displaced by historic restorations taking place in Old Havana’s other main Plazas (the Plaza de la Catedral and Plaza de las Armas) and the Parque Central. Therefore, there was no way to move residents out of the remaining buildings so that they could be restored. Moreover, CENCREM suddenly found itself short on funding because of meager returns from UNESCO’s international campaign, and because it did not have control of finances for the project which were funneled through the municipal government.14 With respect to the most controversial feature in the Plaza Vieja project, the underground parking structure, disagreements arose over what should replace it, further impeding its completion. Opinions were divided between those who proposed repurposing its underground space for cultural uses (e.g., a discotheque or video room), and those who wished to eliminate it altogether (Rigol Savio 1994:128). Among the latter, there were further debates about what time period to restore the Plaza to, whether to place a fountain in the center of it, what type of fountain to use (since historical records suggested various fountains in different epochs), and where to locate it. Commenting on this debate, one CENCREM professional, who had championed the reuse of the existing parking garage, said that “it was a structure that was very well constructed, so they didn’t want to return the Plaza to the way it was before the garage was built.” She went on to refer to such a reconstruction of a colonial Plaza as a form of “mannerism,” referencing its artificial character.15 Another CENCREM planner questioned the “valor patrimonial” of this reproduction, since it would be a 1252 MATTHEW J. HILL “copy of a copy,” mimetically reproducing one imagined in the first place by a traveler artist (Galeano Mastrángelo and Fornet Gil 1998:35). In addition to these disagreements, the underground parking structure itself presented further constraints keeping the project from gaining ground. In the end, its physical size, weight, and complex network of underground cables and pipes, together with limited funds generated by the UNESCO campaign, undermined CENCREM’s plans for its wholesale leveling and “pedestrianization.” After numerous debates and international design competitions,16 CENCREM planners, in concert with the municipal government, ultimately decided to eliminate a small cornice at the entrance to the parking structure, redesigning its lampposts, and inserting trees around its perimeter, in an attempt to “attenuate” the contradictory effects that it had in a patrimonial area (Melero Lazo 2011:42–43). Describing the rationale for this intervention, one CENCREM architect noted: “The underground parking structure, built in 1952, created a confusion de percepción en el etorno [a perceptual confusion in the area]…The idea was simply to rid the park of offending elements, so that a minimum amount of money could be expended, and to solve the problems of the buildings first.”17 The Plaza project broke down, in other words, because there were too many overlapping actors and lines of authority for its ultimate realization (Ramón Moreno 1988:5). The breakdown demonstrates how technological restoration projects can undergo progressions and reversals in the process of gaining solidity (Latour 1996:85). In the end, the Plaza project did not become a stabilized heritage object because it failed to link enough actants together to allow it to flourish as a dynamic space for residents and a few tourists (Harman 2009:49). On the one hand, the project did align a number of allies into a stable whole by restoring the oldest buildings in the Plaza (the Casa de los Condes the Jaruco and the old Philharmonic building, the Casa de los Hermanas Cardenas), reconstructing the partially collapsed buildings for use as social housing, and attenuating the most objectionable features of the parking structure. Yet, on the other hand, the sheer size and unwieldiness of the parking structure as well as disagreements over whether to repurpose or replace it, the lack of replacement housing for the residents of the Plaza’s solares, and the failure of the UNESCO international fundraising campaign threatened to return the Plaza project to the level of “signs, language, [and] texts” (Latour 1996:24). 1253 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba Throughout the 1980s, then, in spite of some initial renovations, the Plaza restoration project remained largely at the virtual level of plans. While the CENCREM preservation plan produced what one historian called “a consciousness that the Plaza was something historical” and thus an important part of the “patrimonio of the city,” the network of institutional actors, ideas, and materiality enrolled in this project were not sufficiently aligned to fully transform the Plaza into a heritage object.18 Moreover, a 1982 speech by UNESCO’s Director General, Amadou-Mahtar M‘Bow, added another layer of complexity by repositioning the Plaza within an international set of sites and meanings. The speech conferred a sense of uniqueness on the Plaza project by highlighting not its domestic historical evolution, but its outstanding universal value as global heritage. In his words, the Plaza had historically served as a “unique meeting spot in Latin America” and one of the “most representative architectural works” in the Antilles that evolved from the “synthesis of European, African, and AmerIndian cultures” (Rigol Savio and González 1983:7). M’Bow went on to note that UNESCO’s influence added a cosmopolitan argument for the restoration of the Plaza as part of a global network of World Heritage sites and a critical link in the “impeccable historic journey” of the development of the Americas, and the common legacy of all of humanity (1983:7). Yet UNESCO’s global claims failed to sufficiently align with the international donors, tourists, planning agencies, urban forms, Plaza residents, decaying architecture, and the unwieldy infrastructure of the parking garage to stabilize the Plaza as an early 19th century colonial square. As a result, the Plaza reassemblage fell short of the CENCREM plan’s goal “to improve the living conditions of the local population” by reducing the density and crowding in the Plaza’s solares (Cuba 1983:6–7). Instead, the construction of new housing units in the three partially collapsed buildings ultimately compounded the problem of crowding in the Plaza by introducing scores of new residents displaced by restorations taking place in other parts of Old Havana.19 The Post-Soviet Reassemblage of the Plaza Vieja (1993–2014) What seemed like the definitive end to the Plaza Vieja restoration project came about in 1993 when an important 18th century merchant’s house collapsed while awaiting restoration. The implosion, which took place in front of a British journalist and leading conservationist, resulted from 1254 MATTHEW J. HILL a shortage of funding for restoration work in the Old City, a product of the demise of socialism in the former Soviet Union. While the building’s collapse, a product of heavy rains and vandalism, signaled the end of the initial CENCREM Plaza project, it didn’t result in its complete failure. Rather, it became the occasion for the project’s reconfiguration in a new institutional, technological, and material guise. This confirms Latour’s point that technological projects can drift in ways that lack a clear starting point and trajectory (1996:91). At moments they speed up, and then shift direction when actors back out, compete, or lose interest. The temporality of such projects proceeds not on linear calendar time, but through the “chain of permissions and refusals, alliances and losses” that can halt a project for an indefinite length of time, and suddenly cause it to accelerate (Latour 1996:88). Ironically, the reversal occasioned by the collapse of the Colegio Santo Angel also catalyzed an important institutional reconfiguration which helped to resuscitate the Plaza project by giving rise to a new actor network. The Colegio’s collapse reverberated to the highest levels of the Cuban government, which in response, passed Decree Law 143 (1993), creating a new legal structure and administrative model for heritage restoration in Old Havana. Under this new heritage regime, responsibility for the reassemblage of Old Havana, and the Plaza Vieja, shifted to the reconfigured Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana (OHCH). In other words, Decree 143 transformed the OHCH from a local cultural institution, subordinated to the provincial government, to an entrepreneurial sub-state heritage agency, answerable directly to the highest level of government— the Consejo de Estado (Cuban Council of State). Together with Decree 2951 (1995), which designated Old Havana as a zona de alta significación para el turismo (Zone of High Significance for Tourism), Decree 143 gave the OHCH the unprecedented ability to plan, administer, and self-finance the restoration of Old Havana independently. In short, it created, for the first time in this post-Soviet socialist context, an autonomous branch of government charged with generating revenues to reinvest in redeveloping Old Havana. It was both a state-owned business entity and a branch of government focused on historic restoration, tourism, planning, zoning, taxation, infrastructure development, and social housing. In keeping with these new entrepreneurial and governance capacities, the OHCH set up a pair of commercial arms to operate hotels and restaurants and lease commercial office space. The first of these was 1255 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba the tourism company, Habaguanex (1994), which over the course of the next decade would establish a profitable network of 15 hotels and more than 100 restaurants, bars and shops, and over 30 museums, concert halls, and art galleries, generating over $100 million USD annually in gross income (Fornet Gil 2011:308). The second was the commercial real estate company, Fenix, which rented office space in restored buildings to foreign enterprises interested in setting up shop in the old city. While these new economic actors were not private, they operated in order to generate profits and exploit the buildings and public space of the Plaza Vieja for commercial uses (Plan Maestro 2008). In addition to these commercial actors, the OHCH also established an office known as the Plan Maestro para la Revitalización Integral de La Habana Vieja (Office of the Master Plan for the Integral Revitalization of Old Havana), an entity charged with undertaking the planning and urban administration of the entire prioritized conservation district, including the approval of proposed new uses of buildings and issuing construction licenses. Building on rights conferred by Decree 2951, which granted it the powers of eminent domain, the OHCH also established its own housing office, superseding the municipal government’s Oficina de Vivienda. This enabled it to reassign housing units to Old Havana residents independently, and relocate Plaza Vieja residents to new replacement housing units that it constructed on the city’s outskirts.20 This post-Soviet institutional assemblage more effectively translated the interests of a broader range of local, national, and international actors than its Soviet era counterpart, allowing the Plaza project to evolve, while also transforming it based on the respective interests of those actors. They included Habaguanex functionaries, who sought a more commercial focus of the restoration project in return for their investment; former CENCREM professionals, who, once recruited into the ranks of the OHCH’s office of the Plan Maestro, continued to press for an “integrated” conservation plan that combined social housing with new forms of economic development; the city historian, Eusebio Leal, and the OHCH, which pursued a historicist and colonial image of the Plaza21; the socialist state, which, turning to tourism as the main source of national revenue, sought to increase its international stature and percentage of profits from the OHCH projects; and finally, a host of international donors, brokered by the UNDP, which placed certain “conditions” on the projects in exchange for their contributions. This actor network transformed the original CENCREM 1256 MATTHEW J. HILL vision, which focused on historic preservation and social housing alone, to one anchored in commercial retail and international tourism development. The project became a heritage object precisely through these many “recruitments, displacements and transformations” that came together in order to preserve the Plaza as a historic square, restoring while also radically changing it (Latour 1996:119). The most significant of these transformations was the wholesale removal of the underground parking structure. The city historian, Eusebio Leal, was an important actor in making the decision to demolish the structure, in keeping with his role as a person who uses history, as one historian put it, to “motivate people to action.”22 This motivational quality is evinced in the poetic overtones with which Leal spoke of the demolition: [T]he demolition of the parking structure in the Plaza Vieja was the most difficult and complicated challenge that I’ve had to face. It was a construction that couldn’t be integrated with the concept of a public Plaza. The construction of that parking structure was an act of vandalism (acto vandálico), a shady deal (negocio turbio) in its time. I assisted in accumulating these 235,000 tons of rubble, and consider this decision a victory of justice and beauty. (Guerra 1999:4) Based on the aesthetic criteria that privileged the colonial over the contemporary city, Leal viewed the decision to remove the structure as an act of “justice.” However, many residents held a contrary view, and thought that removing the parking lot was itself a form of injustice. They were particularly concerned with the proposal to level the structure with dynamite because of the risk it posed to their already precarious tenement units. In one resident’s words: “If your house collapses, the only thing that they have to say to you is, ‘Sorry, but you’re screwed [jodido]!’, because there are thousands of people who are living here in [emergency] shelters.” He went on to note that: “Even though our units aren’t worth much, one desires to hold onto them, because the other option is to possess nothing.” This concern sent Plaza residents en masse to the Communist Party to protest the action. As a concession to residents, the OHCH opted to remove the massive structure with jackhammers, a noisy, dusty process that would take two years to complete. Leal and the OHCH then created a uniform colonial vision of the Plaza—resurfacing its single level with polished cobblestones, 1257 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba MATTHEW J. HILL and installing a large Carrera marble fountain in its center. OHCH planners surrounded the fountain with a heavy metal fence—a controversial decision because it limited public access, giving rise to tensions between the OHCH, Habaguanex, and tourists, on the one hand, and the residents who resided in the Plaza’s solares, on the other. These tensions with residents created a heightened sense of “us” (the people) versus “them” (the office as the representative of the new party state) (cf. Gal and Kligman 2000:51). Solar residents of color, in particular, complained about being stopped more frequently and asked to show their identification cards. This amounted to a new type of racial profiling and a feeling of being under 24hour surveillance. As the project costs grew, so did the stakes in maintaining it among a broader network of mediators who spoke in the name of history, planning, and profits. This illustrates Latour’s point that as a technological project gains solidity, it has to line up more and more human and non-human actors, growing in scale as it recruits actors who further aggregate additional resources (1996:127). This allowed the network of actors to consolidate its own form of power which in turn led to distinct forms of exclusion. To further protect its investments, the OHCH installed a police Figure 5: Restored Plaza Vieja, 1998. 1258 MATTHEW J. HILL station in the ground floor of a former printing shop, halting the perceived threat of purse snatchings and other petty crimes against unsuspecting tourists, presumably from the Plaza’s residents and those of other solares in the vicinity. The incorporation of the Plaza Vieja into Old Havana’s other main plazas (Catedral, Armas, and San Francisco) as part of a tourist itinerary that became known as the kilometro de oro (gold kilometer) further attracted new actors and sources of investment capital. Once the center of the Plaza was restored, Habaguanex, in conjunction with the historicist orientation of the OHCH, increasingly appropriated other unused or underutilized spaces in the Plaza, as the focus of the restoration shifted to buildings with the most commercial potential. In the case of the collapsed Colegio Santo Angel, where planners disagreed over whether to create a historicist reconstruction or a modern structure, the OHCH and Habaguanex decided to reconstruct a replica of the original from the ground up, turning the building into an apartment hotel and restaurant.23 Similarly, they created a new copy of the original Cafe Taberna that once served as Old Havana’s first coffee shop, converting it into a restaurant and bar and anchor for the main tourist entrance to the Plaza. The commercialization of the Plaza further exacerbated social exclusion, since only tourists and (primarily “white”) Cubans with access to dollars, could take advantage of sidewalk seating at the Plaza’s new restaurants and bars. There was also an unwritten rule against riding bicycles or playing pick-up games of baseball, which created resentment among youth given the paucity of other recreational spaces in the area. The historicist reconstruction of the Plaza, together with the Colegio and Café Taberna, played an important role in recruiting several other new international actors into the Plaza assemblage by the early 2000s—accommodating their interests as well within this evolving heritage object. Decisive in this regard was the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which selected Old Havana as one of three pilot areas in Cuba for the implementation of its ART Global Initiative. ART (re)introduced “sustainable human development” at the local level by facilitating coordinated action between local government actors and “international cooperation actors” in order to strengthen territorial development processes (Biggeri and Ferrannini 2014:90). Known as the Programa de Desarrollo Humano Local (Local Human Development Program) or PDHL, the UNDP’s ART initiative brought in multilateral matching funds that amounted to over 1259 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba $650,000 USD for the redevelopment of Old Havana, leading the OHCH to establish a new Office of International Cooperation (Hearn 2004). This office then brokered UNDP funding from a number of international donor nations for several high profile social and cultural development projects in the Plaza’s solares. Yet, these promising development projects had social costs insofar as they resulted in the displacement of many residents who were required to move to newly constructed replacement housing on the outskirts of Havana. They also generated debates around who ultimately had the right to reside in the Plaza. A letter from the OHCH’s Office of Housing to Amara, a long-term solar resident that the OHCH had earmarked for relocation to the East Havana suburb of Alamar, highlights the extent to which solar residents being displaced began to be seen as “troublemakers” by preservation planners. The letter insinuated that Amara was casting the government’s efforts to improve her housing as an “expulsion.” It also suggested that she was using the relocation as a pretext for requesting an extra apartment for her son and daughter-in-law, who, like many young couples, had been struggling for years to find an independent living space so that they could begin their own family. In resisting such displacement, she and other residents pointed to their many years of residence in the Plaza, and the distance of the OHCH’s replacement housing (in Alamar) from the city center, which disrupted their social connections and was inconvenient to their places of employment. One resident commented: “I don’t see how they can talk about social development, when all they are doing is sending people over there [to Alamar].” In the end, nearly two-thirds of the Plaza’s 650 residents were relocated, while most of the prized replacement housing within the restored Plaza was assigned to “less conflictive” residents hand-picked by the OHCH’s Office of Housing (cf. Fornet Gil 2011:309). Not only was there a new consolidation of power spearheaded by the OHCH, which emerged out of its commercial ventures and governing functions, but by linking up with international interests, more money flowed into the Plaza and the emphasis on economic sustainability took the upper hand over keeping the previous residential community intact. Accommodation of the interests of these international actors resulted in a number of restorations that featured a curious blend of “historical” and cultural influences. For instance, in response to a request from the regional Belgian government of Wallonia, which provided funding for the restoration of Casa del Conde de Cañongo, one of the Plaza’s largest 1260 MATTHEW J. HILL solares, OHCH planners included a ground floor museum (the Casa de Valonia) promoting the Flemish workers of that region. They similarly included a Spanish playing card museum in another solar, at the behest of a Spanish architectural foundation. Another solar, restored with Austrian funding, was turned into a microbrewery, serving beer in large plastic “beer tubes,” while funds from the Junta de Andalucía (Autonomous Government of Andalucia) went to the restoration of the ratonera for use as “social housing,” in addition to a new clothing boutique and perfume shop on the ground floor. Habaguanex then decommissioned the police station and rented out the available space to a host of international retail chains including Benetton, Paco Valente, and Pepe Jeans.24 These and other projects, such as the conversion of a Republican era cinema into a planetarium at the behest of the Japanese government, shaped the Plaza restoration in keeping with a variety of external commercial interests. The mandate of the historical restoration was remade by the engagement with this eclectic assortment of actors and interests. Yet a series of “framing devices” helped reinforce a uniform vision of the Plaza as a colonial square (cf. Farías 2010b). They did so by offering a “ready-made” perspective, training the gaze of the viewer to see the Plaza as part of a “disciplined order of things” (Boyer 1994:253). For instance, the OHCH decorated the entrance to the Plaza with reproductions of the lithographs by Durnford and Garneray, depicting the Plaza in colonial times. They also installed a cámara oscura (a dark chamber with a pinhole and mirrors), donated by the Deputation of Cádiz, in the lookout of the Gomez Mena office tower. The latter gave tourists a panoptical view of the Plaza, while excluding views of the dilapidated tenements that lay just beyond its perimeter. Two archaeological sites in the northeast corner of the Plaza that display portions of the city’s original aqueduct (1592), the Zanja Real, offered additional support for the Plaza’s antiquity, together with a life-sized wood cutout (in the southwest corner) of a pair of soldiers playing fife and drum dressed in the red and yellow-gold of the Spanish colonial army. The OHCH further augmented the assemblage by hanging large blue and white banners between the columns of all of the restored buildings in the Plaza. The banners counterpoised grainy black and white “before” shots of the buildings in their unrestored state, and the names of their original aristocratic owners, with colorful “after” shots of their restored condition, and a brief description of their contemporary use, e.g., as an office building, coffee shop, or social housing. The before and after shots suggested 1261 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba the veracity and authenticity of the restoration, while the official logo of the OHCH underlined its role in the revolutionary process of rescuing the Plaza’s patrimony. Conclusion The benefits of an assemblage perspective are, first, that it captures the complex range of constantly shifting social and organizational actors at work in the Plaza Vieja, and their imbrication with a set of non-human actors (material, symbolic, legal), leading to distinct outcomes in the Soviet and post-Soviet socialist periods. The emphasis on “keeping the social flat” (i.e., placing human and nonhuman actors on the same level) shows how multiply intertwined organizational actors, in conjunction with the affordances of buildings and the materiality of public space, combine to produce a particular, and provisional, heritage assemblage, without attributing predominance to any one spatial scale, or privileging the “global” over the “local.” Moreover, an assemblage approach reveals how sites like the Plaza Vieja exist as provisional “projects” that can gain in solidity over time. Rather than see such sites as stable heritage objects, this approach shows how planning documents, like the CENCREM preservation plan, constitute “frameworks” in which diverse actors, interests, and events converge around collective fictions—like the idea of the Plaza Vieja as an early 19th century square (Latour 1996:18). The restoration plan played a role in realizing that vision by inscribing a particular image of the Plaza in the form of paper, texts, and speeches that circulated as material representations, enabling it to recruit new actors during the Soviet and post-Soviet socialist periods (McFarlane 2011:662). The realization of this project in the post-Soviet period, a moment in which the material substance of monumental historic buildings is called upon to help solidify the nation, sustains an updated revolutionary vision both ideologically and economically (cf. Frederik 2012). Finally, assemblage theory as utilized here shows how power operates as more than a discourse—it clearly has a material dimension, and thus must catch not only people, ideas, and institutions, but objects and things in its heterogeneous web in order to discipline and shape behavior. In order to understand how power operates through assemblages, the analyst must, as Latour notes, attend to the social links or practices of assembling 1262 MATTHEW J. HILL as they “weave their way through [seeming] non-social objects (cf. Latour 2005:83). This raises the important issue of the dynamism versus relative fixity of heritage assemblages. While assemblage theory emphasizes the distribution of agency through the vitalism, fluidity, and “élan” inherent in specific arrangements of things (Bennett 2005:461), there is also a tendency, clearly evident in the Plaza Vieja, for such arrangements to become “stabilized” or “fixed” at particular points in time. At these moments, the dynamism of assemblages have the capacity to morph into more stable Foucaultian apparatuses or “mechanisms of entrapment” with the capacity to turn living beings into subjects (Agamben 2009). Returning to the before and after shots of the buildings in the restored Plaza, three images stood out in particular because they were prominently displayed by the OHCH on a sign near the center of the Plaza. They graphically showed the successive phases of the destruction of the parking structure, beneath which were emblazoned the words, Plaza Vieja: Para No Olvidar (Plaza Vieja, In Order Not to Forget). Upon seeing the sign, one former resident commented ironically, “How can you not forget a plaza that never existed?” This clearly demonstrates that for some residents who have lived through the transformation, the remade Plaza Vieja might not be as totalizing as it might initially appear, and that other forms of remaking might yet emerge. ■ Endnotes: I use the term patrimony rather than heritage in this article because it conveys a strong sense of property handed down through the paternal line, and thus of patrilineal kinship that is missing from the English term heritage (see Ferry 2005:13ff). 1 Action in this respect is dislocated or distributed across a chain of actors that comprise the actor-network (Latour 2005:46). Latour uses the term “course of action” to refer to this distributed nature of action in which humans and nonhumans play a role. For Latour, any thing, whether human or nonhuman, that modifies a state of affairs is an actor (2005:71). 2 For another interesting application of assemblage theory relating to intangible heritage, see Bille (2012). Bille shows how what counts as Bedouin heritage in Jordan arises from a practice of assembly that includes not only those who perform heritage (i.e., various Bedouin tribes), but also the multiple institutional actors involved in assembling a whole series of incommensurable and heterogeneous representations and discourses through which this heritage is subsequently presented to international bodies like UNESCO and the general public (2012:108). 3 Brumann (2009, 2014), in contrast to many of these theorists, emphasizes a certain “agnosticism” with respect to the uses of heritage, challenging the idea that all heritage is ultimately about invention or practices of “falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, or enclosure” and encouraging an emic perspective to heritage. 4 In a subsequent article, Low (2011) problematizes the “two-dimensional structure” of her social production and social construction of space model, adding “embodied space” and “discursive practices” to her analysis of space and place. 5 1263 Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba The period of Soviet-style socialism in Cuba took place from 1959–1992. This included a period of centralization (~1965–1974) during which the state consolidated control over the means of production through agrarian reform laws and the nationalization of businesses; a period of decentralization (~1975– 1985) in which it introduced market features and some private enterprise into the state sector; and a period of rectification (~1985–1992) in which it reined in private markets while introducing joint venture agreements in pursuit of Western investment and management expertise. The period of post-Soviet socialism (1992–present) coincided with the development of further joint ventures, especially in tourism, the decriminalization of dollars, and the reintroduction of farmers markets and other forms of private enterprise (see Eckstein 1994). 6 This clareo approach represented a shift from an earlier project that the IPF carried out in Central Havana in the 1970s, where it tore down several blocks of traditional architecture in their entirety in order to construct a series of high-rise apartment blocs using pre-fabricated materials (Plan Maestro 2008:8, Gómez Díaz 2011:48). This 1970s project was subsequently criticized for the radical transformations that it made to the morphology and image of the traditional city (Plan Maestro 2008:8). 7 For a series of similar proposals, incorporated into the Departamento de Monumentos 1980s restoration plan for Old Havana, see Departamento de Monumentos 1981, Annex p. 5. 8 For more on this emphasis on replacing the “excess population” in Old Havana with cultural and tourist installations, see Grupo Asesor (1989:55). 9 As one architect who worked for the Departamento de Monumentos at the time noted: “This was the first project carried out on account of the fact that the Casa was an emblematic institution, of stately influence, and representative of the baroque architecture of the 18th century…The idea was to turn the Casa into a focus of cultural activities that could be projected out to the community, thereby helping to change the physiognomy of the Plaza Vieja” (Melero Lazo 2002). 10 I draw on Latour’s notion of translation here in arguing that technological projects must transform global problems, such as crowding in the city, through a series of local solutions like integrated historic preservation that attract entities like the IPF to become interested in the local solution. Such translations are important to generate interest in a project (Latour 1996:32–34, 118–120). 11 Personal interview with Madeline Menéndez and Alina Ochoa, May 29, 2016. Oficina del Plan Maestro. Habana Vieja, Cuba. 12 This is evident in a series of architectural renderings from the CENCREM plan that illustrate how to transform neoclassical facades into colonial surfaces through the introduction of Persian blinds and fanshaped windows (Capablanca 1983b:27, 31). 13 Upon completion of these projects, CENCREM architects worked on other more culturally oriented projects in the plaza. These included an 18th century merchant’s house (the Colegio Santo Angel), the 19th century home of the Cuban philharmonic society (the Casa de las Hermanas Cardenas), a Republican era cinema, and an old coffee shop (Melero Lazo 2011:37). 14 Personal interview, May 22, 2016. Oficina del Plan Maestro. Habana Vieja, Cuba. 15 The most outlandish proposal came from the California architect Eric Owen Moss, who proposed to “slice” away the plaza’s existing buildings, leaving portions of the original facades, while mostly replacing the plaza’s buildings with bleachers, rupturing the peripheral street grid, and “creating instead a zigzagging pedestrian path around the perimeter” (Lerner 2001). 16 Personal interview with Nelson Melero Lazo, January 28, 2002. CENCREM. Habana Vieja, Cuba. 17 Personal interview with Carlos Venegas Fornias, February 5, 2002. CENCREM. Habana Vieja, Cuba. 18 These residents were relocated from solares in the Parque Central, the Plaza de la Catedral and the Plaza Vieja that were being restored for use as hotels (e.g., Hotel Parque Central), restaurants (e.g. Restaurant la Mina), and museums (e.g., Casa de Bolivar). During the 1980s, the populations in the plaza’s three largest solares, which housed over half of the plaza’s residents expanded, due to the lack of replacement housing (Galeano Mastrangelo and Fornet Gil 1998:24–26). 19 The entrepreneurial and administrative powers conferred on the OHCH by this new legal structure are rare in Cuba. By contrast, the offices that manage Cuba’s other historic centers are administered through local municipal governments, and their budgets are limited by taxes that they collect in the city. Moreover, they are not allowed to run tourism businesses like the OHCH, which are instead operated by state enterprises or individuals. This means that the work of these local conservation offices are largely limited to minor repairs and beautification (painting building facades) and symbolic activities (publishing articles and organizing lectures and cultural events) (Tanaka 2012). 20 1264 MATTHEW J. HILL In this respect, the OHCH continued the conservation orientation of the Dirección de Patrimonio Cultural. 21 Personal interview with Carlos Venegas Fornias, June 1, 2013. Habana Vieja, Cuba. 22 Arguably, this decision reinforced the view of the UNESCO assessor who in the 1980s criticized what he called the “historicist” nature of the restoration, and an inability to incorporate “a new language as an expression of the current epoch” (Ramon Moreno 1988:6–7). In this case, the material remains and meticulous documentation of the original structure facilitated the OHCH’s ability to reconstruct it, albeit with an additional floor for an added hotel room. 23 On the other side of the plaza, Habaguanex also rented out retail space for a Paul & Shark store that opened in the early 2000s in the ground floor of the Casa de Don Pedro Alegre. 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F o r e i g n L a n g u a g e Tr a n s l a t i o n s : Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba [Keywords: Assemblage theory, materiality, heritage, Cuba, socialism, urban spaces] Ensamblando la ciudad histórica: redes de actores, mediación del patrimonio y el retorno del pasado colonial en la Cuba postsoviética [Palabras clave: Teoría del Actor-Red, ensamblajes, materialidad, patrimonio, Cuba, socialismo, espacios urbanos] 装配历史古城: 论后苏联时代古巴的行动者网络，遗产调解，以及殖民时代的回归 [关键词: 集群理论，物质性，遗产，古巴，社会主义，都市空间] Ассамбляж исторического города: сети субъектов, согласование наследия и возвращение колониального прошлого в пост-советской Кубе. [Ключевые слова: теория ассамбляжа, материалитет, наследие, Куба, социализм, городское пространство] Agregando a Cidade Histórica: Redes-Ator, Mediação Patrimonial, e o Regresso do Passado Colonial na Cuba Pós-Soviética [Palavras-chave: Teoria de assemblagem, materialidade, património, Cuba, socialismo, espaços urbanos] ‫ ﻋﻮدة اﳌﺎﴈ اﻻﺳﺘﻌامري ﰲ ﻛﻮﺑﺎ ﻣﺎ ﺑﻌﺪ اﻟﺴﻮﻓﻴﺎﺗﻴﺔ‬،‫ اﻟﻮﺳﺎﻃﺔ اﻟﱰاﺛﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﻧﻈﺮﻳﺔ ﺷﺒﻜﺔ اﳌﻤﺜﻞ‬:‫ﺗﺠﻤﻴﻊ اﳌﺪﻳﻨﺔ اﻟﺘﺎرﻳﺨﻴﺔ‬ ‫ اﳌﺴﺎﺣﺎت اﻟﺤﴬﻳﺔ‬،‫ اﻻﺷﱰاﻛﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﻛﻮﺑﺎ‬،‫ اﻟﱰاث‬،‫ اﳌﺎدﻳﺔ‬،‫ ﻧﻈﺮﻳﺔ اﻟﺘﺠﻤﻴﻊ‬:‫ﻛﻠامت اﻟﺒﺤﺚ‬ 1268