According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. ...The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana's founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell's close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a "dissonance of heritage"—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works' significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.
One of the earliest and most important port cities in the New World, Havana quickly became a model for the planning and construction of other colonial cities.Beyond the Walled Citytells the story of ...how Havana was conceived, built, and managed. Examining imperial efforts to police urban space from the late sixteenth century onward, Guadalupe García shows how the production of urban space was explicitly centered on the politics of racial exclusion and social control. Connecting colonial governing practices to broader debates on urbanization, the regulation of public spaces, and the racial dislocation of urban populations,Beyond the Walled Citypoints to the ways in which colonialism is inscribed on modern topographies.
Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities ...in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.
By comparing the current reform process under President Raúl Castro to Cuba’s opening to market capitalism during the 1990s Special Period crisis, Everyday Adjustments in Havana: Economic Reforms, ...Mobility, and Emerging Inequalities highlights the differences and continuities between adjustments in both periods and their social impacts. It explores the impacts of specific policies such as the expansion of self-employment and the recreation of a private housing market, examining how changes in domestic and international policies after 2011 have modified the post-Special Period status quo and contributed to the formation of new social groups that did not previously exist in Cuba’s Socialist society.
InConceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the ...rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts.Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.
In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met ...fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years' War in North America.The Occupation of Havanaoffers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.
Affectionate, humorous vignettes illustrate how Havana's residents--old Communist ladies, musicians, underground vendors, and poverty-stricken professors--go about their daily lives.
Studies on crisis management in tourism have made valuable contributions to the sector in terms of 'lessons learned', offering contextualisation, analysis and synthesis of factors that influenced the ...development of the crisis and the organisational or destination response. Very few, however, provide information on how tourism organisations attempt to manage risk proactively and how they manage a crisis reactively. Using information from multiple sources and archival material from Hilton Hotels, this study identifies associations between the company's actions in the 1950s before the Havana Hilton's nationalisation by Castro and modern-day principles and concepts of risk and crisis management. The chronicling of the organisation's proactive actions and reactive response to that crisis richly illustrates the contemporary concept of 'organisational resilience' in practice. Based on this analysis, the study proposes a five-stage resilience management framework for tourism organisations which distinguishes risk from crisis management and identifies specific activities within each stage.
•Archival research on the nationalisation of Havana Hilton by Fidel Castro (1960).•Hilton's leadership proactive risk management and reactive crisis management.•A five-stage resilience management framework for tourism organisations.
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