History of Havana (The) By Dick Cluster & Rafael Hernández

OR books, 2018 edition, paperback

For close to 500 years, Havana has been a cultural crossroads, a meeting point for people from the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Here, in a revised and updated edition of a classic history co-written by a Cuban and an American, is the definitive chronicle of the “Pearl of the Antilles.”

“The name of the city,” write the authors, “La Habana or La Havana, comes from Spanish transcriptions of an indigenous word. But in ensuing years many came to believe that the name derived from haven and harbor, which the city has always been in both a physical and a social sense.” Since its founding in 1519, Havana has drawn people from all over the world, including explorers, entrepreneurs, refugees, and the exiled, to create a melting pot of influences and cultures with a very distinct history. Authors Dick Cluster and Rafael Hernández (editor of Temas magazine in Cuba) examine not only the ruptures in the city’s life, but its continuities as well. The traditions that make the city unique, such as its idiosyncratic combination of territorialism and hospitality, or its proclivity for protest, reveal a drive for change as an integral element of its character. Drawing on oral histories and cultural artifacts with grace and precision, The History of Havana chronicles the city’s dynamic culture and politics, making it a superbly well-rounded account of the most intriguing city in the Caribbean.

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Review of The History of Havana

Next year is the 500th anniversary of Havana, the most alluring city in the Caribbean, if not the world. It is brought to life via this excellent book which reads like a novel, laced with drama and full of secrets. Everything that makes Havana special, from its buildings and people, its sultry heat, its sweat and cigar smoke give the book a rhythm of its own. Havana has a tempo that engages, surprises but always welcomes you back like an old best friend. Cluster and Hernandez in this updated version of their 2006 book profess they “tried to tell the story of its people, at all rungs of society, including those who have left many records and monuments behind them and those who have left almost none”.  

They trace the immigrants Havana has drawn from all over the world, including explorers, conquerors, slaves, and refugees: all of whom created a melting pot of influences and cultures and a very distinct history. Rivalled only by Lima and Mexico in the Spanish empire for both riches and people, Havana’s population was three times the size of New York in the mid-18th century. However, by the late 1840s, the United States had become Cuba’s principal trading partner, ahead of England, with Spain a distant third.  By the end of the 19th century, the city became thoroughly internationalised with everything that entails. Graham Greene’s reason for selecting it as the setting for ‘Our Man in Havana’ was “this extraordinary city where every vice was permissible and every trade possible”. Under Batista inequality grew as the U.S. mafia flourished from luxury casino gambling, fuelled by all the drugs and prostitution that US tourists could consume.

After the triumph of the Revolution, which “first and foremost, made the citizens of Havana conscious as never before that they inhabited the privileged capital of an island whose countryside had long teemed with poverty, hunger, curable diseases, illiteracy, and neglect” came a commitment to rectify this disparity which, “together with ideological radicalism and the politics of state socialist centralism, meant that the victorious revolution would pour more resources into the interior than the capital”.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was desperate for hard currency and prioritised re-starting its tourist industry. The authors complain about the “eruptions of contemporary bad taste” that were the new hotels but welcome the beautifully restored old colonial town whose cobblestone streets passed through areas that have not been painted or repaired due to the blockade and which also make Havana so unique. Emerging “from the tunnel leading into a twilight zone, something that was no longer the Special Period but as yet had no name” the new epilogue takes the history up to 2017 with Obamas visit, Fidels death, and Trumps election. Whatever happens next, this book describes a wonderful capital that inspires the world and whose extraordinary people have sustained a revolutionary vision by showing us that a better world is possible.

Bob Oram for CubaSi magazine Summer 2018