Havana in the Atlantic World

From the mid-1500s onward the strategic importance of Havana in imperial trade shaped its development and brought a diverse and cosmopolitan population, both enslaved and free, to the city. Its role as the gathering point for silver fleets also forced the Spanish Crown to invest heavily in defense, which shaped the urban landscape and architecture. Among Havana’s distinctive features is its system of fortifications, which grew to be one of the most extensive and complex in Latin America, especially after a British siege and occupation of the city from 1762 to 1763. Havana’s export profile consisted of animal hides, wax, and tobacco until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sugar production expanded to dominate the island’s economy. Thereafter sugar continued to dominate Cuba’s economy and Havana’s profile until overtaken by tourism in the twenty-first century. Another major force for change to Havana’s population, buildings, and footprint came with the US occupation from 1898 to 1902. US military officials began an ambitious program of public works that included street paving and an electric streetcar system. In the early republican period, the city’s population expanded rapidly; the famous seawall, the Malecón, was extended, and paved streets spread to the west and south to accommodate auto traffic. By the 1930s Havana had become an international business and tourist destination with high-rise apartment and office buildings, luxury hotels, casinos, and nightclubs, often owned by foreigners. As the political, economic, social, and cultural capital of Cuba, Havana embodied the concentration of all those functions in both its built environment and its people. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 brought a new vision of the role of Havana in Cuba’s development that focused on diverting resources to rural areas to redistribute wealth and power away from Havana and discourage tourism. Many wealthy Cubans and foreigners left the island, and their homes often were converted to schools and other public functions or subdivided into housing. In 1982 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Old Havana a World Heritage site, which attracted more foreign aid and capital to restoration projects and rekindled the government’s focus on tourism development in the city. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 provoked a deep economic crisis in Cuba and Havana’s crumbling infrastructure suffered further deterioration. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Cuban government allowed even greater foreign capital investment and joint ventures to build new hotels and restore older buildings. Natural disasters and the pandemic years of the early 2020s further undermined the city’s infrastructure and economy, and extensive outmigration continues as well.