The View from Afar: The Other between Cliché and Change

Frequently, the heritage media are quite revealing in what they do and don't say. Knowledge of what is relevant to the others is good, but understanding has to be proportional to the reported facts. In this sense, on these postcolonial times, it is revealing what the metropolitan power has to say about the state of the art in its largest, anachronistic colony.

Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island that manages to house four million ethnically diverse people in just thirty-five hundred square miles, is one of the world's few territories that is ruled from afar without true participation in the affairs of its rulers, in this case safely ensconced in the marble pavilions of Neoclassical power on the banks of the Potomac. That very same city is the seat of the United States' main heritage preservation organization known as the National Trust (for Historic Preservation) though they seem to be taking a liking to be known rather by the brief and cutely rhyming sobriquet Preservation Nation. The Trust - or PN, if you wish - featured PR as its main article in its bimonthly magazine, Preservation. It carries the unassuming title "Guarding the Glories of San Juan".

PR has a remarkable archidiversity; if you don't think so check my article The Essence of Puerto Rican Historic Architecture located in this blog's archive!... but to many Americans Puerto Rican heritage starts and ends in Old San Juan, so the article's title is predictable. The writer, a certain Eric Wills, whose profile we don't get to know because of a New Year Resolution-obsessed editor, barely transcends this San Juanism (or, more correctly, a San Juan-plus-landmarkism) even if he talks briefly with a so-called Ponce architect about the island's second city. With him at his flat, they gloss superficially over the pork-fueled government initiative to "improve" the infrastructure there and to do a so-called "revitalization" through incentives that may be wiped out because the island's government is badly in hock, like a losing high-stakes casino gamer who has bet out his house.

Wills gets a wind of the protest over Paseo Caribe, a major controversy related to public domains along the shore and the protection of the context surrounding the San Jerónimo fortress, a built-out-on-the-water bastion which architecture is nearly unique among dozens of shore fortifications built by the Spaniards in the Americas and the Philippines. Paseo Caribe is one of these kitschy so-called mixed use developments for the rich with exclusive shops for superfluous merchandise and seven-figure apartments in the most vulgar Miami-ese tradition. PC, a case that can speak volumes - heck, complete encyclopedias - about the situation of urbanism and preservation on contested lands, is condensed into four paragraphs of a fortuitous encounter with the protest camp next to the near-finished project, an interview with the developer (something that I'd have skipped given that man's "reputation") and a generality that civic participation will be more significant in preservation policy in PR.

The most human and interesting part of the article is the interview with the Big Man of PR preservation, Mr. Ricardo Alegría. Alegría ("Happiness") is the story of a life engaged in defending heritage and memory against overwhelming odds, and his biography can tell nearly all there is to making heritage a relevant part of society. But again, enforced magazine-article brevity betrays the need to expose this charming, intense life story. Expediency takes the author to two restoration projects that supposedly mirror new directions in Boricua preservation. But one of them is a sugar estate, and scores of them have been preserved Caribbean-wide so this is not but a catch-up, join-the-club manouevre, though the restoration of a 19th-century mill with its steam engine to working condition is no mean feat that, again, gets little space.

This leaves us with the San Juan old aqueduct. Here the article high-gears it with the impressionist sketch of an early urban infrastructure project, part of those traditionally forgotten parts of collective memory. And the promise of difference entices the reader... but, alas, time's up! So, the social component of preservation that is the promise of this article, the role of preservation in identity construction and as a tool of "growth" management in a dense, tropical society, got the short shrift (again?).

Had I the chance to be interviewed by Mr. Wills, I'd have harangued him into going deep inside the island to see how the defense of landmarks and archaeology is being more and more used as a weapon to challenge misguided, harebrained "development" schemes. I'd filled the space between his ears on how heritage is progressively becoming a fundamental building block of local and Puerto Rican pride, as the standard of the cause is now brandished not by professional architects or highfalutin' academics, but by common workers, schoolteachers, househusbands/wives, artists, and people from varying walks of life. A single case like the ultimately failed attempt to save the midtown San Mateo sector in San Juan could explain in ample perspective the potential of heritage to transform not only cityscapes but also lives!

Puerto Rico is a somewhat atypical case of a subaltern society within the global order, for many years cowed into passive acceptance of cultural mores of a strong, "young", dominant world power with the wherewithal to brainwash masses of people. It can serve as an illustration that identity can be painted over, hidden, pushed into the ground, or plastic-surgeried into a denial of its former self... but it keeps coming back, and obviously with a vengeance. The endless interpretations of the lone-star-in-a-blue-triangle flag, reproduced on head and butt alike; the improvised poets that turn out decimas (a type of poem on 10-line stanzas) in multitudinary, Eisteddfod-like ceremonies; the perpetual congregation of neighbors and friends even within the hostile ambience of malls and offices; the noisy Xmas caroling with rhythmic, hand-clapping trullas and delicious bootleg rum showing up everywhere there's a party; the incredible decoration of anonymous subdivision-house facades - well, there is a veritable INSURRECTION going up in Puerto Rico, and even if it lacks the apparent seriousness of a Palestinian intifada, it is even more determined in getting its own way.

And, like it or not, historic and archaeological preservation, Boricua-style, cannot be understood outside the context of this insurrectionary climate. Those that think that Puerto Rican preservationists are genteel-gentleman-and/or-lady clubs saving symbols of a patrician world are shooting way off the mark. And this "other" keeps being a mysterious, arcane enigma to First Worlders who just shrug and live happily with their clichéd views and comforting, exceptional images of the consumer symbols of exotic travel, another byproduct of the tourism "industry"... As they'll think: "Let me sleep dreaming with my Taj Mahals, Pyramids and Temples of the Sun, let the rest of the world fix itself as it may!"

And the insurrection of the Other's identity will, sooner or later, fix itself... getting back to and over them.

CUBA: AN EXEMPLARY CASE OF PRESERVATION! (part 1)

Some may ask why my homage to Cuba and a full HALF-CENTURY of Revolution has appeared first in my English language blog. It's because this Caribbean island country can show other more prosperous places how to work historic preservation as an integral part of an ongoing social project in which land uses are planned on basis of social needs (though I recognize that the money shortage and the American blockade have hamstrung Cuba's capacity to respond to the needs of its people).

When exactly fifty years ago to this day Fidel Castro proclaimed victory over the venal dictator Batista and a few days later rode triumphant into Havana's boulevards, Cuba was to witness a real sea change in its social order. An agricultural nation barely eking its way by selling underpriced sugar to Western hemisphere nations became in time a more diversified economy with import-substitution industries and a vast improvement in the quality of life of the famished peasants. The tentacles of Mob investment in the hotel and casino business were severed: Cuba was no longer to be a playground for Mafiosi and their beneficiaries. (This in my belief is why the USA's blockade and boycott of relationships with the Castro government has been so tenacious.)

Cuban cities were impoverished backwaters except for Havana, which was beginning to flood with vulgar, glitzy buildings for tourism. (Not all, though: for example, Max Borges's Tropicana club is a veritable masterpiece of poetry in reinforced concrete.) The Cuban capital was beginning to see high rise towers among the traditional scale of 2- to 5-story brick buildings built cheek-to-jowl creating an unique, dense and interesting ensemble in the Old Havana and Havana Central quarters, seat of most 19th century and older buildings.

Although scarce resources were allocated in priority to ameliorating the lot of the peasants and cane workers, who were in time introduced to previously unheard-of luxuries like running water and electricity, preservation of old Cuban cities was from the beginning of the Revolution an irreductible part of the nation's cultural policy. Little information was then available: Joaquín Weiss, an architect, had written a multivolume book on Cuban Spanish Colonial buildings, but other facts were still buried in musty archives, interred away from the gaze of historians and preservationists.

By the mid sixties, general censi had been made of Old Havana and the eastern city of Santiago, Cuba's second most important conurbation. Between the mid sixties and mid eighties a full preservation team would be implemented covering not only these two cities but also a host of other smaller cities and towns, and even rural areas like the Viñales Cultural Landscape, related to tobacco, in the western Pinar del Río province. Those two decades saw an exponential increase in interest in preserving Cuban heritage and hundreds of systematic inventories were performed all over the island. The harvest of all this process has been phenomenal: FOUR World Heritage urban areas (Havana in 1982 was the first one; also Trinidad, Cienfuegos and the most recent one, Camagüey), two cultural landscapes (Vi­ñales, and the first coffee cultural landscape in the Caribbean in the eastern mountains) and the San Pedro fort in Santiago.

Add to all this several dozen protected historic towns and thousands of other buildings over all of Cuba's geography and it's not hard to see that the country needed a specialized center for education, outreach and technical assistance. In 1980 the Cencrem (Spanish acronym for National Conservation, Preservation and Museology Center) was established in the former Santa Clara convent in Old Havana's heart. It now educates Cuban and foreign preservation professionals, and in its studios research and practice is done in benefit of local preservation agencies from the Havana City Historian's office (Old Havana's overseers) to rural archaeological studies in need of investigations over materials conservation.

The deterioration seen in many historic Cuban buildings is a veritable problem; but giant steps have been taken to mitigate its impact. Cuban preservationists are among the most knowledgeable in stabilization and mitigation techniques for old places "over the top", and their skills have been exported by way of technical assistance overseas and frequent workshops and symposia. Thus the Cuban preservation scene is possibly one of the most dynamic in Latin America, equaled maybe only by that of Mexico - a far larger and more populated country. Summing up this introduction, the Cuban Revolution, a solid half-century old today, has been also a revolution of memory and history in the service of the common good. They are the example to follow!