Unstable Spaces: Hotel Design, Tourism Policy, and the Ideology of the Revolution in post-1959 Cuba

• In Event: Latin American Hotels: Visions of Modernity, Spaces of Negotiation

Abstract

After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro espoused an ideology of tourism that countered what he saw as the previous government’s promotion of a decadent American tourism that was detrimental to Cuban culture and society. This project focuses on the legacy of hotel design after 1959 to investigate the intersection of hotel design and government attitudes toward tourism and foreign relations. I analyze hotels as unstable spaces and representations that did not offer a wholesale reinforcement of the Cuban government’s stance toward tourism and communism. Focusing on the Hotel Santa Lucia (Camagüey province), which was constructed using the popular Sistema Giron of prefabrication, I demonstrate how the hotels of the 1970s embody the precarious relationship between the variety inherent in using prefabricated systems and the Cuban government’s denunciation of expressive architecture, and consider this within context of a shift to domestic tourism in less developed areas. I then examine the marked shift in the late 1980s of the Cuban government’s policy toward tourism and foreign investment and how the visual embodiment of these ideas in hotel design, specifically the Sol Melía Las Americas (Varadero) highlights contradictions between Revolutionary ideology and tourist policies that promote capitalist consumption and exclusionary practices toward Cuban nationals. I conclude by using the Blau Marina Varadero Resort as an anchor in questioning contemporary trends in hotel design that promote an eclectic mix of architectural styles in relation to new economic policies and propose what this might mean for the future of Cuban hotels and foreign relations.

Author

• Erica N Morawski, Kendall College of Art and Design