Living Backstage: Housing and Hiding Havana's Early-Twentieth-Century Workers

• In Event: Homes for Havana's Workers in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

Acute housing problems in Havana of the early republican period mostly affected the city's rapidly growing numbers of proletarianized rural migrants and urban artisans, and foreign immigrants. Purpose-built, speculative tenement housing of various typologies – casitas, casetas, habitaciones, accesorias, solares, cuarterías, ciudadelas, or casas de vecindad – explicitly 'destined to be rented out to the working class' proved a lucrative venture for landowners. They filled many an urban block of the rapidly expanding city extramuros, where a growing number of small and medium-size factories were located, employing increasing numbers of Spanish immigrants and Afro-Cubans.

Most of the workers' tenements were clustered in the inner portion of privately owned, long, contiguous land parcels with a narrow street façade, or on the rear part of rooftops of petit-bourgeois viviendas de familias or casas de residencias, erected at the street front, to conceal the workers' quarters and 'improve thus [public] decorum, serving the interests of the landlord and the municipality'. Initially small and increasingly bigger real-estate developers and designers argued that such an arrangement was 'a necessity of public utility'. By 1936, an estimated 97.5 percent of residents of the casas de vencindad were Afro-Cubans. Immigrant Spaniards had effectively displaced them from attractive jobs as well as from desired housing units.

This paper explores the ways architecture and urban planning helped build socioeconomic and racial inequalities into early-twentieth-century Havana's housing network and urban spatial structure, while at the same time forging the image of a 'modern', 'civilized', economically prosperous and culturally homogeneous city.

Author

• Styliane Philippou, Independent Scholar