Globalizing Havana: World heritage and urban redevelopment in late socialist Cuba

This dissertation examines a state-directed project of urban revitalization in Havana's urban core, using Old Havana as a window through which to understand the articulation between late socialism and global capital in contemporary Cuba. I argue that this revitalization is a scalar and uneven process, through which heritage preservationists seek to link Old Havana with a global network of World Heritage cities, while appropriating the cultural norms of World Heritage to remake a local place. In the case of Old Havana, I suggest that this rescaling process occurred in two distinct stages, each of which represent a gradual shedding of sovereignty over Old Havana in order to place it within the orbit of the World Heritage institutional system. The first such shedding began in the late 1970s, when a group of iconoclastic architects managed to get Old Havana declared "national heritage" (1978), and subsequently "World Heritage" (1982), as a means of preserving buildings considered historic from demolition by the Ministry of Construction. After the collapse of the Soviet Union brought restoration work to a halt in the early 1990s, the Cuban Council of State further relinquished control over Old Havana by transferring sovereignty over public land and property in the district to a decentralized, entrepreneurial agency called the Office of the City Historian (OHC).; Taking this hybrid institution as a starting point, I explore how the norms and practices of heritage preservation play a critical role in the "governmentalization" of Old Havana as an urban locality. By governmentalization, I refer to the forms of technical expertise that are used to manage Old Havana as a lived space. These include: planning and zoning practices; the socialization of residents through schools and museums; the licensing, taxing, and policing of the local heritage economy; and the discourses of "adequate housing" that legitimate the displacement of residents to the urban periphery. Through successive chapters that examine the issues of urban governance, heritage production, the shadow economy, and shifting property regimes, this dissertation highlights the contradictions of heritage-based, place-making in a late socialist city.