Havana--The New Art of Making Ruins

Dear Students,

Havana—The New Art of Making Ruins (2006) is a documentary directed by Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler. The documentary tells the story of the ruins of Havana and the people who inhabit those ruins—from a homeless man who lives in an abandoned theater (in which Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso once sang to Cuba’s high society), to an expropriated landowner, to a young woman living in one of the rooms of an old hotel. We also hear from Cuban writer and poet (and ruinologist, according to him), Antonio José Ponte. In recent years, Havana’s ruins have been romanticized and valued for their magical decay, for its poetic evocation of a glorious past now lost, in particular in Buena Vista Social Club; however, for the people who inhabit them, there is very little poetry left in these ruins. What we see is the conflation of the voice of the people whose stories we hear with the ruined city itself, a product of both the passing of time and the absolute neglect by the state. This documentary will help us contextualize the poetry of Carlos Jesús Cabrera Enríquez, as well as Zoe Valdes’s Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada. Hunger in these works comes in many disguises and it is our challenge to make connections between the images we see in this documentary (as well as what we see in Suite Havana—the following post) and the graphic sexuality of a novel such as Yocandra.