Negotiating the Hotel Nacional de Cuba:Politics, Profits, and Protest

In Negotiating the Hotel Nacional de Cuba: Politics, Profits, and Protest, Erica N. Morawski positions that Havana hotel (McKim, Mead & White, 1930) as a significant symbol and space in the negotiation of national identities under the government of Cuban president Gerardo Machado y Morales. Through analysis of archival materials and architectural design, she shows how the project embodied complex negotiations between the machadato, dedicated to creating the hotel as a national monument, and the U.S. conglomerate charged with financing and building it. Looking beyond the hotel's construction to its role in the Revolution of 1933, Morawski demonstrates how the machadato's efforts to define national identity through the hotel positioned it as a key focus of activists who wanted to define Cuban national identity on their own terms, and who engaged not in negotiation but in armed resistance.