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.
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March 2019
Research Article|
March 01 2019
Negotiating the Hotel Nacional de Cuba:Politics, Profits, and Protest
Erica N. Morawski
Erica N. Morawski
Pratt Institute
Erica N. Morawski is engaged in scholarship that focuses on the intersection of design, politics, and identity. Currently, she is completing a manuscript on Hispanic Caribbean hotel design and is conducting research for a monograph on design education and institutions in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. emorawsk@pratt.edu
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2019) 78 (1): 90–108.
Citation
Erica N. Morawski; Negotiating the Hotel Nacional de Cuba:Politics, Profits, and Protest. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2019; 78 (1): 90–108. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2019.78.1.90
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