Business Publications

Out of the jungle

Architectural Review, The, March, 2004

The mythical Cuban art schools (AR January 2000) are at long last being restored by the original team of architects. The idea for five art schools came to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara when they were playing a round of golf at the Havana Country Club shortly after the 1959 Revolution. They would build art schools for the poor not only of Cuba but of the Third World in the idyllic grounds of the Club, which had previously been open only to the dictator Battista and his aristocratic gangster friends.

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There were to be five schools: for drama, music, the plastic arts, modern dance and ballet. Three young and inexperienced architects were appointed, led by Cuban Ricardo Porro, who had two Italian collaborators, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. Four years of intensive labour brought Porro's plastic arts school almost to completion, but work on the site was stopped abruptly. Under Soviet cultural influence, the labour-intensive traditional brick and tile vaulting of the schools was declared to be counter-revolutionary (prefabricated concrete panel systems were to be preferred for all forms of public construction).

The schools were abandoned as they stood, and were gradually colonized by tropical vegetation, and in some places used by local people as quarries for materials. Almost forgotten, they were listed, like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China, by the World Monuments Fund as being among the world's most important endangered great works. This and other moves reminded Castro of his dream, and attempts were made to start work on the site again, though decay and attrition caused immense problems. Porro and his colleagues were called back to advise (Porro from exile in Paris, Garatti from Italy where he had fled after imprisonment, and Gottardi from disgrace in Cuba).

Much less money was available than originally, and time had shown that some of the buildings had serious flaws: the 360m long dance school was reckoned to be too stretched to work academically, and the ballet school site was regularly inundated by 2m of river flood water. There is hope that the other schools may yet be completed, but work proceeds slowly because of lack of resources, and the government seems to be losing interest again. International support is needed.