“Hurricanes in Havana: A Visual History of Catastrophe and Capitalism in Machado’s Cuba”

This paper reassesses the visual and material role of hurricanes in the process of modernization in Havana throughout the early twentieth century. Photo documentation of the hurricane season of 1926 guides our discussion. A storm nicknamed the “Big Blow” destroyed much of Miami that year. Miami’s tragedy became Havana’s gain, as the storm opened a new market for U.S. investors in Cuba. Yet another equally devastating storm known as the Ciclón del ’26 hit Havana, too, a month later. But in this case, the regime of Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado leveraged the storm to its advantage. The destruction presented a political opportunity as well as an aesthetic one. Machado’s regime manufactured the “look” of progress through monumental re-construction projects and photo documentation. Cuban photographers working for commission under the Machado regime, like Manuel Martínez Illa, made their career by documenting the storm. Martínez Illa’s images ranged from iconic surrealist photos of a palm tree stabbed by a splintered beam of wood; to photographic documentation of the Cuban government’s speedy reconstruction efforts, a mixture of political machinations and financial exploitations that we might now label as “disaster capitalism.” The catastrophe of 1926 thus set the scene for Machado’s monumental landscapes, funded by deep-pocketed U.S. banks, which included Beaux-Arts urbanism, neoclassic government buildings, super highways, and Panopticon prisons.