“Recycling Colonial Imaginaries: Havana’s Restoration Project and the Nineteenth-Century Picturesque”

In the heart of Havana’s historic district, a mural reproduction of Frederick Mialhe’s lithograph El panadero y el malojero (1848) reminds us of the city’s colonial past. The painting depicts a nineteenth-century bread seller accompanied by a barefooted black man, likely his slave, who carries an unusually large basket on his head. The image seeks to relink the San José Bakery on Obispo Street to the city’s colonial history, and in doing so, it is revitalizing the imaginaries of a nineteenth-century slave society. The reproduction of Mialhe’s lithograph on Obispo Street offers a glimpse into the larger restoration project that through the 1990s and early 2000s reinserted Havana into the global tourist economy. Such a project has reactivated a visual archive of racialized picturesque views of the city that represented Cubans of African descent as uncivilized bodies for labor. This paper examines the recycling of such colonial imaginaries. I pay close attention to the reproduction of Mialhe’s lithographs and their role in imagining the city and its bodies for tourist consumption. I argue that such reproduction is transplanting the visions of sugar planters and Spanish colonial officials that reconfigured Havana’s landscape during the nineteenth-century, and that the images carry within them the coloniality of a past that is at risk of repeating itself. Lastly, I explain how the process of recycling the colonial past is intrinsically connected with the tourism economy and how these returning images are entangled within a globalizing discourse seeking to reconnect Cuba with Western Europe.