“From Vanguard to Revolution: Visualizing the 1963 World Congress of Architecture and the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana”

This paper looks at two major events – the 1963 World Congress of Architecture and the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana – to consider the forging of a revolutionary aesthetic within 1960s Havana. Selected as a host city by the International Union of Architects prior to the 1959 revolution, Cuba’s new government utilized the World Congress of Architecture to reflect on the role of architecture in developing countries and to promote significant projects happening within the island nation. My analysis will focus on the Pabellón Cuba in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana – an exhibition pavilion built in seventy-two days as the centerpiece of the congress. The pavilion’s inaugural exhibition displayed a deference to Cuba’s past while claiming a progressive leap forward. This was accompanied by visual campaigns that would inform both graphic and architectural design throughout the 1960s decade. Looking at other exhibitions that took place in the Pabellón Cuba, I argue that appropriation was a key element in the forging of a revolutionary aesthetic, and that Cuba’s vanguardia from the earlier Republican era (1901-1958) had a direct influence on these exhibitions and their adjacent visual campaigns. Closing with the example of the exhibition Del Tercer Mundo, which coincided with the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, this paper explores how Cuba presented itself to the world in an era of significant political change.