1940 Map Your Own Havana Holiday
DESCRIPTION
This folding travel map of pre-revolutionary Havana shows the city’s economic reliance on American tourism that the Cuban revolution would so upturn roughly two decades later. Issued by the Hotel Nacional de Cuba to attract the attention of Americans with disposal income, it essentially paints the city as a Caribbean playground.
The piece’s verso maps a Havana populated by country clubs, casinos, boxing rings, airports and historic sites—everything a tourist might need to make their way in and around the city. The foremost orientation towards tourism held by Havana’s city planners here trickles to the city’s cartographic depiction. Few markers of infrastructure that reflect the presence of Cubans living and working in the area to support this tourism are to be seen; in fact, the map is hardly legible to non-English speakers. Though Spanish is used to flavor the map’s cartouche and Havana is occasionally spelled “Habana” as an authenticity signal, all other text is in English. What’s more, the map’s orientation is neither North nor South but is somewhat South by Southeast—a direction likely chosen for its aesthetic affordances. Rather than a legend telling the viewer how to read the map, instructions of how to reach Havana from New York, Florida, New Orleans, and Baltimore fill an empty space in its upper-left corner. Ironically, the map’s color scheme employs a vibrant red for its borders and cartouche—an almost identical hue of red to that used as shorthand for the existential threat of communism that would become synonymous with the island nation in years to come.
Though the majority of the map’s recto advertises the Hotel Nacional de Havana and a night club called Bajo la Luna, nearly half of its space is dedicated to a directory of “Things to Do” and “Sights to See.” Offerings on the island are diverse: opera, yacht racing, polo and jai alai one day, private beaches, a tour of a Spanish castle, and a movie the next—amusing, novel ways to spend time and money seem endless here. Evident only to the especially thorough reader though is a “Rural Atmosphere” section buttoning up the list’s end that briefly enumerates the country’s outlying provinces and major industries.
The pitch this map makes was shaped by a law that had just been repealed. American tourism to Cuba had been built during Prohibition, when Havana was the nearest wet city to the eastern United States, reachable by ferry from Key West and, after 1927, by Pan American's first scheduled international air service. For thirteen years the island's principal draw could go without saying. Repeal in 1933 took that draw away, and what this sheet documents is the industry's answer: a Havana reconstructed on paper as a destination of sport, sun, and sightseeing. It is a city being talked into existence for a market that had just lost its original reason to come.
CONDITION
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