Colonial Churches in Santiago de Cuba
A collaboration with Jorge Hernandez and Monsignor Dionisio Garcia-Ibanez

On October 25, 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept north across the Caribbean, pounding Santiago de Cuba, and parking itself over the tattered, time worn and vulnerable city causing widespread devastation on the Island’s original Colonial Capitol. As fallen trees were being cleared, relief efforts commenced and damages assessed, another type of loss began to reveal itself: loss of memory. The familiar settings that provided the backdrops so profoundly rooted to Santiago’s identity had been ripped open by the brutal winds of up to 150 miles per hour. Gone was the shelter –the collective shelter- of both body and memory.

Violently and abruptly the effects of Sandy’s dismembering winds shocked the very psyche of a people who have had to master the skill of patient surrender to the inevitable tempo of the march of decay.

At the middle of the corpus of the city, as the grade gently falls towards the harbor, a constellation of colonial churches, surrounding the Cathedral and square, anchors the quadrants of the City’s foundational plan, providing an unparalleled example of congruity between territory, townscape and architecture. This web, 500 years in the making, heralds Santiago’s spiritual and cultural provenance and is now at risk. Monsignor Dionisio Garcia-Ibanez, the archbishop of Santiago, began almost immediately, without government assistance, to reconstruct this extraordinary environmental artifact. Beginning with the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, a structure built and rebuilt in place for nearly 500 years, he collaborated with European and American Universities, while assembling and training a school of craftsmen to complete the ambitious work, now underway.

Nearly one year after the storm, by chance the Archbishop encountered a childhood friend in Miami: the acclaimed photographer, Carlos Domenech, and invited him to document the churches. This photographic mission was Domenech’s first return to Cuba after 46 years and his pictures from the content of this exhibit. They document the confluence of diverse elements that formed over time a unique expression of what we recognize as” Cuban” in the island's architecture. With the clarity of a Cuban sky, Domenech captures the precision of Segrera’s Beaux Arts façade for the Cathedral. He paints light eroding the formidable “muro” of Cuban monumentality. He evokes a trance-like state from the indefinite extension of geometric patterns whether from tile floors or Mudejar wooden roofs.

Domenech unearths the influence and sensibility of the presence of the Native and the African, both subsumed by and juxtaposed to European traditions. In other images, shadows layer upon shadows, revealing figures painted in the deep recesses of corners haunted by time. In the end, somehow, these images emphasize the poetic dimension of the middle distance---a space suspended between hope and fulfillment. In this light they are a portrait not only of the structures but also of the City, if not the island, itself.

When we began planning this exhibit, we could never have imagined the events that transpired Dec 17, 2014, the re-establishing of US-Cuba relations. Posture of the middle distance, so touchingly captured by these images, makes this exhibit all the more poignant.

Jorge L. Hernandez, AIA

Professor, University of Miami School of Architecture