Havana PDF Download

Author: María Luisa Lobo Montalvo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
In this exquisite volume, author Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo presents the architecture and history of Havana - part of which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site - in an accessible and engaging text and specially commissioned color photographs."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Hermes Mallea
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847843386
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A nostalgic celebration of the glamour of warm-weather destinations in the Caribbean and Florida, from the great estates of ambitious patrons to the most exclusive resorts of the mid-twentieth century. Through iconic photography capturing the cultural mood at the moment when social codes relaxed from the formality of the Gilded Age to the spontaneity of the jet-set era, Escape: The Heyday of Caribbean Glamour takes the reader inside a world of beach parties and costume balls set in lush tropical landscapes, of rarefied resorts and fairy-tale private estates. Escape presents the visual history of the region’s outstanding getaways, chronicling their transformations from pristine idyllic settings to personalized retreats where responsibilities could be left behind. Joseph Urban, Oliver Messel, Paul Rudolph, and other talented designers made these dreams reality, relying on regional design traditions to express the spirit of places like Antigua, Barbados, Cuba, and Jamaica, and sometimes inventing a new vernacular using fantasy imagery to emphasize the notion of escape from the pressures of urban living. Among these idealized settings blossomed the resort lifestyle of international celebrities, from Marjorie Merriweather Post to Babe Paley, Princess Margaret to David Bowie, whose escapades are spectacularly captured in these pages to make the region’s bygone glamour come alive.

Author: Hermes Mallea
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN: 1580932886
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Great Houses of Havana celebrates one hundred years of creativity, design, and style that made the city "the Paris of the Caribbean." For four hundred years, Havana was the center of Spanish trade in the western hemisphere. With the expansion of the sugar industry, independence from Spain, and North American investment, Havana became a city of great wealth, great style, and great houses in a vocabulary that was a unique amalgam of European, American, and Caribbean elements. Great Houses of Havana traces the evolution of the Cuban home from the classic, Spanish colonial courtyard house to the “Tropical Modernist” villas of the 1950s—houses reflecting international architecture trends while remaining true to the Cuban tradition. Cuba’s social history is woven throughout the book. Vintage photographs illustrate Havana’s sophisticated lifestyle—the masked balls, yacht club picnics, and dynastic weddings of fashionable Cubans and their international guests. Popular cafes, hotels, theaters, and weekend resorts are also featured, creating a view of the privileged life inside the gated mansions of the city’s grandest neighborhoods.

Author: Alicia E. García
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847858472
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Old Cuba presents an insider’s view of the splendid colonial-era sites of the storied island nation, from the grand apartments and magnificent cathedral of Old Havana to the plantation homes of Pinar del Río. Cuba dominates the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, fixed between the great continents to the north and to the south, and has long served as a bridge between the Old World and the New. First visited by Christopher Columbus in 1492, its history of interaction with the Old World of Europe is among the longest in the Americas, and its architecture bears testament to this: Cuba is home to some of the most ancient cities and towns in the western hemisphere. As a result, the country once known as the “pearl of the Antilles,” stands now as a treasure chest of alluring historic architecture—seasoned by European precedents mixed with colonial and Caribbean spice—and boasts an extraordinary number of UNESCO Cultural Heritage sites, from the historic center of Old Havana with its original city walls and the Castillo de la Real Fuerza—the oldest extant colonial fortress in the Americas—to the sixteenth-century city of Trinidad, within the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, recognized by historians and scholars as a triumph of historic preservation and whose maze of pastel mansions and churches forms one of the best collections of colonial architecture to be found anywhere. From Old Havana to Santiago de Cuba, Old Cuba offers an intimate look at the historic architecture— the houses, apartments, monuments, charming public spaces, and centuries-old churches—of this storied country.

Author: Michael Connors
Publisher: Abradale Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Emphasizing the palatial homes and elegant furnishings of the island's plantation aristocracy, this lavishly illustrated book offers a completely different view of Cuba from the one normally seen.

Author: Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060006897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, this picaresque novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former Cuban journalist living from hand to mouth in the squalor of contemporary Havana, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of so many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once-elegant apartment houses that line Havana's waterfront, Pedro Juan's days and nights have been reduced by the so-called special times -- the harsh recession that followed the Soviet Union's collapse -- to the struggle of surviving the daily grit through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger -- all the while observing his lovers and friends, strangers on the street, and their suffering with an unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye.

Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.

Author: Michael Eastman
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN: 9783791346243
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Renowned photographer Michael Eastman pays haunting tribute to Havana's faded glory. In his numerous works, internationally acclaimed photographer Michael Eastman often focuses on the facades and interiors of the world's cities, such as Paris, Rome, and New Orleans. In this book he explores the houses and streets of Havana. Nearly one hundred photographs from the past two decades reveal a world where triumphant past and vanquished present collide. Painterly in quality, these richly colored photographs are dramatically lit and exquisitely detailed. Though mostly devoid of people, they manage to capture contemporary Cuban life through suggestion: an empty chair, an ancient car, a decrepit hallway, a forgotten chandelier. The result is as eloquent as a love poem written to a city rich in history, culture, and feeling.

Author: John Paul Rathbone
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101458917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
"Fascinating...A richly detailed portrait." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Julio Lobo was the wealthiest man in prerevolutionary Cuba. He had a life fit for Hollywood: he barely survived both a gangland shooting and a firing squad, and courted movie stars such as Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis. Only when he declined Che Guevara's personal offer to become Minister of Sugar in the Communist regime did Lobo's decades-long reign in Cuba come to a dramatic end. Drawing on stories from the author's own family history and other tales of the island's lost haute bourgeoisie, The Sugar King of Havana is a rare portrait of Cuba's glittering past—and a hopeful window into its future.

Author: Isadora Tattlin
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565127218
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Isadora Tattlin is the American wife of a European energy consultant posted to Havana in the 1990s. Wisely, the witty Mrs. Tattlin began a diary the day her husband informed her of their new assignment. One of the first entries is her shopping list of things to take, including six gallons of shampoo. For although the Tattlins were provided with a wonderful, big house in Havana, complete with a staff of seven, there wasn't much else money could buy in a country whose shelves are nearly bare. The record of her daily life in Cuba raising her two small children, entertaining her husband's clients (among them Fidel Castro and his ministers and minions), and contending with chronic shortages of, well . . . everything (on the street, tourists are hounded not for money but for soap), is literally stunning. Adventurous and intuitive, Tattlin squeezed every drop of juice--both tasty and repellent--from her experience. She traveled wherever she could (it's not easy--there are few road signs or appealing places to stay or eat). She befriended artists, attended concerts and plays. She gave dozens of parties, attended dozens more. Cuba Diaries--vividly explicit, empathetic, often hilarious--takes the reader deep inside this island country only ninety miles from the U.S., where the average doctor's salary is eleven dollars a month. The reader comes away appalled by the deprivation and drawn by the romance of a weirdly nostalgic Cuba frozen in the 1950s.