This December Cecelia Lawless went to Havana, Cuba, with gifts for the Habaneros who a few years earlier had welcomed her and photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo into their lives and their homes. The gifts were 60 copies of the book Lawless and Pietropaolo created, called Making Home in Havana (Rutgers University Press, 2002). The book contains text and large photographs, many in color.
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For Lawless, a senior lecturer at Cornell in Romance studies, the gesture proved bittersweet. Three of the Habaneros (Havana residents) she interviewed had died since the project began, including the Santería priestess who had blessed the book. Several of the dwellings portrayed in the book, too, were gone, either collapsed or demolished or both.
The experience poignantly illustrated the reason Lawless undertook Making Home in Havana, which she funded mostly out-of-pocket: to provide a testimonial of sorts to an impoverished, vanishing cityscape and its people. She recruited Pietropaolo, a widely published and exhibited photographer, after seeing a remarkable image he'd taken of a Havana street scene.
The book is thematic, exploring the idea of home and how a building becomes "home" in time and space through the histories of its inhabitants. It's a theme that Lawless has explored again and again during her academic career.
The book focuses on two Havana neighborhoods, El Vedado and Centro Havana, where once majestic 20th century art deco palaces and homes are fast becoming ruins. These buildings embody an architectural legacy that exists in few other Latin American cities, and many are passing into oblivion.
Lawless says Westerners tend to romanticize Cuba and Havana, in particular -- it's been "rediscovered." There are the antique American cars, the music, especially the "Buena Vista Social Club," and there is Havana, with its seductive architectural mix of Spanish colonial and 20th century architecture.
But if Westerners tend to project an alienated and decadent nobility onto Havana's architectural treasures, the residents themselves are not impressed by the sentiment; many live in these precarious and substandard buildings.
"For many [Western] visitors, the visual appeal of the place is compelling, like this picture for instance," said Lawless, pointing to a shot from her book of a hallway with a spiral staircase that, as architecturally exquisite as it may be, would no doubt be condemned in the city of Ithaca. "But if you tell Habaneros that you find this is aesthetically appealing and beautiful in its decadence, they would think you were trying to mock them. They'd say, 'Are you out of your mind? We have no running water, this place is crumbling and dangerous.' You see?"
Lawless said she was dead set against creating another pretty piece of cultural tourism that is more about the author than the subject.
"This book is not about me and what I think. It's about the people we met, about what they think. I wanted them to speak for themselves," she said.
They do, quite clearly. In English. That was discouraging for Lawless. She'd advocated for a bilingual text, only to succumb to the publisher's feeling it would stifle sales.
After a highly successful presentation in Toronto last fall, Lawless returned to Cuba with Pietropaolo to follow-up on a promise and to show her work to the Habaneros. In her excitement, she'd overlooked the fact that very few of her subjects spoke or read English.
"They were thrilled but confused, and it was a very upsetting moment for me," said Lawless. "My intention was to create a book that expressed these people directly to the reader, without mediation. I know photographs are a universal language, but when I realized that the very people who made this book happen could not read their own words, it felt like a failure."
The book could hardly be described as such.
In fact, Lawless accomplished the goal of evoking and questioning the meaning of place, which in her prologue she described as "a story in constant process."
"Can images, words strung together through interviews, be enough to capture the ephemeral sense of the home place at the beginning of an epoch, perhaps the beginning of a new political phase?"
The short answer, after reading Making Home in Havana, is "yes."
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