{"id":3665,"date":"2020-09-30T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/16.147.243.36\/?p=3665"},"modified":"2026-08-06T18:13:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T18:13:38","slug":"interview-with-jesse-horst-author-of-erasing-las-yaguas-shantytown-networks-and-social-reform-in-the-cuban-revolution-1944-1963","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/interview-with-jesse-horst-author-of-erasing-las-yaguas-shantytown-networks-and-social-reform-in-the-cuban-revolution-1944-1963\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Jesse<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Jesse Horst works for Sarah Lawrence College as director of Sarah Lawrence in Cuba, the longest consecutively running US academic exchange program in Havana. He earned his PhD in Latin American history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016 and was awarded the University of Pittsburgh\u2019s 2016\u201317 Eduardo Lozano Memorial Dissertation Award for best doctoral dissertation in Latin American studies. His previous work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History<\/a>, and he is currently finishing a book manuscript on slum clearance in Havana from 1930 to 1970. You can read his article “Erasing Las Yaguas: Shantytown Networks and Social Reform in the Cuban Revolution, 1944\u20131963<\/a>” in HAHR 100.3<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. How did you come to focus on twentieth-century Cuba as an area of research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like good research topics, it\u2019s worked for me because twentieth-century Cuba is a time and place that generates new questions every time I find answers. Cuba has intrigued me since sixth grade, when my social studies teacher adored Fidel Castro. I grew up in South Minneapolis\u2014tragically, three blocks from where the police murdered George Floyd this summer. It\u2019s as far from Havana as you can get in some ways, especially the climate, but it has strange echoes: a place full of utopian politics, lots of Spanish, consciousness of US foreign policy, class divisions that map onto urban space, racial hierarchies that disappear from one angle and explode from another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to Cuba for the first time in 2004 on a wonderful study abroad program led by Jeane DeLaney at St. Olaf College<\/a>. What intrigued me about Cuba intellectually was how it could render familiar issues unfamiliar. It allowed me to consider things that I always cared about\u2014like housing, race, or radical politics\u2014from new angles. I think that approaching Cuba as a place that\u2019s familiar in some ways while respecting its uniqueness helps to draw out interesting questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, I fell in love with Cuba because of its contradictions. They matched up with contradictions I saw in myself. Now that I\u2019ve spent many years there, both for research and work, Havana is my favorite city in the world. It\u2019s become home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Plaza del Vapor (Calles Galiano y Zanja, Havana), Cuba, ca. 1948. Public domain<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

2. Your article opens with a quote from Fidel Castro stating that \u201cwe have no shantytowns here\u201d in Cuba. Did this denial of urban informality pose any challenges in reconstructing the story of Las Yaguas and the other shantytowns discussed in the article?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought that was such an interesting quote. It is a denial of urban informality, but it\u2019s a very particular kind of denial. The context was a speech in the mid-1980s<\/a> where Fidel was explaining that the government would send family doctors to\u2026where? He wanted to say to shantytowns, but he caught himself. \u201cAreas that need them most,\u201d he said. It was an affirmation that the government was addressing underresourced areas, but without naming the social and economic barriers that traditionally marked them. Part of this was aspirational\u2014by not naming those barriers, I think he was seeking to not call them into being or legitimize them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, that erasure hasn\u2019t only been aspirational. It\u2019s made the type of housing-based politics that I write about in Las Yaguas very complicated. During the 1990s and 2000s, when Cuba was facing an incredibly hostile situation internationally, precarious housing also grew, especially in Havana. My impression is that it was intensely difficult to research at certain points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not a journalist, I\u2019m a historian, and that has made my work much easier. Even though 1959 is uniquely sensitive for something that\u2019s more than six decades past, it\u2019s still the past. My work has become much less sensitive because of really talented Cuban scholars who have illuminated housing inequality in the present\u2014not as a way to weaken the Cuban government vis a vis the US, but as a way to make it more responsive to its citizens. I\u2019m talking about Mayra Espina Prieto<\/a>, Pablo Rodr\u00edguez Ru\u00edz<\/a>, Luisa I\u00f1iguez<\/a>, Gina Rey<\/a>, Reinier Moreno<\/a>, the late Mario Coyula<\/a>, and many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, I would say that there is not much denial of deficient housing in Havana. Silvio Rodr\u00edguez, the classic singer of the Revolution<\/a>, has done a major concert series to highlight neighborhoods with precarious housing in Havana. Alejandro Ram\u00edrez made a beautiful documentary about it, Canci\u00f3n del Barrio<\/a>,<\/em> with a great accompanying book by Monica Rivero, Por todo espacio, por este tiempo<\/em><\/a>. Journalist M\u00f3nica Bar\u00f3 S\u00e1nchez<\/a> has done amazing investigative reporting of lead poisoning in vulnerable areas. Michael S\u00e1nchez Torres does great community advocacy in los Pocitos with Proyecto Akok\u00e1n<\/a>. Popular Cuban films like Conducta<\/em><\/a> and Habanastation<\/em><\/a> have even brought housing deficiencies to the big screen. And every Sunday, if you watch the popular Cuban police drama Tras la huella<\/a>,<\/em> a number of plots revolve around busting crime rings in Havana shantytowns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consciousness is there. Financing, especially as the US embargo continues, is much more complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Your article looks to continuities in slum clearance plans between the Batista and revolutionary regimes. How does this historiographical move allow new insights into Cuban history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll never forget my first summer of research, when I sat in the Library of Congress in Washington DC and read the entire run of Arquitectura<\/em> (a pre-1959 journal). This was a very stuffy, elite journal, but I kept finding rhetorical elements that fit language I had always associated with 1959. It caught me off guard. I don\u2019t mean rhetoric that called for Batista\u2019s overthrow\u2014there was none of that. I mean the rhetoric of urban planning, of governance. How could this be? In fact, it was not that these elite guys were all so progressive, or that Revolutionary leaders were all so stuffy\u2014it was that the urban poor had managed to get their voices into the political system in certain ways. This is not an isolated case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s happened in the historiography of 1950s Cuba is that it\u2019s been very easy to forget the interesting things that were happening in politics and society beyond antigovernment protest. Historians have lost track of institutions and practices like health care or religious freedom or economic planning in those years, each of which has a particular, unique history. Whether these can be considered origins of the specific events that led to Batista\u2019s fall from power is very doubtful\u2014and yet they mattered deeply to the course of Cuban society in the years that followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are good reasons for this oversight. The Batista government ended up being very brutal and clumsy, and the protest against it ended up sparking one of the best-known events in twentieth-century Latin American history. But what do we lose if we look to the origins of Cuban society in the 1960s purely in terms of a specific revolutionary movement in the 50s, however popular it ended up being? What do we lose if we solely focus on that angle, to the exclusion of all others? In my view, we lose quite a lot. My own particular argument in this article is that we lose the voices of the urban poor, of Las Yaguas residents, who managed to shape urban policy on a national scale before 1959 against very difficult odds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n