in 1991, and the loss of Soviet patronage, plunged Castro’s Cuba into an excruciating poverty that crippled the state infrastructure and fomented political disillusion, and from which the country has not fully recovered. All evidence suggested that the Cuban socialist experiment was succeeding, and that international socialism was truly the wave of the future. Friends of mine who grew up in Cuba in the 1970s and ’80s remember fondly the time when the country’s educational system was superb, the health care system was the envy of the world, and the planned economy sustained a standard of living that got better every year. Many a Cuban will also wax nostalgic for the decades that followed the triumphant revolution in 1959.
#Concrete utopia cast full#
The hotel, the management tells me, is kept full by wealthy Russians who come to Cuba to bask in the sun and indulge in nostalgia for an era when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power, the Eastern Bloc was leading the space race, and Soviet imperial influence extended all the way to the warm Caribbean. Each suite is named for a Soviet cosmonaut, and the principal salon is decorated with vintage photographs of Russian spacecraft and celebrities, including Laika, the dog who orbited the globe aboard Sputnik 2. It has since then been meticulously restored as a boutique hotel, with appointments more lavish than the original and tricked out with Soviet space-age memorabilia. When I first visited the site, in 2002, the building was an abandoned shell, an eerie relic. Designed in 1974 by Antonio Quintana - Fidel Castro’s favorite architect - the daring concrete structure was built as a rest and relaxation retreat for Russian cosmonauts and military brass. Installation view, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 Ĭasa de los Cosmonautas cantilevers dramatically over the powdery white sands of Cuba’s fabled Varadero beach.
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