Art School Doc Uncovers Cuba’s Unfinished Spaces

The Cuban Revolution ended in the year 1959, leaving Fidel Castro as the country’s prime minister and Cuba itself poised for a time of questioning the old ways, and opening up new avenues of living. 

In the spirit of change and innovation, Castro commissioned three architects — Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garatti — to build an art school on the location of an old golf course. 

Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray’s 2011 documentary, Unfinished Spaces, tells the story of that art school: its triumphs, its failures, and the ways in which it represents the triumphs and failures of Castro’s regime.

In another, if smaller, institution of art and learning, the Ives Main Library on Elm Street partnered with the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on Friday to bring the film to the people of New Haven as a part of a month-long film series dedicated to art and protest. 

“The Beinecke’s doing a good job of community engagement lately,” said Sandra Rux, one of five viewers who clustered in the library before a large screen, ready to learn about one of the greatest unfinished monuments to Cuba and its history. Before them unfolded a tale of politics, community, and the power of creation.

“I helped to make revolution but in a very soft way,” said Ricardo Porro, in one of the movie’s many interviews that, when combined, comprised the story of the Art School in Havana, Cuba. ​“I fight with ideas,” he said, rather than with guns or tanks. The idea: to build a sanctuary for the arts composed of five schools — modern dance, plastic arts (designed by Porro), ballet, music, (designed by Garatti), and theater (designed by Gottardi).

Dorian Dean attended the screening on only her second day living in New Haven, drawn by the posters they had seen around town and the promise of a story about art as a larger representation of a cultural moment. ​“Art and activism is something I’m really interested in as an artist,” Dean said. ​“It’s really interesting to see this as an exploration that’s being pursued for a month.”

Art and activism combined in the form of the Art School. From 1961 to 1965, the three architects designed and built the schools. Due to the embargo from the United States, the architects decided to use Cuban materials like clay and brick. They enlisted student volunteers to help with the construction, a process filled with spirits and hopes higher than the Catalan vaults. ​“All this was built to the rhythm of music from the drums and the students,” described one interviewee, remembering the long days of hard work and merriment.

Porro, Gottardi, and Garatti wanted the school to represent the Cuba they experienced. ​“It has to represent total freedom,” said Garratti, remembering the open boundaries of the schools and how they bled into each other to create a single, multi-limbed organism. Purro designed the School of Plastic Arts to resemble a fertility goddess, and the entrance of the School of Modern Dance to look like an explosion. ​“I wanted to express another feeling I felt during that moment,” Purro said. ​“The fear that something would happen.”

Happen it did, in 1961, when following the Bay of Pigs, Castro became more interested in the Soviet way of life, including Soviet architecture. That meant prefabricated buildings, and an environment in which people saw architecture as bourgeoisie. The prime minister put an end to all ​“non-productive” construction, including the Art School, which at the time remained unfinished aside from Purro’s schools. Classes continued, but without the three main architects: Purro left Cuba for Paris when he realized he would be expected to make Soviet architecture, Gottardi was sent to work on a construction site, and politicians accused Garatti of espionage, having him jailed and expelled to Milan.

In the most tragic and beautiful section of the documentary, the Art School languishes, overrun by plants, flooding, and squatters. It becomes a modern-day ruin, a monument to the dashed hopes of the Castro age. ​“It was fascinating, the idea of such uncensored passion, vision to create something collaboratively,” said Dean. But then came censorship, the killer of art, and shut down far more than just the school itself. From a triumph of creativity, the Art School became a ghost of what might have been.

“I hope to meet Fidel and talk to him and tell him a system needs to be open,” said Garatti. ​“A closed system dies.” The Art School died, but those who believed in it sought to resurrect it. In 2008, following a period where the World Monument Fund had tried to save the school and had been thwarted by the U.S. embargo, Castro himself returned to the project. A team restored Purro’s schools and planned to finish building Gottardi and Garratti’s sections, incorporating modern architecture to represent the complete history of the buildings. In 2009, Cuba cut funding once again.

“I gave birth with this architecture,” said Purro in 2008, gesturing around at the buildings, the students, and their artwork. ​“These are the fruits of my labor.” 

Unfinished Spaces provides a tribute to art as a representation of a people, place, and time. The Art School, in all its glory and decay, symbolizes a turbulent period of Cuban history. By bringing its story to a New Haven audience, the Ives Main Library and the Beineke opened up a new, entertaining way to learn about the past and engage in the present. As the screening ended, several audience members whipped out their phones to Google the current status of the Art School. So far as they were concerned, the story wasn’t over yet.