Carlos Garaicoa
Hotel Parque Central, 1994
Photograph
12 x 19 in
30.48 x 48.26 cm
30.48 x 48.26 cm
AP No. 2
680-0042
Copyright of the artist
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Hotel Parque Central was one of the symbols of colonial architecture located in the center of Havana. In the Fifties it had a great boom and in some way it...
Hotel Parque Central was one of the symbols of colonial architecture located in the center of Havana. In the Fifties it had a great boom and in some way it signified the value of the flourishing capitalism in Cuba. With the arrival of the "Revolution" in 1959, it began to deteriorate and as it was not a priority of the government to maintain symbolic structures of the past, the hotel was left alone in the structure and was admired as a historical ruin until the early 90s. The fact of having left it as a ruin, symbolized that all previous thoughts had no place in the Castro government.
In 1995, advanced cultural recovery projects simulated by city historians and managed by CENCREM rescued the building and fully restored it as it was before, but only for the restoration of the 18th century façade that would be assimilated into the interior of the future. hotel. Once the proposed City Rehabilitation Master Plan was approved, the Parque Central Hotel project was put into practice, proposing its integration into the new architectural context. This work is a metaphor for the failures of ideologies, as the government insisted on freezing the past and prioritizing the future of the new ideological paradigm.