Resumen de La calzada del Cerro: esplendor y ocaso de La Habana neoclásica
Mario Coyula Cowley, Isabel Rigol Savio
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a booming plantation economy developed in western Cuba. There was a heavy increase in the population density, and an educated and enterprising landowning Creole aristocracy consolidated itself. The city grew beyond its walls, branching out along several different roads. The most important of these roads ran to the southwest, a section of which took on the name Calzada del Cerro. With a length of over three kilometers, the Calzada is the virtual backbone of El Cerro. This district was the main exponent of Cuban neoclassical architecture.
No other main city in Latin America continues to have such a coherent nineteenth-century urban axis. El Cerro, which reached the height of its social, cultural and economic splendor in the mid 19th century, was associated with the birth of the Cuban national identity. The Calzada del Cerro indeed left behind a glorious past of luxury and elegance, with a dark side embodied by colonial dependence and slavery.
