Letter from ... CUBA.

In the introduction to The Havana Project 1996, a collection of theoretical insertions in Havana by such luminaries as Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne and Coop Himmelblau, Fidel Castro wrote 'Cuba has no need for monuments'.

This may have been a tacit warning to foreign, mainly Yanqui, architects, not to presume to apply their brand of monument to Havana. Or it may simply have been a declaration of Castro's long-standing commitment to a collectivist, socially useful building programme which has, since the revolution, produced acres of utilitarian building but little of beauty.

Havana today is architecturally as great, as perplexing and as depressing as everything else about Cuban culture. It has a remarkably unaltered but largely decaying urban core. In it are splendid Spanish Baroque buildings, some fading like the ghosts of grand dowagers, others newly primped models of the famed restoration of La Habana Vieja. There are tumbledown movie theatres, apartment and office buildings in luscious tropical variants of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne; and sassy Morris Lapidus Modern hotels -- hotels that were discredited after the revolution because of their association with US exploitation and are now state-owned, refurbished (without casinos) and, poignantly, back in their old role as tourist hotels. Then, on the fringes of the city are two dismal, albeit useful, kinds of development: estates of concrete slab housing and industrial buildings built in the '60s and '70s, and post Cold-War International Bland hotels and convention centres.

In the late '60s, Castro stopped commissioning poetic architectural monuments, soon after he called to an abrupt halt the construction of one of the greatest in postwar Cuba. This was the National Arts Schools, a complex of five organic buildings, once ripe as mangoes in their sensuality and revolutionary spirit and even now, as they are engulfed by a sea of tropical vegetation, so striking you wonder how they fell off the international radar screen. (They were brought to North America's attention recently by architect and historian, John Loomis, who produced a book and travelling exhibition about them.)

The Schools of Modern Dance, Plastic Arts, Dramatic Arts, Music and Ballet were designed by three architects, Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti, and located on what had been Havana's most exclusive country club, in the garden suburb district of Cubanacan. They were personally commissioned by Fidel Castro who, after playing a last game of golf there with his companero Che Guevara, declared the site should be an international art school that would cultivate a new art for a new socialist culture. To give form to this visionary idea, lead architect Ricardo Porro took inspiration from the much neglected Afro-Cuban culture on the island. His voluptuously plastic School of Plastic Arts makes reference not only to late Corb, but also, in its bulging Catalonian brick domes and vaults, to an African village and to the goddess of fertility and creativity herself, woman. I wanted, declared Porro in an interview in Los Angeles earlier this year, to create 'a city of breasts'. The other schools were dif ferent but equally inspired, sharing the brick curves, in situ concrete and a raw, organic style.

But for a variety of reasons -- political and practical construction of these schools, considered now by many Cuban architects the zenith of Cuba's fledgling quest for its own brand of Modernism, was stopped in 1965 before completion. The fate of the schools reflects the decline in stature over the last 30 years of architecture and architects in Cuba. After the revolution, architects who chose to remain (about two-thirds of the architects in Cuba left, including most of the best, as did many good craftsmen) had to give up private practice and work for state firms. On monthly salaries of, now, approximately [pounds]10 ($15), they became answerable to the new Ministry of Construction, not the Ministry of Culture, which oversaw the other arts, and were assigned to the construction of prefabricated schools, housing, industrial and agricultural buildings.

Since Cuba was opened to foreign investment after the end of the Cold War, architects (reportedly 90 per cent of them) have found themselves working, often in association with foreign investors who call the shots, on state tourist buildings. Most are as dreary and devoid of Cuba's rich sensibility as the utopian housing. But, in the last couple of months, the situation has started to change, with thawing international relations, and with the emergence of a younger architecture generation that is more enquiring and vocal than their Cold-War forbears. A few architects are managing to put a personal stamp on some state projects. This month sees the completion of a lively bank remodel on the 5th Avenue in the swank Miramar district by architects Antonio Choy and Julia Leon, and another couple Oscar Garcia and Teresa Martin. Its yellow sloping panels and tapering roofs offer a cheerful nod to the experiments with form going on overseas.

As project architects for a state firm, Maceo, Garcia and Martin have also been given the go-ahead for the Packard Hotel, a $20 million hotel on a prime location at the end of the nineteenth-century boulevard, the Paseo del Prado, on the Havana seafront. It promises to bring modernity to the old district in the shape of a sleek steel and glass penthouse atop restored Neo-Classical lower floors, complete with huge ceramic mural by a leading Cuban artist on one flank. And Roberto Gottardi, architect of the School of Dramatic Arts, recently designed A Prado Y Neptuno, a restaurant on the ground floor of a late nineteenth-century building in La Habana Vieja. His modest homage to his favourite designers and artists -- Frank Lloyd Wright, Philippe Starck, Charles Rennie Macintosh, Carlo Scarpa, Roy Lichtenstein, Louis Kahn -- is considered by Emilio Castro (no relation to Fidel), who designed graphics for the restaurant, to mark a turning point for architects in the city.

Meanwhile, a once influential architecture magazine, Arquitectura Cuba, has been relaunched and is now edited by Eduardo Luis Rodriguez (who has written several wonderful books on Havana architecture, including the forthcoming Havana Guide: Modern Architecture, 1925-1965). Some architects are also agitating: For the restoration of Havana beyond the old district (La Habana Vieja); for a ban on the cheap, mediocre graphics on their local burger chain, Burgui; and for the restoration of the arts schools.

And this last dream seems to have been answered. Last month, Fidel Castro announced the five arts schools are to be restored. The project is to be directed by Roberto Gottardi, the only one of the three original architects who remained on the island. This is grand news indeed, and portends a hopeful start to the new Millennium for Cuba's long under-appreciated architects and architecture.