 France during the reign of Louis XIV (r: 1643-1715) influenced the Cuban baroque both directly and indirectly through Spain via the Spanish platereque style, which was in turn influenced by the French baroque.
When all Cuban governmental offices were centralized in Havana in 1733, the city became more attractive to commerce and a magnet for wealth. With the founding of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Jeronimo de la Habana (now Universidad de la Habana) in 1728 by Father Geronimo Valdes (1649-1729), one of Cuba’s “builder bishops,” there was a surge of ecclesiastical and private construction. As Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo has described the city:
“During the first half of the eighteenth century, Havana – crossroads of the Indies – ceased to be a mere hub of American commerce, and became a thriving city, exporting the bounty of the tropics: tobacco (despite the state monopoly decreed in 1717), sugar, salted meat, hides, livestock, and hardwoods. It was an expensive city where wages were higher than in Spain or Holland.”
There is no better example of the Cuban baroque style in architecture than the Catedral de La Habana with its ornate columned façade (Pl. 1). Constructed of coquina, a fossilized coral rock (also known as “black teeth” or “iron shore”) and limestone, the cathedral dominates the city’s Plaza de Catedral. Rebuilt in 1748, the cathedral has been described by the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) with the adage “music turned to stone.” Because rich members of local congregations spent large sums building an furnishing their churches, ecclesiastical furnishings, including sacristy chests, were fabricated without thought of expense. Most of these chests were made of Cuban mahogany (Swietenia mahogoni) with West Indian cedar (Cedrela odorata) interiors.
By the mid-eighteenth century Cuban architecture became more dynamic, and decorative arts and furnishings followed suit. A later, more elaborate, baroque style began to incorporate traces of the French rococo asymmetry (see Pl. IV).
In 1762, Havana and the western half of Cuba was ceded to England as one of the consequences of the Seven Years` War (1756-1763). Havana became an open port, which changed the social, economic, and political landscape. As one historian has written: “During the British occupation, Havana’s residents had enjoyed their ability to purchase coveted consumer goods from the British merchants that had descended upon the city. With the return of Spanish rule, the government had instituted a degree of comercio libre, or free trade, which, while not the economic freedom of unrestricted laissez-faire, was a vast improvement over the previous system.”
With comercico libre, fashionable furnishings were now imported directly from France, England, or the Netherlands as well as from Spain. Consequently, Cuban furniture made during this period was quickly given foreign forms and styles such as the Queen Anne style, as well as French and Dutch baroque and rococo elements. In an article about English eighteenth-century furniture exports to Spain and thence, perhaps, to Cuba, Robert Wemyss Symonds wrote: “London since earliest times had possessed the reputation for the making of articles of the best quality and of the latest design. Not only to Englishmen at home and in the colonies, but also to many foreigners… For distinctive features of design, apart from the brighter coloring of the Japan grounds, the use of cane seats to chairs, stools and settees owning to their greater coolness in a hot climate, is one noticeable characteristic of this furniture.”
Like Cuba, Spain was inundated with foreign fashions in furniture design, and because of this many scholars maintain that any purity of form in Spanish furniture design disappeared with the eighteenth century.
“Spain gradually lost her national traits in furniture toward the end of the XVII century. In the XVIII they completely disappeared during the rule of the Bourbons, when the dominant styles were naturally those called ‘Louis,’ which in many cases were full of elegance and restlessness 