Source: Photograph (2010) by WTL© on site in Havana.
Comment: The Casa de las Américas (you can see the cream colored bas relief of the Americas above the entranceway on the right) looks like--as one guide book calls it--a "secular temple," right (Eyewitness Travel, p. 100)? It was erected very quickly in 1959 as Cuba's central (and centralizing) cultural institution. The Casa's founder was Haydée Santamaría, one of the heroines of the Cuban Revolution and one of Fidel Castro's lovers (or visa versa, right?). The Casa houses the most complete collection of Latin American art from 1960 to the present anywhere in the world. The Casa de las Américas indeed has been a veritable pantheon for almost all of Latin America's leftist and left-leaning intellectuals from 1960 to the present. A few are: Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, José Saramago, Alicia Alonso, Mario Benedetti, Silvio Rodríguez, Hernán Castellano-Girón, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Carmen Naranjo, Ariel Dorfman, and hundreds more.
Humanities question: Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado (1922-1980) was one of the survivor's of Castro's failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953; she was one of the founders of the July 26 Movement; she helped found the Cuban Communist Party; she fought in the Revolution in the Sierra Maestra alongside women and men recruits; she had a daughter, Celia Hart Santamaría, with Armando Hart Dávalos, in 1963; she opposed the Sovietization of Cuba (installed by the Castro regime) because she generally favored the communist approach of Leon Trotsky; she committed suicide on July 26, 1980 in an office in the Casa de las Américas; she's buried in the Colón cemetery (see: => Havana #25). For a commentary in Spanish on her suicide (and the suicides of many others whose deaths in Cuba remain unexplaine) by a Cuban who felt betrayed by the Sovietization of the Cuban Revolution, see: => Yahoo Respuestas.
Humanities question: What is the relationship between the architecture of this building, its function in the politics and culture of post-1960 Cuba, and secular humanism?