Romantic Cartographies: La Condesa de Merlin’s Colonial Havana and the View from the Harbor

When la Comtesse Merlin, née María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, arrived in Havana in June 1840, the city that greeted her contrasted with the port she had left behind in early adolescence. Having served as a commercial outpost for the Spanish overseas empire, Havana at mid-nineteenth century was turning into the Paris of the Caribbean under Governor Miguel Tacón’s program of reform. Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (1844) records the contours of a city in transition through various spatial tropes, beginning with the initial view from the harbor, colonial plazas and monuments, and the ritual of the afternoon paseo (promenade). Merlin’s tour of colonial Havana reveals the gender and racial divides prevalent in Cuban slave society as well as a criolla's transnational awareness of a city precariously balanced between its colonial past and a mirage of prosperity.