Ciudades en el Caribe

Abstract

With the insertion of the Caribbean into the world capitalist economy in the 16th Century, its cities were exposed to a dynamic process of changing hegemonies in which geopolitics played a decisive role. This article, the result of a course given at the UPR College of General Studies in 2010 and the draft for a book in preparation, analyzes the progression of this urban history. The analysis focuses on four cities— Santo Domingo, San Juan, Havana and Miami—over a period of five centuries. The urban history of the Caribbean takes shape in three phases— colonial, developmentalist and open cities—with a parenthesis operating in the case of Havana, the "socialist city," a failed attempt to vary the political dynamic of a a region faced with North American hegemony and Miami‘s urban primacy since the 1960s. The article concludes postulating the formation and the implications of a 21st Century marked by a hegemonic megacity, Havana/Miami.