El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory

In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth‐century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthetic discourse of Spanish colonial power, El Templete underwent a process of local assimilation, whereby classical forms and academic aesthetics were adapted to the self‐representation of a heterogeneous colonial city.