Havana Club
Havana Club is a brand of rum created in Cuba in 1934, now one of the best-selling rum brands in the world. Produced in Cardenas, Cuba by family-owned Jose Arechabala S. A. the brand was nationalized after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Since 1994 it has been produced in Cuba and sold globally by Havana Club International, a 50:50 joint venture between Pernod Ricard and the Cuban government. Bacardi produces a competing product with the same name in Puerto Rico, sold only in the United States; the two companies have engaged in ongoing litigation about ownership of the brand. The Arechabala family founded a distillery in Cardenas, Cuba in 1878. Renamed Jose Arechabala S. A. the company created the Havana Club brand in 1934, sold rum under that name in both Cuba and the United States. The company was nationalized without compensation by the Castro government in 1960; the Arechabala family allege. Subsequently, much of the Arechabala family was forced to leave Cuba for Spain and the United States, while other members of the family were imprisoned.
The Cuban government sold rum abroad under the Havana Club name beginning in 1972, focusing on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The government focused on Havana Club because the Arechabala family had not established plants outside of Cuba and so could not produce a competing brand; the company was considered a "national jewel" by the Cuban government, in 1977 manufacturing was moved to a new plant in Santa Cruz del Norte. Since 1994, Cuban production and non-US global marketing of Havana Club has continued under a joint partnership between Pernod Ricard and Corporación Cuba Ron. In 1994, Bacardi began producing rum under the Havana Club name in Cataño, Puerto Rico using a recipe given to them by Arechabala family members. While sold in only a few US states, production was expanded in 2006, in 2012, after winning a critical court battle, Bacardi announced plans to sell the rum more broadly; the Havana Club trademark has been the subject of extensive trademark litigation in the US, World Trade Organization.
After Jose Arechabala S. A. was nationalized, the Arechabala family stopped producing rum. They allowed the US trademark registration for "Havana Club" to lapse in 1973; the family alleges. Taking advantage of the lapse, the Cuban government registered the mark in the US in 1976; the brand was assigned by the Cuban government to Pernod Ricard in 1993. In 1994, Bacardi obtained the Arechabala family's remaining rights in the brand, began producing limited amounts of rum bearing the name. 922 cases were sold in the US in 1995 and 1996. This drew litigation from Pernod Ricard. Pernod Ricard was successful in two of the first three court holdings issued in this litigation. However, in 1998, after heavy lobbying from Bacardi, the US Congress passed the "Bacardi Act", which protected trademarks related to expropriated Cuban companies, ended the first phase of the litigation by eliminating Pernod Ricard's standing; this act has been applied only to the Havana Club trademark. The act was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization in 2001 and 2002, on grounds that it singled out one country.
The United States has not yet acted to address the WTO ruling, despite a 2005 deadline and requests from the European Union. Following the initial round of litigation, a second round of litigation occurred, through both the US Federal court system and the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, focused in part on the deceptive nature of the use of "Havana" in the name of a rum produced outside of Cuba; this round of litigation lasted from 2009 to 2012, again resulted in a victory for Bacardi. After this defeat, Pernod Ricard announced plans to market the product in the US under the "Havanista" mark, while Bacardi announced plans to extend distribution of Bacardi's version of Havana Club throughout the US. In Spain, Pernod Ricard's ownership of the mark has been upheld in three court rulings, most in 2011. In January 2016, after a thaw in US-Cuba relations, the U. S. government awarded a trademark for Havana Club to the Cuban government, "expected to reignite longstanding tension between Bacardi Ltd. and the Cuban government".
Bacardi appealed the decision, in 2017, Florida lawmakers asked President Donald Trump to reverse the decision. Pernod Ricard's Havana Club is the fifth-largest rum brand in the world, with 4 million cases sold in 2012–2013, it is sold in over 120 countries. Its strongest markets include France, Germany, where marketing plays off the brand's distribution in East Germany during the Cold War. Since 2008, it is bottled in India, the world's second-largest rum market. Pernod Ricard plays on Cuban themes in its marketing, including labeling Havana Club as "El Ron de Cuba", it is one of the most common items brought into the US by tourists returning from Cuba. To avoid charges of customer deception, Bacardi's Havana Club labeling prominently mentions that it is made in Puerto Rico and is referred to as "Havana Club Puerto Rican rum". Pernod Ricard's labeling, originated by Cubaexport in the 1970s, is gold and red, features the Giraldilla, a weathervane from the old fort of Havana. Pernod Ricard has announced plans to use similar gold and red labels on their "Havanista" product in the United States.
In 2016, Bacardi plans to sell their version of Havana Club nationally. This will be bottled in Florida. Añejo Blanco: White rum. Marketed as a mixer. Añejo 3 Años: Aged 3 years. Añejo Espe
La Cabaña
Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, colloquially known as La Cabaña, is an 18th-century fortress complex, the third-largest in the Americas, located on the elevated eastern side of the harbor entrance in Havana, Cuba. The fort rises above the 200-foot hilltop, along with Morro Castle. After the capture of Havana by British forces in 1762, an exchange was soon made to return Havana to the Spanish, the controlling colonial power of Cuba, in exchange for Florida. A key factor in the British capture of Havana turned out to be the overland vulnerability of El Morro; this realization and the fear of further attacks following British colonial conquests in the Seven Years War prompted the Spanish to build a new fortress to improve the overland defense of Havana. Replacing earlier and less extensive fortifications next to the 16th-century El Morro fortress, La Cabaña was the second-largest colonial military installation in the New World by the time it was completed in 1774, at great expense to Spain.
Over the next two hundred years the fortress served as a base for both Spain and independent Cuba – La Cabaña has been used as a prison by the government of the leaders Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raúl. In January 1959, communist revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro seized La Cabaña. Che Guevara used the fortress as military prison for several months. During his five-month tenure in that post, Guevara oversaw the revolutionary tribunals and executions of people who had opposed the communist revolution, including former members of Buró de Represión de Actividades Comunistas, Batista's secret police; the complex is now part of a historical park, along with the El Morro fortress, houses several museums open to the public. Every night a cannon is fired at 9pm, the so-called "El Cañonazo de las 9", a custom kept from colonial times signaling the closure of the gates in the city wall. Media related to Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña at Wikimedia Commons
Radiocentro CMQ Building
The Radiocentro CMQ Building complex consisted of a radio and television production facility and office building in Calle L and La Rampa in El Vedado, Cuba and it was modeled after Raymond Hood's 1933 Rockefeller Center in New York City. With 1,650 seats, the theater first opened on December 23, 1947 under the name Teatro Warner Radiocentro, it was owned by brothers Goar and Abel Mestre. For the construction of this building, the Havana building authorities granted a permit in 1947 amending the ordinances that were in effect in El Vedado prohibiting the construction of buildings of more than three storeys; this statute was modified six years to expand the construction of up to four floors because many planners and owners claimed the need to authorize them to build taller buildings in the area. The building was set back from the property line five meters, adding four meters for an arcade, which allowed a distance from the road, while adjusting to the strong slope of 23rd Street, in this way the arcade became a wide gallery, which sub-divided the basement level.
This gallery became the covered hall of the cinema located in the upper corner with Calle L. The building had an expressionist curved cover of a large scale relating to the important intersection; this same scale was adopted in the restaurant, located on the opposite corner on M. Street; the wide gallery gives access to the lobby of the office building. The third building is set up by a prismatic piece on M Street set back to emphasize the two corners; the cinema with a capacity for 1,700 spectators was a Cinerama which used three projectors and a twenty-five-foot radius screen. It had a small stage in which short-term shows could be offered, in order to entertain the audience in the middle of the films; the radio station CMQ occupied part of the offices of the ten-story building, attached to the block of rental offices. In this area, a part of the land had been reserved for future television installations, which had not yet been built. In one of its studios, Studio Number 2 was the venue not only of radio program transmissions but that studio was the location of all or most of the RCA Victor recordings in Cuba from 1948 to 1959.
The label at the CMQ complex was a Cuban record label founded in 1959 by RCA Victor. It released music by several internationally successful artists such as Celia Cruz, Beny Moré, Orquesta Aragón and La Lupe; the ground floor, common for the entire complex, had different types of commercial establishments: several exhibition halls, a bank, a restaurant and a cafeteria. The pedestrian circulation was designed in such a way so that it made it necessary to pass in front of these premises; the Radiocentro CMQ Building of 1947, built on 23rd Street between Calles L and M in El Vedado, was the first mixed use building in Cuba. The architectural program of the building included businesses, offices and television studios, as well as the Cinerama Warner cinema; this project joined the expertise of the structural engineers, the U. S. firm Purdy and Henderson and the architects Martín Domínguez Esteban and Miguel Gastón and Emilio del Junco, all members of the ATEC. The building had a great impact; the building is a series of independent boxes, it was designed by the Basque architect Martín Domínguez Esteban.
Esteban had been the architect of the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela, along with Carlos Arniches. The CMQ Building was loosely modeled after Raymond Hood's Rockefeller Center.] The Radiocentro CMQ Building had an impact on many Cuban architects who subscribed to Modern architecture and buildings that would be built in the following years, such as the Hotel Habana Hilton across La Rampa designed by Welton Becket and associates with the Cuban architectural firm of Arroyo and Menéndez, the1958, the twenty-three story Edificio Seguro Medico by Antonio Quintana, among others. Walter Gropius, during a visit he made in 1949 to Havana referred to the Radiocentro CMQ Building to defend the need for architectural teamwork and collaboration among architects: It is impossible for the architect to know all of the equipment and installation requirements. In 1952 the CMQ Radio and TV Network planned to provide administrative offices, a radio station and housing for employees. CMQ selected a 110,000 sq. ft. plot of land costing 700,000 pesos.
The company Fomento de Hipotecas Aseguradas financed 80% of the cost of the residences and 60% of the commercial shops. El Banco Continental Cubano granted a credit of 6 million pesos. Martín Domínguez Esteban with Ernesto Gómez-Sampera designed the FOCSA Building, a modernist project aimed to provide housing for its workers and additional radio stations. Work began in February 1954 and finished in June 1956. At the time of construction it was the second largest residential concrete building in the world, second only to the Martinelli Building in São Paulo, Brazil, it surpassed the López Serrano Building in height, Cuba's tallest building. The FOCSA shares some curios design similarities with the Edificio del Seguro Médico of 1958 by Antonio Quintana including single loading of apartments, natural ventilation of the apartments and a small rear window under the kitchen cabinets marking vertically the center of the wall. In 1943 while France was under German occupation, a group of Paris artists in a café on the Rue Dauphineartists formed what they called an association with the intent to exhibit art as an answer to the Nazi party's description of Modern art as Degenerate art.
The group presented its first exhib
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto was a Spanish explorer and conquistador, involved in expeditions in Nicaragua and the Yucatan Peninsula, played an important role in Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru, but is best known for leading the first Spanish and European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States. He is the first European documented as having crossed the Mississippi River. De Soto's North American expedition was a vast undertaking, it ranged throughout the southeastern United States, both searching for gold, reported by various Indian tribes and earlier coastal explorers, for a passage to China or the Pacific coast. De Soto died in 1542 on the banks of the Mississippi River. Hernando de Soto was born in Extremadura, Spain, to parents who were both hidalgos, nobility of modest means; the region was poor and many people struggled to survive. He was born in the current province of Badajoz. Three towns—Badajoz and Jerez de los Caballeros—claim to be his birthplace, he spent time as a child at each place.
He stipulated in his will that his body be interred at Jerez de los Caballeros, where other members of his family were buried. As he grew to adulthood, the Spanish took back control of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. Spain and Portugal were filled with young men seeking a chance for military fame after the defeat of the Moors. With discovery of new lands across the ocean to the west, young men were attracted to rumors of adventure and wealth. De Soto sailed to the New World with Pedrarias Dávila, appointed as the first Governor of Panama. In 1520 he participated in Gaspar de Espinosa's expedition to Veragua, in 1524, he participated in the conquest of Nicaragua under Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. There he acquired a public office in León, Nicaragua. Brave leadership, unwavering loyalty, ruthless schemes for the extortion of native villages for their captured chiefs became de Soto's hallmarks during the conquest of Central America, he gained fame as an excellent horseman and tactician.
During that time, de Soto was influenced by the achievements of Spanish explorers: Juan Ponce de León, the first European to reach Florida. In 1530, de Soto became a regidor of Nicaragua, he led an expedition up the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula searching for a passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enable trade with the Orient, the richest market in the world. Failing that, without means to explore further, de Soto, upon Pedro Arias Dávila's death, left his estates in Nicaragua. Bringing his own men on ships which he hired, de Soto joined Francisco Pizarro at his first base of Tumbes shortly before departure for the interior of present-day Peru. Pizarro made de Soto one of his captains; when Pizarro and his men first encountered the army of Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, Pizarro sent de Soto with fifteen men to invite Atahualpa to a meeting. When Pizarro's men attacked Atahualpa and his guard the next day, de Soto led one of the three groups of mounted soldiers; the Spanish captured Atahualpa.
De Soto was sent to the camp of the Inca army, where his men plundered Atahualpa's tents. During 1533, the Spanish held Atahualpa captive in Cajamarca for months while his subjects paid for his ransom by filling a room with gold and silver objects. During this captivity, de Soto taught him to play chess. By the time the ransom had been completed, the Spanish became alarmed by rumors of an Inca army advancing on Cajamarca. Pizarro sent de Soto with 200 soldiers to scout for the rumored army. While de Soto was gone, the Spanish in Cajamarca decided to kill Atahualpa to prevent his rescue. De Soto returned to report. After executing Atahualpa and his men headed to Cuzco, the capital of the Incan Empire; as the Spanish force approached Cuzco, Pizarro sent his brother Hernando and de Soto ahead with 40 men. The advance guard fought a pitched battle with Inca troops in front of the city, but the battle had ended before Pizarro arrived with the rest of the Spanish party; the Inca army withdrew during the night.
The Spanish plundered Cuzco, where they found much silver. As a mounted soldier, de Soto received a share of the plunder, which made him wealthy, it represented riches from Atahualpa's camp, his ransom, the plunder from Cuzco. On the road to Cuzco, Manco Inca Yupanqui, a brother of Atahualpa, had joined Pizarro. Manco had been hiding from Atahualpa in fear of his life, was happy to gain Pizarro's protection. Pizarro arranged for Manco to be installed as the Inca leader. De Soto joined Manco in a campaign to eliminate the Inca armies under Quizquiz, loyal to Atahualpa. By 1534, de Soto was serving as lieutenant governor of Cuzco while Pizarro was building his new capital on the coast. In 1535 King Charles awarded Diego de Almagro, Francisco Pizarro's partner, the governorship of the southern portion of the Inca Empire; when de Almagro made plans to explore and conquer the southern part of the Inca empire, de Soto applied to be his second-in-command, but de Almagro tur
Plaza del Vapor, Havana
The building was called Plaza del Vapor and it was one of the most important and well known markets in Havana. Its name derived from its builder Francisco Marti, the impresario of the Tacón Theatre and who had a monopoly of fish in the city. Marti had an image in his office of Neptuno, the first vapor that made regular round trips between Havana and Matanzas. "It was the image of that ship that ended up naming the building." From the Plaza del Vapor, Marti sold 50% of all the lottery tickets in Cuba. The building site was square in shape, the building had a playground-courtyard in the middle and an 8.3 metres high Colonnade along the perimeter facing Calles Galiano, Reina and Dragones. The main floor was commercial, the upper floor was occupied by the residences of some 200 families. In 1840 the building was remodeled into its characteristic colossal masonry arches comprising the height of the ground floor; the main facade facing Calle Reina had a clock tower in the center of the building. Iiron frames at the playground and railings throughout the building had highlighted letters M and T, the initials Miguel Tacon.
At the beginning of the Revolution, the Ministry of Public Health declared the place unhealthy and its vendors were resettled in the area of Calle Amistad between Estrella and Monte. In 1959 the building was demolished by the Castro government. Today the site is occupied by the park El Curita. Andrés Stanislas Romay writes about the Plaza del Vapor: "Meanwhile the animation reigns in the inner enclosure of the square, that as by charm you see transformed into a kind of fair. If you do not want to be a philosopher, the diversity of physiognomy, conversations, will serve as a distraction, or you will contemplate with satisfaction the golden pineapple, the purple mangoes, the velvety caimito and other thousand rich redoubts of the fertile fields tropical But behold, this agitation subsides, the concurrence disappears and with it the fruits and the square is deserted. Do you think that this building is totally destitute of interest? No, by the way: it is transformed into a temple of love, of that subtle spirit that penetrates whenever the man stamps his mark and who does not disdain to visit the darkest shelter at the same time as the most majestic palace.
When the interior of the square remains as resting from the mercantile struggle that has suffered, you will see several people of the strong sex glide under the arcades and gamble in certain places as if they were the geniuses in charge of silence. An infinite number of faint whistles shake the air in all directions and soon after you hear those whistles coming from the upper floor of the square, as if there were echoes echoed by the first; these whistles are one of the thousand inventions of the subjects of the bandaged god, species of electric telegraphs from heart to heart. Just have been changed by this means the corresponding notices will see appear on the interior balconies of the building some female faces, youthful and engage in signs and dedicates words sotto voce a loving conversation. In such a corner of the square other individuals, whose condition is revealed at first sight, new Diogenes who would live inside a barrel if there were no banks in the more brown, who belong to a class, more abject than what it has the honor of having counted Noah and Alexander the Great in its ranks.
But those men have fallen asleep, the lovers of both sexes have retired: it is twelve o'clock and except for the monotonous noise of the water of the fountains, nothing interests you anymore in the interior of the square. Let's go outside; the fruit stalls, the little shops, the clothing stores, the fur shops and a thousand other establishments adorn the exterior of the building, in a showy way, giving each of its sides a particular character. The most animated side is that in which are the fruit stands, which are invaded by a homogeneous throng that, by virtue of its money, buys the right to cause the economic fall of a neighbor. Meanwhile, with some exceptions, the shopkeepers and the shopkeepers rest on or invent new ways to attract customersl. Otherwise nothing remarkable offers the Plaza de Vapor during the hours that mediate until the end of the artificial day, as soon as the night unfolds its mantle, you will find the animation and the light on the outside, the silence and the interior darkness."
There were more than 160 businesses in the Plaza del vapor. Carlos Rodríguez Búa writing about the nearby "El Barrio Chino" notes: "...the Plaza del Vapor occupied la manzana between Galiano, Dragones and Águila streets and about 1824 there were established without any order and with the most petty irregularity the vendors of daily supplies for that part new of the population, so that the best of those positions were uneven wooden blocks that belonged to different owners. I knew the Plaza del Vapor in its decline, at the end of the 50s and it was incredible the amount of small businesses that were piled up there. I'll talk about it again because it was located in the neighborhood of Chinatown and there were a few of them there. I used to go there every week to buy the discs with 45 revolutions per minute that on the site were obtained at a third of the official price in nightclubs, as well as to the bookstores of use in which you took me masterpieces for a few cents, as well as the expensive National Geographic magazines used."
Nicolás Tanco Armero writes about Vivaya a baseball player at the Plaza del Vapor:"Viyaya played in t
Bastion fort
A bastion fort or trace italienne, is a fortification in a style that evolved during the early modern period of gunpowder when the cannon came to dominate the battlefield. It was first seen in the mid-15th century in Italy; some types when combined with ravelins and other outworks, resembled the related star fort of the same era. The design of the fort is a pentagon or hexagon with bastions at the corners of the walls; these outcroppings eliminated protected blind spots, called "dead zones", allowed fire along the curtain from positions protected from direct fire. Many bastion forts feature cavaliers, which are raised secondary structures based inside the primary structure, their predecessors, medieval fortresses, were placed on high hills. From there, arrows were shot at the enemies, the higher the fortress was, the further the arrows flew; the enemies' hope was to either ram the gate or climb over the wall with ladders and overcome the defenders. For the invading force, these fortifications proved quite difficult to overcome, accordingly, fortresses occupied a key position in warfare.
Passive ring-shaped fortifications of the Medieval era proved vulnerable to damage or destruction by cannon fire, when it could be directed from outside against a perpendicular masonry wall. In addition, an attacking force that could get close to the wall was able to conduct undermining operations in relative safety, as the defenders could not shoot at them from nearby walls. In contrast, the bastion fortress was a flat structure composed of many triangular bastions designed to cover each other, a ditch. In order to counteract the cannonballs, defensive walls were made thicker. To counteract the fact that lower walls were easier to climb, the ditch was widened so that attacking infantry were still exposed to fire from a higher elevation, including enfilading fire from the bastions; the outer side of the ditch was provided with a glacis to deflect cannonballs aimed at the lower part of the main wall. Further structures, such as ravelins, hornworks or crownworks, detached forts could be added to create complex outer works to further protect the main wall from artillery, sometimes provide additional defensive positions.
They were built of many materials earth and brick, as brick does not shatter on impact from a cannonball as stone does. Bastion fortifications were further developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the French invasion of the Italian peninsula; the French army was equipped with new cannon and bombards that were able to destroy traditional fortifications built in the Middle Ages. Star forts were employed by Michelangelo in the defensive earthworks of Florence, refined in the sixteenth century by Baldassare Peruzzi and Vincenzo Scamozzi; the design spread out of Italy in the 1540s. It was employed throughout Europe for the following three centuries. Italian engineers were in demand throughout Europe to help build the new fortifications; the late-seventeenth-century architects Menno van Coehoorn and Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, are considered to have taken the form to its logical extreme. "Fortresses... acquired ravelins and redoubts and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps..."The star-shaped fortification had a formative influence on the patterning of the Renaissance ideal city: "The Renaissance was hypnotized by one city type which for a century and a half—from Filarete to Scamozzi—was impressed upon all utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city."
In the 19th century, the development of the explosive shell changed the nature of defensive fortifications. Elvas, in Portugal is considered by some to be the best surviving example of the Dutch school of fortifications; when the newly-effective maneuverable siege cannon came into military strategy in the fifteenth century, the response from military engineers was to arrange for the walls to be embedded into ditches fronted by earthen slopes so that they could not be attacked by destructive direct fire and to have the walls topped by earthen banks that absorbed and dissipated the energy of plunging fire. Where conditions allowed, as in Fort Manoel in Malta, the ditches were cut into the native rock, the wall at the inside of the ditch was unquarried native rock; as the walls became lower, they became more vulnerable to assault. The rounded shape, dominant for the design of turrets created "dead space", or "dead" zones, which were sheltered from defending fire, because direct fire from other parts of the walls could not be directed around the curved wall.
To prevent this, what had been round or square turrets were extended into diamond-shaped points to give storming infantry no shelter. The ditches and walls channeled attacking troops into constructed killing grounds where defensive cannon could wreak havoc on troops attempting to storm the walls, with emplacements set so that the attacking troops had no place to shelter from the defensive fire. A further and more subtle change was to move from a passive model of defence to an active one; the lower walls were more vulnerable to being stormed, the protection that the earthen banking provided against direct fire failed if the attackers could occupy the slope on the outside of the ditch and mount an attacking cannon there. Therefore, the shape was designed to make maximum use of enfilade fire against any attackers who should reach t
University of Havana
The University of Havana or UH is a university located in the Vedado district of Havana, the capital of the Republic of Cuba. Founded on January 5, 1728, the university is the oldest in Cuba, one of the first to be founded in the Americas. A religious institution, today the University of Havana has 15 faculties at its Havana campus and distance learning centers throughout Cuba, it was first called Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Gerónimo de la Habana. During those times, universities needed a royal or papal authorization in order to be created and thus the names Real y Pontificia; the two men who gave that authorization to the university were Pope Innocent XIII and King Philip V of Spain. In 1842, the university changed its status to become a secular and literary institution, its name became Real y Literaria Universidad de La Habana and when Cuba was a free republic, the name was changed to Universidad Nacional. The university had first been established in San Juan de Letrán before it was transferred on May 1, 1902, to a hill in the Vedado area of Havana.
The interiors of the building were decorated by Armando Menocal y Menocal. The seven frescos represent Medicine, Art, Liberal Arts and Law. At the main university entrance there is a bronze statue of Alma Mater, created in 1919 by artist Mario Korbel; the model for the statue's face was lovely 16-year-old Feliciana "Chana" Villalón, the daughter of José Ramón Villalón y Sánchez, a professor of analytical mathematics at the University. Chana married Juan Manuel Menocal, who went on to become the Dean of the Business School. Juan Manuel Menocal was a professor at the law school when Fidel Castro was a student there in the 1940s. Maria Rosa Menocal, former Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, was the granddaughter of Chana and Juan Manuel Menocal.. The main library "Rubén Martínez Villena" was established in 1936. After the government was taken over by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, the University became a center of anti-government protests. Batista closed the University in 1956. From January 1, 1959, the date on which Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, until January 1, 1962, the University went through a period of reformation to eliminate "anti-revolutionary ideas".
In 2002, Rutgers University–Camden and the University of Havana signed a Memorandum of Understanding to formalize research and exchange opportunities for students and faculty. The MOU was re-signed in October 2016 with the addition of encompassing all of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; the University of Havana is made up of 16 faculties and 14 research centers in a variety of fields, including economics, social science and humanities. In total, up to 25 specialties are taught at the university. Now, it has about 60,000 degree students in regular classes. There are 16 faculties into which the university is divided: Natural Sciences Faculty of Biology Faculty of Pharmacy and Foods Faculty of Physics Faculty of Geography Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Faculty of Psychology Faculty of Chemistry Social Sciences and Humanities Faculty of Arts and Letters Faculty of Communication Faculty of Law Faculty of Philosophy and History Faculty of Foreign Languages Economic Sciences Faculty of Accounting and Finance Faculty of Economics Faculty of Tourism Distance Education Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, students joined different organizations, aligning themselves directly or indirectly with some political party.
The strongest of all these organisations was the FEU created by Julio Antonio Mella, a co-founder of the Cuban Communist Party in the 1920s. The European revolutionary tradition of college-based political activism, practiced in Cuba and in many other Latin American countries and the alleged corruption of Cuban political parties at the time turned the FEU, a stronghold of communist ideology, into the most influential of Cuban political organizations before 1959, it was a major participant in the overthrowing of Cuban President Gerardo Machado. The FEU initiated the national general strike of 1933, resulting in the imprisonment of many of its members. Founder Julio Antonio Mella, himself had been killed at the hands of two assassins sent by Machado while exiled in Mexico in 1929 After the coup d'état by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, when free and democratic elections were suspended, the violent clashes between university students and Cuban police reached its extremes. Students known to be members of the FEU were violently tortured and killed in the streets of Havana, the organization reacted with an irregular war in the city, aiming to assassinate police officers of high rank, like the chief of the police in Havana, Blanco Rico, killed by 4 FEU members.
After the assault on the Moncada barracks by Fidel Castro, an attorney who graduated from Havana University School of Law, who had contacts in the FEU, the FEU became an ally of Castro's new July 26th Movement, though there were discrepancies between the leaders in the form that the forthcoming revolution should be carried out. While Fidel Castro was hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the FEU, led by Jose Antonio Echeverria, attempted to kill Fulgencio Batista in an armed assault at the Cuban Presidential Palace on March 13, 1957. Batista managed to escape, man
