Mobile and Havana

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf 

By John S. Sledge and Alicia García-Santana; Photos by Chip Cooper and Julio Á. Larramendi 

Ediciones Polymita S.A. of Guatemala City, 2024 

Distributed by The University of Alabama Press 

Hardcover: $49.95 

Genre: History, Architecture, Photography 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf is immediately appealing with its expansive text, large format, and stunning photographs. On the first encounter, it might be a bit daunting to figure out just what is the point? However, it does not take long to discover that Mobile and Havana is really two separate but intricately linked books in one, providing a scope that brings the titular cities into a simultaneously intimate and broader perspective.  

The two long essays that provide the text for Mobile and Havana are “Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf” by John S. Sledge and “La Habana-Mobile: The Shared Heritage” by Alicia García-Santana. “Sisters across the Gulf” examines the social and cultural history of the two cities. “The Shared Heritage” is an architectural history of the two cities and of the cultural influences that define those and other cities in the region. Each essay is illustrated by historical documents and the photography of Chip Cooper and Julio Á. Larramendi. The photographs add immeasurably to the book’s appeal. Cooper and Larramendi each have vast experience photographing both Mobile and Havana. Their photographs are striking on their own merits but also intriguing in their stylistic differences. Cooper’s lyrical photos are impressionist in approach; I cannot stop admiring Cooper’s photo of “Wet cobbles, Havana.” Larramendi’s architectural photos are more documentary in style; Larramendi’s series of photos of the Horst House in Mobile reveals much about vernacular adaptation of the Italianate style. 

Visionary Mobile archivist Jay Higginbotham said, “Mobile, Alabama, and Havana, Cuba, have only three things in common. The past, the present, and the future.” The distance between the two cities, linked by the Gulf of Mexico, is a little more than six hundred miles. John Sledge looks closely at the past, present, and future of both cities in a compelling history that begins with Columbus’s conviction that Cuba was not an island but a part of Asia. Thus emerges the confusion that seems to characterize the earliest European explorers in Sledge’s entertaining and unvarnished overview of the early “new world” era. After he was made governor of Cuba, the ambitious Hernando DeSoto turned his governorship over to his wife, Isabel de Bobadilla, so that he could invade Florida in search of gold and silver. Isabel turned out to be a capable and well-respected leader. DeSoto’s expedition in Alabama resulted in his contentious encounter with Chief Tascalusa and the tragic battle of the elusive town of Mabila. 

The founding of Mobile as a French outpost on Mobile Bay by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville was followed several years later by the founding of New Orleans and Biloxi by d’Iberville’s younger brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. Don Bernardo de Galvez, “a virtual force of nature,” arrived on the scene, and British West Florida became Spanish West Florida. Sledge documents the voyage of the ship Pelican to Mobile with marriageable French women, which, after a stop in Havana, arrived in Mobile with passengers and crew dying from yellow fever. Such stories illuminate and deepen the history of the cities and their struggles. 

By the nineteenth century, Mobile’s reputation grew as the cotton trade and the related slave trade flourished. As the Civil War grew closer, there was a Southern desire in Mobile and elsewhere to annex Cuba as a slave state. When the Civil War began, there were warm relations between Spanish Cuba and the South, which brought boom conditions to officially neutral Havana. Mobile itself was dubbed “the Paris of the Confederacy” in the early days of the war, but as battle wore on, there was a “depressed” and “stagnant” aspect to the city. 

Sledge’s narrative considers the influence of Mobile’s Spring Hill College on introducing the American pastime of baseball to Havana, the eradication of yellow fever in Havana by Mobile native William Crawford Gorgas, the import of Havana industries to Mobile, and contraband smuggling operations between the two cities in the 1920s. Inexpensive steamship passage made travel between the two cities flourish. After the Cuban trade embargo of 1960, two visionaries – Eusebio Leal Spengler in Havana and Jay Higginbotham in Mobile – worked to bring the Society Mobile-LaHabana about, and the two cities became sister cities. Both men protected the historical restoration of their respective cities; Leal even “lay down in front of a steamroller” to protect a street preservation from being covered with asphalt. Despite political influences affecting the relationship, Sledge illustrates the many ways in which they are still connected. 

That connection is further illustrated by Alicia García-Santana’s architectural essay, “LaHabana-Mobile: The Shared Heritage.” She writes “Individuals transmit the cultural values of an era whose evolution transcends geographic, linguistic, economic, social, or philosophical boundaries; it ignores conflicts of religion, race, or political beliefs.” Her writing highlights the shared heritage of the Americas and is a fascinating read for those interested in architecture. In highlighting “cultural borrowing,” García-Santana defines Havana’s Spanish-Creole legacy, the influence of Christian and Muslim transculturation, and the English, French, and Spanish influences which ultimately become an “American” style.  

The examples are striking. García-Santana traces the evolution of the double parlor, of the “chateau with galleries” becoming the urban “Creole cottage,” and how Baron de Carondelet’s dictate that the facades of New Orleans buildings have arcaded galleries yielded a “porte-cochère” style. By the same token, the Creole townhouse gave birth to the slightly variant American townhouse. García-Santana calls the “courtyard garden house,” so popular in Mobile, “one of the greatest architectural contributions to the process of transculturation.” In addition to Havana and Mobile, García-Santana takes strolls to St. Augustine and New Orleans and includes examples from other locales, even to an eighteenth-century chapel in Quebec, Canada. 

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf offers much to savor, beautifully illustrated. It is a treasury of history that provides a deeper understanding of the centuries-long relationship between two fascinating port cities. 

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).