Hotel Tropicana

Alexandra Spiegel

Images and text about the Cuban Revolution of 1953-–59 are the only advertisements allowed in the communist island state of Fidel Castro, whose goal was to found an anti-imperialist country based on Marxism.
Today, most Cubans live from tourism. Following the end of the Cold War, the Cuban government made the decision to invest in tourism to replace the export revenue they’d lost. A total of 55,000 new hotel rooms were to be built on the island by the year 2020. The exhibition project Hotel Tropicana consists of visualizations of these hotel rooms based on architectural drawings as well as film stills from the Russian director Michail Kalatosow’s film Soy Cuba (1964), which evoke the goals and necessity of the revolution. Alongside these large-scale works, Alexandra Spiegel presents photographs from the private and state tourism industry that she made during a study trip to Cuba in 2017. Hotel Tropicana is part of the exhibition series “A RADICAL CITY,” initiated by A TRANS.