Habana

Habana, aka Havana, is the capital of Cuba. It appears in Stevens' "A Word With Joe Rodriguez-Feo", where Stevens writes: "Is lunar Habana the Cuba of the self?" (6).
==About Havana==
The largest and most populous city in Cuba, and the third largest metropolitan area in the Carribbean, Havana was founded by the Spanish in the 16th century and served as a "springboard" for the Spanish conquest of South America. The most significant period in Havana's history, as far as Wallace Stevens is concerned, would be the Republican period, which lasted from 1902-1959. During this period, Havana was developing rapidly and would eventually boast the third largest middle class population per capita in Latin America. It was a major tourist destination, and--while it certainly boasted its share of organized crime--was known for it parks and marinas, as well as for its casinos and music houses, and (oddly enough) grand prix racing ("Havana", Wikipedia).
==What is Habana/Havana Doing in this Poem?==
Initially, Habana serves a negative role in the poem. It is linked, more than once, with the moon, and thus with both poetry and madness, or as Stevens has it, ignorance, imbecility, and the grotesque. This ought not to be understood as an instance of racism, however. Stevens is using Habana, as he often does figures of the "other," in a purely rhetorical sense, to symbolize inaccessible or incomprehensible regions of consciousness (though if this excuses Stevens from the charge of outright racism, it cannot excse him of the charge of orientalism). More specifically, here Stevens makes Habana stand in for the whole of Romanticism, which argues that "man's interior world" is a twilight, faerie realm. While Stevens agrees that the subjective, interior space of consciousness is valuable, particularly for its reinventions of the known, its ability to shrug off conventional ways of seeing/being, he quibbles with the idea that this realm is seperate from the exterior, objective world. This argument appears somewhat injudicious, since the Romantics did not in fact hold this opinion consistantly, but rather deployed it as part of a more complex dialogic of immanence and transcendence. Rather, it is modernism's looking back at the Romantics that creates the association between romanticism and idle fantasy. On the other hand, given Stevens' familiarity with the Romantics, especially Coleridge, it is probably that Stevens is not arguing with Romanticism at all, but instead with the misrepresentation of Romanticism typical of the modern period.