Capturing contested mobile space: speed and injustice at the axes and planes

English writer and journalist Graham Greene was enthralled by the seediness of Havana, its looseness and its strangeness. In 1963 he compared the “seawet” Malecón to a tropical twin of the promenade in Brighton, a city he loved as well for “the sea, a sense of fun and the unexpected”. He later spent time in Brighton’s Hotel Metropole to write the screenplay of Our Man in Havana. Green’s literary comparison, based on ‘looseness’, ‘strangeness’, ‘the sea’ and ‘the unexpected’ echoes the development of the seafronts of both cities, which were designed for speed. In 1905 the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland staged the first flying start kilometre speed trial, on the newly surfaced Madeira Road (now Drive) in Brighton on the south coast of England. Half a century later, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista brought stock car racing to Cuba on Havana’s seafront road, the Malecón. Both roads emerged from the unexpected, similarly built on reclaimed land using methods that were noteworthy at the time: Madeira Road for the use of the new roadbuilding product, Tarmac, and the Malecón as it had been built by American GIs. As there are, at the same time, deep geopolitical divergences between the cities, not least of colonialisation, these associations with speed can highlight injustice within.