Juan Roberto Diago’s “Ciudad Transparente” asserts the spectral presence of Havana’s marginal barrios as a self-contained cosmos of reclaimed memory and unapologetic survival. Constructed as a variable installation of multiple small-scale houses from weathered wood, burlap sugar sacks, rusted metal, and found detritus, the work assembles an entire fragile urban landscape whose open, skeletal structures render the city literally and metaphorically transparent—its walls pierced, its interiors exposed, its foundations laid bare. Each dwelling functions as both shelter and reliquary, the scarred materials carrying the imprint of sugar plantations, slave barracks, and contemporary scarcity, transforming the discarded into durable architecture of resistance. Conceptually, the piece declares that true transparency in Cuban society is not utopian clarity but the painful visibility of what official narratives have rendered invisible: the enduring Afro-Cuban presence that persists through improvisation, ancestral knowledge, and the quiet alchemy of turning historical wounds into habitable space. In Diago’s uncompromising vision, the transparent city stands as an unequivocal monument to those who build their future from the ruins of the past, where fragility itself becomes the strongest form of defiance.