In El mundo de las Maravillas, Carlos Garaicoa returns once again to Havana as a reader of the city — not merely of its buildings, but of the damaged language still clinging to them. The work begins with a black-and-white photograph of a former Havana department store, one of those commercial façades that once belonged to the theater of urban modernity: places of display, desire, gathering, elegance, and consumption. These buildings were not neutral containers. They were social mirrors. They announced a Cuba of abundance, aspiration, spectacle, and public life — a Cuba that now appears through the worn skin of the city as memory, ruin, and contradiction.

Garaicoa’s intervention with pins and thread does not restore the building. It does something sharper. It activates the façade as a page. The old store sign, El mundo de las maravillas, becomes the beginning of a sentence, and the artist completes it with his own bitter-poetic addition: negado y soñado fuera aquí — “denied and dreamed of, as if it were here.” The phrase turns the photograph into a suspended argument between what the city promised and what history withheld. Wonder is not absent; it is displaced. It exists as fantasy, as lack, as something imagined from inside a place that cannot fully possess it.

The work belongs to Garaicoa’s 2009 body of photographs in which Havana’s commercial signs and architectural remains become a form of urban literature. In the text accompanying the series, the artist describes these old department stores as former glories of Cuba’s luxurious and “consumerist” past — true temples and meeting places, barometers of a once-wealthy Cuba and stark counterpoints to the less fortunate lives surrounding them. That tension is central to the image. 

The building is both evidence and accusation. It shows the survival of a name after the collapse of the world that gave that name meaning. The thread lines stretch across the photograph like provisional architecture: part drawing, part repair, part scar. They suggest the artist’s long-standing practice of completing what Havana leaves unfinished — collapsed buildings, interrupted projects, broken civic promises, empty structures waiting to be read. But here the completion is linguistic as much as architectural. Garaicoa does not invent a new building; he draws out the hidden sentence already embedded in the city. The façade becomes a text, and the text becomes a diagnosis.

There is no nostalgia here in the simple sense. The image may evoke a lost commercial Havana, but the work does not sentimentalize the past. Instead, it exposes the violence of promises that remain visible after their social content has disappeared. The storefront still says maravillas — wonders — but the street around it tells another story: waiting bodies, worn surfaces, architectural fatigue, and the everyday persistence of a city that continues to live among the remains of its own projections.

Garaicoa’s Havana is a city written over by ideology, commerce, scarcity, and memory. In El mundo de las Maravillas, those forces meet in a single façade. The photograph records the urban fact; the pins and thread transform it into thought. What appears at first as a documentary image becomes a kind of civic haiku: brief, precise, wounded, and unresolved. The work asks what happens when a city’s signs outlive its dreams, and when the language of abundance remains attached to a landscape of denial.

The result is one of Garaicoa’s most elegant meditations on architecture as social residue. The department store becomes ruin, poem, witness, and unfinished monument. Its name promises wonder; its condition delivers history. Between those two poles — the advertised paradise and the lived reality — Garaicoa constructs a fragile but devastating image of Havana: a city where the marvelous is still legible, but only as something denied, imagined, and endlessly deferred.