Praia de Marianao: “Não é um bairro, é uma praia”.

This article posits that Havana’s urban spaces, in this case, the Playa de Marianao development, functionedas mechanisms for externalizing social differences in early 20th century Cuba. This work aims to analyzethe discursive representation generated about this suburb in the newspapers Diario de la Marina, ElMundo, and the magazine Social as a way of legitimizing these segregationist practices and the modelsof social exclusion that define the Havana bourgeois elite. The methodology involved focusing on the complex text-co(n)text, prioritizing the dialectical relationship between the text, its production context, and the textual environment, offering a socio-historical perspective that explains how urban phenomena are subject to different conditioning factors, where economic, social, political, and cultural agents, private real estate interests, and social groups acquire singular importance. The Havana elite enjoyed a lifestyle that privileged privacy and internal homogeneity, which was reinforced by their monetary capacity, allowing them to have systems of differentiation, security, and separation. These systems operated beyond their material expressions to become accentuated in their discursive expressions.