This paper examines the role of colonial-era music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage in the wake of the economic and ideological crisis known as the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of colonial-era Catholic sacred music that emerged in the 1990s sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto the restored colonial spaces of Havana. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work in Havana, I demonstrate how this musical revival is intrinsically tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities since the 1990s. Focusing on the restoration of the colonial Paula Church as a concert hall and on the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s early music revival, I demonstrate how performances of—and writings about—colonial music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the postcolonial present. This imaginative, presentist perspective conveys two ideas: cultural and racial mixing as inherent in Cuban identity, and a sense of agency for contemporary Cuba in infusing hegemonic European culture with subaltern cultural practices. I argue, therefore, that the revival of colonial-era music seeks to enroll the fraught colonial past in the needs of the present to foster local identity in place and to project a sense of belonging at times of profound change and uncertainty, yet it highlights the tensions between whose pasts are silenced and sounded.