Iglesia y Convento de Belen

This guide to the Iglesia y Convento de Belen in Havana follows a priest who climbed the same stone stairwell before dawn, notebook in hand, to study the sky through a brass instrument he called a cyclonoscope. It traces the building's own path first, from a school and convalescent home the Bethlehemite friars raised in the early seventeen hundreds, through the Jesuits who took it over in 1854 and built the twin-domed observatory on its tower by 1858. From there it settles on Father Benito Vines, who from 1870 read cirrus streaks, cumulus and low nimbus like a private scripture of the sky, certain each shape carried a message about a storm's hidden center.