Havana at 500: 440 years of progress and 60 years of neglect

Requiem for a great metropolis at 500

Havana, Cuba B.C. (Before Castro)

 La Habana, Havana for Gringos, is a great city that deserves to be honored and celebrated especially on its 500th anniversary. The Spanish still feel close ties to Havana and Cuba. Remember that for 383 years of its history a Spanish flag flew over Cuba.

On August 25, 1515 Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded  San Cristóbal de La Habana, on the southern coast of Cuba, near what is today the town of Surgidero de Batabanó in Mayabeque province.

Havana's founder

Four years later on November 16, 1519, Havana was founded at its present location. Havana would thrive and flourish for centuries. Theodore Dalrymple in a 2002 essay "Why Havana had to die" described in shorthand the evolution of this great metropolis.

"No words can do justice to the architectural genius of Havana, a genius that extended from the Renaissance classicism of the sixteenth century, with severe but perfectly proportioned houses containing colonnaded courtyards cooled and softened by tropical trees and shrubs, to the flamboyant art deco of the 1930s and 40s. The Cubans of successive centuries created a harmonious architectural whole almost without equal in the world. There is hardly a building that is wrong, a detail that is superfluous or tasteless. The tiled multicoloration of the Bacardi building, for example, which might be garish elsewhere, is perfectly adapted—natural, one might say—to the Cuban light, climate, and temper. Cuban architects understood the need for air and shade in a climate such as Cuba’s, and they proportioned buildings and rooms accordingly. They created an urban environment that, with its arcades, columns, verandas, and balconies, was elegant, sophisticated, convenient, and joyful."

My father who left Cuba during the Batista dictatorship described Havana as a place of music. Walking block by block there were different groups playing live music in different cafes, night clubs and gathering places. The Malecon was the place to people watch. 

Havana was a vast place where people of social classes, races, and religions worked and partied together.

The Castro regime and its sympathizers try to portray what existed before in the most unfavorable light possible, but reality has a way of crushing their propaganda campaigns.

On April 24, 2019 The Guardian reported that "in 1958, Cuba had 511 cinemas, and Havana alone had 130 – more than either New York or Paris at the time. Carolina Sandretto documents the now largely forgotten buildings for the book Cines de Cuba, published by Skira." Think about this, the Castro regime portrays Cuba as a place where the vast majority lived in grinding poverty with only a small wealthy elite living well. If that is true then why were there 381 movie theaters outside of Havana?

The arrival of the Castro regime in 1959 would usher in six decades of decay and destruction that continue to the present day. Dalrymple makes the argument that this neglect was due to ideological considerations.

I suspect that the neglectful ruination of Havana has served a profoundly ideological purpose. After all, the neglect has been continuous for nearly half a century, while massive subsidies from the Soviet Union were pouring in. A dictator as absolute as Castro could have preserved Havana if he had so wished, and could easily have found an economic pretext for doing so.  Havana, however, was a material refutation of his entire historiography—of the historiography that has underpinned his policies and justified his dictatorship for 43 years.

According to this account, Cuba was a poor agrarian society, impoverished by its dependent relationship with the United States, incapable without socialist revolution of solving its problems. A small exploitative class of intermediaries benefited enormously from the neocolonial relationship, but the masses were sunk in abject poverty and misery. 

But Havana was a large city of astonishing grandeur and wealth, which was clearly not confined to a tiny minority, despite the coexistence with that wealth of deep poverty. Hundreds of thousands of people obviously had lived well in Havana, and it is not plausible that so many had done so merely by the exploitation of a relatively small rural population. They must themselves have been energetic, productive, and creative people. Their society must have been considerably more complex and sophisticated than Castro can admit without destroying the rationale of his own rule. 

In the circumstances, therefore, it became ideologically essential that the material traces and even the very memory of that society should be destroyed.

This neglect is not just an aesthetic disaster but a human one as well. When buildings collapse people are hurt and some die. On November 7, 2019 a 13-year-old girl and her mother "died after the collapse of a housing unit located in the garage of the remains of a house on 21st Street, between 30th and 34th, in Havana’s Playa District."

Prado y Neptuno, Hotel Telégrafo, La Habana, Ca. 1955

 Fabian Flores writing in Havana Times on July 16, 2015 reported that a building in the historic center of Havana collapsed at dawn leaving four dead, including a three-year-old child, and three others injured.  A two-story building located at number 409 Habana St., between Obispo and Obrapía Streets in Old Havana crumbled in seconds. This collapse "took the lives of Henola Alvarez Martinez, 3, Jorge A. Alvarez Rodriguez and Glendys Amayi Perez Kindelan, both 18, and Mayra Paez Mora, 60, according to a statement released last night by the Havana Provincial authorities."

Havana, Cuba in the 21st Century

American journalist Tracey Eaton has written that Havana is collapsing building by building. In 2009 Ray Sanchez writing in the South Florida Sun Sentinel said that "Havana's historic architecture at risk of crumbling into dust." In 2016, The Guardian reported on "uncollected rubbish, overflowing sewage and water leaks" in Havana.

Paradoxically, the decline and collapse of Soviet assistance coincided with an intensification of preserving the historic center of Havana to attract tourism.  When the Soviet Union was heavily subsidizing the Castro regime tourism was not needed, and Havana was neglected and allowed to fall into absolute ruin.

Havana is crumbling away. This dictatorship has developed an art for creating ruins that inspired a documentary by that name. Meanwhile UNESCO and local preservationists are trying to save remnants of this once great metropolis. On this 500th anniversary let us remember what Havana once was and could be again.