Scott Wilson Washington Post Service.
The International Herald Tribune.
Tuesday, December 26, 2000
HAVANA "In each neighborhood, revolution," reads the sign on a
sooty Communist Party building in Old Havana. Just next door, there are signs of
a different sort of revolution sweeping through the graceful stone buildings and
broad plazas.
Workers are salvaging Havana's romantic old quarter from the ravages wrought
by centuries on the Atlantic seafront, meticulously restoring block by block
what was not destroyed by pirates or the privations of the U.S. trade embargo
imposed on the Communist island since the early 1960s.
"There is so much work," said Roberto Perez, a former veterinarian
who has taken a more lucrative job on an Old Havana construction crew, "so
much, that I expect to be working here for at least another eight years."
A New World outpost of wooden huts and fortune hunters almost 500 years ago,
Old Havana is now a cornerstone of Cuba's financial future. The restoration is
motivated both by a desire to preserve the area's history and the more modern
considerations of luring tourists and their foreign currency.
The number of tourists visiting Cuba is increasing by 12 percent a year,
according to government estimates that forecast 2 million visitors in 2000.
Eight in 10 of them pass along Old Havana's narrow streets where Cubans lean
over wrought-iron railings and sway to music from corner cafés.
The neighborhood runs along Havana's famed seaside avenue, the Malecon,
before running up the narrow, deep-blue channel that opens onto the harbor.
Freighters dock where Spanish galleons and invading English frigates once did.
Streets too small for most trucks open onto wide plazas, carved up by
triangles of gardens or marked by a central fountain.
With its antique American cars, shrines to Ernest Hemingway and ubiquitous
revolutionary symbols, Cuba at times seems close to becoming a tourist theme
park. But the history here is real, especially in Old Havana, which Unesco named
a World Heritage site in 1982. And so is the money emerging seven years after
President Fidel Castro, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Vice President
Carlos Lage, in the depths of Cuba's post-Soviet financial crisis, decided to
initiate Old Havana's revival with a $1 million investment.
The restoration project has been in full swing for two years, financed now
by annual revenues of about $40 million generated by the government-owned
refurbished hotels, galleries and restaurants.
At the helm is Eusebio Leal, the city historian who has virtually unchecked
power to carry out the work in a country of blanketing bureaucracy. He lectures
around the world, reportedly breaks building codes with impunity and reports
only to Mr. Perez Roque and Mr. Castro. More than 150 projects, most in
partnership with foreign investors, are in the works under his bustling
authority.
"It is the reason for my life," said Mr. Leal while conducting a
recent tour of the old city.
At Plaza Vieja, old and new are side by side. On one corner is a
meticulously restored apartment building with iron filigree balconies and high
ceilings now set aside for foreign residents. Across the plaza, laundry hangs
from balconies and old men gather daily to play dominoes under the exposed
wooden eaves.
"And of course running it all is Eusebio Leal," said Ricardo
Becerra, a university instructor from the eastern city of Camaguey who is in
town for a conference.
"He's moving mountains," added Mike Phillips, who teaches English
at Havana University.
That the city historian is as well known as a baseball star is testament to
Mr. Leal's devotion to his task. He frequently accompanies Mr. Castro on foreign
trips, delivering seminars to historic preservationists. What his utilitarian
wardrobe lacks in panache he makes up for in the poetry he uses to describe his
work.
"Something small for such a great man," Mr. Leal said to describe
Hemingway's tiny iron bed in Old Havana's restored Ambos Mundos Hotel. Hemingway
called the hotel "a good place to work."
Like urban gentrification from Baltimore to Berlin, salvaging Old Havana has
a price. More than 35,000 people live within a half-mile radius of Plaza Vieja.
Hundreds of them have been moved to distant neighborhoods as a result of the
renovation, and many will not return. Only select families, picked by the length
of time they have lived in the neighborhood, received temporary housing in
American suburban style miniature villages that stand cheek-by-jowl with the
renovation work.
Miguel Angel, a photocopy assistant in a government ministry, has lived 39
of his 43 years in a small second-story apartment on Plaza Vieja. More than two
years ago, he was moved out of the apartment during renovation and put up in a
complex of two-story, metal-sided buildings a block away. Twenty other families
are there, too, rotating in and out as the work progresses.
"I thank God for the opportunity to live here and that I will be able
to return," said Mr. Angel, recalling several longtime neighbors who were
moved further away.
His move was supposed to last only a year. He was recently told he would be
in by next summer, and he looks forward to leaving the stuffy temporary
apartment he says is "fine but not forever."
"Really, though, I think this is a very positive thing," he said
of the renovation. "Before, Old Havana was a place only for Cubans. Now it
is a place for everyone."
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