Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.. Mark Stevenson - Associated Press. Sunday, December
3, 2000
Havana --- Salsa music dances over wet laundry flapping from the open
second-floor windows of Old Havana's crumbling buildings, mixing with the harsh
sounds of workers scraping, hammering and drilling in the spaces below.
While using foreign money to renovate centuries-old plazas and build new
ground-floor shops and restaurants that will attract tourists to the city's
once-seedy historic center, the city is allowing many neighborhood residents to
stay in the floors above.
The result is a mix of contradictions: Canadian and European tourists stroll
through narrow streets crowded with Cubans, including special police officers
and black market hucksters selling illegal rum and cigars.
Bands play "Guantanamera" and ballads to revolutionary icon
Ernesto "Che" Guevara late into the night in front of Baroque
churches, Romanesque forts and Art Deco hotels.
"We want to recover everything we can but not to create a movie set. We
want to recover the life of the city," says Patricia Rodriguez, an
architect and coordinator of the City Historian's Office, which is overseeing
the renovation.
Renovations in other Latin American colonial cities, such as San Juan,
Puerto Rico, and Cartagena, Colombia, were elitist, she says. "The
residents were expelled; the buildings were bought by the rich. They restored
them but left the center like a beautiful body with no soul."
The office founded by City Historian Eusebio Leal operates a construction
company and a real estate firm as well as hotels, shops and restaurants, all
aimed at raising money to pour back into Old Havana's restoration.
Workers strip old masonry structures of rotting wood and buckling plaster
and then reconstruct the buildings practically from the ground up. Halting Old
Havana's slide into ruin will take at least 20 more years, says Rodriguez.
"It's a race against time," she says. "Every three days or so
we have a couple of collapses, anything from a room or a piece of a balcony to
an entire building."
The few blocks now fully restored constitute about a fourth of the old city
center and are occupied mostly by hotels, restaurants, shops and offices. In the
blocks still to be restored, more than 75,000 people live in old buildings, many
of them crumbling.
Tiny, makeshift wooden lofts built inside the high-ceilinged old buildings
divide living spaces into cramped warrens. In some areas, wooden splints prop up
entire facades.
Makeshift kitchens and bathrooms are built on patios originally designed to
reduce humidity in Havana's steamy climate. As humidity works its way into
overloaded masonry walls, buildings fall apart.
Factory worker Mayra Hernandez lives with her three grandchildren in one of
the divided apartments.
"I'd like to see Havana restored, see it beautiful again like it used
to be," Hernandez says. She also wouldn't mind a job in tourism and the
chance to earn a salary in U.S. dollars.
The average monthly salary for Cubans is about 230 pesos, or the equivalent
of a little less than $11. It would not cover a dinner for two at one of the
sidewalk cafes in Old Havana's white limestone San Francisco Square.
Most of Cubans' economic necessities are heavily subsidized by the state,
including free health care and education. They pay little or no rent and receive
about half of their food heavily subsidized by the government through a ration
system.
Still, Cubans covet dollars to obtain the many things that the ration card
and limited government salaries don't provide: cooking oil, shampoo, a birthday
cake for a child, a nice skirt or tennis shoes.
Because tourism puts them into such close contact with dollars, few Old
Havana residents relish the idea of leaving the neighborhood. Still, some will
have to be relocated to reduce overcrowding and allow for further renovations.
Along with holding legitimate jobs in tourism, some locals sell stolen
cigars and rum to tourists for dollars. Before the police presence was beefed up
about two years ago, tourists became targets for thieves.
"There was street crime, truancy, people snatching things from
tourists, wallets and cameras," says Manuel Coipel Diaz, a sociologist who
works in the San Isidro district, a corner of the old city once home to dock
workers and prostitutes.
But things have been cleaned up, and since 1995 the City Historian's Office
has made a special project of San Isidro.
Officials hope to rescue traditions like the Rumba de Cajon, or Box Rumba, a
swaying percussion music developed by San Isidro dock workers who banged out
rhythms on wooden crates. They also want to introduce visitors to the Afro-Cuban
religion of Santeria.
"We don't want to do just the typical rumba and religion," says
local dance teacher Ernesto Acea. "We want to expose our people to world
culture. We teach you salsa; you teach us rap."
ON THE WEB :
UNESCO site on Cuban heritage sites:
www.international.icomos.org/risk/cuba_2000.htm
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