By Richard Chacón, Globe Staff, 4/25/2001.
Boston Globe
HAVANA - Adam Guerrero isn't sure what Ernest Hemingway would say about all
the ruckus going on outside his old room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel.
The cacophony of hammers, drills, trucks, and shouts from construction
workers in this section of Old Havana might have been enough to drive the
American novelist out of the fifth-floor refuge in the hotel where he did some
of his best writing.
''He probably would've shouted from the windows for quiet, or he would've
gone off to his farm and written about how noisy it is here,'' said Guerrero,
23, a construction worker who has read much of Hemingway's work. It is required
reading in most Cuban schools.
But the noise is a sign of change. Slowly but surely, the heart of Communist
Cuba is being rebuilt in a process that blends capitalist-style urban planning
with government-controlled social planning.
The colonial neighborhoods of Old Havana - ground down by years of neglect,
lack of money, and salt-laden ocean air - are gradually being restored to the
stately buildings that once defined this city as a gateway to the New World. The
boom is turning these once crime-ridden, cobblestoned streets into one of the
most desirable areas in the country for tourists and Habaneros alike.
To be sure, many of the early benefits are for tourists: new hotels,
refurbished parks, and glittering, music-filled restaurants.
Hemingway's old hotel is a perfect example. With its spacious, restored
lobby and piano bar, the Ambos Mundos Hotel - the name means Both Worlds - is a
perfect perch from which to see and hear the building boom.
But in Castro's Cuba, no rebuilding program, no matter how many foreign
tourists and dollars it attracts, can happen without serving a social agenda. In
Old Havana, that means moving many of the area's 70,000 residents out of
cramped, makeshift dwellings to new housing and teaching them how to live in
them, whether they like it or not.
Two blocks from Plaza Vieja, one of the newly restored squares that dot the
525-acre old city, a row of neat townhouses has been built where some displaced
families have been sent to live while their buildings are refurbished.
But the residents are also being taught lessons in adjusting to new
amenities, such as private bathrooms, a bedroom, or a kitchen with a real stove,
sink, and refrigerator. Those are amenities almost unknown in the dense quarters
where as many as four families shared one toilet, electricity arrived through a
spliced cable, and the sink was a plastic tub.
''These families have become so accustomed to living in close areas and
making their own accommodations that they have to understand that their new
homes will be different,'' said Rafael Rojas, director of Old Havana's Master
Plan, part of the Municipal Historian's Office, which oversees reconstruction.
''So this is not just about new hotels for travelers, but about creating a
whole new living environment for residents,'' Rojas said.
But other families have had to leave the old neighborhood altogether. When
planners conducted a neighborhood census to determine who would be given
provisional housing, they discovered thousands of new arrivals, mostly desperate
migrants from the provinces who had come seeking better opportunities during
Cuba's economic crisis in the mid-1990s.
Families originally from Old Havana - and they must prove it with goverment
documentation - are given first priority to stay in a renovated building.
Thousands of others have been reassigned to new housing developments in Alamar,
an eastern suburb about 10 miles outside Havana, or they have been sent back to
their provinces.
''Yes, it's a nice home we have and better than all four of us living in one
room with one lightbulb,'' said Carmen Garcia, a 34-year-old resident who was
recently sent to live in Alamar. ''But I miss Old Havana, and it's so far away
from us. I miss our friends.''
The payoff for Cuba's growing tourist industry has been dramatic. Old
Havana, nestled along the capital's sea-splashed boulevard, has become the
country's second most important tourist magnet, outdone only by Varadero, the
resort city about 80 miles east, a favorite winter sanctuary for planeloads of
Europeans and Canadians.
Old Havana's narrow cobblestone streets, colonial churches, forts, and
elegant houses are reminiscent of Beacon Hill, Quebec City, or Cartagena in
Colombia. But preserving the neighborhood's charm was rarely a priority for
corrupt governments in the 1930s and '40s and hard to justify for Fidel Castro's
communist regime, which promised more housing when it seized power in 1959. It
allowed multiple families to inhabit dwellings that were once large
single-family homes.
Despite Old Havana's crumbling condition, the United Nations placed it on
its World Heritage List of special places in 1982 and gave the government money
to begin restoration. But it took another decade for the Historian's Office to
get the funds and permission it needed from Castro to turn the area into an
attractive opportunity for foreign investors.
The turnaround began with just $1 million. Eusebio Leal, a legendary figure
known as the ''mayor of Havana'' and a close friend of Castro, created
Habaguanex, a private agency, with a government loan and power to fix just about
whatever he wanted.
Within the first year, the organization had formed enough joint ventures
with foreign partners to repay the money, and it still had a few million left
over to begin the work of rebuilding parks and houses.
The agency collects a special sales tax, perhaps more efficiently than most
democratic Latin American countries, from store owners and vendors who sell
everything from paper cones full of peanuts to vintage books and magazines on
the Plaza de Armas, one of the main squares in the old city.
To date, about $150 million in reconstruction projects have been launched or
completed, including a dozen refurbished hotels featuring such touches as clerks
dressed as Franciscan monks or a lobby with a honking peacock. About 6,000 new
jobs, most in construction and tourism, have been created, according to Rojas.
The program has also rebuilt schools and created new cultural centers,
including galleries funded by the governments of Mexico and Venezuela and a
modest new aquarium - a collection of small fish tanks, really - that draws
about 1,000 children a day.
''Our philosophy is two-thirds of the money goes back into reinvestment,
while one-third goes into strengthening social programs,'' Rojas said.
Only a third of Old Havana has been touched by the magic wand of Habaguanex.
There is much in the old neighborhood, as in most of this city of 2 million
people, that is crumbling. And some residents in other sections of the city
wonder when or if they will get the kind of attention that the zona turistica
has seen.
''I used to feel lucky that I didn't live in Old Havana, because it wasn't
very nice or safe,'' said Yeslinda Lara, 30, a government secretary from the
Vedado neighborhood. ''But now I see all of the scaffolding and the new
buildings, and it makes me wish I lived there. Or at least that someone would
come do that where I live.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on
4/25/2001.
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