Recovering Havana

Recovering 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 centre, many neighbourhood residents are
being allowed 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.

All aim to raise money to lift Havana out of the decay

"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,
co-ordinator 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 centre like a beautiful body with no soul."

The office founded by city historian Eusebio Leal operates a
construction firm, 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 more, says Rodriguez, an architect.

No-one would mind seeing their city restored - and earning dollars

"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 centre 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.

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 US dollars.

The average monthly salary for Cubans is about 230 pesos, or the
equivalent of a little less than R84. 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 subsidised by the
state, including free health care and education. They pay little or no
rent and receive about half of their food heavily subsidised by the
state through a ration system.

Still, Cubans covet dollars to obtain the many things the ration card
and limited government salaries don't provide: cooking oil, shampoo or a
birthday cake.

Net sites: www.international.icomos.org/risk/cuba_200 0.htm and
www.islandconnoisseur.com/cuba/oldhavana.htm

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