By James C. McKinley Jr.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
HAVANA: These days, when Eusebio Leal Spengler walks the streets of Old
Havana, people treat him like a rock star. Ladies kiss him on the cheek
and whisper they love him. Children point at him.
He pumps the hand of a tour guide he knows and on discovering the
tourists are from Ireland, he recommends they visit the Calle O'Reilly,
a street named for an Irish-born general in the Spanish Army who
revamped the city's defenses in 1763 and married a Cuban heiress.
"Ladies and gentlemen, there goes the man most responsible for the
restoration of the buildings you see here," the guide tells his flock.
It is not an exaggeration. Over the last 40 years, Leal, the official
historian of Havana, has pulled off an unusual feat. While much of
Cuba's infrastructure has crumbled and its economy has limped along, he
has rebuilt and refurbished more than 300 landmark buildings in Old
Havana, from fortresses built in the colonial days to famous nightspots
and hotels of the city's swinging era just before the Cuban Revolution.
The center of the city was once a dark warren of cobblestone streets,
worn facades and decaying ruins. Now it has some streets that rival
Prague or Paris for cleanliness and beauty.
Tourists throng the Plaza de la Catedral, with its 259-year-old
cathedral, and wander up Calle Obispo, a street lined with luxury shops,
to the Floridita, the plush bar where Ernest Hemingway drank mojitos and
daiquiris.
"There were years when not everyone believed in this," Leal said, as he
walked up Calle Obispo and shook hands with well-wishers. "Years when
there was lot of work, a lot of difficulties, but now it's easier,
because now you can see all the people, how they support you, they give
you a smile, some happiness, and this makes it possible to continue at
least for a little while longer."
Yet the renovation has only gone so far, and tens of thousands of people
are still trapped in squalid buildings just blocks from the refurbished
zones, giving rise to grumblings among some residents that the
renovation amounts to a Potemkin village for visitors.
They point out that few Cubans can afford the $7 drinks at the Floridita
and that by law Cubans cannot stay in the restored hotels, even if they
could afford the $150-a-night rates.
"The reconstruction doesn't have anything to do with the state system we
live in," said Yadira Amorós, a 30-year-old single mother who was using
a plumber's wrench in an effort to get water flowing to her dingy
apartment a block from Calle Obispo. "None of this benefits us."
Leal says the key to the renaissance of the old city has been a strategy
of restoring old hotels, restaurants and historic sites to attract
tourists, then using the revenue from tourism to fund more restoration.
In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost billions in
subsidies, Fidel Castro gave Leal's office extraordinary powers to
collect taxes and reap the profits of tourism in the old center, through
a state-owned company called Habaguanex. Leal has plowed the profits
back into the construction work, not only for hotels, but for schools
and residences as well.
"It's a law to try to save the patrimony rather than sell it, in the
moment when the country was in a very profound crisis and all of us were
looking for a way to eat, a way to get to work," he said.
As a result, the Spanish town founded in 1519 around a deep harbor has
come back to life, along with treasure trove of buildings in the baroque
and neoclassical styles. More than 350 buildings have been renovated,
about a third of the 4-square-kilometer, or 1.5-square-mile, center
marked by the old city walls.
The United Nations has praised Leal's development model and named the
zone a World Heritage Site. Among the hotels are the Ambos Mundos, where
Hemingway used to write in a corner room, and the Santa Isabel, a small
colonial inn favored by former President Jimmy Carter and Jack
Nicholson, the actor, when they come to town.
Everywhere there are construction crews gutting buildings and rebuilding
the interiors. The sounds of jackhammers mix with the sounds of
traditional Cuban combos playing salsa hits for tourists.
Currently more than 220 buildings are being refurbished. One of the
projects under way is the restoration of Sloppy Joe's Bar and the hotel
above, once a fixture in central Havana for journalists, writers,
artists and other hangers-on among the intelligentsia.
Just a half block from the Bodeguita del Medio, another famous eatery
favored by Hemingway and now constantly mobbed with tourists, ordinary
Cubans troop into a sparsely stocked government store to get their
monthly rations of beans, powdered milk, cigarettes and soap.
Yeisi Rodríguez, a nurse who grew up in the neighborhood, said the
renovations had certainly improved the atmosphere. Yet she was still
living in a partitioned part of her father's apartment with her husband
and a 3-year-old toddler.
Together they get by on state rations and about $20 in salary. She said
she could not afford to shop at the stores along Calle Obispo where
tourists go.
"Where the shops are it is much more beautiful than it used to be," she
said. "But I cannot buy there. It's difficult. They are always fixing
something, but what are we going to do with this amount of money?"
Leal is acutely aware that much of the population has yet to benefit
from the renovation.
"It pains me to see every day the border that divides what has been
restored and what remains to be restored, and every day it is more
urgent and harder, and it pains me a lot that many people still cannot
receive any benefit," he said.
One reason for the continued poverty is that the workers in the hotels,
museums, restaurants and hotels reap little of the tourist money flowing
into the zone. All receive a state salary of $10 to $20 a month in Cuban
pesos plus a bonus of $12 in hard currency, but most of the profits from
the businesses go to the renovation efforts.
They are the lucky ones. Others hold down jobs and receive a salary only
in Cuban pesos. Even with subsidized food, free health care and
education, Cubans complain they cannot make ends meet and must resort to
selling stolen goods or confidence schemes aimed at tourists.
"Everyone has to do something," said a man who ran a state-owned grocery
store for a $12 salary. "I sell cigars."
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