Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/ ARCHITECTURE-CUBA: Restoring Colonial Era Homes and Neighbourhood Charm

Dalia Acosta

CAMAGUEY, Cuba, Dec 15 2004 (IPS) - Isabelita del Barrio is anxiously awaiting the day that a brigade from the Office of the Historian in this Cuban city will “finally” knock on her door to begin renovating the home where her family has lived for nearly a century.

“Now they say they are definitely coming,” said the 72-year-old woman who has heard talk lately about the renovation of old houses like her own, located in the historic centre of this city, 540 kms east of Havana.

Isabelita, as she is known around the rundown neighbourhood of Carmen, shows off each room, the furniture and the “tinajón” – massive clay jugs used to collect rainwater before the days of indoor plumbing – which dates back to 1818, with the pride of someone who knows the value of what she has. It doesn’t matter that the kitchen is crumbling or that the whole house seems to be falling to pieces.

“I’m not leaving here for anything in the world,” she tells IPS as she fondly strokes one of the columns in the courtyard that has lost its whitewash and paint, clearly showing the round bricks with which it was made in the late 18th or early 19th century.

The house, located on Martí street between Bembeta and Risa, has been selected for “prompt” refurbishing, because it is representative of the city’s colonial era architecture and the original structure has been preserved nearly intact.

This is only one aspect of the work of the Carmen Neighbourhood Workshop, a pilot project of the Camaguey Office of the Historian whose aim is to bring about a transformation of the neighbourhood.

In Camaguey, the Catholic Church played a key role in the emergence of a strong sense of place among local residents, because they identified so strongly with their parishes, and in extension with their neighbourhoods – – a process that deepened over the centuries, according to historians.

Camaguey was founded on the coast in 1514 but was moved to the interior of the province for health reasons. The city gradually grew up around the churches and plazas, and now has a historic centre covering 300 hectares, the largest in this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people.

Carmen dates back to the 1730s. This neighbourhood of modest colonial homes rose up around the city square where the Church of Our Lady of Carmen was built nearly 100 years later.

The neighbourhood is home to some 1,000 people in 429 houses. Around 42 percent of the local residents are between the ages of 26 and 60, and 26 percent are over 60.

Meeting the needs of the ageing population is one of the priority tasks of the Neighbourhood Workshop, according to Maiveris Varona, an expert with the office on conservation and restoration projects in the Office of the Historian.

The search for financing to open a geriatric centre in the area is one of the long-standing projects of this team of experts who last year found solutions for 25 of 27 cases of families in need of special social assistance.

With limited funding, the team is working to improve housing conditions, give a boost to the local economy, strengthen the community identity and clean up the local environment.

The team is working with the neighbourhood primary school, and has provided assistance to single mothers, people with alcohol abuse problems, and a couple who tested positive for HIV, the AIDS virus.

The group also works as a “communication channel” between the neighbourhood and the authorities.

“The local residents identified the nine most pressing problems facing the neighbourhood, and the nine priorities that we should work on. The strategy in the different areas emerged from that assessment,” Varona told IPS.

The list includes the deteriorated condition of many of the homes in the neighbourhood, the lack of materials to carry out the necessary repairs and renovation, the lack of street lights in some areas, a dearth of public and private telephones, and problems with public services like sewage.

Of the 447 buildings located in the area, 150 have a sound structure, 230 are in fair condition, 58 are in poor shape and nine are in ruins. Sixty-six percent of the housing units are in need of some degree of refurbishing or repairs.

“There are no problems of overcrowding here, but of deterioration of housing,” said Varona.

Because it cannot cover all the costs of the renovation, the Office of the Historian arranged with the provincial housing authority to be able to sell construction materials to local residents at subsidised prices.

“We cannot address the needs of the entire historic centre because we do not have the finances. So a study of the neighbourhood and the homes was carried out, and we decided which ones would be refurbished,” said Teresa Pascual, the director of the Office of the Historian’s “master plan” for the neighbourhood.

For now, “it’s only a palliative measure for the most urgent cases,” but people “feel that something is being done on their behalf, that the project is making an effort to resolve their problems,” she explained to IPS.

The central plaza reflects the changes. Fifteen years ago all that could be seen were a few stands were people sold fruit, against a backdrop of crumbling houses. But today many buildings have already been repaired, and the area is once again a bustling centre of social activity.

“The centre of activity in the neighbourhood was the plaza, a tradition that we have tried to maintain and enrich,” said Varona.

In the plaza, Camaguey artist Marta Jiménez has made life-size sculptures of well-known local residents, like “the man with the cart, a natural community leader, who is still alive,” Varona added.

Concerts, Saturday night dances, plays put on by the Harlequin children’s theatre troupe and art exhibits are among the cultural events organised by the Office of the Historian.

“As soon as they come home from school, they want to come here,” says a 37-year-old mother reading on a bench while her two daughters play with a group of children in the plaza. “They don’t miss a single concert or dance, or anything else that happens here."