By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Apr 24 2007 (IPS)

Havana today, humanly and physically, is a city trapped between its past and an uncertain future, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a ten languages. In this article, the author writes that for Cuban urbanists and architects, unless drastic action is taken immediately Havana\’s future will be mined with an array of devastating threats. The city increasingly shows the effects of the lack of attention and repair. The lamentable state of the buildings and roads requires major investments that the country does not seem capable of making. Meanwhile thousands of families suffer a promiscuous co-existence while the specialists feel a justified fear that desperate solutions to the city\’s problems could destroy its physiognomy.

If the visitor is also a professional photographer, he will return with the idea of pitching a picture book of Havana, having photographed not only the rough architecture of the Plaza de la Revolucion but also the ruins scattered throughout the city, sweat-drenched people packed into buses, exhibitionist mulattas with gleaming white teeth, and knots of men trying to start up vintage American cars from the 1940s or 50s.

More than almost any other city in the world, Cuba is both seen and sees itself through the lens of particular themes — the revolution, poverty, the exuberance or exhaustion of its people, the decaying buildings, its boardwalk, or its happy uniformed school children — according to the interests of those who seize on one common place after another, almost always from a position of preformed prejudices. The exercise of ”knowing” Havana is conducted with a levity and vehemence unrivalled in most capitals, and yet, too often what is essential about the city remains unreachable through the issues and propaganda, whatever the political tint.

If this persistent and prejudiced view of Havana is visible and significant, it is because the physical destiny of a city –not just of an emblematic building or a sector with historical or architectural value, but ALL the city– rarely concerns the people that live there, particularly those who think about it and love it, as intensely as in Havana today.

And thus it is no accident that a debate is now building in Cuba (far too late, according to many) about the vicissitudes suffered over the last 50 years by urbanism, architecture, and construction and that the present and future of Havana has been placed in the most acute and polemical light.

Both on and off the island, the work of preservation and rescue of the most important historic architectural patrimony of the island, concentrated in so-called Old Havana, has been recognised. This work, undertaken with particular resolve beginning in the 1990s, was presented as an urgent necessity for an urban space that had decayed to the point that delay was unacceptable. Overseen by the Historical Office of the City, this project of enormous architectural and social complexity, for which detractors haven’t lacked, has succeeded in reversing the physical deterioration of the so-called historic centre and provided it with a new image.

However, outside of the old walled town there has been nowhere near the same level of investment, enthusiasm, or achievement. The years of wear and tear have taken their toll on the old and new proletarian neighbourhoods of the city to the point that many are now on the verge of physical collapse and a certain moral deterioration is evident as well.

For Cuban urbanists and architects, unless drastic action is taken immediately Havana’s future will be mined with an array of devastating threats. While the city, for very concrete political reasons, avoided the disproportionate and often poorly-planned urban growth that struck Latin American cities in the 1960s and managed to preserve is physiognomy from the horrors of modern construction and its highways and skyscrapers, the lack of efficient solutions for the preservation and growth of Havana is all too obvious.

The creation of a ”socialist city” in the 1970s and ’80s with clusters of hundreds of apartment buildings built without respect for aesthetics or even urbanism was intended to resolve the need for housing, but without success.

Havana today, humanly and physically, is a city trapped between its past and an uncertain future. Beneath its facades and streets, and inside its inhabitants an essential and daily drama is being played out beyond the rhetoric and the logic of tourism or prejudice. Havana is a cause of pain, for those who love her, need her, and live in her. The city increasingly shows the effects of the lack of attention and repair. The lamentable state of the buildings and roads requires major investments that the country does not seem capable of making. Meanwhile thousands of families suffer a promiscuous co-existence while the specialists feel a justified fear that desperate solutions to the city’s problems could destroy its physiognomy. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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