Viva! Havana

What’s the hottest urban destination in the Caribbean? If you say Nassau or Kingston, guess again, because the answer is Havana. After four decades of isolation, Cuba’s seaside capital is now swarming with visitors from all around the globe. In last week’s column I described the driving force behind the current tourist boom. History, culture and music may be the primary reasons people visit Cuba, but it also offers the chance to step back in time to a lifestyle that seems little changed from the ‘50s. Havana remains very much an anachronism, a city that relishes its past. Let me walk you through Havana.

One is easily seduced by the Caribbean sultriness, Latin American rhythm, and Spanish architectural magnificence of Havana. This city is mysterious, decrepit yet ravishingly beautiful. Because of Cuba’s economic plight, it is a capital city like no other. Whole districts appear to be on the point of tumbling down and, despite a population of over two million, it can be unnervingly quiet and there is little of the commercial bustle that normally pervades a big city.

Havana can hardly be called relaxing. It is a place where you are expected to fend for yourself, where after every few steps you will be asked whether you want cigars, a taxi, or a girl for the night. But you may soon develop an admiration for the Habaneros’ resilience – more durable than the buildings they live in – and may fall in love with this most intoxicating of cities.

Little remains of Old Havana’s oldest buildings as they were constructed of wood rather than stone. Most of the architectural marvels date from the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, in a style that was a synthesis of Baroque, Moorish, and Gothic designs – definitively Hispanic but adapted to suit the hot Caribbean climate. During this period Cuba had suddenly found great wealth from its burgeoning sugarcane industry and these mansions became status symbols for the merchants and the sugar aristocrats who owned them. Floors were made of marble and ceilings of mahogany, walls were painted with murals, hung with tapestries and decorated with Italianate bands of colored plaster work called cenefas. From around the 1820s, new buildings were Neo-classical in style. Some were stern, such as El Templete on Plaza de Armas, others flamboyant, including the mansions along the Prado. Many of the Prado facades also exhibit 20th-century Art Nouveau details and arabesque flourishes such as keyhole-shaped windows.

Tropical humidity and neglect have precipitated the buildings’ demise. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Cubans were encouraged to live in the countryside or in new Soviet-style apartment blocks, and the upkeep of Old Havana was not in the government’s list of priorities. It was only when tourists started arriving in the late ‘80s that a massive restoration project was set into motion. The size of the task is overwhelming: there are some 900 buildings of architectural importance within the old city. Some have been completely restored. Elsewhere the work is superficial and the buildings are still essentially ruinous.

Renaissance Of Havana Vieja

Received wisdom blames the city’s teetering state on government policies since the 1959 socialist revolution coupled with the punishing US economic blockade, which have led to the country’s impoverishment. But the effects of socialism on the city are more nuanced, and not all deleterious.

The revolution decided to focus all of its intention for development in the countryside for agricultural production. The city of Havana was abandoned. The Castro regime also saw Havana as the nesting ground for opposition. There was no development, which meant that the colonial core of the city – and what we consider valuable, all these ‘50s heritage buildings that have begun to be erased everywhere else – survived miraculously.

Not all of the revolution’s urban policies amounted to benign neglect. One of the Castro revolution’s earliest acts was to cancel a massive auto-oriented urban-renewal scheme that would have cut through the oldest part of the city. The socialist state outlawed real estate speculation, and – say what you will of the human-rights implications – forbade free migration from countryside to capital, interdicting the human tide that has overwhelmed every other Latin American capital in the past four decades.

It’s interesting to recognize that Havana covers an area of 2.1 square kilometers, with a total of 3,500 buildings. It has a population of more than 70,000. A large extent of the problem is bad housing conditions and lack of services. The overuse of buildings dedicated to housing with the consequent deterioration causes overcrowding and development of slums. In nearly one-third of the homes, water has to be pumped manually and is stored in tanks without connection to the main supply.

Challenge Of A Utopia

The master plan for the comprehensive revitalization of Old Havana arose in view of the perspective of development of the Historic Center, and the need to create an entity that would group all those who held responsibility for it. It was set up in December 1994 to study the problem of the Historic Center and its fortifications, as well finding the most suitable strategies for the rehabilitation of Havana. The master plan is based on the participation of all the citizens and entities having influence in the territory, so as to ensure a space where all involved converge.

Tucked among the decaying modernist villas in the suburb of Miramar is a valuable resource for preservationists. Construction of this 1:1,000 scale maquette of metropolitan Havana – sculpted from recycled cigar boxes, cardboard, and sponges – was undertaken by the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital, an urban policy think tank, following its formation in 1987. La Maqueta is amazingly detailed. Its elements are color-coded to show whether they date to the colonial, republican, or revolutionary periods of Cuba’s history.

When completed, this work in progress will represent 144 square kilometers of the metropolis, which is home to more than 2 million people. To work as a living visual laboratory, it must be kept up to date – it already includes a perfect tiny mock-up of the plaza constructed just last year as a venue for daily rallies demanding the repatriation of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban child whose Miami relatives insisted on keeping him in the United States.

In life as in La Maqueta, politics is never far from issues of preservation and planning. It is common now, among people who care about the world’s built heritage, to acknowledge that Havana – with its dense urban fabric of lavishly expressed buildings from four centuries – is a preservationist’s dream. It is also common to lament its deterioration.

This may require the end (or restructuring) of Cuban socialism and the lifting of the US embargo – a convergence of circumstances that feels increasingly imminent, though it remains unpredictable. But if and when this occurs, the architects of Havana’s future will still be guided by values and sensibilities that come from their experience of socialism: a nationalist passion for their built heritage. An unwillingness to displace existing populations, and a desire to cultivate tourism without creating theme-park historic districts or re-establishing zones of class difference.

What makes Havana particularly precious is this precise moment in time. First, there is a lot of deferred maintenance and collapsed buildings – there was period of a few years when 800 buildings in Havana collapsed. Second, this comes at exactly the time that money is beginning to be made available for preservation because of tourism. Third is the incredible pressure on governments and private corporations from all over the world (except for the US).

Tapping a tourist boom, lodging chains like Spanish Melia, French Novotel and Dutch Golden Tulip groups compete for choice sites. The oversized hotels they have put up in joint ventures within the Cuban government reflect nothing of Havana’s existing fabric.

All of this tension and dynamism makes for an incredibly exciting environment coupled with the fact that Fidel Castro is now 75 years old and everybody’s saying, "What next?"

From dozens of articles and books, not to mention the Buena Vista Social Club film and CDs, people outside Cuba now have a vivid picture of Havana as an intimate, vibrant city that is falling apart. But few realize how extensive preservation activity is, despite the immensity of the challenge and paucity of resources. Everywhere, workers are scraping woodwork, painting, priming, rebuilding moldings and replacing glass.

Much of the current work is being funded by income from the burgeoning tourism activity, which became increasingly important when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and its support of the Cuban economy vanished. In terms of beaches, sun and fun, there is a huge amount of competition all over the Caribbean. Except Cuba has these incomparable assets in Havana and Trinidad. They’ve discovered their trump card: In Cuba you can do culture and sun.

Thus the Cubans have come up with a way to fund restoration in their most vulnerable heritage areas such as colonial-era Old Havana. The economic devastation that followed the end of the Soviet support could have meant the paralysis for preservation. And it initially did. But Eusebio Leal, the historian of the City of Havana, proposed a new manner of dealing with the preservation of Old Havana’s heritage. Leal’s idea resulted in a 1994 decree that gave the official historian power to administer tourism and commercial activities with the historic zone, impose taxes, and reinvest part of the revenue. His office now oversees a travel agency and an enterprise that runs hotels, restaurants, and shops – as well as a planning bureau and ongoing bricks-and-mortar projects that provide employment for some 800 skilled craftsmen. Health and educational services within the district, as well as local police, also receive funding.

Using this approach, plazas and thoroughfares in Old Havana have been returned to pedestrian use and old buildings rehabilitated and given new functions. If you arrive in the city by ship, for example, the first thing you see when you step off the efficient cruise terminal – a retrofitted early-20th-century customhouse – is a pedestrian square, Plaza de San Francisco. At one edge is the 1738 church that gives the plaza its name. It has been restored for use as a concert hall and museum.

Opposite is the Lonja de Comercio, an imposing Renaissance Revival office block with a covered atrium, built in 1903, which was renovated in a joint venture with a Spanish investor. Before, it housed "unattractive administrative functions." Now it accommodates the offices of several airlines and other foreign companies.

Lining another side of the plaza are the travel agencies run by the city historian’s office and several cafes whose tables spill into the square. From the plaza a pedestrian street leads into the heart of Old Havana. By a corner of the Lonja de Comercio, there is a typically Cuban moment of ironic humor: a twice-life-sized naked copper Mercury, once the finial atop the building. Damaged in a hurricane, it was patched back together last year but installed face down on the cobblestones, marked off by iron bollards.

Other historic buildings in Old Havana have been turned into restaurants, museums, galleries, and shops. At the same time this remains a densely populated district. Some of the restored buildings are schools and clinics. The streets are crowded with foreign tourists and Cuban tourists – and folks who have been living upstairs or around the block for decades.

World Architects At Work

The rehabilitation of Old Havana, in the first instance, and the whole of the city is a work of great responsibility for all Cubans. It would be unfair, however, not to mention the selfless and valuable support of various countries, institutions and personalities which, in one form or another, have offered Cubans their help in the true sense of international cooperation: to encourage nations to find their own road, to design their own destiny.

In 1994, a colloquium sponsored by the MAK – Austrian Museum for Applied Arts – brought some forward-thinking architects from Vienna, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles to meet with counterparts in Havana and set their imaginations loose on the city.

One example of the resulting reveries was California architect Eric Owen Moss’s idea for Plaza Vieja, one of few sizable open spaces in Old Havana. Laid out in the 16th century, the plaza has been a marketplace and later a park, but its usability was ruined in 1950 by the construction of a subterranean parking garage. The roof stood five feet above the surrounding pavements. Moss’ idea was to "attack" the plaza, transforming it into a huge amphitheater. The plaza’s void would be the theater’s bowl. He would "slice" away at the existing buildings, leaving sections of original façade but mostly replacing them with bleachers and "rupture" the peripheral street grid, creating instead a zigzagging pedestrian path around the perimeter that linked the courtyards and light wells of the original structures.

The Cuban response to this, in what has been said and what has been done to Plaza Vieja, reveals how planners there see their task. Plaza Vieja is a principal locus of preservation work now. The parking garage was removed and the original grade restored. The entire plaza has been reserved for pedestrians. At its center is a new fountain that copies one from the 18th century.

Slowly the buildings at the periphery, mostly palatial town houses that have been subdivided into apartments, are being renovated. In this process their original facades are restored, ground-floor spaces are given over to public functions such as galleries and the floors above are reconfigured as modest apartments. So far, these are providing homes for some 50 families. The renewed Plaza Vieja will also include a cinema, school, and hotel.

But Cuban designers are not interested only in a strict historicist approach. The hotel slated for restoration on Plaza Vieja, the 1906 Palacio Cueto, is a sinuous Catalonian-style Art Nouveau confection. Plans call for an addition that will not just reprise but simplify its lines and include a diaphanous drape fluttering over a mural.

When asked about a design direction for infill construction on the hundreds of Havana plots where buildings have collapsed, Rigol suggests that there’s no reason new buildings shouldn’t be utterly fresh, drawing on the Cuban talent for Modernism and complementing without duplicating the scale and styles of surrounding structures.

Havana is at an incredible moment in terms of what the city is going to look like. Developers from Europe who want to build 40 stories high are coming in and saying, "You want milk for your children? Let’s do it." Fortunately they have only a few of those hideous new hotels that come in containers – so far.

The prospect of normalized relations with the US, and the destabilizing flood of dollars that could follow, is sobering. Bureaucracies don’t change.

Who’s going to replace them? All cities have as their vision of what Havana already has: mixed use, compactness and streets that are walkable.

Cuba is so far behind in the provision of cars that it would bankrupt the country to become a car society. And in a way, they haven’t crumbed themselves up with outmoded infrastructure. So it’s perfectly poised to leap ahead.