Life Goes On During Old Havana Renovation

H A V A N A, Dec. 3 -- 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 center, the city is allowing many neighborhood residents 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.

“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, an architect and coordinator 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 center like a beautiful body with no soul.”

Pouring Money Back Into Old Havana

The office founded by City Historian Eusebio Leal operates a construction company and 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.

“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.”