Armed with foreign money and a socialist agenda, Havana
forges a new approach to historic preservation--one that
benefits residents as well as tourists.
Above: In Plaza Vieja--one of the largest open spaces in Old Havana and an important
part of the city's preservation effort--a parking garage was removed and
replaced with a fountain. The surrounding buildings are being restored for
mixed use.
Of all the problems wrought by Cuba's prolonged economic crisis, the most
immediately evident--if not the most tragic--is the deterioration of its
urban architecture. For centuries Havana was the richest city in Spanish
America; its wealth and worldliness left a built heritage of intoxicating
beauty. Now these structures stand as crumbling monuments to the country's
historical pattern--an inverse proportion of gorgeous buildings to the money
needed to restore them.
But tucked among the decaying Modernist villas in the suburb of Miramar
is a valuable resource for preservationists: La Maqueta de la Habana. 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 from the colonial, republican, or
revolutionary periods of Cuba's history. A work in progress, when complete
it 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 Elián González, the Cuban child whose
Miami relatives insisted on keeping him in the United States.
Offsite:
Discover the history and current state of sustainable development in
Cuba at www.cosg.supanet.com/gdic.html,
the web site of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital
which runs the Maqueta de la Habana. You can also email the organization
for more information at gdic@ceiniai.inf.cu.
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. Received wisdom blames
the city's teetering state on government policies since the 1959 socialist
revolution coupled with the punishing U.S. 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. "Because the revolution
decided to focus all of its intention for development in the countryside
and on agricultural production, Havana was abandoned," explains Gustavo
Araoz, an architect and executive director of the U.S. committee of ICOMOS,
the International Council on Monuments and Sites. "The Castro regime
also saw Havana as the nesting ground for opposition. There was no development,
which means that the colonial core of the city--and what we now consider
valuable, all this 1950s heritage that has begun to be erased everywhere
else--survived miraculously." And 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.
Above: Havana's low-budget planning practices include the
fifteen-year-old scale model La Maqueta de la Habana (left),
which will eventually represent 144 square kilometers of the
city. The tourist-friendly Plaza de San Francisco (right)
was named after the 1738 church (middle) that now serves as
a concert hall and museum.
As demonstrated by La Maqueta--a highly elaborated, if low-tech, planning
aid, the counterpart of which very few cities possess--lack of funds has
not stopped the city's design professionals from doing what they can with
what they have: cataloging what is there, undertaking pilot projects, and
thinking hard about how they would fix it all whenever they get the
chance. That may require the end (or restructuring) of Cuban socialism and
the lifting of the U.S. 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 reestablishing zones of class difference.
"What makes Havana particularly precious is this precise moment of
time," observes Lee Cott, a professor of urban design and planning
at Harvard's Graduate School of Design who brings his students to Havana
to conduct a studio each year. "First, there is a lot of deferred maintenance
and collapsed buildings; there was one recent period of a few years when
800 buildings in Havana collapsed. Secondly, this comes at exactly the time
that money is beginning to be made available for preservation because of
tourism. A third thing is the incredible pressure that is being brought
to bear on the city by governments and private corporations from all over
the world--except for the U.S." Tapping a tourist boom, lodgings chains
like the Spanish Meliá, French Novotel, and Dutch Golden Tulip groups
compete for choice sites; the oversize hotels they have put up in joint
ventures with the Cuban government refiect nothing of Havana's existing
fabric. "All of this tension and dynamism makes an incredibly exciting
environment," Cott says, "coupled with the fact that Fidel Castro
is now 74 years old and everybody's saying, 'What next?'"
Above: Havana architects José Antonio Choy and Julia
León designed a glass-and-steel addition (left) for
a 1957 bank (right) in the suburb of Miramar.
From dozens of articles and books, not to mention the Buena Vista Social
Club film and CDs, many outside Cuba now have a vivid picture of
Havana as an intimate, vibrant city--that is everywhere falling apart. But
few realize how extensive preservation activity is, despite the immensity
of the challenge and paucity of resources. "I was in the building where,
in Buena Vista Social Club, Ruben Gonzales is playing the piano for
the children," Cott says of his last trip to Havana. "Gymnasts
were there practicing. There was Ruben, at his piano. And there must have
been 50 workers scraping woodwork, painting, priming, rebuilding moldings,
and replacing glass. There's a lot of activity right now."
