What do you get when you "put people before profits?" Paradise.
Havana's former grandeur decays and crumbles
Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:40 AM ET
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Almost half a century of communist rule has saved Havana's eclectic architecture from the urban developer's bulldozer, but a lack of repair has taken a ruinous toll on its neo-Baroque and Art Deco gems.
Dozens of colonial buildings and beautiful squares in Old Havana have been restored since the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO designated it a world heritage site in 1982. But the rest of the city of 2.2 million people is falling into decay.
"The situation has become critical. There are areas of the city where buildings collapse every few days. The overcrowding is tremendous," said leading Cuban architect Mario Coyula, who fears Havana's architectural beauty is damaged beyond repair.
In teeming, pot-holed Central Havana, poverty coexists with some of the world's finest examples of neo-Baroque and Art Deco architecture built before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
It is Cuba's most densely-populated district, with 160,000 people living in 1.3 square miles of crumbling buildings dating from the 1920s and 1930s, many now lacking basic sanitation.
This is the setting for the ribald fiction of Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutierrez, whose best-selling "Dirty Havana Trilogy," which has been translated into English, recreates an underworld peopled by pimps, prostitutes and black-market hustlers.
Foreign visitors stroll through spectacularly dilapidated streets snapping photographs of the city's rotting grandeur and vintage American cars caught in a bizarre time warp.
Amidst the squalor and rubble, tourists brave darkly-lit streets to climb to the city's best-known private restaurant, La Guarida, perched on the top floor of a palatial town-house built by a sugar baron in 1913.
The building of marble staircases and statues today houses 30 families who built small two-floor apartments inside formerly high-ceilinged rooms, called "barbacoas" because of the way a new floor is inserted like a barbecue grill. A washing line with drying clothes hangs between elegant columns.
In the restaurant upstairs, where a main course costs the same as an average monthly wage in Cuba, photographs on the wall recall celebrity visitors, from Jack Nicholson to the Queen of Spain.
"This building would have collapsed without the restaurant. Its owner has helped a lot with money for repairs," said Enio Ochoa, a former naval engineer living on the second floor.
STANDING BY MIRACLE
Experts say renovating Central Havana would be so costly that demolition is inevitable in many parts. Residents involved in urban planning believe their district can be saved.
"We have an advanced state of deterioration, but renewal is possible," said one official who asked not to be named.
She said 15 percent of the buildings were in very bad shape. "Nobody knows how they are still standing. It's a miracle they have not fallen down," she said.
Iraelio Fernandez's building did collapse. He and his wife moved into an abandoned cinema across the street where he raises chickens and a pig in a roofed space that once housed a 1,000-seat theater called the Palace.
"We moved here until they build new houses," he said.
Cuba's communist authorities say the nation of 11 million has a deficit of 400,000 houses and 43 percent of homes need repairs. Many have not seen a coat of paint in decades.
The government is trying to tackle the problem. In 2006 it injected funds into an accelerated construction program that saw 110,000 units built, almost treble the previous year, but still 40,000 below target.
Architect Coyula said Castro's government, born of a guerrilla revolution that ousted a right-wing dictatorship in 1959, put housing on the back-burner as it gave priority to health and education programs, and industrial development.
The housing crisis worsened when Soviet communism collapsed and sent Cuba into an economic tail-spin in the early 1990s.
Today it is not rare to find three generations of a family sharing the same roof.
Central Havana was the site of the only riots against Castro's rule in the hot summer of 1994 when some 35,000 people took to the sea in rafts is a desperate exodus to the United States.
The Cuban government blames the "blockade" -- as it refers to U.S. sanctions -- for the country's economic shortcomings.
But some Cubans say the government has only itself to blame for the urban decay of Havana.
"It's late to try to save the rich diversity of this architecture," said Cuban writer Antonio Jose Ponte. "It's not far-fetched to think that Central Havana will disappear."
today.reuters.com
Island once awash in beef
Cubans have not always been hard up for beef. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba was said to have as many cattle as people--about 5 million--and one of the region's highest per-capita consumption of beef, experts said.
But Fidel Castro's revolutionary government nationalized the large land holdings of U.S. and other ranchers and slaughtered many of the cattle to make up for falling food production in other areas.
The beef industry never recovered, but dairy herds were built back up through huge investments and imported animal feed, experts said. Years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed and ended $5 billion in annual subsidies, Cuba lacked the money for feed, and much of the dairy herd also was lost.
Today beef is found almost exclusively in state-run restaurants catering to tourists and dollar-only markets beyond the reach of most citizens.
The problems have been exacerbated by severe droughts and by what some experts describe as Cuba's ill-fated attempts to breed a superbovine that could thrive in a tropical climate.
One product of that effort was a single prodigious milk-producing cow called Ubre Blanca, Spanish for "white udder." During one 24-hour period in 1982, the cow produced 241 pounds of milk, more than four times a typical cow's production.
But the Cubans never could breed the cow, which died several years later and now stands stuffed in a glass case in the lobby of the cattle institute about 15 miles outside Havana.
Milk subsidized and limited
The government today imports huge quantities of milk from New Zealand, Canada and other countries and distributes it at subsidized prices for infants, children up to age 7, the elderly and the infirm, according to Alvarez and others.
Most everyone else has to purchase powdered milk on the black market for $1 a pound. Cubans earn an average of about $10 a month.
At the same time, per capita beef and veal consumption in Cuba has fallen from about 3.7 pounds per month in 1961 to just over 1.2 pounds per month in 2001, according to the United Nations (news - web sites). That compares with about 8 pounds of beef and veal per month consumed by the average American.
"It's a tremendous drop," said James Ross, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Florida. "The bottom line is that the Cuban administration has adopted policies that do not favor cattle production."
Cubans have made up for the beef shortage by eating more pork and chicken, which Alvarez said is cheaper to produce than beef.
But others say they prefer a juicy steak.
"The meat of a cow tastes better no matter how you cook it," said Salazar, the farmhand.
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