During the day it is Galiano street and at night it becomes Italia avenue. While the sun shines on its unpainted facades and its cracked walls, it is just one more artery in Centro Habana, with its beggars and its informal vendors, but when evening falls it becomes the new showcase of Christmas lights, a flash that dazzles everyone. the neighbors and raises hives among those who live long hours of blackouts.
Galiano has never been an easy street. It does not have the breadth of Reina nor the ancestry of Paseo del Prado, but there is no commercial route in the Cuban capital that does not pass through it: everything dies and is born in its portals. Do you need a disposable razor? Glue to fix grandma’s coffee cup? A belt so your pants don’t fall down? There is all this and more on Avenida Italia, the name that no one tells you but which you can use if necessary.
Now, the official press talks about transforming the road and making it “an innovative urban district and a benchmark for the principles of the circular economy, digital culture and creativity and the enhancement of supply chain products”. Pure verbiage that hardly has an echo between the timbiriches of the merolicos and the menacing gaze of the policemen who patrol it non-stop.
“It is a project that is carried out with the Italian collaboration, which co-finances it. It works with the Italian Agency for Cultural and Economic Exchange with Cuba (AICEC),” details an article in Havana Tribune who prefers to use the glamorous name of the streetto bring it closer –to the cannon and everything that can guarantee a few euros– to the boot-shaped peninsula that has little or nothing to do with that scar that Galiano has become and that goes from the Havana coast to El Parque El Band-Aid.
At night, it becomes Neapolitan and cosmopolitan with some lights installed on top that could make any tourist believe that lighting is common in the twilight street and dark stairs. The local media are filled with images of workers installing the power lines with light bulbs and there is no lack of interviews with some opportune passerby who talks about the wonders of those fireflies of hope on their heads. But in Galiano it always dawns.
Morning arrives and the lights are no longer noticeable, the man who asks for money on a corner of San Rafael begs for something to eat again, the lady who offers sponges to scrub and hides every time a uniformed man passes walks around again. the portals and the Avenida Italia only the memory remains. Makeup only lasts as long as the sun doesn’t shine.
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