In Centro Habana and Havana Vieja, it is survived among the debris of real estate in ruins that, if they are barely standing, is thanks to the “miraculous static.”
Havana, Cuba. – The art of masking ruins has been fashionable in Havana for years. The same authorities that due to negligible or lack of political will allowed the conversion of majestic buildings or humble homes in those manevice of rubble that affect the life of their inhabitants and pollute the city today boast of being their saviors and perform urban planning workshops that are nothing more than avis hobbies until they manage to expel residents of the historical part of the capital.
In his book The art of ruinsAntonio José Ponte refers: “In the heart of Havana, a daily and terrible war between accumulation and vacuum is fought. Where there was an old solar house yesterday, a hive of humble and noisy people, there may be a hill of debris today and tomorrow an absurd park, with two or three seats under a sun of justice, guarded by buildings that will also collapse the week, the month, the month, the month, the month.
That daily and terrible war that Ponte points out is maintained and progress, while the leaders look at this urban massacre from their protected bunkers, of which they only leave to make an appearance in the places of the landslides immediately after they collected the injured and the dead.
After a collapse, when more, they raise a park, a guarapera, a ditú, a mipyme, a parking or, above all, hotels for tourists.
The residents in the historical area of Old Havana and Centro Habana are being displaced, such as the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, but not due to a war, such as the one between Israel and Hamas’s terrorists, but for the complicity of the regime with the urban geophage of the military conglomerate of the military conglomerate Gaesa for taking over the best located spaces in the city.
Those who lose their homes for landslides are sent to the periphery of the capital, to distant places such as Wajay, Fraternity, Miraflores Viejo and other sites where there are the so -called “Transit Hostels” of which no one has ever returned.
In Centro Habana and Havana Vieja, as in Tuguria, the city raised in its book by Ponte as a metaphor of Havana, nothing is rebuilt again. It survives among the debris of real estate in ruins that, if they barely stand, is thanks to the “miraculous static.”
The recovery of the deficit, battered and ruinous housing fund of Havana is not of interest to the rulers. Turn the city into a tourist postcard only for foreigners, where “native mulatto” and PinguerosTobacco, Viagra and Ron sellers, provide sexual and social services, from one hotel to another, on behalf of the country.
There is no doubt. The “tugurization” advances, with prominent future, within the master plan of the city’s historian’s office. It has the GAESA bills and the complicity of the Communist Party to make ruins of the old part of the city and mask them until they can convert the historic center into a theme park or a resort.
Hence, each architectural project, each of the Tactical Urban Planning Workshops in Havana – a few days ago was closed its thirteenth edition – are attempts to mask the ruins under a painting collage with paradisiacal beaches, posters that ask the population to resist, images of Fidel Castro or the Che Guevara, photos of El Floridita and the winery of the medium.
The purpose of that magnification of the ruins is none other than to epatar to the fools useful, Cubans or foreigners, willing to praise the tricks of Castroism.
