Havana/The Higher Institute of Industrial Design (ISDI), in the heart of Centro Habana, was on Thursday guarded by civil agents on the four sides. Custody was late, and just after the graphic designer Esteban Aquino denounced on his social networks, illustrating his message with photos, that numerous documents of the institution, including thesis, books and catalogs, were watered in the nearby Carlos J. Finlay park.
“These files were, and they are, the historical and technical reference for the academic training of students. The work of those who are now excellent exponents of design, teachers, tutors, authors and great personalities ends their useful life,” Aquino lamented, graduated from the ISDI. With sadness, I cried: “I really do not know who are inside that building, I don’t know what they do and less what the destiny that the property takes, but I consider that being ignorant does not imply being insensitive. Not knowing is not synonymous with disrespect.” And he asked: “What is the motivation that pushes these people who, supposedly, were formed with principles based on respect for social property, education and culture? What values are we talking about?”
What the undercover police officers are watching now, in any case, is nothing more than a “cannibalous” place little by little, as expressed to 14ymedio A neighbor. “The scavengers were going to crumble the entire building,” says the woman, who day by day, observed how people got For the gap that had left one of the partial landslides of the property on the back. “They had already taken the windows and were taking the doors. If they leave them they will end up taking the bricks one by one.”
“I have proposed doors, bath cups, blinds and even bars”
Another neighbor, resident a few meters from the nearby bus stop, has also witnessed the building’s scrapping. “I have proposed doors, bath cups, blinds and even bars,” he tells this newspaper in allusion to the informal market that has been nourished in the last months of the isdi spoils. “There are houses here that they seem inside because they have armed with what has come out of there,” he says and points to what remains of the structure.
For decades, the neighborhoods where an official entity deteriorates or where some state construction has been fed from their remains or their construction materials. “I have a neighbor who reinforced the bed baster with the table of a blackboard and in this same lot there are now several doors that are the same color all taken from there.”
The most deteriorated woods have also paid off. “The other night, which we had a very long blackout, the residents of Alman armed a fire in the street to cook with some tables of the ISDI.” However, the momentary benefit, the woman fears that the ruin ends up becoming a great garbage dump and “this whole neighborhood looks even more dirty than is.”
The building, which was initially Hotel Military and Customer of Officers of the Spanish Army, went through the headquarters of the Cadet School (1874-1878), asylum of widows and orphans, barracks of the General Staff during the first American occupation and even Ministry of Health, before the revolution.
/ 14ymedio
In 1982 it was transformed into the headquarters of the Polytechnic Institute of Industrial Design, prelude to the ISDI, and, despite its high architectural, historical and educational value, it was allowed to die in decades of neglect, bad reforms and absence of maintenance.
In March 2022, the building was closed after a “architectural failure” that endangered students and workers. “The revolution founded the universities and always accompanied them,” said the official note, as if the words were enough to hold cracked columns.
That speech collapsed, literally, In July of 2024, when a part of the inner facade collapsed. And in January 2025, Another collapse Partial left an old woman wounded and four families without access to her homes. Despite not having fatal victims, the symbolic impact was deep: not only a building was sank, but a promise, an institution and an era.
More accurate resulted in the words of the architect Lourdes Martí, founding rector of the ISDI until 1988, who in 2022 had launched a public complaint: “What happened during these last 33 years? Have you never maintained again? What architectural failure is that which does not allow to recover the building, or part of the building? Do you want to destroy the building or eliminate the formation of industrial and informational designers? country?”.
