You cannot live in the building of the closed Musical Theater of Havana. The residents have been fighting for decades for the authorities to do something with the place, located on the corner of Consulado and Virtudes, in Centro Habana, which has been in disrepair since it closed in 1989.
“If it can’t be rebuilt or rehabilitated as a theater, at least they clean it up,” denounces Lydia, who lives two blocks from the theater and has friends in the building who, with a license to rent to foreigners, had to leave the business. “The least that goes up there are cockroaches; there are rats and all kinds of vermin. When tourists arrived and saw the panorama, they immediately canceled.”
Residents also report that many times “water drains, or who knows what liquid” from inside the building. At the entrance, garbage overflowing from a container that has not been collected for many days accumulates. On the eaves and side walls, vegetation grows without hindrance. “That must be a jungle on the inside,” jokes another young man who passes by the place this Monday.
“That must be a jungle inside,” ironically another young man who passes by the place this Monday
Built in 1959 on what had been the old Alhambra Theater –founded in 1890 and collapsed in 1935, where skits were performed only for men–, the Musical Theater of Havana experienced a period of certain splendor under the direction of Héctor Quintero, and the Mexican Alfonso Arau, the American Federico Smith or the Cuban Leo Brouwer, of recognized artistic trajectories later.
In 1988, Quintero relinquished command, and a year later, the theater was closed. According to Ecured, the Cuban official encyclopedia, the closure was “due to construction problems.” According to the documentary nobody knows what happened (2008), the closure was expected to be temporary and a “problem in the electrical installation” was alleged.
One of the interviewees on that tape, reviewed Carlos Espinosa Domínguez a few years agoexplains that “everything was due to three cables of the system that conduct electricity to the stage. They needed to be covered, and in the absence of the necessary material for it, tape. Something inadmissible according to the safety regulations of the firefighters, who ordered the closure of the property until the problem was solved. Was it so difficult to do that? From what you can see, it was, because after two decades or so it remains unresolved, with the addition of the havoc caused by so many years of neglect and abandonment”.
Although the room gave a lot of life to a depressed part of the neighborhood despite its central location, the residents have lost hope of recovering it as a cultural space. They are satisfied that the hygienic conditions are the minimum and necessary.
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