Cojímar, illustrious ruins field

Cojímar (Havana)/“Do not pass. PNR.” The prohibition of the police, written in large black letters on the box of an abandoned truck, is almost unnecessary if the look is looked up to the building. With a haunted mansion, the ruins of the old Campoamor hotel, which housed a reformatory and had many other uses in Cojímar, make clear to the walker what awaits him if he crosses the threshold.

Similar warnings hang, in pieces of zinc, from the fence that protects the building in “danger of collapse”, and that has been completed with sticks and barbed wire to prevent the curious from entering. Inside, in the old garden, the truck without wheels and a rusty bus whose structure shows the traces of the scrap metals, which have only left the vehicle’s shell, rest.

“That was first a reformatory, then it was a differentiated school [para estudiantes con discapacidad en el aprendizaje] And now he is abandoned, ”he explains to this newspaper Pedro, 77,“ born and raised in Cojímar. ”However, the fisherman recounts only the chronology he knows, and that is limited to the time when the building has been in the hands of the revolution.

When they built it, in 1907, its owners and architects wanted it to be the jewel of the capital spa, to which the rich Creoles were traveling and where the great fortunes of the island veranerated. The story is recorded even Ecured, the Wikipedia official, who awarded the property to Pilar Samoan First Cuban accommodation LGBTI+ Friendly from the hands of the Spanish chain Axel.

Bought by the Government of the Republic, a few years after its opening it became a sanatorium for tuberculosos until the arrival of Fidel Castro. Today, even Ecured hides its ruin: “after 1959 this building had various uses, until, unfortunately, the lack of attention and maintenance has led it to a total calamitous state, which probably never recovers again.”

“It’s a shame,” Pedro agrees. “The Government is letting it go to be lost. That is repaired and how many families do not fit there. People who are living with the in -laws or have nowhere to live,” the fisherman emphasizes while pointing out the gigantic construction that retains a faint pink color.

With abandonment, the building has become a kind of greenhouse to the cane. The vines eating the walls attracted to moisture, from the cracks of the balconies guide ferns and, from the windows of the last floor, robust for the years they have had of peace, the reverded branches of several trees come out. Its roots have ended the floor and erased the border between one plant and another from the old hotel.

Little is left in the field of luxury and comfort that attracted, in its time, figures as prominent as the widow and the son of José Martí, the captain of the liberating army José Francisco Martí Zayas-Bazán, heir of several lines of illustrious surnames on the island. “A few years ago it was commented that the historian’s office wanted to repair the building, but they said that the foundations and the structure were not Drack it.

Meanwhile, the garbage accumulates in the wall of the property that gives to Real Street, the main cup. The road has become a walk of small landfills that appear in any corner and potholes that the cars try at all costs dodge.

The same fate of the Campoamor had other elegant buildings and mansions of Cojímar that in the Republic belonged to entrepreneurs and families of the High Class. This is the case of the fifth Pedralbes, which belonged to the Catalan businessman Joaquín Boada and was built by Mario Rotllan, an outstanding representative of the art nouveau that came to have several workshops on the island.

With the ricked walls and the gardens taken by wild plants, the house survives just as a refuge for several families. In the ancient gardens, where exotic species of plants brought from any corner of the world came to live together, now sprout palms and banana trees.