Havana inside: Martí cast

The cast Martí is not the best known neighborhood of Havana. Nor the most colorful and iconic for its constructions. Many from outside the area, or other parts of Cuba, probably do not know exactly their location or have even heard of it.

However, it is a habanero cast like the one that most, with its peculiarities and distinctions, but also with not a few problems. It is, in a way, a mirror of the increasingly widespread difficulties that cloud the landscape and daily life of Cubans.

Mostly humble community, located in the current Municipality Cerro, the cast Martí emerged as a working neighborhood in a then peripheral area of Havana, which over time and the sustained growth of the Cuban capital was integrated into the city framework.

Next to Rancho Boyeros Avenue, it is part of the Armed Popular Council, which shares with the most reputed cast Casino Deportivo and other adjacent neighborhoods. It is a mainly residential zone in which there alternate low -rise buildings and recent construction with homes of different characteristics and conditions, according to the possibilities of its inhabitants.

As a community, the Martí cast is a portrait of life in many parts of Havana and all Cuba, beyond social and architectural similarities or differences.

Together with their houses and state institutions and also some private businesses, in their environment there are no lack of the streets and deteriorated constructions – in contrast to others in a better state -, salideos that border on their roads and garbage dumps that overflow and expand, as a testimony of the crisis and the already naturalized, relegated to other more peremptory needs.

This is how the photoreporter shows us this Sunday Otmaro Rodríguezafter a recent tour of this perhaps less known, but in a few paradigmatic senses Barriada Habanera.