Havana It’s an anniversary this November 16th. This Sunday, the Cuban capital celebrates its 506th anniversary in its current location. However, more than five centuries later, for many Havana residents, the situation that the city—and the country in general—is going through does not exactly invite commemorations and celebrations.
Like every year, the capital’s authorities and institutions carry out a program with various cultural, academic and community actions to commemorate the founding in 1519 of the then town of San Cristóbal. The agenda also includes events and promotional campaigns.
However, in the streets and neighborhoods, in deep, everyday Havana, a different mood prevails: survival, concern, and restlessness in the face of the current day-to-day life of the city.
Havana reaches its 506th anniversary with a more than complicated panorama. It is not only the economic crisis, which will worsen throughout 2025, that drives up prices and corrodes the walls, but also the constant blackouts, the overflowing garbage, the diseases that give no respite…
For weeks now, dengue, chikungunya and other ailments have been infecting Havana residents and putting stress on polyclinics and hospitals, while mosquitoes remain on the prowl and the government’s sanitation drive was a matter of the weekend. No matter how much it tried to be minimized, the epidemic is hitting hard.
Havana anniversaries are usually accompanied by well-known images. Photographs of emblematic sites of the city: the squares and buildings of the Historic Center, the iconic boardwalk, the Paseo del Prado, the obelisk to José Martí in the square of the same name, La Rampa…
Havana, however, is much more than a tourist postcard or a promotional image. It is also its different neighborhoods and districts, its city bustle, its people without touch-ups and makeup, its problematic and persevering future, its harshest and most contrasting snapshots.
To that Havana that reaches its 506 years between challenges and shortcomings, blackouts and cold fronts, landfills and inflation, arboviruses and fumigations, photoreporter Otmaro Rodríguez brings us closer today.
