Of rumba in the alley of Hamel

Almost four years ago that Salvador Rodríguez ceased to existthe founder of the artistic and community project Hamel alley. His death was a very hard blow for an initiative with more than three decades of roots and for the Havana neighborhood in which it is based.

After this time, neither is Cuba the same. The traces of the pandemic, the redoubled economic crisis, the migratory wave, endless blackouts, the fall of tourism, have blurred the country that was years ago. But the alley maintains its Bregar, its mystique.

In Centro Habana, in the popular neighborhood of Cayo Bones, the Hamel alley resists the onslaught and paradoxes of time. The project, its people, refuses to capitulate their essences and purposes, refuses to stop being.

With the example and spirit of Salvador, painter and self -taught that began to walk around 1990, this small alley located very close to the busy street San Lázaro – and whose name remembers the American businessman Fernando Belleau Hamel – remains a Sanctuary of Afro -Cuban culture in the Havana city. And the rumba is the pillar of its soundtrack.

Open Sky Gallery, space for creation and exchange, reservoir of culture and popular wisdom. All that and more is the alley of Hamel, a place also marked in the tourist maps, an attraction recurrent with their own halo and history that imagines people around the world, even in the middle of the decline of a sector considered the locomotive of the Cuban economy

Until there the tourists continue to arrive, by their own desire or carried by skill Embrujo of the place. In that company, which is at the same time cultural resistance and business, exercise of survival and proud exposure of the native, the Sunday clubs of the rumba are a special moment of the calendar.

Rumba unleashes the nature of Hamel alley; It makes it bloom. It marks its greatest call and its greatest enjoyment, mixing ages and backgrounds, puts the same to a European as a neighbor of Cayo Bone, to veterans of Columbia and Yambú who feel children who feel for the first time in their body The rhythmic shaking of the Guaguancó.

In the rumba, in its busy Peñas, the alley of Hamel reaches its maximum expression. It manifests itself in all its splendor of music and colors, of enjoyment and humanity, despite crises and shortcomings, of the inevitable passage of time. To this unique place in Havana, with its murals and sculptures, with its music and its people, we bring him today through the photos of Otmaro Rodríguez.