Havana/The huge audio teams and a stage, placed on the street, sprinkled on Tuesday with the narrow and almost childish facade of José Martí’s home house in Havana. On the 172th anniversary of the birth of the National Hero of Cuba, a hurry official act, with some local authorities, shook the routine of the San Isidro neighborhood, an area where the crisis and lack of investments have left deep injuries.
In number 41 of Paula Street, the house that has been drawn by each Cuban child, described in songs and photographed until tired, celebrates this January a century of having become a museum. In the place, where Martí spent only three years of his life, hang photos of his adolescence, images of his time in New York, snapshots with his son, countless protected documents after the crystals and some personal objects.
The facade of an impeccable yellow, the windows with their retouched blue and the red roof make up a striking contrast with the surroundings
The facade of an impeccable yellow, the windows with their retouched blue and the red roof make up a striking contrast with the surroundings. While the house, built in 1810, seems to resist the passage of time, other nearby homes are on the edge of the collapse or turned into mere rubble. A few meters from the museum, from a neoclassical -style building of the early twentieth century there are hardly any arches. Through the holes where once they were now, mountains of bricks, twisted irons and garbage are sprouted.
When folding the corner, on the Avenida de las Misiones, another abandoned property after the collapse of their roof “greets” visitors who approach the place where, in 1853, the crying of a baby announced a life as brief as prolific. Beyond the short fragment in front of the entrance of the sanctuary, reality becomes harder and more neglected. The sidewalks full of holes, the balconies about to collapse on the passers -by and the anguished face of the residents in search of food collide with the soft tone of the guide that details the occurrences of that restless child born of a Canarian mother and of a Valencian father.
/ Juliette Isabel Fernández Estrada/Facebook
If you bend to the right to the street that gives its name to the neighborhood the journey then becomes a descent to the poorest and most forgotten Havana. The garbage accumulates, abandoned animals look for something to eat between waste and a father drags a truck with cubes and drums full of water to use at home. Another turn, also to the right, and is flowed into Ladies Street. There, around number 955, this morning there was a police operation. A call to visit Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara’s house and appreciate his work Happy Peasants 1938-2024 It resulted in threats against the organizers and several artists with the mobile service cut.
Unlike the impoluta Martiana Facade, Otero Alcántara seems to take many centuries facing the weather. On its walls you can hardly distinguish the blue tone that once covered them. A cable kneading crosses the upper part and the door that gives access to the artist’s house, imprisoned since July 2021, has poorly stuck boards to prevent it from coming down. A few daring arrived there this January 28 after reading the call in networks, but they only found poverty and abandonment. There were no microphones platforms, or officials making speeches and much less tourists taking pictures. Nor was the voice of those diligent guides that explain the details of each piece exposed, of each photo hanging on the wall. None of that, but the contempt for the young artist who shouted “homeland and life.”
