BRINGING BACK HAVANA

The buildings and houses that made the city one of the most beautiful in the
world have survived the Revolution. But will they survive capitalism?

_____________________

BY PAUL GOLDBERGER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT POLIDORI

Aristocratic architecture taken over by another class: Many of Havana's grander residences
have become "cuidadelas," or little cities, in which more than a dozen families live together.

IN Havana, perhaps even more than in Los Angeles, you are what you drive. Samuel Gonzalez, a taxi-driver, has a red-and-white 1953 Chevrolet, which by the standards of this city, where American cars from the nineteen-fifties are among the chief ornaments of the cityscape, qualifies as a coveted vehicle, almost chic. For a long time, Mario Coyula, an architect who travels in more sophisticated circles than Samuel Gonzalez, had one of Cuba's only Porsches. Now, conscious of his role as vice-director of a group overseeing architectural planning for the Havana region, he drives one of the colorless Russian-made Ladas that were the cars preferred for years by the Cuban government. Ambassadors from other countries, restricted neither by the ideology of the Revolution nor by the need to choose their cars from what happens to be around, ride in Mercedes-Benzes, but then so does Fidel Castro. And Eduardo Luis Rodriguez, an architectural historian, has no car at all.

Rodriguez, who is one of the most highly respected scholars of twentieth-century Cuban architecture, has no telephone, either. He lives, with his wife and two sons, in a small apartment beneath the parish house of a church in Havana's Vedado section, and he moves around the city by bicycle. To reach him, you go to his house, walk across a tiny patio, on which sits the empty frame of a fifties sling chair, and rap on a sliding-glass door. If there is no answer, you leave a note telling Rodriguez when and where you hope to meet him. If he is not already committed, he will show up.

At thirty-eight, Rodriguez is more worldly than most Cubans: he has travelled to Europe and the United States to lecture on the architecture of his homeland. A stocky, bearded man, he has an amiable bearing, and his manner bespeaks graceful discretion more than scholarly hauteur; like many Cubans, he wears his erudition lightly. Despite his reputation abroad, he has not had an easy time as a scholar, because he does not always hew to the official line about architecture and preservation in Havana, which is, in effect, that the city is fine and that it will become even finer thanks to the work now being done by the official city historian, a man named Eusebio Leal, whose genteel title belies the fact that he has become something like the Robert Moses of Havana.

There is some disagreement about whether Havana is, in fact, so fine. The city is one of the richest and most eclectic urban environments anywhere, overflowing with architecture that is extravagant in its ambition and spectacular in its execution. But Havana is largely crumbling. Its buildings are falling down, its sewers are a mess, and its telephone system resembles that of an Eastern European city circa 1975. The Calzada del Cerro, the main street of the once prosperous El Cerro neighborhood, is one of the most remarkable streets in the world: three unbroken kilometres of nineteenth-century neoclassical villas, with columned arcades making an urban vista of heartbreaking beauty -- linear monumentality of a sort that exists nowhere else, except, perhaps, in Bologna. It is now deteriorating so dangerously that when I stopped for a moment in front of one building a passerby grabbed my arm and pulled me away; the cornice, he said, looked as if it was about to collapse.

In Cuba now, the only buildings that get taken care of are the ones that bring in tourist dollars, and this situation makes local preservationists like Rodriguez fear for the city's future. While Old Havana is protected as a UNESCo World Heritage site, and is being restored as a quaint tourist attraction -- this is Eusebio Leal's project -- the rest of the city seems to be viewed less as an irreplaceable artifact than as turf on which Cuba can play out its romance with capitalism.

A glimpse of the Havana that Rodriguez fears appeared two years ago in the form of the Hotel Melia Cohiba, a shrill, twenty-two-story tower of brown marble and reflective glass erected by a Spanish hotel chain in the hope of attracting tourists and businesspeople. It sits next to the Riviera, the flashy hotel erected by Meyer Lansky just before Castro came to power, which is a prize relic of fifties architecture. Beside the Cohiba, the Riviera looks as venerable as a Renaissance palazzo. And last November the Carlos III Mall, four stories of shops and fast-food outlets around a central atrium, opened up in the center of Havana, providing a taste of Paramus, New Jersey, within blocks of the Plaza of the Revolution and its three-story-high bas-relief of the face of Che Guevara. In a city that, despite the deprivations of socialism, has always been known for its vibrant street life, the mall is an ominous symbol: it represents not just capitalism, but suburban American capitalism.

No one believes that Havana will remain as it is for much longer. That American investment is forbidden has not prevented Havana from becoming ever more American in its way of doing business. The question, however, is what American model the city will embrace -- sprawl and high-rises in the manner of south Florida, or more sanitized renovations of its older buildings designed to attract tourists.

Eduardo Luis Rodriguez rejects both scenarios, and wants to see, instead, a Havana in which Art Deco palaces from the nineteen-thirties and good modernist architecture from the nineteen-fifties are as carefully restored as the city's nineteenth-century colonial buildings. "The government, the potential investors, they do not have any consciousness of the breadth of twentieth-century architecture in Havana, where we received every style in a very short period," he said. "But unlike the colonial buildings, none of it is protected." Rodriguez's passionate feelings about preservation in Havana have occasionally put him in disfavor. In a speech in 1995, in Washington, D.C., he said that he thought the Castro government should establish strong regulations for foreign investors to insure that new projects would not jeopardize Havana's architectural heritage. "I said something that was not politically correct, and I was told that what I was saying would discourage foreign investors," Rodriguez recalled.

Rodriguez's counterparts abroad are concerned about Havana's future, too. In the United States, where businesspeople watch and wait for the day when the American embargo ends, architects, many of them Cuban born, are looking forward to the day when they can return and begin to plan the city.

Some of them are not waiting. Andres Duany, the Miami-based architect celebrated for the traditional villages he has designed, like Seaside, Florida, and his brother Douglas, a landscape architect, visited Havana two years ago. Their goal was to devise building codes that would protect the city's eclectic old architecture and prevent Cuba from turning into a landscape of malls and Wal-Marts -- another Miami. "If they convert Havana into Hialeah, it would be the greatest failure of all," Nicolas Quintana, a Cuban-born architect who left Havana in 1960 and has lived in Miami since 1986, told me. "The moment investments come from the outside, they will rip apart the urban fabric," Douglas Duany said. "This is a very poor country. It will do anything for dollars, and its codes are not geared to protect Havana against large-scale investment. People in Cuba are sick of leaky roofs, which is what they associate old architecture with." The Duanys are part of an increasingly large and vocal group of Miami architects and planners who are studying Havana in the hope of protecting it, in a sense, from the Cuban government, which they do not trust to treat the city with the care it deserves. Among the others are Quintana, who is helping to found a program in Cuban studies at the architecture school of Florida International University, and Raul Rodriguez, a successful Cuban-born architect in Coral Gables who maintains close relations with a full range of architects and planners in Cuba, from Leal, the most powerful government official, to Eduardo Luis Rodriguez, who might be called the loyal opposition.

Unlike the political Cuban-Americans who united under Jorge Mas Canosa to pressure the American government to keep the economic embargo alive, the architectural lobby is not skittish about dealing with the present government of Cuba: it is much more realistic, is politically more centrist, and, in some cases, even left of center. There is an absurdist paradox underlying this effort: a group of American architects in a capitalist country, trying to persuade a Communist system that it has to be less indiscriminate in its embrace of the marketplace.

"In order to save this incredible architectural inventory from destruction, you need an infusion of capital that is impossible under the present system," Raul Rodriguez said. "But too strong an infusion of unregulated capital will bring it down. Isn't it significant that it is those of us who live under a capitalist system who are now preaching abstinence?"

"I can't think of a single Miami firm that doesn't have an eye on Cuba right now," Michael Smith, who heads the operations of the Turner Construction Company in the southeast United States, says. "Castro won't be there forever, and we see a terrific opportunity."

THE Castro government, in contrast to many regimes whose power is absolute, has shown almost no interest in architecture. It constructs relatively little and -- what is stranger still for a Communist government -- it ascribes little symbolic power to buildings. The government has not built great monuments to itself and it has not torn down the monuments built by its predecessors. It tends to adapt them instead. The Havana Hilton, finished just a year before Castro came to power, in 1959, was renamed the Havana Libre and for some time housed the revolutionary government's offices. A modern bank tower that was begun just before the Revolution was stopped in mid-construction, but, instead of being torn down as a capitalist symbol it was finished and turned into a hospital. Even the monument built to memorialize American lives lost in the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 remains, except that it has been shorn of the bronze eagle that once crowned its summit, because the Castro government considered the eagle too overt an American emblem. Fidel Castro works in a Mussolini-modern building that his predecessor, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, erected as the Palace of Justice. Castro changed its name to the Palace of the Revolution, and moved right in.

It isn't so surprising, then, that Havana's stunning range of architecture remains virtually intact, if in dire condition. For nearly four decades, the Cuban government has dealt with Havana by ignoring it. Improving living conditions in the provinces took priority over building in Havana, and the city was largely left alone, preserved by default.

"Fidel hated Havana. He thought it |represented the work of the bourgeoisie," Nicolas Quintana says. "He abandoned it, and now the city is going to pieces."

A former mansion in Vedado. "Fidel hated Havana; he thought it represented
the work of the bourgeoisie," a Cuban-American architect says.
"He abandoned it, and now the city is going to pieces."

Havana nevertheless still looks less like a Caribbean city than like a European or a South American one -- Barcelona, perhaps, or Buenos Aires. It is easy now to forget that when Cuba's elite began to flee Havana for Miami after Castro came to power they were leaving a city that was one of the world's most cosmopolitan, for what was, by comparison, a swampy backwater. In the thirty-nine years since then, Miami has been transformed into an international city, and Havana has all but stopped. It is wrong, however, to say that the city is frozen in time. Time is very visible in Havana; it just shows itself by decay.

Havana possesses as varied a mixture of twentieth-century architecture as New York: there are Art Nouveau palaces to rival those of Barcelona, Art Deco houses to equal those of Paris, Spanish Colonial mansions in the style of Beverly Hills, and as much first-rate international-style modernism as in Berlin. Most of the grand residences had been occupied by sugar barons and industrialists who fled after the Revolution, and only a handful are in decent condition. Some, like an ornate house with a grand marble staircase a block away from my hotel, which was abandoned by a pharmaceuticals-maker, have become ciudadelas -- literally,"little cities." That is, they are home to more than a dozen families. Laundry hangs from an elaborate stone-carved veranda, and one of the occupants of the house sells souvenirs from a cart amid weeds that were once a front lawn. Part communes and part squatter communities, ciudadelas have taken over some of the city's greatest houses. At the rate they are decaying, it is hard to imagine that many of them will still be standing ten years from now.

"It is a pity, to know that there is no possibility of saving this," Eduardo Luis Rodriguez says. "You can maybe save a hundred great buildings, but here there are a thousand of them."

The streets of the suburbanized Vedado neighborhood are haunting. At night, they are completely dark -- Cuba cannot afford many street lights -- and much of the light within the houses is fluorescent, creating an eerie shrillness amid the soft features of the sculptured cornices and columns. This is aristocratic architecture taken over by another class, and while that is not in itself a process unique to Havana (it has also happened in Bedford-Stuyvesant and parts of Harlem), its impact here is staggering. These houses still possess a majestic presence, and the streetscape, though marred by empty lots and jangly new buildings put up in the fifties, continues to have a sense of coherence. It resembles the Garden District of New Orleans: there is the same mixture of great mansions, multiple dwellings, slight decay, and, here and there, well-tended preservation, all softened by lavish foliage. But nowhere in New Orleans is there a house like the stone mansion at the corner of Havana's Twenty-seventh and K Streets, where a broken-down 1958 Cadillac Fleetwood sits rusting in the front yard like a piece of sculpture, with families of cats and dogs turning its inside into an animal ciudadela, and where a woman watches over them from a balcony grand enough to review an Army battalion.

In the formerly posh neighborhood called Miramar, there is something even spookier: a sprawling stucco palace with a round turret, huge gables, and a roof of green tiles which has holes large enough to drop a breadbox through. What had been the glass on the front door is entirely broken, leaving only open ironwork between the outside and the marble vestibule. The place is so dilapidated that I assume it to have been entirely abandoned, but it turns out to be occupied by a Spanish-born woman named Luisa Faxas, who, with her mother, bought it in 1942 and has never left. After the Revolution, the Cuban government seized commercial assets but not residences, and a few members of the upper classes remained in them. Senora Faxas, a thin, chain-smoking woman of seventy-five who was dressed in pink pedal-pushers, has three children in the United States, but she refuses to leave the house to join them. The house has been badly damaged by water, with the exquisite plaster detail in the living room half destroyed, the master-bedroom ceiling crumbling, and most of the furniture gone.

And abandoned room in the Faxas house. After the Revolution, Castro's government seized
commercial assets, but not private residences, and a few members of the former upper
class still live in their mansions, which are falling apart around them.

I imagined that Senora Faxas was so devoted to her sumptuous home that she remained, like a Cuban Miss Havisham, oblivious of the realities of the world around her and determined to hold on to her castle and protect it from a government that is more comfortable with the idea of twelve people living in one room than one person living in twelve rooms. I assumed she wanted only to die amid the remnants of the splendor she once loved. That turned out not to be true at all. "When I'm in another country, all I want to do is come back," she said, puffing on a cigarette and shooing away her dog. "But I don't love this house. I never did. The government keeps trying to persuade me to leave, so it can take the house, but all it keeps offering me is small apartments. And if the deal is not going to be fair, I stay here."

OVER Eduardo Luis Rodriguez's drafting table hangs a framed black-and-white photograph of a strange, voluptuous modern building. It turns out to be his private passion: the Castro government's first, and last, foray into serious architecture, a Cuban national arts institute built on the former golf course of the Havana Country Club, not far from Miramar. The country club, a place where Luisa Faxas might well have spent her afternoons playing tennis, was seized shortly after the Revolution by the government, which intended to convert it to a more populist use. The regime commissioned Ricardo Porro, a prominent Cuban architect, to design an extraordinary campus of Expressionist modern buildings, each one housing a different artistic discipline, and while not all the institute was built, the first stages, which included a fine-arts complex and a modern-dance complex by Porro and a ballet complex by Vittorio Garatti, were enough to establish the school as a project of stunning ambition.

And then, almost as quickly as the government commissioned the project, it withdrew its support. A set of buildings which brings to mind such architects as Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Jose Luis Sert, and Louis Kahn, the school had an earnest, determined aestheticism that did not sit well with a regime increasingly influenced by the harsh Leninism of the Soviet Union. The college continues to operate, although its buildings have never been properly maintained. A huge, Soviet-style concrete bunker of a dormitory was put up in front of several of Porro's buildings, making a mockery of their careful relationship to the landscape, and the most beautiful section of all, Garatti's ballet school, was never even opened. Its monumental brick vaults, its long, serpentine brick gallery, and its extraordinary brick dome are now virtual ruins, with the tropical jungle closing in on their lyrical, floating planes.

Ricardo Porro, after being cast aside by the revolution to which he had hoped to give an architectural identity, abandoned Cuba altogether, and now lives in Paris. His school, however, is a masterwork, and it has been more thoroughly rejected by the government than the grandiose classical buildings put up by Castro's predecessors. The current regime, it seems, cannot bear to accept its own parentage of an architectural treasure. I had never heard of the school until Eduardo Luis Rodriguez directed me to it, for it has been written out of architectural history as definitively as certain government figures who fall out of favor are written out of political history. Rodriguez knows it's unlikely that the buildings will ever be fully put back together, but he sees restoring the institute's good name as a duty. "For young architects, this school is the flag in our war to recover architecture," he says, walking across the former golf course. He insists that I see every nook and cranny of the school: swirling, sensual curving passageways; arcades that seem like a cross between Gaudi and Le Corbusier; and domed studios littered with broken glass. "Porro wanted to make a statement about disorder against order, tranquility against tension," Rodriguez said. "This complex started as a symbol of what the Revolution could do in architecture, and then it became the opposite -- a symbol of what the Revolution didn't want."

What the Revolution does want, apparently, is Eusebio Leal. A scholar and politician -- he is a member of the National Assembly, and functions within the highest reaches of the Castro government -- and a relentless, if subtle, self-promoter, Leal has awakened the government's interest in the city. Almost single-handed, he has revived Old Havana, the once-decaying colonial core near the waterfront, making it safe for tourists. Leal made restoration into a vehicle for development, just as it might be in an American city. The Old Havana he has made has a pristine, slightly too-perfect air about it: Old Havanaland. But the government knows that theme parks are profitable. So the new tourist route in Old Havana includes craft markets on the plaza in front of the cathedral; a church restored as a concert hall; and a Benetton boutique in the Plaza San Francisco. The tourist route doesn't include the main art museum, which has been closed since last summer for renovation, or the Granma, the boat in which Fidel Castro returned to Cuba in 1956, which has been displayed for years behind the old Presidential Palace in a glass enclosure that looks like an auto showroom. The boat is still there; it is just that it has been reduced to a kitschy curiosity, barely relevant to the new form of tourism, in which Old Havana feels every day more like Old San Juan.

Leal alone decides what will be restored in Old Havana. In addition to running the city agency that oversees old buildings and cultural facilities, he controls a state-owned company called Habaguanex, which develops and runs hotels, restaurants, shops, and offices in Old Havana, and another company, called Fenix, which is a real-estate-management company. You do not do business in Old Havana without running into Leal, whose mini-capitalist empire will bring in around forty-three million dollars this year, twenty-one million of which his agency plans on reinvesting in its projects. (The rest goes to the state.)

"Leal does whatever he wants, and no one can say no," a young architect in Havana says. "He treats Old Havana as his private fiefdom." But Leal has largely ignored the rest of the city, which is off the tourist route and crumbling fast. Leal, unlike many high officials of the Cuban government, is extremely visible: he has his own television show, and he can sometimes be seen on the streets of Old Havana, surveying his dominion. Early one evening, Eduardo Luis Rodriguez and I ran into him as we were heading toward the Plaza Vieja, the most active restoration site right now in Old Havana. A man of medium height with wavy steel-gray hair, Leal dresses in guayabera shirts. His manner is unfailingly courteous, but it is a courtesy that, like his traditional Cuban dress, is designed to create the illusion of accessibility. His demeanor is formal and cool, and he greets Rodriguez kindly but somewhat warily, with the tone of a person who is not accustomed to participating in conversations he cannot control.

Leal's restorations are stunning to look at, and they are technically superb: a staff of sophisticated, mostly young architects has remade such landmark hotels as the Ambos Mundos and the Santa Isabel with elegance and finesse. They consider their work to be important in holding back the onrush of sprawl development in Havana and in asserting the importance of traditional urbanism. Their goals, in this sense at least, are identical to those of the Miami architects' lobby. It is just that Leal's people draw the line at Old Havana; and the lobby (and Rodriguez) are far more concerned about the rest of the city.

"I am against malls, and we give a lot of value to traditional neighborhoods. What we are doing is insuring that at least in Old Havana the wrong things will not happen," says Patricia Rodriguez, one of the architects in Leal's office. But these restorations, exquisite though many of them are, constitute a kind of Potemkin village: luxury hotels face picturesque squares, while a block or two away are deteriorating houses with entire families living in single rooms, often open to the street. Leal's office operates with so resolutely capitalist an attitude that it has produced an elegant forty-three-page book, much like a corporate annual report, that celebrates the achievements of its restoration projects. When Patricia Rodriguez hands me a copy at the end of our meeting and I express thanks she says that it will be fifteen dollars, please, in American currency. Leal has from time to time asked journalists for thousand-dollar contributions to his restoration funds in exchange for interviews.

"Eusebio Leal is a very compulsive person, and very forceful," Eduardo Luis Rodriguez told me, choosing his words with care."He managed to convince people that the colonial buildings had value and should be restored. The problem was that he forgot about twentieth-century architecture." Colonial architecture is easy to like, not only because it is pretty, charming, and relatively unchallenging but also because it is ideologically safe. Putting money into fixing it up doesn't make the Castro regime nervous, since Old Havana was created neither by the capitalist sugar barons, who made the city's great mansions in the first three decades of this century, nor by the hated Batista regime, which made the city's early-modern buildings in the fifties. Colonial architecture was made by settlers who lived in the nineteenth century -- long enough ago so that to the current regime they are quaint rather than threatening.

IF Eusebio Leal is the New Age Cuban bureaucrat, turning capitalism to the benefit of socialism, and Eduardo Luis Rodriguez the independent scholar, pleading the case for the city as an artifact, Mario Coyula is something in between. An architect, scholar, planner, and urbanist who has been a central figure in the development of Havana since just after the Revolution, he has managed, more successfully than anyone, to operate on all sides of the table. He does not have anything like the power of Eusebio Leal, however, and seems increasingly to function as a philosopher on the city. He has close ties both to the international architectural community and to the Cuban government; he travels often in and out of Cuba discussing the development of Havana at academic conferences. He believes that the dangers of overdevelopment in Havana posed by the architects in Miami are exaggerated. But he nonetheless looks at Havana today with a certain amount of despair, because he feels that the country's economic problems will make it impossible for it to repair its older buildings, or to plan wisely for its future development.

Coyula is best known in Havana as the master of "the model" -- a spectacular, sprawling miniature of the city, a hundred and sixteen metres square, which fills a two-story hall in his organization's Miramar offices. The main purpose of the model is to allow planners to evaluate the effects of new projects on the cityscape, and Coyula points with pride to the fact that a new high-rise hotel proposed for the Malecon, Havana's waterfront boulevard, was rejected after its insertion into the model suggested that it would have a far more deleterious effect on the skyline than the investors behind it had indicated.

Waterfront buildings on the Malecon, where plans for a high-rise hotel were recently proposed.
"The Moment investments come from the outside, they will rip apart the urban fabric," a
Cuban-American architect, who is trying to prevent Havana from becoming a strip-mall, says.

The model is color-coded, with colonial buildings in red, twentieth-century buildings in beige, and brand-new or unbuilt ones in pure white. As soon as you see it you realize that Havana is primarily a twentieth-century city, that most of its growth occurred after the end of the Spanish occupation in 1898. A modernist by training, Coyula is exceptionally proud of the city's heritage of modernist architecture from the fifties.

Coyula is that oddest of creatures -- a Communist elitist. "I remember before the Revolution people tended to show their best facades to the street -- the facades of their buildings as well as of their characters," he says. "I despised that at the time, because I thought it was hypocritical. But at least it provided a friendly streetscape. Now the situation has been reversed, and people are not giving the proper value to good manners at all." Coyula is in a bind. He loves Havana, deeply and passionately ("thanks to my Havana, graceful and crumbling/waiting for this body, already fulfilled" are two lines of a poem he wrote as a dedication for his new book on the city), and yet he is, technically at least, part of a government that seems increasingly willing to allow large corporate enterprises from abroad to dictate the city's future form.

The dilemma for Havana is not just that there seem to be two alternative scenarios for its future -- another south Florida, full of sprawl and high-rises, or more Leal-style restorations of historic buildings creating a kind of cordon sanitaire for the benefit of tourists -- but that, in the end, the two are not really so different. They are both American models, and neither embraces the richness and the scope of the Havana that exists now. The question is whether Havana will be taken over by the world outside the theme-park gates or by the one inside it.

"For thirty-five years we haven't been thinking about money," Mario Coyula said. "But now we are learning very quickly."

[End]