This immense national effort has a
long history, having begun in the nineteenth century with a
series of hard-fought wars during which the attempts of
intelligent and ambitious Cubans to achieve independence
from Spain only ultimately resulted in the island's being
delivered into the hands of the United States of America. The
North American grip was broken by the 1959 Revolution but its
influence is unlikely ever to cease, due to the island's close
geographical proximity to its 'neighbour to the north'. Overseas
admirers of the restoration of Old Havana feel that this is a fact
which the Habaneros would do well to bear in mind, given the
potential for cultural disaster which a new American control over
Cuba would bring.
The organisation responsible for the renaissance of Cuba's capital is the Office of the City Historian. The post of City Historian is a time honored institution in Latin American cities, with some having had a historian since the eighteenth century. Havana remained without a historian until the early twentieth century, having throughout its existence been a city in which the inhabitants lived for the moment, rather than with any particular awareness of or respect for posterity. However, Havana has never been bombed, or developed, and the majority of its historical buildings are constructed of materials so monumental that it takes a great deal of hard work to completely destroy them.
This is not to say, however, that Old Havana's grand palaces, churches and mansions are in a satisfactory state of repair. Although the city has never experienced attack by the forces of man, those of time have wrought havoc with plaster, metal, glass and wood. The massive mahogany and cedar beams used for construction at a time when the island of Cuba was thickly covered with ancient forests of hardwoods have suffered severely from centuries of depredations by energetic termites. It is often the case that only the facades of noble old buildings have survived relatively intact; with collapsing floors throughout their interiors there is little left to be saved internally. In these cases, huge efforts are made to shore up the facades, and indeed the conservation teams of the Office of the City Historian are highly expert at propping up structures, given that there are 900-odd important buildings within the area of what was the walled city of Havana, amongst which well over half urgently require attention.
Havana's first City Historian was appointed in the 1930s. His name was Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring who was a respected historian and writer, and in addition to his efforts to save Old Havana and to document lesser-known details of its past, he wrote regularly for the Cuban press. His weekly column in Social, the magazine published by a group of intellectuals for whom Cuban cultural identity and nationalism was a guiding principle, made wry and penetrating observations on Cuban cultural mores.
Dr Roig's function as City Historian was more defensive than proactive: he spent much of his time lobbying to prevent successive unscrupulous politicians from trying to do away with Old Havana in order to develop the site into a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland. He successfully prevented the destruction of the Church of San Francisco de Paula, but sadly failed to preserve the University of Havana, which was located in the Convent of San Juan de Letrán, occupying a full block behind the Palace of the Captains General (Museum of the City of Havana). Roig was unable to do very much actual restoration due to lack of funds, but when the Revolutionary government took over in 1959 the restoration of Old Havana was immediately given high priority as well as an annual budget. The funding was respectable rather than enormous, but it did enable the restoration of a few of the historical centre's more important buildings.
Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring died in the early sixties and his assistant, Dr Eusebio Leal Spengler, took over the post. Leal's first task was to complete the restoration of the Palace of the Captains General. Without a doubt the grandest, most historically significant and most beautiful of Havana's buildings, the Palace presented a considerable restoration challenge, not least because of the complex archaeological studies that had to take place before work could begin: part of the palace covers the site of the original Main Parish Church. Having completed the building's repair and established it as a highly successful museum (Museo de la Ciudad de La Habana), Leal went on to restore a number of other important edifices including fortresses, churches, early domestic buildings and more grand palaces.
For over two decades the project jogged along satisfactorily, although there was never enough money and progress was not fast. Visitors continued to remark with a mixture of dismay and delight at the plethora of romantically crumbling ruins which constituted the historical centre. However, major change was just around the corner: when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, Cuba's preferential trade deals and economic support disappeared almost overnight and the island was plunged into the so called 'Special Period in a time of peace', a crisis that implied that everyone should be ready to tighten their belts and cultivate a Blitz Spirit. Foodstuffs and services were dramatically reduced, challenging, once more, the spirit of sacrifice that has always been a constant feature of the Cuban people.
Needless to say that under those circumstances, funding for the restoration of Old Havana had drastically to be cut. Leal, however, was not the sort of person to passively stand by whilst the project bit the dust. Having already had the historical centre of Old Havana and its system of fortresses listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, he swung into action and after much discussion and debate, a law was passed which allowed the Office of the City Historian to set up a commercial arm through which it could earn hard currency to be invested in the ongoing restoration of the historical centre.
The progress of the project then became exceedingly exciting. Catapulted overnight from relative obscurity amongst his dusty tomes into the public eye, Leal effectively became over the next few years Chief Executive of Habaguanex, a holding company to which belong all Old Havana's hotels, restaurants and real estate organisations, whilst still fulfilling his responsibilities as Director of the Museum of the City and Historian of the City of Havana. The Office now employs over 7,000 people involved in cultural, restoration, commercial, constructive and management-related activities.
The decade of the nineties saw an absolute transformation of the heart of the historical centre, and major changes around its periphery. From the outset, Leal made it very clear that this was not to be solely a physical restoration, creating a sanitised and prettified Old Havana for tourists to love and leave, robbing the city of its life and turning it into a ghost town at weekends or during the low season. The key phrase used to describe the project was 'an integral restoration', meaning that Old Havana's restoration would constitute a renaissance in every aspect of the life of the city, not just stone, wood and plaster. |
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The revivification of Old Havana's cultural life has been high on the Office of the City Historian's list of priorities from the outset. The historical centre is full of churches, some functioning, others deconsecrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they were put to various other uses, usually destructive to the fabric of the buildings. Three of these have now been restored to act as a trio of important, and complementary, concert venues. |
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The Basílica Menor de San Francisco de Asís, which stands in the Plaza de San Francisco, was originally the church attached to a monastery from which all Franciscan missionary activity on the South American continent was coordinated. In 1762 it was seized by the British invaders for Protestant worship, and after being deconsecrated was used for customs warehousing, as a post office and finally as a cold store. It lost its noble dome and crossing during a hurricane in the mid nineteenth century, and it was a sad structure to which the Office of the City Historian turned its energetically benevolent attentions.
After an exceedingly painstaking restoration during which a massive concrete cold store had to be removed from the nave of the church, the Basilica Menor was reopened as Old Havana's largest concert hall. Its acoustics are superb, it is air conditioned throughout, and now audiences attending the excellent Saturday night concerts of chamber music, choral concerts and piano recitals can ponder the elegant asceticism of the building whilst listening to distinguished classical musicians from Cuba and abroad. The Basilica is closely linked with the Iglesia de San Francisco de Paula, which stands at the end of the Alameda de Paula, overlooking the harbour. The Alameda used to be Havana's principal promenade ground and it is Eusebio Leal's intention to return it to its bygone beauties, removing the unsightly remains of old wharves which lie before it and restoring its decorative wrought iron and classical statuary. The church is the chosen rehearsal space of Ars Longa, the Office of the City Historian's ancient music group, and it is from there that they coordinate Havana's annual Early Music Festival.
To these two concert halls has recently been added the Iglesia de San Felipe Neri, a beautiful seventeenth-century oratory which was converted to banking premises in the 1920s. Architecturally it is a rather curious combination of soaring ecclesiastical spaces with distinctly earthbound bankerly detailing, but it works beautifully as a venue for song recitals and lyric theatre. Its large wooden stage is floated over the original altar area, under which archaeologists discovered the foundation stone of the building together with a handful of silver and gold coins, which are now on display in a glass case to one side of the stage according to an old custom
It is not only music that is being rejuvenated in Old Havana, but dance as well, not the all-pervading salsa from whose strains it is virtually impossible to escape, but exciting modern dance which takes place throughout the streets and squares of the historical centre during the annual City in Movement Festival. This innovatory event, conceived and organised by the Office of the City Historian's Cultural Programming Department, involves dance groups from all over Cuba and the world interacting in a relay of movement which starts in the Plaza de Armas and ripples out in every direction, linked logistically by the built, so facilities must be provided for visitors, but only the kind of visitors who will respect and enjoy the area. All the hotels in the historical centre are housed in old buildings of exceptional historical and architectural interest and they are all charming. Perhaps the most charming of all is the Hotel Santa Isabel, housed in the Palace of the Counts of Santovenia on the Plaza de Armas. It has an incomparable view of the leafy Plaza de Armas and has been chosen by a glittering parade of dignitaries and their entourages, from film stars, socialites and supermodels to illustrious clergymen, important diplomatists and visiting heads of state.
The practical way in which the restoration of Old Havana is now being achieved is a join-the-dots theory whereby small groups of buildings are restored for a carefully considered mixture of end uses. Afterwards, the spaces between these areas are gradually transformed as the renaissance effect radiates outwards. An interesting case in point, currently in progress, is that of the corner of Teniente Rey and Compostela Streets, where the restoration of the exquisite neo-Gothic and neoclassical excesses of the Farmacia La Reunión is providing the focal pointfor a group of buildings including a school (this is already restored and opened), shops (principally the pharmacy, which sells herbs, spices, medicines and all sorts of pharmaceutical supplies and also houses a small museum), a bakery, a church (still open for worship, but in sore need of repair), a small hotel (in the potentially extremely pretty but currently ruined cloisters of the Convent of the Little Sisters of Santa Teresa) and above all, lots of housing, both for those already in need in the area and also the families who will move out of the Convent prior to its conversion to a hotel. All these families will be housed in spacious conversions of the old offices above the pharmacy, and in restored buildings nearby, in addition to an interesting new building project in the area.
In amongst the more earnest social aspects of the restoration project there are delicious doses of frivolity. Perhaps the mos popular of these to open in recent years is the Museo del Chocolate, where a small exhibition of chocolate-making equipment provides an excellent pretext for the sale of sinfully delectable hot and cold chocolate, and truffles made on the premises by graduates of the Cuban School of Master Chocolatiers, using cacao from the mountains of Baracoa.
A great deal has been done in Old Havana but there is still a quite staggering amount left to be tackled and funds are in short supply. However, no-one in their right mind would advocate an indiscriminate opening-up of the area to general and foreign investment. The longer the current investment situation continues, the longer the Cubans will have to consolidate their enviable achievements in Havana's restoration, to strengthen the Habaneros' sense of individuality and to fortify their cultural bastions against the stifling blanket of North American homogeneity which is already flapping threateningly in their direction. As Hugh Thomas quoted on the frontispiece of his monumental Cuba, the Pursuit of Freedom: 'Yet, Freedom! Yet thy banner, torn, but flying/Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.'
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'Stiltwalkers of Old Havana' whose task it is to stride like gaudy beribboned giraffes between the groups to activate each performance, accompanied by a running, shouting crowd of thoroughly overexcited children. Balancing the requirements of visitors and residents is vital to the success of the restoration of Old Havana. It is an appallingly overcrowded area of the city where many people live in very poor conditions, sharing completely inadequate sanitary facilities; housing is thus absolutely first priority with the planners and architects of the Office of the City Historian. However, without the income from tourism very little can be (Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto iv, stanza 98) |
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Although the city has never experienced
attack by the forces of man, those of time
have wrought havoc with plaster, metal, glass
and wood... It is often the case that only the
facades of noble old buildings have survived relatively intact; with collapsing floors
throughout their interiors there is little left to
be saved internally |
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