Cuba: Restoration of the old city.

At the time of the Revolution, only about five hundred of three thousand buildings in Habana Vieja (Old Havana) were considered in good condition. In the 1950s, many of the colonial palaces had been turned into shabby apartment buildings, and little had been done to counteract the effects of torrential rain and salt air. Yet like many cities in Latin America, Havana was on the verge of a building boom. An influential group of Harvard-trained architects led by Jose Luis Sert had submitted a plan for every city "much like that of Le Corbusier for Paris." This would have devestated Habana Vieja, replacing old buildings with glass and steel high-rises, turned narrow cobble-stoned streets into limited access highways, and reconfiguring plazas into parking lots. This urban nightmare also included an artificial islands off the Malecon with casinos, malls and hotels. To a lesser extent, this was the fate of the other Cuban cities like Lima, Caracas and Santo Domingo, which retain little colonial flavour.
Inadvertently, Castro changed all that. The casnios shut down, the swank hotels filled with bearded guerilllas, and the tourists were sacred off. The subsequent elimination of the private sector derailed the ambitious plans and overnight reduced the value of real estate to $4 per square meter. For better of worse, Habana Vieja was preserved.
Architecutural preservation was decidedly not a priority during the early years of the revolution, and Habana Vieja (including the surrounding fortresses) as a World Heritage Site. The current Histroiador, Eusebio Leal, reached out to the public by offering guided walks of the old city on Saturday afternoons. Money from abroad began to trickle in, and efforts were undertaken to spruce up key landmarks such as the Plaza de Armas. "This made for some glaring contrasts, since on had to walk a few blocks to see a building literally crumbling to the ground.
Buildings in Havana are colour-coded according to when they were errected. Anything built before the nineteenth century is brown; between 1900 and 1959, beige; and after the Revolution, salmon coloured.
Many streets were named after their physical characteristics. Empedrado (cobblestone) was the first street to be paved, and Tejadillo (tile) was so named because of the first house to recieve a tiled roof. Lamparilla (Lamp) immortalizes the oil lamp "lit by a pious woman every night on the corner of Habana Street. Aquacate street took its name from a avacado tree that grew in the Convent of Belen.
Other streets were labeled by function rather than form. Picota ( yoke) was the site of the whipping post for condemned criminals. Amargura (bitterness) recalls the grim religious procession of the Franciscan monks that passed each morning durin Lent. Throughout Cuba, there are Amargura streets, where crucifixes were set up to mark the Stations of the Cross. Another popular street is San Pedro, which runs along the waterfront. It was given its name by sailors because of their devotion to St Peter, patron saint of seafarers.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy, in 1991 went into free-fall wth the loss of the huge sugar subsidies that had sustained it. Castro declared the infamous Special Period, and Chinese cicycles replaced gas-guzzling Cadillacs on the Malecon. The future of Cuba would bow be foreign tourism and the U.S dollar became legal tender in 1993.
That year, the Office of the Historiador assumed responsiblility for all tourism-related activinties in Habana Veja and brought in $4million, which was poured into restoration projects extending beyond the face-lift of the Plaza de Armas. In 2001, it earned $70 million and emplyed four thousand people. This funded seventy-six preservation projects, fourteen hotels, seventy-nine other tourist facilities such as restaurants, and even a slick magazine on historical topics called Opus Habana.
But the problem arises when a creaky old building is transofrmed into a tourist-hotel, where do the poor and the dark-skinned residents go? Many are forcibly relocated to Alamar, a souless housing project west of the city.
It is estimated that up to thirty thousand people will be relocated to Habana Vieja alone.
Leal has also been criticized for excessively "prettifying landmarks and creating a colonial Disneyland for tourists." The immacutely white-washed facades, with pastel-coloured eaves and bougainvillea in flowerpots, can be opressively quaint. One of the greatest charms of Habana Vieja is "the eclectic, anarchi vitality of its architecture, with a neoclassical church beside an art noveau mansion."

Leal has been labelled as the architect of "tourism apartheid," since few Cubans can afford one of his chic cafes in Habana CIeja.
Yet little or no restoration has been undertaken outside of Habana Vieja and Centro Habana ( downtown Havana), although there are plans to develop the Maelcon. It is estimated the Havana loses three buildings every da. According to a Cuban government report, 1400 structures must be abandoned each year, and 20 percent of 2.2million Habaneros live in housing considered in "precarious condition."
Despite this, twenty thousan people move to Havana from the provinces each year. The city's infrastructure is equally in need of repair. According to one expert, it would take several billion dollars to upgrade Havan's failing water and sewage services.
"I won't live to see the full restoration of the city," Leal told a reporter from the New York Times, which in November 2005 featured Havana on the front page of its travel section. "So much is left to be done, but this is a start."