The Opacity of Cuba’s La Habana Vieja 

On a recent trip to Havana, two fellow visitors reminded me what it feels like to encounter the Cuban city for the first time and to become enamored with its paradoxes. The first, a young Kansan woman in my Airbnb, learning that I study Cuban architecture and urbanism, expressed a familiar curiosity about the dramatic contrast between austere 19th-century mansions, colonial palaces and the surrounding blocks of ruinous buildings. The second, a Berliner, shared ceviche with me on a restaurant balcony overlooking a street bustling with tourists and art vendors. He pointed out with a laugh that our utensils came from Air France first class.  

These two saw a city full of adventure and charm, a patchwork city where friendly locals shepherd you past grifters and barkers, take you to the best cheap restaurants, and unveil the city’s underground bars and pop-up venues. Both expressed surprise at Cubans’ warmth and eagerness to show off the city’s many pleasures, and at the easy-going atmosphere of a country known for its isolation and political repression.  

Like them, I have benefited from Cuban guides whose knowledge of the city reveals the treasures behind its obvious deterioration. Over several trips since 2016, I have seen Havana’s beauty through the eyes of young architects whose projects embrace austerity and the possibilities of historic renovations, energetic professionals who know how to navigate the complex rules of Cuban society, and idealistic recent graduates who bring me to hidden spaces and magical vistas.  

From the start, their warnings have also tempered my wonder. They remind me of the difficulties of growing up and living in the conditions of enforced revolution and point out the ways in which history and reality have been co-opted for political purposes. This has not precluded my fascination with Cuban architecture and its preservation, nor kept me from appreciating the skill and ingenuity of Cuban design professionals. It does, however, change what I see when I cross jarring thresholds between pristine streets and inhabited ruins, when I encounter artifacts of Cuba’s underground market, or even when a friendly Cuban changes the rules of engagement and opens the city to me. Through those windows into Havana, I see opacity. Habaneros struggle to define their own history and reality. Here, opacity emerges in response to social conflict and urban decay. 

Most people who visit Havana for the first time gravitate to the Spanish colonial neighborhood of La Habana Vieja, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The neighborhood was established in the early 16th century between a deep, defensible bay and the ocean. Red barrel-tiled roofs over stone, wood and concrete walls shade a maze of narrow, irregular streets. The primarily residential neighborhood of roughly 60,000 people clusters commercial, governmental and tourism facilities in its northern half. In this tourist zone, one encounters a vibrant historicism of lush gardens, ornate glass and woodwork, and pastel-painted facades above stone- or wood-cobbled streets. Crews of street cleaners constantly groom the cobblestones. Cubans and tourists mingle freely.  

As the location of my research, I have most often stayed in this area when I visit Cuba. The buildings’ clean facades and quiet streets contrast with the vivacity and rowdiness of the bustling colonial port city they evoke. Critics of Havana’s historic preservation district have accused it of being, like other touristic Spanish-American colonial cities, a living museum—which is to say, a dead neighborhood.  

These critiques are aimed primarily at the tourist plazas and corridors, which follow pre-revolutionary urban economic patterns. Areas with a high concentration of opulent mercantile, governmental and major religious buildings fall more easily into the mold of historical tourism than comparatively modest residential areas to the south. La Habana Vieja’s 1982 UNESCO designation reinforced these patterns of urban valuation and significance. Later, the Office of the City Historian of Havana, the body managing the restoration, inscribed these patterns in the city’s Master Plans.  

Cuba’s decision to develop its tourism capacity beginning in the 1990s allowed the Office to access foreign investments and business partnerships so that, following extensive renovations, the city’s oldest area has become one of its most modern. Though the Office has designated a percentage of tourism income to subsidize residential renovations throughout the neighborhood in collaboration with the community, these have not kept up with the pace of deterioration. At the same time, tourism and the relative value of foreign currency have exacerbated existing social and economic inequalities in the city. The tourist zone, intended as a lively historical immersion, actively resists the porosity of its own boundaries: police patrol the sidewalks, and foreign credit cards are required to enter some hotels.  

The proximity between restoration and deterioration that attracted me and my fellow visitors to the city’s mystery also effectively disrupts La Habana Vieja’s museumification. A few minutes of wandering will inevitably expose the casual, distracted visitor to un-museumlike streetscapes. Just beyond the lighted boundaries of plazas ringed by breezy colonnades and two-story mansions, the neighborhood fades into gray, dusty streets where missing doors offer glimpses into dark tarpaulined courtyards or pocked and crumbling staircases. Here, balconies sag precariously overhead while spalling layers of stucco and concrete uncover rusting rebar and cracked stone blocks. Empty buildings hide behind two- or three-story facades punctured by tenacious vines and propped up with wooden scaffolding. These areas have been pummeled by storms and floods, stressed by overcrowding, and worn down by lack of maintenance. Despite decades of investment in their rehabilitation, their baseline construction, quality of renovations, and insufficient upkeep have eroded any apparent differences from parts of the city without historic preservation funds.  

Here, the rhythms of everyday life spill from small, hot interior spaces, through open doors and windows, onto the narrow sidewalks and streets. People pushing carts of fruit or bread rolls, churros or empanadas, call out their wares and make exchanges via buckets lowered on ropes from balconies. Others chat through open windows and ground-level doors, passing time or conducting errands, trading money or information through ordinary-looking living rooms. Professionals walk to or from work in white button-down shirts and dark skirts or pants. Bike taxis, empty or with a few Cuban passengers, pedal from the cruise ship port to the main plazas or the Malecón. Pairs of students in school uniforms laugh and joke. In the evenings, children kick balls in the street. Groups of older adults sit outside on folding chairs and play dominoes. Couples dressed up to go out hold hands and lean toward each other. Here, one sees the daily work of Havana, the Havana of every type of pedestrian, and the communal Havana with its dense social network. 

Martiniquan theorist Édouard Glissant calls for “the right to opacity,” the right of places like Havana to resist the expectations of external gazes, the right to difference, and the right to deny the “transparency” often demanded by outsiders (Poetics of Relation 1990, 11). Havana is an opaque city. Like the paint on a historical building concealing its provenance and condition, Havana’s superficial realities obscure layers of official and vernacular obfuscation, and of contrasting historical narratives with racist and classist subtexts. These deep conflicts inevitably disturb the veneer presented to visitors. Habaneros reacting to the pressures of economic hardship, social conflict, and the draw of foreign cash form a constant flow of unsanctioned interactions between tourists and Cubans. Employees standing outside restaurants with oversized menus make passes at foreign women. Museum docents listlessly watch confused visitors from stools by the door. On every corner, Cubans, mostly men, look out for tourists to approach with a smile and entice with competitive dollar-to-peso rates, with taxi rides or with Cubano cigars. They offer to lead the way to the best bar, restaurant or cafe in La Habana Vieja, where they know the owner. From the worn stone steps of churches and the perimeter walls of 16th-century fortresses, older men or young mothers with their children plead for money with stories of illness and poverty. They take out a nearly empty ration card and point to their own emaciated arms.  

These things disconcert tourists and break the illusions of tropical festivity and historical curiosity. With these actions, Cubans remind visitors of the urgent struggle, or lucha, that orchestrates the lives of most Cubans—not the lucha for the nation’s soul which animates revolutionary rhetoric, but the struggle for daily survival. Glissant’s “right to opacity” describes a community that refuses to simplify itself for the convenience of others, but in Havana, opacity has become a tactic of la lucha that goes beyond rights.  

Watching a small segment grow and prosper while the rest inevitably declines, residents reclaim the city with opaque urban activities: actions that disquiet or disturb tourists, spaces of illicit economies and markets, the cannibalistic theft of materials from one building to expand or repair another, and myriad other clandestine operations invisible to outsiders. It would be incorrect to call these actions rights, in the sense of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” which anticipated the 1968 Paris student movements and public demonstrations. Lefebvre proposed that every active member of an urban community, broadly defined, has a right to shape that city and to defend and exercise political agency through it. Habaneros’ evident desire to exercise this right is foreclosed by the impossibility of political representation. Likewise, deliberate opacity cannot entirely explain the peculiar contrasts one encounters in the Cuban capital. 

When the woman from Kansas asked me about the neighborhood’s architectural discrepancies, I described the Office of the City Historian’s economic and social strategy, the historic divisions worsened by time and weather, and the early successes and gradual weakening of the preservation scheme. I told her about the prevalence of building collapses, which have only increased since the preservation project began, and which are often blamed on rural migrants overtaxing old structures with unsanctioned additions. I told her how the pandemic set off a deep economic crisis in Cuba, causing mass depopulation, destabilizing the city’s social and economic balance. I told her that foreigners often romanticize Havana for its ruins, that not long before I first visited in 2016 this decay had been the backdrop for an international art biennale, and that these aesthetics downplay the seriousness of Havana’s condition. I told her that the beggars who hover in plazas with hungry eyes, the Cubans who sleep in colonnades of shuttered colonial buildings and those sifting for food at every dumpster, would have been unthinkable in Havana not long ago. Their presence betrays the failure of the Cuban dream. I wanted to justify why I cannot share her enchantment. Where she finds transparency, I only see the opacity of a long history of contested claims to the city, an opacity both deliberate and without choice, born of deep social mistrust and instability, an opacity more obvious with every visit.