Cuba
for sale: ‘Havana is now the big cake – and everyone is trying to
get a slice’
Property
developers are queuing up to pounce as Cuba opens its doors to the
world. Proposals for Havana’s old harbour are described as ‘Las
Vegas meets Miami in the Caribbean’. So can the city cope with the
commercial storm ahead?
Oliver Wainwright in
Havana
Monday 1 February
2016 07.00 GMT
In central Havana’s
Parque Fe del Valle, at the end of a street bustling with the usual
scenes of queues for the bakery and clapped-out 1950s cars weaving
between piles of rubble, is a glimpse of a very different Cuba. Every
bench, wall, dustbin and plant pot in this tree-lined square is
occupied by bodies hunched over laptops and gathered around
smartphones, as people swipe at tablets and gesticulate at their
screens.
Three generations of
one family are huddled around a phone, the children fighting over who
gets to wear the headphones while the granny holds a baby up to the
camera – so that relatives in Miami, who they haven’t seen for
years, can inspect the family’s new arrival. Nearby, two brothers
scroll through Facebook to check the latest enquiries for their
bed-and-breakfast business, their laptop balanced on a makeshift desk
of crates, while a gaggle of teenage girls stream music and practise
dance moves under a tree.
This lively scene,
which looks like an impromptu secondhand technology fair, is the
result of a new phenomenon in Cuba: Wi-Fi hotspots. In a country
where the internet is still forbidden in private homes and an hour
checking emails at an internet cafe can cost nearly a week’s wages,
the arrival of five designated Wi-Fi zones in Havana has been nothing
short of revolutionary.
Walk along La Rampa
by night, the long people-watching road that slopes up from the
seafront into the neighbourhood of Vedado, and you’ll see huddles
of ghostly faces, illuminated only by the glow of screens. These
sprawling open-air internet lounges have also spawned a new informal
economy. Wi-Fi touts wander the streets like drug-pushers, re-selling
the state telecom company’s prepaid $2 scratch-off cards for $3
apiece, muttering “cards, cards?” instead of the usual “hashish?
girls?”. Snack stalls and drinks stands – private enterprises
that would have been forbidden five years ago – have sprung up to
fuel the spontaneous street-corner parties, where people gather
around to watch the latest Hollywood trailers on YouTube.
Havana is now a big
cake – and everyone is trying to get a slice
Miguel Padrón
“We are seeing a
whole new quality of public space,” says Miguel Antonio Padrón
Lotti, a Cuban professor of urban planning, who worked at the
country’s National Physical Planning Institute for 45 years.
“Cubans have always socialised on the streets, but now we can
interact with the wider the world at the same time.”
The wider world is
arriving here in ever bigger droves, and not just through the
internet. On the cobbled streets of Habana Vieja, the beautifully
restored old town, it can now be hard to move for the throngs of
package tour groups. They follow their flag-toting guides between
cafe-lined squares, shuffling from the Museo del Chocolate, past
living statues and outposts of Victorinox and Diesel, to boutique
shops housed in majestic old mansions where handmade watches are on
sale for $12,000.
A street in central
Havana in 2007, before the latest spate of restoration.
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A street in Havana
before the latest spate of restoration. Photograph: Claudia
Daut/Reuters
Not long ago, all
this was crumbling. The improbable transformation is the work of the
Office of the City Historian, a vast state department of architects
and planners headed up by Eusebio Leal Spengler since 1981. Wielding
unheard-of power for an architectural historian, equivalent to that
of a mayor, he has won plaudits from Unesco and heritage bodies
around the world for what he’s achieved here over the last 30
years, against all the odds.
In the early 1990s,
Leal persuaded Fidel Castro to set up a state-owned tourism
enterprise, Habaguanex: a company charged with developing hotels,
restaurants and shops. Crucially, it would plough the profits back
into restoring Havana’s derelict buildings and streets, as well as
seeding social projects and community facilities. It was a canny
model of capitalist tactics deployed for socialist ends, which has
seen Leal’s office channel more than half a billion dollars into
the old town. The company now presides over a growing empire of 20
hotels, 40 restaurants and 50 bars and cafés, as well as dozens of
high-end boutiques.
But outside the
tourist circuit of the four main plazas and the carefully repaved
pedestrian routes that wind between them, two-thirds of the old town
remains in a perilous state. Castro’s revolution was fundamentally
anti-urban, focusing on restructuring the rural economy at the
expense of the colonial capital, and the consequences are all too
visible. Look beyond the newly polished stage-set facades, and you’ll
still find families living several generations to a room in buildings
that threaten to collapse around them at any minute.
Although half of the
profits of Habaguanex are ploughed into social initiatives –
including health clinics, schools, libraries and old people’s
centres – the renovations have come at a price, exaggerating the
divisions between the scrubbed-up and the squalid. Many former
residents of these grand historic buildings have been rehoused far
away from the centre, in the hated suburbs of Alamar and Habana del
Este across the bay to the east. More look set to be displaced as the
pressure to accommodate foreign visitors only continues to rise.
Havana’s harbour
area is the focus for future redevelopment.
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Havana’s harbour
area is the focus for future redevelopment. Photograph: Oliver
Wainwright
One local cafe
owner, who used to live in an historic building in the old town with
20 other families, now has to travel two hours a day to get into
work, since his former home was renovated. But he has mixed feelings
about the consequences. “The tourists might be pushing us further
away,” he says, “but they’re also bringing in money that the
city desperately needs. And our building was about to fall down
anyway.”
As part of the
growing restaurant industry, he benefits from being paid in the
currency that foreigners have to use on the island – the
convertible peso, or CUC – which, pegged to the US dollar, is 25
times more valuable than the local currency, the Cuban peso (CUP). It
is a gulf that has effectively created two classes of citizen in this
supposed land of equals: those with access to hard currency, and
those without. “Life is better if you work for the tourists” is
how one rickshaw driver puts it – as two middle-aged Americans
struggle to get out of his fibreglass cabin, adding a generous tip on
to the already over-priced fare.
Nothing is going to
happen very quickly, for the simple reason that it takes so long to
get anything done
Belmont Freeman
More than 3 million
tourists came to Cuba last year, boosted by a sharp increase in the
number of US visitors, which has surged by almost 40% since Obama
ushered in a thaw in diplomatic relations at the end of 2014.
American citizens are officially still forbidden to travel here for
the sole purpose of tourism, but the sanctioned categories of
travelling to “support the Cuban people” and for
“people-to-people activities” are vague enough to allow tour
operators to thrive. American cruise-ship giant Carnival is already
planning to bring “culturally themed” cruises here from May,
making it the first such cruise company to visit Cuba since the 1960
trade embargo. According to the IMF, an end to the embargo could see
as many as 10 million US tourists a year – a deluge for which the
creaking, crumbling bones of Havana are far from prepared.
“The
infrastructure just isn’t there to cope with such numbers,” says
Belmont Freeman, a Cuban-American architect based in New York, who
has made frequent trips to Havana over the last 15 years. “The city
is woefully underserved for hotels and even if more were built, the
services couldn’t supply them. The mains water system hasn’t been
improved since the 1920s – it still loses around 50% through
leakage.”
Not that this seems
to be standing much in the way of the luxury hotel developers, who
have their sights set on opportunities across the city. On the
eastern side of Parque Central, just visible through a cloud of
construction dust from nearby roadworks, stands the stately frontage
of the Manzana de Gomez building, a classical pile that occupies an
entire city-block, built as Cuba’s first shopping mall in 1910. Now
entirely stripped out, it stands as an eery windowless shell,
awaiting the opulent filling of a five-star Kempinski hotel planned
to open later this year.
A former shipping
warehouse turned into an art and souvenir market.
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A shipping
warehouse turned into an art and souvenir market. Photograph: Oliver
Wainwright
Around the corner,
the Hotel Packard is being similarly spruced up and expanded by
Spanish starchitect Rafael Moneo for Iberostar. Further north, near
the package beach resort of Varadero, British property developer
London & Regional has unveiled plans for The Carbonera Club,a
$500m luxury development of 1,000 Conran-designed residences arranged
around an 18-hole golf course. Taking advantage of a recent
relaxation of regulations, it will allow foreigners to own beachfront
property on the island for the first time. US chains such as Marriott
and Hilton can do nothing but stand drooling from just 100 miles
across the Straits of Florida, waiting for the embargo drop.
One insider
describes some foreign developers’ proposals for the harbour as
'Las Vegas meets Miami in the Caribbean'
“I give it two
years, max,” says Freeman. “It will be US business interests that
finally push congress into lifting the embargo – they’re all
going crazy being shut out of this market.” American architects and
developers are already queuing up to be first in line, ready to
pounce on investment opportunities when the embargo drops. Frank
Gehry sailed into Havana in December, aboard a streamlined yacht he
designed for himself, here to “offer his expertise to Cuba”
according to a government statement.
“You know that
Cuba is at the centre of attention of many people,” Gehry told the
gathered crowd. “And in the immediate future it will attract many
investors – particularly the tourism sector. But I am sure that you
know to be careful with those projects.”
Jorge Pérez, a
Cuban-American condo tycoon based in Miami, paid a visit to Havana
for its art biennale last year. “I wish they would let me be the
developer for all of this,” he told Miami newspaper el Nuevo Herald
on his return. “I think I could change Havana in 10 or 20 years. If
they opened things up and I could build a luxury condominium in
Vedado, I would sell them in two hours here in Miami.”
It is the kind of
prospect that worries Miguel Padrón, who is not sure that Havana is
ready to cope with what developers are preparing to throw at it. “We
will have many divas and divos arriving with their very nice
drawings,” he says. “But as a society, we desperately need to
improve our capacity to debate and discuss these plans. The challenge
is how to capture the potential of the market in the right way, to
learn how to negotiate with foreign investors. Havana is now the big
cake – and everyone is trying to get a slice.”
The elevated
railway line which could become Havana’s High Line.
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This elevated
railway line could become Havana’s High Line. Photograph: Oliver
Wainwright
All eyes are focused
on bay of Havana itself, once the source of the city’s immense
wealth and now the place from which investors are hoping to extract
an even bigger bounty. With the opening of a new $900m port 30 miles
west of Havana at Mariel – built with Brazilian help – the old
harbour now represents the next major development opportunity: a
derelict jumble of warehouses and struggling fragments of industry.
“The harbour is
the embryo of the city,” says José Antonio Choy Lopez, a Cuban
architect who sits on the board of UNIAC, the Union of Cuban Writers
and Artists: a body charged with assessing plans for the bay. As one
of the best natural harbours in the Americas, enhanced by impressive
fortifications in the 16th century, it was where the Spanish galleons
assembled, laden with riches plundered from the New World, before
sailing in protected convoys back to Europe. Huge quantities of gold
and silver, along with Alpaca from the Andes, emeralds from Colombia
and mahogany from Guatemala, were all traded here, bringing profits
that are wrought in Havana’s palatial buildings. “It was a
cultural crossroads, the very reason for the cosmopolitan character
of the city,” says Choy. “And its redevelopment is now the most
important project facing Cuba this century.”
For such an
important project, precious little is actually known about the plans.
Not that the sense of mystery is unusual. In Cuba, things are rarely
announced until they actually happen. “They never publish targets
here,” says one foreign diplomat, “because they usually don’t
meet them.”
The informal
property market, where people advertise their homes on the street.
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An informal street
property market. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
Choy talks of
proposals to turn the harbour into a centre of “culture and
recreation”: the redundant Tallapiedra power station might become
an art gallery, along the lines of London’s Tate Modern, while the
site of the Nico Lopez oil refinery across the bay, where a chimney
still belches thick black smoke 24 hours a day, might be developed
into a new city of science and technology. There is talk of
transforming an elevated railway line into a linear park, like New
York’s High Line, as well as plans for a big new transport hub next
to the old train station.
Sensitively done, it
could have a similar quality to harbour revitalisation projects such
as San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf or Cape Town’s V&A
Waterfront; the elegant steel-framed warehouses repurposed with
minimal intervention. One such shed has already been reborn as a
crafts market, while another recently reopened as a restaurant and
microbrewery.
However, the future
of such enterprises, post-embargo, could be precarious given the
complex history of land ownership here. One US shipping company has
an $850,000 claim on a kilometre stretch of the waterfront, including
the brewery building, which they say was seized from them after the
revolution. The same goes for many such buildings across the city and
beyond, with the value of claims for confiscated US property
totalling almost $8bn, including long-standing claims from the likes
of Exxon, Texaco and Coca-Cola. Despite diplomatic talks,
compensation issues have yet to be resolved.
There is also no
guarantee that the next stages of the harbour redevelopment will be
as low-key as the warehouse renovations completed so far. Havana may
well find itself catapulted from having too little money to having
too much, too fast, with all the usual consequences. One insider
describes some foreign developers’ proposals for the harbour as
looking like “Las Vegas meets Miami in the Caribbean”.
Renovations in
Havana’s Old Town.
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Yet another
renovation in Havana’s Old Town. Photograph: Reuters
Freeman is more
optimistic. Havana will be saved from the worst effects of commercial
speculation, he thinks, by a combination of glacial Cuban bureaucracy
and happy accident. “Nothing is going to happen very quickly, for
the simple reason that it takes so long to get anything done,” he
says. “Other countries have been trying to develop in Cuba for
decades, and they’ve been stymied all along by the country’s
sclerotic controls over every aspect of economic activity.” The
harbour will also be protected from the “Venice syndrome” of vast
cruise-ships dwarfing the city with their stacked cliff-faces of
cabins, he says, because the boats simply won’t be able to get in.
A road tunnel, laid across the bottom of the bay in a big concrete
tube in the 1950s, makes it too shallow for them to enter.
At the other end of
the scale from the grand waterfront plans, there are signs across the
city of a new kind of real-estate development. Scaffolding has long
shrouded much of Havana, but it no longer just signals the work of
the City Historian. Recent changes to property laws, which have
allowed Cubans to buy and sell their own homes for the first time in
years, paired with a relaxation of US rules on how much money
Cuban-Americans can send to their family back home, have spawned a
micro-real estate industry of independent renovation. Families with
access to cash from overseas are doing up crumbling buildings
themselves and either letting them out as holiday rentals (possible
through Airbnb since last year) or selling them on – minting a
wealthy new class in the process.
It is a change in
legislation that foreign companies have been quick to pounce on. Choy
is currently putting the finishing touches to the renovation of a
building on the waterfront that his family owns, converting it into
holiday flats using funds from Cuba Real Tours – one of a growing
number of companies developing boutique holiday lets. “We have
invested a huge amount in this project,” says company director
Patrick Fries, “but it’s incredibly risky as we don’t actually
own the building.”
They have also
encountered the chief difficulty of anyone trying to do construction
work in Cuba: the dearth of materials. Glass still isn’t produced
on the island, so each window has to be imported – and the customs
limit of four windows per person, or two doors, mean these
small-scale refurbishments often entail getting friends and family to
help out.
But such obstacles
certainly haven’t limited the aspirations of would-be developers,
or the level of quality that they can achieve with a bit of Cuban
resourcefulness. Freeman describes an “eye-popping” day he spent
with one of Havana’s fledgling estate agents, touring spectacular
1950s houses that had been fixed up extraordinarily lavishly and are
now being offered for up to $800,000.
Elsewhere there are
penthouses listed for more than $2m, although no one knows how much
anything is really worth: there are no benchmarks and no mortgage
industry. Instead, people gather at the end of Paseo del Prado,
standing with handwritten signs around their necks, displaying faded
photos of apartments for sale, and browsing listings written in
dog-eared exercise books. It is one of the many strange scenes in
Havana of micro-capitalism at work – which clearly won’t be micro
for much longer.
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