“Miscellaneous items,” promises a mini-shop embedded in the remains of a building
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 15 November 2025 — From the sidewalk of Belascoaín Street, where the rumble of classic cars mingles with the smell of fried food and musty dampness, a small rectangle cut into a corroded wall catches the eye of anyone passing by. It is an irregular opening, as if forcibly torn out, embedded in the remains of a building that lost its splendor decades ago and, as of few years ago, also lost its upper floors. All that remains of that collapse are bare columns, layers of paint flaking away, and a faded mural where someone tried to paint a sun, perhaps to ward off so much ruin. But amidst the chaos, two words painted with a thick, clumsy brush offer an unlikely promise: “Miscellaneous Items.”
The phrase, written amidst rust and desolation, carries the touch of an inside joke between the city and its inhabitants. “Several,” yes: several collapses, several rainstorms without shelter, several decades of architectural neglect. But also “several” as an act of faith, as a declaration that, despite everything, someone resists the continued encroachment of emptiness. There, where there should be silence and dust, a small makeshift shop flourishes, clinging to life like the plants that sprout in the cracks of the balconies.
Behind the peeling paint, a table laden with merchandise creates an unusual collage of times and origins.
Peering into the alcove is like discovering another world. Behind the peeling paint, a table laden with merchandise creates an unusual collage of times and origins. In one corner rest packages of baby wipes—imported, smelling of another country—next to gleaming aluminum basins, brand new, as if they’d just rolled off the assembly line in some workshop in the Cerro neighborhood. A few steps further in, behind a makeshift counter made out of planks, the vendor arranges jars, funnels, ladles, and an assortment of metal parts that could belong to anything from a kitchen to a 1970s Russian motorcycle.
Everything is arranged with a mixture of care and urgency, as if each object were a soldier ready for the daily battle against scarcity. A radio plays softly,
almost timidly, while a household fan stirs hot air that barely manages to dispel the smell of garbage wafting from the mountain of trash growing on the corner. Nothing here is comfortable, spacious, or new. But the whole thing works, pulsates, breathes. It is a fragile little venduta [shop] built on the skeleton of what was once a building and what could one day, in the distant future, be an empty lot.
The contrast is brutal and commonplace: disaster and entrepreneurship, collapse and the will to prosper coexist in a space barely three meters wide. This coexistence, so quintessentially Cuban, transforms Belascoaín’s makeshift stall into a small symbol of the entire city: what is about to fall and what insists on rising again. Between ruin and ingenuity, between precariousness and inventiveness, beats the same obstinacy that drives so many: to sell something, to survive, to not let life completely crumble.
At midday, a customer stops to look. He is not looking for anything specific; in Havana, nobody’s looking for anything particular, you look for whatever comes along.
At midday, a customer stops to look. He is not looking for anything specific; in Havana, nobody looks for anything particular, you look for whatever comes along. And in the small window opened among the rubble, something always appears: a screw, a sponge, a packet of detergent, a tired greeting from the vendor. Assorted products, just as the sign promises. Assorted and vital. Assorted and, above all, attainable.
Because here, in this fragment of ruin turned shop, the city reminds us that it is still capable of creating a tiny paradise where before there was only dust. And that this stubbornness, this will to survive among ruins, Havana’s strongest pulse remains.
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