The house has become a greyish shell that the municipal museum, which is in charge of the building, watches over with suspicion.
14ymedio, José Lassa, Havana, 2 February 2025 — The state of the house where Bola de Nieve, author of the most melancholic lyrics in Cuban music, was born provides enough to write a heartbreaking bolero. Located on the corner of Máximo Gómez and Versalles streets, in Guanabacoa, Havana, the house has become a grayish shell that the municipal museum, in charge of the property, watches over with suspicion.
What is left standing are walls that mark the perimeter of the house and several columns that support the structure of the porch, topped with floral ornaments that simulate the frames remaining in the windows. The roof has long since collapsed. From the remains of the building, one can guess the dimensions of a republican manor house that once occupied the entire street corner and now remains “ boarded up” to prevent unwanted tenants from sneaking in.
Like the bolero by the Cuban artist Es tan difícil (It’s so difficult), it has become an impossible mission for the Guanabacoa museum to take care of the house and rescue it “There was a project to restore it, but it never came to fruition. In the end, they boarded it up because people were constantly coming in to sleep or live there, and that was the solution: to seal it,” a museum worker told 14ymedio.
In 2011, on the 100th anniversary of Bola’s birth, the municipal museum put up a plaque commemorating the musician’s birthday, but soon after removed it.
As explained, the house belonged to Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernandez’s family – who gave himself the ironic artistic name of Bola de Nieve (Snowball) – but the musician moved his relatives to another house in the same municipality, located on the corner of Nazareno and Maceo streets. “His brother’s descendants did not keep the house, so they exchanged it. It was for a time a”cuartería”(similar to a tenement house) where several families lived,” the employee explains.
While people were living in the house, the museum could not restore it, but nor it did not allow the tenants to make major changes, since the building is considered a heritage site. When it was finally vacant, another place having been given to those who lived there, the museum could “get its hands on it” without obstacles. Then, there were no more resources or intentions to repair the house.
“There has been talk of restoration projects and some have even been submitted, but nothing is being done. There are many heritage sites in Guanabacoa with restoration projects submitted, but the problem is that there is no money,” the worker says. When the Guanabacoa museum itself “needs repairing,” the future of the manor house is clear: “it is going to be lost.”
Translated by LAR
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