14ymedio, Julio César Contreras, Cienfuegos, 10 August 10, 2024 — Each city on the Island with a certain economic accommodation had a Ten Cent store during Cuba’s Republican years. Built many times to order, designed by foreign architects and managed by American chains, those retail stores used to be the center of boulevards and shopping avenues. What has become of them after 1959 would horrify their former owners.
The Ten Cent of Cienfuegos is no exception. Two floors in an eclectic style and with monochrome stained glass windows, the old shop, located on the city’s boulevard – formerly San Fernando Street – is now a danger for pedestrians who pass by. The store, which has gone through several names, from Variedade Cienfuegos to the current Variedades Cimex, has been surrounded for months by a metal fence that prevents people from approaching the building, which is in danger of collapse.
Built in 1912, the former Ten Cent was owned by the American company F. W. Woolworth Company, dedicated to the sale of retail items. Since its nationalization after the coming to power of Fidel Castro, the centenary building has undergone very little, if any, maintenance. When the facade began to lose pieces and the humidity was already eating away the walls, Cimex tried to carry out a repair in 2017, with a view to the city’s bicentennial, and invested two million pesos.
The old Ten Cent was owned by the American F.W. Woolworth Company, dedicated to the sale of retail items at a low price
“That great restoration they promised came to nothing. The little they did was of poor quality, either because the resources were stolen, or because the materials were not good enough, or both. Everything is very beautiful in theory, but when they put it into practice, they ruin it,” complains Ramón, a resident of the area who remembers the years when his father, a textile worker, bought him candy for 20 centavos at the store.
Ramón recalls that around 2000, the building devised by the Italian architect Alfredo Fontana Giugni was the victim of another “restoration.” “They spent a long time working in the Ten Cent, and in the end they were only able to restore a part of the ground floor,” he says. When walking on the boulevard, many pedestrians move away from the ruinous structure. Although the facade seems firm, the windows reveal holes in the ceilings and some destroyed areas. The ornaments or a piece of wall that fell have brought more than one scare to the Cienfuegueros. “They waited too long to pay attention to it and now, if there’s not a lot of money, there’s no remedy. I hope they don’t lose it completely, like so many other buildings of that period,” Ramón says, wistfully.
What has become of the Ten Cent stores after 1959 would horrify their former owners
Nor does he expect a future repair to bring the building back to its old glory. “If they were to restore it, everyone knows that they won’t have access to most of the products, because of how expensive everything is. Then we’ll start calling it the ’Ten Dollar,’” he mocks.
At 78 years old, Ramón is able to remember the majesty of the republican buildings that adorned the city in his adolescence. “The most elegant mansions, the shops with the best style, all were capitalistic,” he says. The Revolution soon got rid of the “smell of Yankees,” of “capitalism. Now there are only mansions converted into leaders’ homes, convents transformed into schools and some fragments of that time that people don’t even recognize,” he says. The Ten Cent, at least the ones that are still standing and have not become MSMEs, are the last to survive that “dispossession.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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