Not even the ice cream shop employees know when it will reopen its doors.
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodríguez, Havana, 26 December 2024 — Nobody knows when Coppelia will reopen. Cuba’s most famous ice cream parlor, located on the emblematic corner of 23rd and L, in El Vedado, has been closed for months. “The cathedral of ice cream is dead,” was the verdict of a Havana resident when, on Thursday morning, she saw only two employees reluctantly selling cookies.
To 14ymedio’s questions, the workers answered, holding their treats and seated at one of the many entrances of the centrally located establishment: “There is no ice cream and we don’t know when there will be any.”
As the passers-by who walk around the ice cream parlor remind themselves, “Nothing has been sold there since Hurricane Rafael struck,” last November 6.
A month later, at the beginning of December, the Coppelia ice cream factory on Rancho Boyeros Avenue gave the final blow to production after running out of ammonia to refrigerate the product.
The chains that, placed from one fence to another at the entrance, have been blocking the entrance to Coppelia for weeks, are not the only ones that draw the attention of Havana residents. “They also removed the huge awnings where the tables were placed for customers to sit and there are many fallen trees.” Even the craftsmen who used to sell their items in front of the establishment have disappeared. “They dismantled all that and we don’t know if the vendors will return, ” another Havana woman admits.
Inside the utopian revolutionary ice cream parlor – created with the idea of giving Cubans a taste of the most exclusive flavors – only a few foreigners, loaded with cameras and lenses, walk around and take pictures after getting the workers’ approval. The crooked sign at the entrance, evoking the legs of a ballerina, and the fallen poles in its gardens, seem to announce the inevitable: after several crises and temporary closures in recent years, Coppelia has finally hit rock bottom.
Translated by LAR
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