14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 24 October 2024 – Once upon a time there was a place that was pure noise. Legend has it that in Old Havana’s Plaza de Armas “you had to ask one foot’s permission to place the opposite foot down”. Luis Mario, who worked in the nearby restaurant La Mina when it was “overrun with business and the employees left every night with a wad of banknotes”, can’t believe what he sees now. Damp, blackened through lack of cleaning and empty of visitors, the square, which is also home to the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, the Palacio del Segundo Cabo, the Santa Isabel Hotel and the Museo Nacional de Historial Natural, looked like a desert this Wednesday.
Anyone familiar with the square since the 1990’s used to call this place – which once was brimming with sales activity – “books square”. While it’s true that there was an abundance of sleep-inducing editions of Che’s ’Bolivian Diary’ and Fidel Castro’s almost dissenting ’History Will Absolve Me’, in this same space you could also find – if you knew how to ask and could make it clear that you weren’t a State Security agent – a rare print copy of the demonised ’Out of the Game’ by Heberto Padilla, or that agonised mea culpa which Eliseo Alberto Diego titled ’Report Against Myself’.
You just needed to know where to look. Chroniclers say that no one left the square without what they were looking for. If it was love, there was always a wide choice to hand: a girl, a girl and a boy, a girl and a girl or a boy and a boy. Tourists were dazzled and surrendered themselves to this place. They gave in, loosened their wallet and put reason to sleep. More than a few would wake the next day without wallet, documents or even shoes. But now all of that sounds almost like just a past and happy piece of history. Where there was life, only dampness and emptiness remain.
Contributing to the square’s racy image was the proximity of El Templete – a foundational site of the city – from which name derived a joke, given the colloquial use of the verb “templar” as synonymous with having sex. What serious city could have as the epicentre of its birth a synonym for a whorehouse? Only Havana, before they turned it into a militarized centre that disowned its nights of revelry, partying and carnival. From those enforced chastity belts that were imposed by the Cuban regime, this current sense of desolation has arrived.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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