When the sun comes out and the shadows that inhabit the place retreat, what you see is a square fallen into disgrace.
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 3 August 32024 — There is a map for any Havana you want to find. If you try to avoid danger, unsafe areas and having your throat cut, there is one street, but if the goal is to take a chance, experience risk and furtive relationships in the dark, then another map will have to be consulted. Parc de la Fraternidad [Brotherhood Park} has every map, for both the spineless and the daring. You can find an illuminated corner to take a collective taxi or the abysses of a city where the Police turn a blind eye when they want.
As soon as you cross Reina Street, you can tell you’re entering a territory with other rules. The lamps that once illuminated the garden and pedestrian crossings on the side of the Havana Capitol barely provide light. “This gets as dark as a wolf’s mouth,” says an old man who sleeps in the portals of the Palacio de Computación, a property that once housed a large market of the Sears chain and that now languishes from the lack of young people who visit it since they can now browse the web on their cell phones.
The man, who was left homeless more than a decade ago, says that he used to spend the early mornings on a bench in Parc de la Fraternidad but now “the one that’s not broken is used for other things when night falls.” The function of the pieces of wood that have not yet been torn from the supports of the benches can be as wide as imagination allows. The same goes for any type of currency or substance that can be exchanged for sexual favors. “After a certain time you shouldn’t come here,” he warns.
When the sun rises and the shadows that inhabit the park withdraw, what you see is a plaza fallen into disgrace, with beautiful trees, but with almost no places to sit and an increasingly neglected patch of grass. The line at a nearby bus stop winds between the roots of the laurels, but people must appeal to the sidewalk to sit down because “here out of every three benches, two are broken,” says an old woman who waits for the bus that goes to Marianao.
The reasons for so much deterioration are as varied as the possible maps of the Cuban capital. To the lack of investment that has affected the entire area, especially after the death of the city historian Eusebio Leal, is added an economic crisis that makes vandalism and theft of any public element a way to shore up survival. Many of those who spend the night or make a living in the park are not interested in intruders being comfortable enough to stay; they don’t want anyone to see what goes on there.
At the end of the 18th century the area became a military exercise field, and now other battles are being fought on its premises. Prostitution, the stealthy search for a partner for one night, the bodies that are sold, even under the age of 16, which in Cuba is the age of majority, and the exchange of foreign currency and the sale of drugs have changed the raison d’être of a park that was once short of housing a zoological garden.
Its several plots of different sizes and its ornamental elements are currently the scene of a country in crisis. In the center of the ensemble, there is a ceiba, the “Tree of American Brotherhood” that was fertilized with land from each of the republics that participated in 1928 in the VI Pan American Conference. Popular legends have attributed that mixture to a ritual that condemns the entire Island to eternal unhappiness until what was supposedly buried in the roots of the tree is extracted.
However, there has been no need for spells or evil enchantments for the environment of the stately ceiba to be in a worse state every day. The spell has been of a different type and looks more like carelessness and neglect than any centenary spell.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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