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3.NOCTURNES (HAVANA BY NIGHT)

By day the city’s walls become the very flesh of habaneras and habaneros. Past midnight, the flesh becomes palpable shadow. Follow me now through Centro Habana, along Belascoaín to Cuatro Caminos, and from there, along Calzada del Cerro and Monte towards the Belle Epoque city center around the Capitolio. The sidewalks look mostly deserted, with a game of dominos in progress here and there. Some furtive passersby on foot or on a squeaky bicycle are carrying modest bundles of contraband.

The dilapidated buildings with their columns and balconies, which by day still display traces of their former elegance, now look more menacing. They transform into a city besieged and half-bombarded, survivors scrambling through secret passages. The buildings in this neighborhood, like in many others, have turned organic. The result of neglect and improvisation, their stately architecture has gradually melted into a maze of mysteriously connected hideouts. Beneath the high ceilings of the former palaces, many rooms have been horizontally subdivided to create extra spaces, lofts known as barbacoas often accessible only through gymnastic contortions. The narrow shelters many habaneros in poor neighborhoods call home are reflected in the name of the fashionable restaurant La Guarida in Calle Concordia in Centro Habana. The name, taken from the movie Fresa y chocolate (1994), means something like “the foxhole.”

Reality check: Centro Habana from Calle San Lázaro rooftop

Another Cuban movie, Juan de los Muertos (2012), poked grotesque fun at the psychological consequences of tired revolutions by turning the entire population of Havana into zombies. There was no need to build sets: the city provided the perfect environment for the undead to roam, and for survivors to seek refuge from mutants in their foxholes.

Along Calzada del Cerro, under a full moon, deep shadows carve out contrasts of dramatic detail against fantastic skies, with here and there an incongruous royal palm tree emerging out of a hidden garden, towering over rooftops crisscrossed with generations of improvised plumbing and wiring. These snakelike skeins look just as jungle-like as the roots that hug and penetrate walls and columns in acts of slow motion copulation with the mansions of the “leafy suburbs.”

The mysteries deepen in the narrower streets. A lone smoker sitting on his doorstep converses with street cats and dogs, thriving in a miasma of noxious gasoline, burned and spat out as hallucinogenic fumes by 1950s Chevrolets that are packed at night with chulos and chulas, some of them proudly proclaiming by way of bumper stickers: Soy el 13 de más 12, in the code of the bolita, or street lottery, I’m the pimp with the most whores.

Abandoned nineteenth-century trains slowly rust away in the Cristina station at Cuatro Caminos – industrial dinosaurs without a museum. One wonders when those ghost trains last entered the station, what voyages ended here. The older barrios south of the Avenida del Puerto lie beneath the grandiose Mad Max architecture of the ancient Tallapiedra power station. Here, life becomes teeming again, with animated domino games in progress, and quick eyes on the lookout for intruders.

During the hot summer nights, life increasingly spills out onto the streets. Kids run around sidewalk craters displaying sewer systems gone geological with age. Among their elders, sudden, vicious quarrels erupt about sex or territoriality, fueled by too much rum or other less benign substances.

In these parts of Habana Vieja, a world removed from the tourist streets, here and there semi-collapsed buildings have become half-open spaces and floating floors become grottoes, some of them still inhabited. On the ground floors, deep corridors leading to successive mysterious patios have likewise become objects of speleology rather than of architecture. These barrios of Habana Vieja slowly turning organic, resembling a Piranesi engraving, may be fascinating to the poetic imagination, but what effect do they have on their inhabitants? It’s almost a Life After People setting. And then all of a sudden, an angel appears: a girl with the incredible, sometimes almost painful beauty of all the Cuban races combined, happy in her minimal body armor, smiling at life such as it is and will be.

Legend has it that in his younger years, Fidel roamed the streets at night to stay in touch with el pueblo. All such legends go back to the Thousand-and-One-Nights example of the khalif Haroun-al-Rashid anonymously exploring the alleys of Baghdad. As a child I heard the same legends about the emperor Charles V in Flanders. It’s true that Fidel was genuinely interested in the details of peoples’ lives, sometimes to the point of micro-management, but of course he could never disguise himself, even under the cover of darkness and extremely poor street lighting.

But supposing the stories are true, what would the Man have had to say to the people here? Maybe the extreme neglect came from only looking at a bright future and never at the dark past. These neighborhoods were of colonial origin and thus tainted with the original sins of the ages without the blessings of Marxism. Even the grand monuments on the Plaza de Armas and the Plaza Vieja, the two main squares of the old city, only got official attention once tourism became the new national industry in the 1990s. In the intervening forty years after the Revolution they were treated with contempt for reflecting the wrong history. On the bronze doors of the Capitolio, the face of former president Machado has been chiseled away. Machado was a corrupt politician of the 1920s and ’30s. He got the treatment Egyptian pharaohs sometimes inflicted on their predecessors by being erased.

Maybe the Revolution would have preferred to also obliterate the old popular barrios. Luckily, no Cuban Robert Moses ever had the clout or the budget to sanitize the city, as happened to large parts of New York. Marxist theorists often abandoned such neighborhoods to what, in their jargon, was the lumpen proletariat. It has to be said, in fairness, that such terms were never used in Havana, and that the revolution’s declared intention was always to be inclusive and to leave no one behind. But febrile, teeming life prevails, long after the dogmas and the ideals of orthodox Marxism have disappeared.

Havana with makeup: the beautiful panorama

Havana is such an organic metropolis, that I know of no city with a richer and more fascinating variety of urban textures, spontaneous recycling of spaces and materials, or more lively interactions between flesh and stone. This covers the entire spectrum from the graceful to the desperate, from the super-kitsch to the intuitive or the resolutely post-modernist, with a good measure of bad taste thrown in by sudden influxes of money, ominously spelling future architectural horrors when real estate speculation starts running wild. Havana may go the way of some parts of Manhattan, where buildings born of the oversized egos of fashionable architects regularly kill the souls of entire neighborhoods.

I may live to regret the disappearance of Havana’s sexy ruins. But that, admittedly, is backward thinking.