HAVANA’S ROOFTOPS
An oasis in crowded city
You can’t see the secret world of Havana’s rooftops from the street. But get high enough and look out across the skyline and it’s there, a whole other city in the air.
It’s a hidden village of makeshift apartments, chicken coops and tiny vegetable gardens, where boys in flip-flops fly homemade kites and shirtless men play dominoes in the sea breeze, with drying laundry flapping around them.
Street-level Havana can be noisy and smelly, but rooftop Havana is bathed in sunlight and flushed clean by the ocean air. It’s beyond the reach of prying eyes, a place for romantic trysts or some muchneeded solitude.
“Cubans are nosy, man,” said Yordan Alonso, 25, father of three, a part-time barber, part-time bicycle taxi driver and lifelong roof-dweller four stories above San Ignacio street in Old Havana. “Up here, nobody bothers you,” he said.
Alonso’s building is a half-block from the city’s Plaza Vieja (Old Plaza), at the unmarked border between cheerful, tourist Havana and crowded, crumbling Havana, into which visitors rarely stray. This part of the city waits more impatiently than any, maybe, for the day the U.S. tourists and investors come rushing back, to catch it before it falls down. Never has that day seemed closer for Cubans such as Alonso, with the United States and Cuba mending relations.
Built from concrete blocks set on the roof of a ruined colonial-era building, his tiny apartment looks out over the Old Havana skyline to the deep-blue Straits of Florida.
The population has surged to 2.1 million since Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution, but the housing supply has not kept pace. The Communist government consistently falls short of construction goals, and the ugly apartment blocks it put up in the Soviet era couldn’t absorb all the growth.
In overcrowded Central Havana and in the historic quarter, the shortage of places to live and play and find much-needed privacy pushed the city upward, spilling onto the rooftops. The technical term is “parasitic architecture.” The Cuban government doesn’t encourage the practice, but in the city’s oldest and most dilapidated neighbourhoods, longtime roof-dwelling families like Alonso’s were usually allowed to stay. The parasites became permanent.
Cuba is like that — built for one thing and adapted to another. Beat-up Studebakers run on Soviet jeep engines. Restaurants occupy old mansions. Many of the grand homes of Old Havana were designed for one family, with a business on the ground floor and space for multiple generations and servants’ quarters on the upper levels. Now they are crowded tenements, in varying stages of decay.
Alonso’s building has 36 apartments, including his own and the four others on the roof. His wife’s family settled there more than 20 years ago. Bundled electrical wires and phone lines run up the main staircase and spider web from there. Outside each apartment is an old oil drum or plastic tank for storing water piped up by electrical pumps.
Most residents’ front doors are open to their neighbours to catch the breeze and gossip.
A rickety wooden ladder continues to the roof where Alonso and his family live. Their neighbour, Josue Gutierrez, keeps his pigeons there.
There are pigeon coops on almost every azotea (rooftop) in the neighbourhood, most of them improvised out of rebar and green plastic roofing panels.
Gutierrez, 22, has one of the best, built by his father, who raised him on this rooftop, tending pigeons.
But unlike Alonso, he doesn’t even like being up on the rooftop above the city. “I don’t waste my time watching people,” he said. “I’d rather be down there with my PlayStation.”
When he and Alonso were growing up on this roof, they would climb down to run free in the Plaza Vieja, one of the main squares in Old Havana, back when it was in ruins. Now it’s a major destination for foreign tourists. At the new café on the corner, a Cuban band played Hey Jude in English.
The renovated Old Plaza has tapas bars, a spa, even a Benetton store. But the police don’t let the neighbourhood kids play baseball there anymore or run shirtless, Alonso said.
“It’s like a museum now,” he said. Even the fountain at the centre of the plaza is fenced off.
Surely more tourists were on the way, Alonso said, given the thaw between Havana and Washington. The rough-worn Havana he grew up in, and its rooftop world, might not survive it. Maybe that was a good thing.
“Sometimes I think we should move, so my kids have more room to play,” Alonso said.
“But where else am I going to get a view like this? What’s it worth?” he asked. “Some day, a millionaire is going to come and want to buy it.”