With the help of Spain, Cuba's former colonial occupier, laborers are restoring the Malecon sea wall – and dozens of crumbling apartment buildings – after decades of neglect and battering by nature.
Thousands of Havana residents whose apartments are threatened by rain and ruin will benefit from the multimillion-dollar project, which also calls for two hotels, shops, bakeries and a bar or two.
The work will take years. How many, officials can't say: That largely depends on communist Cuba finding foreign credit and investment. Nor will planners in a Cuba slowly opening to foreign trade rush the job.
"You must remember that this is our business card. It is the face of Havana," said architect Orestes Modesto del Castillo, director of projects for the City Historian's Office.
"We are not interested in rushing it. We are interested in having it very well done."
At 4 miles long, the Malecon is both Havana's busiest east-west traffic artery and its most popular pedestrian refuge. Fishermen trolling oil-streaked waters pass by, lovers nuzzle on the bulky seawall, and tourists gawk at the clifftop El Morro fortress.
Bicycle taxis, Soviet Ladas and pre-revolutionary Studebakers jostle across its six lanes.
Nineteenth-century Spanish architects first conceived the idea of a coastal promenade as the colonial capital spread beyond its original city walls. Plans were scrapped as the Cuban revolution intensified.
After the United States occupied Cuba in the 1898 Spanish-American War, military engineers built the first three-block stretch of what was known as the Avenida del Golfo, from Prado to Crespo Streets, in 1902.
Work continued under a series of Cuban governments until 1955. Development spread westward to the Almendares River and beyond: past the Nacional and Presidente hotels, the old U.S. Embassy, the mansions of the Vedado neighborhood.
The Malecon has hosted Carnival and baseball celebrations, military parades and a farewell procession for revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
But decades of pounding by the sea, pollution, heavy traffic and economic privation since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution have taken their toll. The sidewalk is studded with potholes, the seawall crumbling. Never flush with cash, Castro's communist government had other investment priorities.
In central Havana, the Malecon's colorful rows of balconied 19th and early 20th-century buildings – ranging in style from Neo-Gothic to Renaissance to Art Deco – fell into disrepair. Heavy rains and hurricanes brought some tumbling down.
With growing tourism in the 1980s, Cuba took another look at its historic Old City, designated a world heritage site by the United Nations. The Malecon project is an offshoot of that preservation work.
There were – and remain – many obstacles: recession, the loss of Soviet economic aid and the U.S. trade embargo. To overcome them, City Historian Eusebio Leal Spengler's office received authority to seek foreign aid.
Soon, agencies, architectural firms and businesses from the Spanish municipalities of Andalucia, Asturia, the Canaries, Extremadura and Madrid adopted individual blocks of a 14-block stretch in Central Havana.
They've provided financing, building materials and technical advice, investing the equivalent of more than $1.3 million. Some 1,400 apartments housing 5,300 people are to be renovated.
"We're trying to preserve everything, but that's impossible. Some of the buildings are in such bad shape we have to demolish them," del Castillo said.
Plans also call for renovating Students and Lovers Park, Maximo Gomez Park, La Punta Esplanade and Antonio Maceo Park, where each year residents commemorate the 1871 slayings of eight students by Spanish troops.
Also planned are projects to clean up Havana's harbor and modernize antiquated utilities. Officials hope to reinvigorate preservation work elsewhere in the city as well.
The work is excruciatingly slow. Laborers chip away by hand at the seawall and sidewalk, exposing rusting steel rods; work is halted whenever the seas get rough, which is often.
"They're doing beautiful things to this. And it's good for tourism," said fisherman Hugo Gonzalez, 59, as he sat on the seawall and nodded approvingly.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press