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