On Havana’s rooftops, a hidden city

On Havana's rooftops, a hidden city
The Washington Post
Nick Miroff

HAVANA — 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 city 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 much-needed
solitude.

"Cubans are nosey, 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 like Alonso.

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 beyond. Ships and barges eased in and
out of the Bay of Havana past the 18th-century San Carlos de la Cabaña
citadel, one of the large Spanish colonial fortresses in the Americas.

The population of this city of 2.1 million has surged since Fidel
Castro's 1959 Revolution, but its housing supply has not. The communist
government has consistently fallen short of its construction goals, and
the big, ugly apartment blocks it put up in the Soviet era couldn't
absorb all the city's growth.

In overcrowded Central Havana and here 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 for it is "parasitic architecture." The Cuban
government doesn't encourage the practice, but in the city's oldest and
most dilapidated neighborhoods, 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.
Boatless fisherman float baited hooks out to sea on homemade buoys of
Chinese condoms, puffed up like big balloons.

Many of the grand colonial-era 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 today, including his own and the
four others on the roof. His wife's family settled there more than 20
years ago after their tenement in another part of the city buckled in a
storm.

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 neighbors to catch the breeze
and gossip, letting their dachshunds and Chihuahuas come and go, their
droppings left drying in the stairwell.

From the street, itinerant vendors walk up the worn marble stairs to
ply the corridors, hawking pastries and chorizo sausage, probably
pinched from government stockrooms.

A rickety wooden ladder continues to the roof where Alonso and his
family live. Their neighbor, Josue Gutierrez, keeps his pigeons there.

There are pigeon coops on almost every azotea (rooftop) in the
neighborhood, 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, and has since moved away.

Gutierrez gets up at 4 each morning to go fishing when the weather's
good, motoring a few miles out with a friend to troll for tuna or
snapper. He tends his pigeons at dusk, changing their water and feeding
them with the chickpeas he gets through the government's ration system.

"Yo, Baldy!" Gutierrez shouted to a friend at another pigeon coop on the
roof of neighboring building, about 100 yards away, on a recent
afternoon. Baldy did not notice. "He can't hear me," Gutierrez said.
"Too much wind."

There were pigeon-keepers on seemingly every rooftop. Gutierrez said his
entire neighborhood is "a battlefield"; everyone is trying to trap each
other's birds. Gutierrez had rigged the rooftop with little snares
fashioned out of fishing line to cinch around a bird's ankle as soon as
it lands.

In the United States, Gutierrez said, pigeon-keepers prefer messenger
birds. In Cuba, the hobby is built around raising birds that venture out
to attract others to their roost, where they can be captured for their
owner's collection. It's called "stealing pigeons."

It is a game of seduction, and one of Gutierrez's birds, El Azul de la
Grua, "The Blue One on the Crane," is Old Havana's avian Casanova.

El Azul is called that because the only place he likes to roost is on
the idled construction crane, a block from Gutierrez's building, hanging
over a half-built tourist hotel.

Gutierrez lifted El Azul from his coop and released him into the air
with an upward toss. The bird flew in a wide looping arc, past the crane
and out over the tourist heart of Old Havana, before circling back to
the coop.

El Azul once stole 82 pigeons for Gutierrez in a 14-month span.
Gutierrez kept some and sold the others. The least valuable are popular
with practitioners of Santeria, where they meet their demise on the
altars of Elegua, Oshun and other Afro-Cuban deities with a purported
appetite for pigeon blood.

The birds are just a hobby for Gutierrez, he said. He loses money on
them. 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 cafe 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 neighborhood kids play baseball there
anymore or run shirtless, Alonso said.

"It's like a museum now," he said. Even the fountain at the center of
the plaza is fenced off.

Surely more tourists were on the way, Alonso said, with the United
States and Cuba mending relations. 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, looking out across the city as big cloud banks moved in
from the north.

"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."

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