• by Leonardo Padura
• Tuesday, March 22, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Havana is being reborn. I can't be sure whether this is taking the best form possible. The first elements of the "updating of the Cuban economic model" have been made official and the effects have begun to be felt in an accelerated fashion on the face of a city that for the last fifty years seems to have been stuck in time, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs.

In this analysis, Padura writes that thus far the most striking and visible opening in the country is the revival of self-employment, with a broadening of the allowed categories and activities (nothing spectacular- it has been concentrated in lower-level jobs and small businesses rather than professions). To spur the expansion in this direction, a significant number of new licences have been issued, although at the same time the government has imposed heavy taxes on these forms of work, which raises doubts about whether many people will be able comply.

The search for individual solutions in these small businesses and the absence of regulation of their look or location has given Havana the feel of a bustling country fair, uncontrolled and unlimited, of a city where the urban and the rural mix and where ugliness and the feeling of poverty has come to define it. In the end, Havana is changing because it has to change, and one of the costs of this is yet a further loss of its already diminished beauty.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramon Mercader as central characters.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES//

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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