Despairing over disrepair, it is not uncommon for me to take a photo of a crumbling Dublin house when I see one. It has come to symbolise land speculation, greed, disregard for the right of shelter and home, as well as refusal to plan, manage, or have a vision for the city as a place to live. I take a photo of the grey wall against the grey skies as a document. In Havana, I never had that urge. I would see the same mechanical effects of the elements, the same crumbling, time’s unrelenting production of dust but with an entirely different meaning, cause, and symbolism.
One is demolition by neglect, the other is demolition by strangulation. Tracing the source of both to the very root, we find, unsurprisingly, the logic of capital. In the case of a Georgian house in the Liberties, capital grows while holding the patch of city land underneath it to ransom; a colonial house in Havana is a testament to capital holding an entire island to ransom. A Georgian house divided into flats in Dublin is an act aimed at squeezing more profit out of the rental market. Yet the similar division of a solar in Havana is a matter of doing the most with the materials available to people under a blockade.
The unlawful United States blockade has been for decades the most visible imperialist act of social mass murder imposed on the Cuban people. For 33 years, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted an annual resolution demanding the blockade's cessation. Solidarity movements around the world have made it a central point of their campaigns. The determination of the US to make the Cuban economy scream, like many others before, has forced the people and the government of Cuba to develop a specific relationship with technology and infrastructure. Echoes of this relationship reach the media in the West through the romanticised visuals of old cars and colonial houses in a vivid colour scheme, labelled as “frozen in time”, or any other euphemism useful to obfuscate the deadly force of the blockade denying Cuban people access to so many goods, services, and materials.
In the first three decades of the revolutionary Cuban state, the relationship with the Soviet Union had an important role in shaping the island’s supply chains, planning its development and improving the living standards. As the Soviet Union exited the world stage, Cuba entered the Special Period in the Time of Peace (Período especial en tiempos de paz). Unlike a special period in the time of war which would be a reaction to an open military assault from the US, this was a restructuring of economy and everyday life in light of the radically disrupted supply of fuel, goods and materials.
An example from this time I find interesting when it comes to Cuban people’s relationship with everyday objects and infrastructure surrounding them, is a story of two books. El libro de la familia (The Book of the Family) was published and distributed at the beginning of the Special Period, in 1991. It was a compendium of technical knowledge and practical skills useful for maintenance, repair, and agriculture.
As the Cuban people engaged with the new situation and the book’s advice, a dialogue emerged. In 1992, Con nuestros propios esfuerzos (With our own efforts) was published, another compendium of practical advice stemming from experience, embedded knowledge, and new ideas of the Cuban people in response to The Book of the Family and the new situation. This attention to repair, maintenance and making good use of what is there is not merely a byproduct of an economy developing in extremely adversarial conditions. It is in line with the overarching insistence on care, as manifested in Cuban healthcare at home and abroad.
The meaning of a home under blockade and not
I have been writing this article, or variants thereof, for a while now. One of its first drafts was written at the corner of Línea and 18 in Havana. The building there used to be a tram station until the 1960s; then it became a bus factory. During the Special Period, it was repurposed into a bicycle factory, and today it is a cultural space.
When in the 1990s the factory at Línea and 18 pivoted from buses to bicycles, it was in an effort, quite literally, to keep moving. The bus factory was an assembly plant for parts that used to come from the Soviet Union, and that was not an option anymore. Economic activity, productivity, and local employment had to be preserved, but what also had to be preserved was the production of socially beneficial goods, a production that would match the new reality of fuel scarcity.
I thought about the bicycle factory as I was working on another draft on the replacement bus from Dublin’s Connolly train station. On a hot summer bank holiday weekend, trains were not in operation, as the maintenance and repair works were ongoing – just like the bank holiday before that. Interventions to keep Ireland moving are mostly there to keep the capital flowing uninterrupted, I thought.
And once again, looking at a boarded-up Georgian house, I thought about why I refused to take photos of houses in Havana. The reason was not exactly political, it was intimately emotional: these are still homes. Cuba and the Cuban people are forced, by the actions of the imperialist bloc and the inaction of others, to make difficult choices about where to direct every brick and every litre of fuel. And the choices they make are never compromised by accepting homelessness, or by leaving anyone behind.
Sometimes, authors of our own times write of revolutions as relatively short, abrupt events. They write of revolutionaries as idealists, visionaries of impossible utopias eventually proven wrong by the world. The truth is that we still live in the times of the Cuban revolution, and the revolutionaries are waging the revolutionary war in this world, not one of the past or of imagination. Making their own history, not under circumstances of their own choosing.
Harun Šiljak is an academic, author, and activist based in Dublin.