Enguayabera, Oxygen for Alamar

Enguayabera, Oxygen for Alamar / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar
Posted on January 9, 2016

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Havana, 9 January 2015 — A neighborhood
without a church, cemetery or cultural center. That was Alamar in East
Havana until late last year, when the Enguayabera recreational complex
opened. A mass of concrete that for decades was an abandoned ruin, now
seeks to offer the more than 100,000 people in the area a different
option to boredom and alcohol.

The district's residents are delighted with the new place, although many
of its areas are not yet up and running. Since the nineties the hall,
which was built to house a factory making guayabera shirts, had been
converted into a public toilet and garbage dump. "The rats were driving
us crazy," said a neighbor whose ground floor apartment was affected by
the abandoned factory.

Now, the old textile factory located on 162nd Street is newly painted
and trucks come and go hauling away the trash. At the entrance, some
photographs show the deterioration that overcame the building during the
"Special Period" – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss
of its subsidies to Cuba – when the factory was forced to stop
production and send its workers home.

Enguayabera is trying to emulate the popular Cuban Art Factory* in
Havana's Plaza district but, unlike that center, it will be administered
entirely by state entities. The place has four cinemas with a capacity
of 40 seats, a small theater, and party space where the whole complex
was opened on 29 December with a concert by Manolito Simonet y su Trabuco.

For now, the literary café, ice cream shops and the shops operated by
Artex and the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets attract the most people
during the day. Although the wifi area trumps everything atthis point,
as an alternative for those who, until recently, had to travel to the
Pan American Village or wifi zones in more central parts of Havana in
order to connect.

The space also has a playground and three inflatable parks, but the huge
puppets that make up the latter were not inflated this week, to the
frustration of the children and their parents who arrived, excited by
television reports about the new attractions. The sense of a rushed
opening permeates the place, but does not diminish the enthusiasm of many.

With two teenagers, Yusmila has lived in the area since she was a child
and commented to this newspaper about her relief, now that her family
will have recreational opportunities so close to home. "I don't let them
go into Havana after six in the evening and they were really bored at
home," said the woman, for whom "the ability to go to the movies 200
yards from here is a blessing."

However, others are more skeptical about the cultural offerings promoted
by Enguayabera. A young taxi driver who operates on the route between
Havana's Central Park and Alamar commented on this. As a self-employed
worker, it seems excessive to him to have "four movie theaters, in a
time when people have everything at home with the weekly packet."

The man also recognizes that the new cultural center will affect him
directly because, as he confesses, "all those who will now entertain
themselves in Alamar are customers I will lose because they won't need
to go here and there to get to a disco or a movie theater."

Eusebio Mitjans has lived for 35 years in the neighborhood that was
supposed to be the home of the "New Man," but which ended up becoming a
dysfunctional bedroom city filled with prefabricated blocks. He spent
dozens of hours in voluntary work on the construction of the guayabera
factory during the eighties, and now says he feels "satisfied" because
the site is being renovated for young people.

Sitting with Mitjans on Thursday in the site's literary café was his
20-year-old niece. The young woman asked the waitress if there was a
program yet for the authors who would be presenting their works. But the
clerk just shrugged her shoulders and didn't answer. "In Alamar there
are more writers than buildings, and now all they need is to publish
their books," said the young woman.

All around her is the glittering appearance of the new. The nightmare of
the parishioners is that one bad day it will all collapse into ruins, as
happened once already to the guayabera factory.

*Translator's note: See articles here, from The Havana Times, and here
from the Washington Post.

Source: Enguayabera, Oxygen for Alamar / 14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/enguayabera-oxygen-for-alamar-14ymedio-reinaldo-escobar/