Photos: Nester Nuñez

Photo Feature by Nester Nuñez

HAVANA TIMES – Built beginning in the 1970s on the outskirts of Cuban cities, these housing developments were, at the time, a response to the country’s severe housing shortage. Alamar in Havana and Jose Marti in Santa Clara are among the best-known examples of a model that spread throughout the island. They were modest apartment buildings, but they gave thousands of families a place to live and build their lives. Over the years, residents altered and expanded their apartments as best they could, while the neighborhoods themselves grew older.

Three years after my first visit to this neighborhood in Matanzas, I return and find the marks of a decline that is far from unique to this place. The apartment buildings need maintenance, while the services that were once part of daily life—the ration store, the neighborhood produce market, the barbershop, public transportation—have disappeared or now function only precariously. Neighborhoods that were originally designed to grow alongside the cities have, in many cases, become trapped on an increasingly difficult-to-live-in urban fringe.

But perhaps the most visible change is in public spaces. Where state-run services once stood, small private initiatives have taken their place: makeshift barbershops, vendors selling root vegetables, secondhand clothing, and other businesses that now occupy porches, sidewalks, and former commercial spaces.

It is a transformation that speaks not only to Cuba’s current crisis but also to the resilience of its people in finding new ways to survive. The housing developments that once represented a promise of the future have become places where that future now seems uncertain, while life continues to adapt, as best it can, to what remains.

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