Havana’s Giron Building is Now a Prison for Its Occupants

With no elevators serving its 17 Floors

The 132-apartment building was a symbol of modernity when it opened in 1967 on Havana’s seafront.

By Pedro Espinosa (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – With ocean views and one of the best locations Havana’s Vedado district — the luxurious Grand Aston hotel sits beside it — the Girón Building might seem like a dream home. However, the two-block, seventeen-floor building is more like a run-down tenement where residents worry about a dilapidated staircase, broken elevators and a deteriorating infrastructure.

Anyone entering the enormous building, located on the Malecón between E and F streets, will quickly realize that its problems are much more than skin deep. The stairway’s rusted handrails offer a hint of what’s to come. “Don’t touch that!” a woman warns an absent-minded boy who had been holding onto the fragile railing.

Climbing each floor takes courage. As one begins ascending block 2, steel rebars become visible through the stair’s broken concrete, which has been battered by the salty sea air. Reaching the landing does not calm the nerves. If anything, it makes them worse. Instead of discreetly located teller windows with electronic cash registers, one finds square openings blackened by soot, the traces of a recent fire.

The flames, which began in an apartment on one of the upper floors, affected the building’s electrical system. Since then, the only elevator that was still working has been out of service. “From that day on, my mother has not been able to go outside,” says a young man carrying a bag full of yucca and pumpkins as he paused to catch his breath on the sixth floor before continuing on to the eleventh.

“I think they’re waiting for the whole thing to fall down and bury us all so they can build a hotel on the site,” said a man who, along with other building residents, has been complaining non-stop about the modern ruin that has become what was once a daring architectural project and a social experiment built according to futuristic, communist city planning principles.

“I was born here so this is what I know,” says one resident who has watched his neighbors leave. “Some people realized what was to come before it was too late, left in the 1990s and moved to other neighborhoods. There were those who took longer but, when home sales became legal, left their apartments before they collapsed on top of them. Then, of course, there are the nitwits like us who stayed.”

For decades, as the crumbled and the iconic parasols surrounding the structure cracked on all sides, many of the original residents held out hope that the state would implement a comprehensive repair program. “Letters were mailed and letters came back. We became experts at writing to ministries, officials and the National Assembly, but it was all just for fun,” he says.

Alongside the staircase, residents have nailed boards over narrow columns that once allowed the sea breezes to pass through the building. But with chunks of them falling off, they now pose a danger to small children and pets, who could slip through the spaces between them. “You don’t have to be very thin to fall through because the gaps are getting wider and wider,” the young man points out.

The 132 apartments have been depreciating in value as the building that houses them becomes ever more uninhabitable. What little light illuminating the stairway at night comes from an open doorway. Early in the evening, residents lock themselves behind metal bars. “Anything could happen,” says Raiza of the common areas. She moved to the building as a child when her father, a high-ranking official, was given a home in “El Girón.”

“I remember how it was back then. Everything was new; everything was beautiful. When I told my friends from Cerro — the neighborhood where I was born — where I was living, they were drooling,” she says, recalling the early days after the building first opened in 1967. Designed by Cuban architect Antonio Quintana, it was built using a the sliding mold system. It was seen as a precursor of the bright future that was to fill Cuban cities with skyscrapers, bridges and modernity.

“The first residents formed a tight-knit community. The CDR* folks were here every day. Volunteer work was organized and families themselves kept things looking nice,” Raiza says beaming. She believes that the building’s abrupt decline was due to the lack of resources brought on by the Special Period. “It needed a helping hand because it was already more than twenty years old when that crisis began. But what happened in the 1990s was the final blow.”

“People started cooking with wood, even in the stairways. There wasn’t a single lightbulb in the hallways because they had all been stolen,” Raiza says, adding that pigs squealing inside the apartments became part of the building’s soundtrack. Efforts to obtain building materials or find a government work crew to make repairs ran headlong into the reality that subsidies from the Soviet Union had been cut off.

“We should have moved somewhere else back then but my father was very fond of this place and the truth is the view of the sea is very nice from our apartment on the twelfth floor” she admits. “It’s the only thing we have, seeing the horizon morning, noon and night, because right now my father can’t go anywhere. He’s locked up here because there are no elevators.”

In a desperate attempt to garner attention, resident sent another complaint to Facebook administrators this week about the poor condition of the building and its broken elevators. Within minutes, hundreds of users commented the post, adding more details of the drama that is taking place within the walls of this former jewel of revolutionary architecture. But no description can capture the fear that comes from climbing the stairs, listening to the anecdotes of its residents and peering into the abyss between the gaps in the façade.

“For sale” signs have been taped to some of the doors of the 132 apartments that make up the two blocks of the giant edifice. Those who manage to get far enough inside to read one of them know they are not looking at an attractive home in the centrally located neighborhood of Vedado, situated just a few yards from the sea waves. What they will will find, if anything, is a property whose lifespan may be shorter than that of Cuban communism’s New Man, whom the Girón Building was built to house.

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*Translator’s note: Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, a network of neighborhood committees across Cuba described as the “eyes and ears of the Revolution.” Their intended purpose was to support local communities and report on “counter-revolutionary” activity.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

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