Havana Man Blocks Street to Protest His Decrepit Housing
Lazaro Aguilar wanted to speak with the mayor, but the police and State Security arrived instead.
HAVANA TIMES – On Thursday, June 19, Lazaro Aguilar Medrano ran out of patience. The resident of Aguiar Street, on the corner of Muralla, in Old Havana, blocked the passage of vehicles that morning, demanding an institutional response to the poor condition of his house. However, as 14ymedio confirmed, it was the police and the State Security who arrived, instead of the housing officials.
Aguilar blocked the street with an old armchair, a mattress, a bed frame, a washing machine, a sign with his demands, a motorcycle, and some containers that his family uses to store water in this part of the capital, which has one of the worst water supply problems in the whole city. “I want the government here. Because I’ve had enough of their shamelessness, and I’m not going to talk to anyone else,” he declared in a video made by CubaNet.
In the recording, Aguilar demands the presence of Alexis Acosta Silva, Old Havana’s mayor, and also of the city’s governor, Yanet Hernandez Perez. “The block is going to be closed off until the government shows up here,” he insisted. The man noted the lack of response to the requests he filed with the Housing Institute, the Communist Party, and other provincial and municipal entities to resolve the plight of his family.
Lazaro also made mention of his mother, Estrella Medrano Lopez. According to him, she had been the recipient of numerous official decorations throughout her life: “Estrella has a thousand medals, a thousand pieces of shit, a thousand… all for nothing. They shit on all that,” he declared, as an example of the abandonment suffered by the people who, in their youth, helped to build the country’s current political model. “What’s the party for? What’s the government for? Close them down! Because they don’t work. They don’t work,” he clamored.
After one o’clock in the afternoon, when this newspaper visited the place, Aguilar had already been detained by uniformed men. A police car remained parked outside his house. Nearby was some graffiti that had been painted on an almost ruined facade: “All we need is love”.
The protester’s belongings had been removed from the street and placed on the sidewalk in front of his house. Although the man was gone, the neighbors remained attentive to the scene of the police operation, that included patrol cars, motorcycles, uniformed agents and others in civilian clothes guarding the corners. The command post for the deployment is located at the nearby Municipal Electoral Commission, right on the corner.
The outside of Lazaro’s house, which had probably been built at the beginning of the 20th century, revealed its deteriorated state of construction after decades without maintenance, compounded by the lack of resources of those living there and the crowding caused by housing problems. In a photo Aguilar posted on his Facebook page, you can see that the house also has a precarious wooden roof terrace add on, to increase the space vertically. The rest of the block bears the traces of multiple building collapses.
Aguiar isn’t just any Havana street. From its start on Misiones Avenue, it stretches some fifteen blocks through the center city. Its buildings were once the site of the main offices or branches of at least nine banks, making it one of the epicenters of the Cuban capital’s financial district, the island’s little Wall Street. All these businesses were nationalized after Fidel Castro came to power in January 1959.
Aguiar Street was also the site of numerous companies and insurance agencies, a number of business associations like the British Chamber of Commerce, the Cuban Bank Association and the National Chamber of Business and Industry. Its buildings came to house 105 law firms, beauty parlors, small sewing factories dedicated to producing bed linens, and tailoring. The commercial and financial activity there earned it the nickname of “money street.”
Blocking streets, be it to protest the bad condition of housing or to denounce the lack of water, has become ever more common in Cuba in the last few years. In Havana, you can frequently see lines of women blocking the cars from passing, to draw attention to demands ranging from solving their housing problems to sending a tank truck with water to alleviate the shortage.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana TImes.