Tower K: Guillotine of Globalist Capital in Havana
HAVANA TIMES – Havana’s skyline has a new protagonist. From Vedado rises the tallest building in Cuba: Tower K (officially Selection on K), inaugurated in January, standing 154 meters tall (42 floors). It was built with 100% Cuban investment estimated unofficially between 226 and 565 million USD (the higher figure equals exactly one million per room). The building is owned by the GAESA conglomerate (the Armed Forces’ business system) and is operated by Iberostar, a Spain-based transnational tourism chain.
Tower K—named after the Havana street where it stands—has been controversial since construction began.
It’s been mockingly nicknamed by passersby and internet users: “guillotine,” “eyesore,” “GAESA Tower,” “Lookout of Misery,” “Callejas Tower” (after GAESA’s late boss), “Tower of Mordor,” or simply “Tower KK.” The new hotel’s nicknames condense the (almost) widespread disgust at its unpleasant aesthetics, coupled with contempt for the overlords of this land. It’s ironic that the hotel’s SkyBar, whose floors and facilities carry “cinematic” names, is called Habana Blues: the title of a film about protest music from the 1990s.
Still, there are those who see Tower K as a symbol of progress. And on Facebook, doctored images have circulated showing the Tower adorned with giant letters: TRUMP.
Logics of Skyscraper Construction
Before 1959, capitalists—even mafia capitalists—from the USA made multimillion-dollar investments in Havana’s Vedado district, and several of those hotels still operate today (albeit dilapidated). There were exceptions: the Nacional was always state-owned, while today’s Habana Libre belonged to the Gastronomic Union and was managed by Hilton (payments to the owners went into union retirement funds).
Today, according to Cuban economist Pedro Monreal and official statistics, real estate is practically the main destination of Cuban state investment—leaving far behind strategic sectors like agriculture—while tourism has not recovered since the pandemic. For the most part, hotels remain at very low occupancy. Is Tower K becoming one of those “empty cathedrals of neoliberalism”?
GAESA is a synonym for a gentrified nomenklatura fused with global capital. It’s no coincidence that they chose Vedado for their first Tower: it’s an “instinct,” or better said, a conditioned reflex. Globalist capital today fills cities around the world with skyscrapers—often following peculiar logics:
Moscow has had its skyscraper zone for decades called Moscow City (originally in English, like “Selection” in K). It fractured a center city architecture of moderate height, interrupted only by the famous Stalinist towers. “Coincidentally,” it was built in the historic Presnia neighborhood, where insurgent workers took and defended their ground during the Russian Revolution of 1905.
London began building skyscrapers around 2000 in East End: a formerly port, industrial, and working-class territory, cradle of labor actions since the Chartism parliamentary reform movement of 1837–1848. They broke the horizontality of the traditional skyline—Victorian and Georgian—attempting to homogenize it visually in order to erase historical memory, especially social memory, and establishing “segregated capsules” with harmful effects of “heritage impact, socio-spatial segregation, and urban sustainability,” according to 2024 studies.
The constant: globalist capital appropriating geographies with histories of struggle.
While it rants about progress, capital marks “its” spaces like the dog perched on a mountaintop overlooking the expanse of a country, telling his buddy in that Facebook meme: “If I pee here, all this will be mine.”
To those who defend megaconstructions as “progress,” know that due to protests against “vanity skyscrapers” and their symbolism of power, Chinese authorities banned in 2022 the construction of buildings taller than 150 meters in cities with fewer than three million inhabitants. Tower K would not be permitted if Havana were in China.
Luxury Surrounded by Rebellions, Struggles, and Misery
Capital advances by materially and morally degrading those who live around the site of investment, extracting its slice of profit. The appropriation by capital of increasingly large “trendy” urban spaces is called gentrification, which displaces previous residents and changes aesthetics and social practices.
Centro Habana is just a few blocks from Tower K, and a short walk suffices to witness the disastrous conditions in which its residents live; for the new hotels of Old Havana, such proximity to misery is even more immediate. Of course, both of those municipalities, as well as Vedado, have “bright” zones, but even there, people are forced to “struggle”: surviving through illegal, semi-legal means, or jobs where labor rights are a bluff.
But the heritage of rebellions remains. The University is still there. That hub of Cuba’s fight for rights recently showed its loyalty to those rebellions with the national strike against the rate hike imposed by the capitalist–state telecommunications monopoly ETECSA, which today’s students explicitly link to the actions of 1920–1960.
Very close by are La Rampa on 23rd Street (a gathering point for bohemian dissenting youth after 1959), the Coppelia ice cream parlor (birthplace of hippies in Cuba, and symbolic for the LGBTIQ+ community), and Parque G (meeting place for freaks, rappers, rastas, and punks in the early 2000s, and site of the 2009 march against violence).
Tower K is a clear signal of what they want to do with the entire area, already emptied of practical current content—but not of lived experience. Will they succeed? That depends on today’s rebellions.
Dreaming of a Controlled Collapse
While Cuba’s wealthiest pose for photos on K’s observation deck, there are those who dream of its controlled demolition.
We don’t know whether global capitalism or the Cuban establishment will collapse first.
But… will the collapse be controlled?
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