Urban Havana Rituals Between Salt Spray and Waves
HAVANA TIMES – The sea of Havana has corners that don’t appear on tourist postcards. Small, almost secret places where generations of Habaneros have learned to swim, to dream, and sometimes to forget. Among them, the little beach at 12th Street and the one at 16th Street, in Miramar, hold a special magnetism. They are not white-sand beaches, nor do they have luxury umbrellas, but they possess something deeper—that air of belonging that only lived-in spaces can grant.
Since the mid-20th century, when Miramar was just beginning to build its avenues and mansions, the shores remained open, democratic, inviting everyone to come close to the sea. There, on concrete walls and makeshift stairways, a ritual was born that still persists, going down with the clothes you’re wearing, feeling the crash of salty water on your skin, and letting the horizon heal what the city cannot.
Collective memory named these places with Havana’s typical simplicity: “the little beach at 12th Street and the one at 16th,” according to the street that leads to them. Yet at 12th Street, there is a symbol that defines the experience: the yaquis, those enormous blocks of concrete aligned not far off the coast.
Conceived as breakwaters, they ended up becoming the stage for urban rituals. There, children learned to throw themselves into the void, teenagers tested the courage of their dives, and adults found a refuge where they could gaze at the sea as if consulting an oracle. Between the shore and the yaquis, a natural pool is formed, a serene space that has become a metaphor: a contained sea, a breath within the waves of Havana life.
The 1970s and 80s saw them flourish as a meeting point: portable radios, laughter at sunset, entire families setting up with thermoses of coffee. Even in the 1990s, in the midst of shortages and blackouts, the little beaches were a place of relief and resistance, because there it was enough to let the breeze envelop you to feel that everything was lighter.
Today, despite the years, the little beaches remain alive. There is no summer without young people visiting them. They come with guitars and speakers, accompanied by fleeting loves or lifelong friends. The yaquis remain, firm, like silent guardians of those stories, each crack marked by decades of jumps and tides.
Perhaps that is why, even as the concrete erodes and the city changes, the little beaches never die. They continue to be points of social, emotional, and generational encounter. Spaces where Havana reflects its most intimate version: that of those who search, in the ebb and flow of the water, for the certainty that there will always be a place to return to.
In every wave that crashes against the yaquis echoes a piece of the past. And in every laugh that resounds in the afternoon it is confirmed that the little beach is not just a place, but an urban rite: a reminder that, before the sea, we are all a little more Habanero.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here on Havana Times.