Vendors Bring Life into Havana’s Dilapidated Streets
In the midst of the ruins, the constant shouting of a seller seemed to awaken a neighborhood where the crisis has imposed a slumber.
By Juan Diego Rodríguez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – How alive or dead is a street? Is it the ruins, the shells of houses barely standing, and the decrepit facades that define the throb of a thoroughfare; or, in reality, is its death certificate only the signature of the lack of traffic, of street vendors, and of shouts from balcony to balcony. If it is the latter, it can be said that the central San Lázaro Avenue in Central Havana has not yet been buried because it still breathes.
This Monday morning, a young man placed his cart right in front of a building with windows boarded up due to a collapse. Life and obsolescence just a few meters away. A few ripe banana trees here, a balcony about to collapse there; tomatoes with their skins gleaming in the sun on this sidewalk, a column cracked from top to bottom on the other. Amid the ruins, the merchant’s constant shouting seemed to awaken a neighborhood where the crisis has imposed a slumber.
The mango, with its season just starting this year, contributes to that sense of resurrection. Green, plump, and ripe they peek out from the vendor’s improvised platform. The wheels supporting the platform, probably taken from some vandalized garbage container, allow the small stand to move: up San Lázaro, down San Lázaro, like blood in the arteries of an organism in intensive care, but alive. Some cucumbers add urgency because their tips are turning yellow and the skin is beginning to look sunken in in several places. The sack, in the shade, protects the most expensive item: a pound of imported rice, which, in the Cuban capital, is now approaching 300 pesos.
The veins are visible in the vendor’s neck and the youthfulness in his figure. The pushcart vendor hawks his wares and the avenue shakes. An old woman leans out from a balcony, a neighbor opens the blinds next to a bus stop. “Come on, your papaya is here!” is heard, and it is as if the commercial defibrillator gives a few minutes of life to the avenue that connects Old Havana with Vedado, just a few seconds, but they seem eternal and enough to certify a heartbeat.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
Long-time visitors to Cuba, especially Havana, remember when roving street vendors would sell bread from their carts in the early morning hours. Some of the bread was so fresh that it would still be warm from the oven. On the first day of my last visit to Cuba last year, I saw the bread they now sell in the government bakeries. I couldn’t believe that they even called it bread. My Cuban friends tell me it’s even worse today. Hard to believe that it’s gone from street vendors selling bread so fresh that it was common for people to make their morning coffee around the time they knew that the bread would arrive in order to eat the bread and drink the coffee together to what is sold today.