What Would Havana’s Alamar District Be Without Its Trees
Photo Feature by Veronica Vega
HAVANA TIMES – Alamar, a “model” community to the east of Havana, was a project launched with great fanfare by the revolution in the 1970s.
Born out of the direct efforts of worker micro-brigades who needed homes of their own, the neighborhood eventually featured several schools, a beautiful movie theater, and three polyclinics. It even had a giant saltwater pool that brought joy to children and young people.
However, this budding progress came to an abrupt halt with the collapse of the socialist bloc, and Alamar became a community relegated to neglect.
The architecture of the buildings, designed in the Soviet style without consideration for the tropical climate or the essential need for covered walkways to ease movement through the streets in near-constant heat, creates a visually monotonous landscape with its angular and repetitive lines.
This aesthetic misfortune is only redeemed by the natural beauty of the neighborhood’s location, which runs parallel to the coast and features a sloping entrance beside the Cojímar River. It is a beauty increasingly battered, yet still resilient amid the general decay, offering a note of hope to the landscape each summer.
With vast stretches of red earth and other rocky areas of mixed vegetation, wild taro is common, and vines often snake through fences around gardens and makeshift farms.
What would become of the people of Alamar without the friendly presence of the flamboyant trees, the white oaks that tint the air with a rain of pale flowers, or the scent of the fuzzy blooms of the leucaenas? Or the beautiful hanging flowers of the yellow acacias, with their cylindrical pods full of sweet round seeds? Or the explosion of color brought by bougainvillea?
In urban areas of the capital where there is no such space for color and oxygen, no cheerful noise of birds—and lacking, too, the showy artificiality of progress—life becomes even more oppressive.
Among bus stops and markets affected by product shortages and limited choices, deprived of the lush variety and visual lures of the free market, here the trees rise up and compensate—at least visually and spiritually—for the lack of social prospects.
What would Alamar be, pushed to the outskirts (7 kilometers past the tunnel of Havana Bay), without this constant reminder from nature that abundance still exists and renews itself each year—for everyone?