Havanna – The city of contrasts

After our bike-tour and our stay at the Friedrich-Engels-School, we went to Havanna, the capital of Cuba. When we arrived in Havanna, we crossed the Plaza de la Revolución on our way to the hostel. Around the Plaza there are high buildings of the communist party. Just like the Plaza itself, these buildings still are in pretty good shape. Just a few hundred meters away you can see streets broken apart, which look like a construction started some time ago but didn’t get finished, probably because of a lack of money. While exploring the city you will repeatedly find such contrasts.

During our stay in Havanna, we visited the Centre of Fidel Castro Ruíz and the Cuban institute for the Understanding of Nations, which made our stay in Cuba possible. We had a lot of free time here in Havanna and thus were able to see different faces of the city – not just the main attractions. In Havanna Vieja, the most touristic part of the city, where you can also find the Capitol, there is the Obispo street, the main street for tourists. Here you can find souvenir shops, restaurants, but also bookstores. All of them are expensive in comparison to what you find a few streets away.

While Obispo street is kept clean, there are piles of trash all over the streets nearby. If you leave the main touristic areas, you get a sight of another part of the city. There you also find restaurants, where the Cuban people eat and bookstores, where you can buy books for just a few hundred pesos, often less than one Euro. As far away from the Capitol as the tourist-souvenir-market, just in a different direction, there is a flea market where Cuban people sell everything they can find like old, broken, electronic devices.

The Capitol is one of the buildings that are taken care of very much. But standing in front of the Capitol, you can see old collapsed buildings – ruins right in the city centre. You can see old collapsed buildings – ruins right in the city centre. You can find these ruins all over Havanna.

But although Havanna may seem a bit filthy at first sight, if you want to explore it, you can see more than the existing pretty parts. You can also see the vision behind empty buildings which used to shape the beautiful city but are now collapsed because of the bad state of the economy and the resulting poverty of the state. I am curious how the city will develop – whether there will be more collapse or if it comes closer to the former vision.

And I am looking forward to visiting Havanna again.