Havana in Renewal and Havana in Decay

Anyone travelling around Havana will note the general decay amongst buildings, roads and the like. There are certainly signs of some renewal amongst the decay. It’s been an interest of mine to find out which is occurring faster, the renewal or the decay. I haven’t yet found the answer. Last trip I posted some photos of both the renewal and the decay. Below are some further pictures. There are also some figures quoted below from works done by a chap named Joaquín P. Pujol regarding the current state of infrastructure in both Havana and Cuba. The information quoted can be found in the referenced articles.

“The Cuban government has acknowledged that a lack of housing is one of the country’s biggest challenges. According to official estimates, the housing shortage reached some 500,000 homes by the middle of the past decade. But given the deterioration of the existing stock, independent estimates put the current housing shortages at closer to 1.6 million units.”

“Over 100,000 people in the capital area do not have access to running water and depend on cistern trucks to provide them with some supply of water.”

www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume21/pdfs/pujol.pdf

“In the city of Havana alone it has been estimated that there are currently over 8,000 residences in peril of collapse.”

“The number of passengers transported by public buses daily, which in the 1980s had reached 4 million, dropped to less that half a million in the 1990s and only recently had climbed back to one million.”

“According to a November 2007 EFECOM report, nearly 3,000 kilometers of major roadways in Cuba are in poor or substandard condition. Over 75% of paved roadways in the Havana area alone are in poor conditions and in need of substantial and complex repairs. The cost of performing the needed repairs and improvements on the major highway system in Cuba has been estimated at US$1 billion.”

www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume19/pdfs/pujol.pdf