We’re so accustomed to seeing America’s mainstream media celebrating Havana as “exotic” and “quaint” and “unspoiled” that it came as something of a surprise to see USA Today, on December 2, running a piece headlined “How Havana is collapsing, building by building.”
Reporters Tracey Eaton and Katherine Lewin didn’t pull any punches. They talked to one Rafael Álvarez, who “was up at 6:30 a.m. to warm milk for his baby daughter when he heard the sound of pebbles falling.” Next thing he knew, in his words, “the floor below us came loose. We were left hanging in the air, then fell into the abyss.” He ended up “buried in rubble to his waist.” But he was the lucky one. He lost his mother, daughter, and two others in the collapse of his apartment building. It was 101 years old.
They talked to Carlos Guerrero, who lives with his family in another building that looks as if it’s about to go any minute. “Neighbors tell them, ‘Get out of there! It’s going to collapse!’” They talked to Yanelis Flores, who says her own flat, where “daylight shines through terrifying cracks in the walls,” is “worse than a pig pen.” A staircase collapsed last year, stranding people on the upper floors. And they talked to Magaly Marrero, who “said her apartment is so bad that she showers in the kitchen and relieves herself in a bucket.”
And they talked to others. Plenty of others. They provided statistics showing that these anecdotes were only the tip of a massive iceberg. “In Havana,” they wrote, “some of the same architectural gems that draw tens of thousands of American tourists crash to the ground every year.” Their piece amounted to a powerful indictment of Communism.
Except for the fact that Eaton and Lewin didn’t really focus on Communism as the ultimate cause of all this decay. No, when it came to causes they turned coy. Here, in fact, is how they put it: “Causes [for all these building collapses] range from weather and neglect to faulty renovations and theft of structural beams.” Well, yes, those may be the immediate causes. But the reason why these “architectural gems” haven’t been properly maintained over the decades – or torn down and replaced by safer structures – is, quite simply, Communism.
If you’d taken a stroll around East Berlin just before the Wall fell, you’d have seen the same kind of miserable dilapidation – derelict blocks of flats that had pieces missing and in which you could still see bullet holes dating back to World War II. Venezuela, of course, is headed down the same road. Meanwhile in the U.S., we have a younger generation that’s been brainwashed into thinking that socialism is just dandy and that is sending the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Washington. Congratulations to USA Today, then, for documenting the dire consequences of Communism, but please: next time, be more up front about what’s really behind all this deadly disrepair.
