Miami: A ‘Malecón’ for nostalgia
By Aurelio Pedroso
HAVANA – I read with interest that Havana’s emblematic Malecón has just been reproduced in miniature on Biscayne Bay, just like that other singular imitation of our Sanctuary of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre.
A 400-feet wall attempts to assuage the nostalgia of so many remembrances and experiences lived for decades along the more than 24,200 feet of our seaside boulevard, one of the most beautiful on earth. If memory serves, it has been catalogued by experts (not Cubans, luckily) as the second or third most beautiful coastline drive in the world.
Every time I’ve hosted a foreign visitor, I’ve taken him for a stroll along that long concrete wall that popular idiosyncrasy has described as “the world’s longest bar,” because every night someone – whether with his girlfriend or friends – places on it a bottle of rum and attempts to fix the world, the island, love and anything else that goes through a human mind.
All by itself, the Malecón tells the history of Havana through the buildings that were constructed along its left side, from east to west, from its creation in the early 20th Century to almost 60 years later.
The first explanation to the visitor comes at the small public square in La Punta, where the wall begins. The skyline of Havana, which rises like a shell, is the same as it was in the 1950s. Not a single building has been added, although several have disappeared. In La Punta, near the Morro lighthouse, as if welcoming the foreign sailors, rises a monument to Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan hero, precursor of the independence of Latin America, the United States and France.
You don’t have to be an émigré to feel nostalgia. Transitory nostalgia, at least, if we look at this with a clinical eye. Almost my entire long life is flooded with seawall-related memories.
When I was a child, my parents parked their car in front of the monument to the victims of the Maine and set up a dominoes table, something that people no longer can do because the Transit Police doesn’t allow it. I remember the raft exodus in 1994, when – thanks to the currents – those people who took to the sea in East Havana ended up, swiftly and unexpectedly, in front of the U.S. Interests Section, less than 30 yards from the coast.
Time and some local ordinances have changed the malecón. As a child, I went to see an old man who had built a shack near the Havana Riviera Hotel, near the shoreline. A rustic set of stairs that extended from the wall to the reefs enabled us to climb down to the shack and listen to his stories. Today that’s impossible, because the waters have risen and the waves hit the coast hard. As a consequence of global warming, I might add.
And everybody bought fish at the San Lázaro cove, in front of the Spanish tower of the same name. There was a little dock from which the fishermen took to the sea, knowing that upon their return they would sell their fish in no time flat.
Havana’s Malecón, ladies and gentlemen, comrades all, will never be the same. No way. Those of us who look at it and remember affectionately have a holy responsibility to make it more pleasant and pleasurable than ever before.
And not as a metaphor, for certain.
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