Despite economic boom, Cuba's structures crumbling

HAVANA -- At the intersection of Marina and Jovellar streets, more than 50 people wait along the potholed sidewalk and broken curb for a bus that wheezes up to the stop already fully loaded.

Somehow, a dozen or so manage to squeeze into the windowless contraption that dates to the days when Moscow provided much of the means to move the Cuban economy. Today, the buses barely keep Cubans moving: They spend as much as two hours getting from their jobs in the center of Havana to their homes.

Those homes are also in a sad state, with at least 500 buildings in this crumbling capital collapsing each year by the government's own account. Their utilities are decrepit too: The water and power distribution systems are corroded patchworks predating the 1959 revolution, and evidence of the state of the sewer system wafts throughout the city.

Even as Cuba's economy booms thanks to a thriving tourism industry, brisk nickel exports, and cheap oil from ideologically aligned Venezuela, the social benefits are difficult to see at street level. Except for a few high-profile historical restoration projects such as the Art Deco buildings of Old Havana, the country's structural decay seems to worsen with each month.

``It's not a question of repairing anymore. Everything needs to be rebuilt," said Julio, a construction worker who spends more time as an unlicensed cabbie than on state building sites. ``There is no material and no money to buy it, so nothing has been maintained."

Some blame the US economic embargo, which has blocked travel and the flow of goods to the island for 45 years in an effort through nine administrations to starve Cuba into abandoning what Washington sees as a ruinous adherence to communism.

Few Cubans will talk openly about what might be wrong with a political and economic system that even in boom times can't keep the wheels of public transport turning or the lights on, especially since President Fidel Castro retreated from the leadership six weeks ago for surgery deemed a state secret. But they complain quietly there is more to their urban squalor than the embargo or the loss of Soviet aid 15 years ago can explain.

``The problem is that the government owns everything, and people only take care of what is their own," said another moonlighting taxi driver, Arturo, who buzzes his plastic-encased motorbike around basketball-sized craters in the asphalt where the Malecon seaside promenade meets 23 d Street. ``Cubans are very clever and improvisational. We can fix anything. But there isn't the will to do it unless it is to improve your own conditions."

In self-improvement mode, city-dwellers resort to pilferage to ``resolve" their problems.

``Resolver," Spanish for to resolve, has long been a euphemism for getting around the system, be it a few frozen french fries set aside to take home by a restaurant cook from each tourist's order or the filching of park bench planks to patch a gap in an apartment's deteriorating walls.

The lack of available or affordable parts, tools, and building materials has had a cancerous effect on the already degraded infrastructure. Doorknobs disappear from public buildings, screws from wall-mounted shelves and dispensers. Along the Malecon, not a single storm drain cover survives to prevent rubbish from clogging the sewers, the square metal grates apparently useful to screen windows.

Even the tourism industry is vulnerable to widespread theft and minimal investment. Ancient air conditioners blow the smell of mold into ``five-star" hotel rooms where renovations have been limited to the lobbies.

Rail track s link most major cities, offering an affordable means of distribution, but the lines are rusted, engine breakdowns frequent, and passenger service so primitive most travelers prefer to hitchhike.

Hope for repair of Cuba's housing, roads, transport, and utilities has risen with the multibillion-dollar investments made by Venezuela in the past few years, including a deal earlier this year for Caracas engineers to complete the Cienfuegos oil refinery abandoned by the Soviets in the early 1990s. That and other joint projects to upgrade the electricity grid, plus crude-oil-burning power plants, have had the effect of lowering the number of blackouts and power failures this year compared with the prolonged outages that left Cubans sweltering without fans or elevators in the past two summers.

``It's very tranquil here, very safe. We like it that way and don't want things to change, at least not suddenly," said Monica, an engineer in her 30s, when asked whether the conditions of urban life were frustrating. Like many asked about their expectations, she said she hasn't given it much thought.