In Havana, there are thousands of dilapidated buildings that are inhabited. What is rarely seen is a modern, empty building in one of the most elite neighborhoods of the capital. This is the case with Riomar.
It is located on 1st Street between Cero and A, in the Miramar neighborhood. Whenever I saw it, I would wonder, with so many people without homes, why doesn't anyone live there?
The building was constructed in 1957 and was a project by architect Cristóbal Martínez Márquez. Its first owner was the trading company "Propiedad Horizontal Miramar S.A."
Riomar was conceived as a condominium, where people purchased their apartments before they were built. The interior details depended on each owner's preferences.
It was an elegant building, featuring 11 floors of apartments, a lobby, reception, mailboxes for correspondence, a telephone board, party halls, two swimming pools, six elevators, and parking spaces for each of its more than 200 apartments, among other amenities.
The maintenance of the building created jobs, as it included services for which the owners paid a monthly fee. This continued until 1960 when the Urban Reform Law was enacted in Cuba.
Those who were owners and left the country lost their apartments. But interestingly, this community was never handed over to the less fortunate. It was declared a frozen zone, and the vacant apartments were occupied by "foreign technicians."
Chilean, Russian, German, Bulgarian, and Czech individuals, as well as esteemed Cuban professionals from within the country, stayed there, coming to the capital to take on significant roles in the government.
However, according to an interview conducted by Havana Times with a resident of the building, these Cubans represent only 4 of the 14 families currently living in this dilapidated structure.
The company Cubalse owned Riomar. In 2001, they made an attempt to restore it to build offices. This pretext was used to gather the owners in one of the building's blocks.
Once they achieved it, there was no budget to undertake such a project. In 2009, the Cuban government restructured Cubalse, and it remains unclear who now owns this building.
Currently, the owners who still inhabit the building have documents for apartments that are not the ones they reside in.
This forces families to stay in Riomar despite the dangers it poses. They cannot repair their homes with their salaries, sell their apartments, or exchange them. Their lives are tied to the ruins of a property that the sea erodes more deeply each year.
Riomar was a victim of the Cuban government's neglect. They were never able to fully occupy it. They also couldn’t provide the wonderful apartments to their political leaders, as it would have been a scandal for them to live in a building with a pool in the most expensive neighborhood in Havana.
They couldn't turn it into a hotel because it was designed to be the home for 200 families. They preferred to let it decay with a selfish attitude of "if it isn't mine, it won't belong to anyone."
I still see it resisting the passage of time and the onslaught of the ocean. Riomar is Le Corbusier's "machine for living" in Havana and the greatest example of neglect in Cuba.
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