Cubans have reacted with indignation on the networks to the progress of the construction of a new hotel being built on the block previously occupied by the Payret cinema and the Kid Chocolate room.
“They destroyed the #CinePAYRET with a poster and everything, literally,”user Erwin Powell commented on Twitter, along with a very significant image that shows the moment when a crane removes the cartel with the name of the emblematic Havana cinema.
For the writer and activist Ariel Maceo Telléz, “the dictatorship finished destroying the Payret cinema, one of the oldest cinemas in the country and in all of America. A cinema that is a symbol of Havana, but we already know that the socialists do not like authentic symbols, that is why they are responsible for destroying them, in order to impose themselves."
For his part, the user Echezabal JDHe showed historical and current images of the cinema on Facebook that allow us to verify the process of deterioration that it suffered over the years.
“What Castroism took away... 145 years after being inaugurated by the Spanish Government on the Island, the Castro Dictatorship murders the #Payret Cinema. They will turn it into another hotel for tourists that will generate foreign currency for the Dictatorial Dome in power,” he predicted along with the images.
In February,Work began on the construction of the Manzana Payret tourist complex and the Pasaje hotel, in the capital's corner of Parque Central, where a good part of the latest investments of the Cuban regime are concentrated through the business-military conglomerate that controls tourism in Cuba.
Although Cuban authorities, including the city's late historian Eusebio Leal Spengler,They assured that the historic cinema will be respected and maintain its function as an exhibition hallAt the time the works began, it is unknown whether this official commitment will be respected by the investors.
"Regarding the Payret hotel, which will actually be built on that block, I declare that this will not affect the integrity of the cinema-theater in any way, rather it will contribute to its restoration and reopening as what it has always been, a public service institution," Leal said in a 2019 interview, a year before his death.
“The Payret will continue to be a cinema for Cubans and its maximum prices will not exceed the value paid today to access similar facilities such as the Martí and National theaters of Cuba,” he added.
Leal has also described the comments about the possible construction of the luxury hotel in the cinema as “an act of continued bad faith.”
In that sense, he clarified that those who did it “are unaware and manipulate the responsibility assumed for many years by the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana.” However, José Reinaldo Daniel Alonso, general director of Development of the Ministry of Tourism (MINTUR),He had assured in December 2018 that the final decision was in his Ministry.
The beginning of construction last February revived the controversy on social networks and several activists expressed their concern about the opacity of the project, of which no details are known so far. In the absence of official clarification, Cubans are concerned about the conservation of their heritage and the details of the project, the investors, the cost of the works and so on.
The history of Payret theater cinema, inaugurated on January 21, 1877, begins in the colonial era, accompanies the War of Independence, the birth of a republic and reaches the revolutionary stage and even the 21st century. The history of Cuban art has paraded through its stage and screen.
After 1959, the Payret was used mostly as a cinema. It was restored in 1969, 1981 and 2008, the latter two with a view to it becoming part of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema.
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