A video posted on Facebook by the Cuban Wil Alarcón showcases the total state of ruin in which Playa El Rosario finds itself, an old popular resort located on the southern coast of the municipality of Güines, in the province of Mayabeque.
In the images, Alarcón traverses the remnants of the place where he grew up and narrates with sorrow what he finds: There's nothing left over there, everything is destroyed. The cyclone took everything.
The author identifies each place he inhabited: the barracks, the corner where the bodega was, Henry's bar, the access road, and the houses of the "little beach of the 5th". "What remains now are these childhood memories we had," he laments.
The images accompanying the testimony depict a devastated coastline: tires scattered on the sand, dry logs, debris, a dilapidated dock, and remnants of partially submerged boats along the shore.
Only one person remains at the site. "This is the only friend left here from those times who takes care of this. So may God bless him for staying and for taking care of this," Alarcón says in the video.
The destruction of Playa El Rosario was not solely the work of cyclones. The town was dismantled in 2005 when the authorities of Güines took advantage of Hurricane Wilma’s passage to demolish with bulldozers around 100 homes, many of which had survived the cyclone, as documented by the independent media outlet Periodismo de Barrio.
Behind the demolition was a deliberate policy. Since 1999, municipal authorities imposed an "economic blockade" on the town, cutting budgets for summer activities with the explicit aim of forcing its residents to yield. In 2004, a year before the demolition, the neighbors were evacuated seven times, not only due to hurricanes but also because of simple southern winds.
After the dismantling, the authorities cut off the electricity supply to the entire town —except for the barracks of the Guardafronteras Troops— and eliminated public transportation. The town had about 233 working-age individuals, of which only 22 were state employees; the rest survived through informal artisanal fishing.
The promised relocation never materialized effectively. In 2017, many of the displaced families were still living in temporary shelters, according to the report "Memories of a Fiasco," published by Periodismo de Barrio and written by Julio Batista Rodríguez.
The case of Playa El Rosario falls within a broad pattern of deterioration of coastal and recreational spaces in Cuba. Places like Boca Ciega have recently been documented on social media in a state of total ruin, while the province of Mayabeque reports one of the highest coastal erosion rates in the country, with an average retreat of one to two meters per year over 70 kilometers of coastline, according to data from the Institute of Oceanology of Cuba from 2022.
Periodismo de Barrio titled its chronicle about this place "Memories of a Failure," a description that, more than two decades after the beginning of the dismantling, remains accurate.
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