Sierra Maestra Building 2017 - 2026
Havana, Cuba.
In 1957, Cuba lived under the regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The country was ruled by military personnel, lined with landowners and bankers. In the same year, a bold architectural project was created for the construction of a building of over 200 beachfront apartments on Puntilla beach, in Miramar, Havana.
The construction began in 1957 and was not completed until 1960.
With the arrival of the revolution, a large part of the residents of the so-called Rio Mar Building fled to the United States, and the state renamed it Sierra Maestra, in honor to the mountain range where the greatest battles of the revolution were fought.
At the height of the economy of the Cuban socialist regime in the 1980s, the building became a leisure space in the neighborhood, frequented by Soviet technicians and political figures, as well as by the local population.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had an extremely severe impact on the country, destroying any prospect of development and initiating a process of progressive suffocation that persists to this day.
The arrival of that economic crisis has historically coincided with the “Storm of the Century”, a tropical cyclone that flooded the entire capital and completely destroyed the facade of the building that was already deteriorating by the sea.
In the following months, the foreigners were removed from the apartments and the Cubans remained with the promise that they would be removed later.
As of 2019, 14 Cuban families were still living in the building that the government had declared uninhabitable.
In the years that followed, the island experienced four major weather events. Cyclones, hurricanes, and heavy rains left 328,000 people homeless. And once again, the Sierra Maestra building became a refuge for people with nowhere else to go.
Today, there are dozens of people who live in and visit the building.
Julio Rodrigues, 55, claims to be an unacknowledged relative of the Castro family, which ruled the country for 60 years. He is one of the building’s longest-standing residents.
Rodrigues and a few neighbors currently live on the ground floor of the building, where he sleeps on a makeshift bed and cooks over an open fire.
Diogenes and his daughter Idalin are new residents.
They moved into the building after losing their home in a tropical cyclone.
They live in a structurally damaged apartment on the second floor that still bears traces of the former residents: remnants of wallpaper, a few broken objects, and the metal frame that once supported a bed.
The issues that have already affected much of the island, ever since the energy blockade imposed by Trump and the United States was intensified, seem even more pressing in this context.
As the number of residents grows, so do waste production, energy problems, and issues with basic sanitation.
Residents often go up to the higher floors in search of materials to recycle, as well as to dismantle wooden furniture to use as firewood for cooking.
The Puntilla Beach, right next to the building, is visited by hundreds of people who, in reverence for the forces of nature, bring offerings to Iemanjá.
The sand is still littered with debris, remnants of concrete structures torn away by the tide and storms.
In this state, the beach becomes an extension of what the Sierra Maestra once was: a place of stories and dreams of a luxurious past that is gradually fading away, at the mercy of the winds and the elements.
Sierra Maestra is today a monument forgotten in time.
Every cracked wall and every steel beam twisted by history and by nature are the marks of a country in which changes are felt in the skin.
