A friend, born and raised in Cayo Hueso, in Havana, has asked me for photos of the people and the streets of that neighborhood. A few years ago, my friend “crossed the pond” and, after going around and around in Miami, due to those coincidences of life, he ended up settling on a small island with the same name as his native neighborhood, but in the Straits of Florida, in the Key West over there.
“Asere, here everyone calls it Key West, in English, but I cling to saying it in Spanish: ‘Caio Hueso,’“ my friend blurts out, with a distinctly Havana accent so that there is no doubt about what he is referring to. “It’s a way of being close to the neighborhood where I was born,” he concludes, from a distance, in a WhatsApp audio.
A few days ago I rummaged through my photographs to carry out the task. To my surprise I found a lot of material. On many occasions I have walked, camera in hand, through the streets of Havana’s Cayo Hueso.
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The history of this neighborhood goes back before it had that name. Jacques de Sores disembarked on July 10, 1555, through the old Juan Guillén cove, exactly between where the Torreón and Parque Maceo are located today. The French corsair looted and then burned the Township de San Cristóbal de La Habana. The story goes that the first to confront the villain were the residents of the area. In other words, the courage of the residents of Cayo Hueso is a trait that could be considered hereditary.
According to historical data, in the first half of the 19th century the area was already urbanized. A map of Havana inside and outside the walls, dated 1853, confirms this. At that time, some of the wealthiest Havana families had lavish estates there. Such is the case of the Aramburus and the Oquendos. Hence the name of a couple of streets that currently run through Cayo Hueso.
At the end of that century, Cuban tobacco workers who returned to Cuba after living in Tampa and Key West, in the United States, began to reside there. Many of those workers had known José Martí and attended his speeches at the time when he brought together Cuban men and women in exile.
In fact, several cigar-making factories were opened in the area at that time. This meant that, in the Cuban republican era, Cayo Hueso was a central point of the Cuban labor movement.
In this way and to remember their old neighborhood on the island of Florida, the new neighbors asked to baptize this little part of Havana as Cayo Hueso. The name was made official on July 26, 1912, after an agreement by the Havana City Council.
To learn more about Havana’s Cayo Hueso, I wrote to Joanna Vidal, a great friend and colleague in journalism, who, as I remember, always proudly told some stories about Centro Habana.
Joa is from the San Leopoldo neighborhood, but “if they ask me, I say I’m from Cayo Hueso, because of my grandmother who lived there. It was she who educated me. That is why I know more about Cayo Hueso than about my neighborhood,” she writes to me in a chat conversation, from Spain.
“I will tell you some things that I know and others that my grandmother told me. To begin with, the people of Cayo Hueso are not the typical descendants of slaves, rather they are blacks and mestizos of a higher class, mostly descendants of artisans and other manufacturers. In addition to the workers, the other point of interest was the students, since there were many hostels, tenement houses and buildings that used to rent due to their proximity to the University of Havana. In this way, you have a very interesting cultural and ethnic mix: on the one hand the workers, mostly cigar makers, who were black and mestizo in a high percentage; on the other, university students, almost all white males from the middle and upper classes.
“This neighborhood is the perfect mix of what we Cubans are.… Due to this mestizaje and because people from different parts of Cuba came to settle in the neighborhood, it began to be a cultural focus, that is why many famous musicians or artists from the 20th century were born or lived in Cayo Hueso: Chano Pozo, Los Zafiros, Juan Formell, Ángel Díaz (an exponent of the filin, a movement that emerged in the Callejón de Hamel), Omara Portuondo, Elena Burke and filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, among others. It has also been a very stigmatized neighborhood.
“In its time, I understand that the prestige of the neighborhood was not good, especially in the first half of the 20th century. The bad reputation was associated with violence. It was said that those who lived there were ‘problematic people,’ but behind that were racial prejudices against blacks and, above all, against religions such as the Abakuá. That is why these cultural movements and recognized artists served to legitimize the neighborhood, to give it social recognition.”
What would be the inescapable particularity of Cayo Hueso?
“I think that the enigma of the neighborhood is in its sense of belonging. Being a neighborhood founded by people who came from other places in its origins and being nucleated in working-class and cultural societies influenced a sense of belonging. That is why what the neighborhood locals do is consumed first or supported. It’s like a kind of brotherhood among its people: they support what belongs to them because that also gives recognition to the neighborhood, it gives it prestige.
“Few neighborhoods in Cuba have that sense of belonging. In fact, we Cubans brag about our provinces, at best our municipalities, but the people of Cayo Hueso prioritize their entire neighborhood, not even the municipality or province to which they belong. There is a pride in being from Cayo Hueso that is instilled from the family itself.
“For example, my grandmother, Juana Jústiz, born in Cayo Hueso, on Soledad Street, in 1923, when she grew up she would go to buy in the agricultural markets there, she would do everything in that neighborhood, although she lived in a nearby neighborhood. That is why El Dany, the popular reggaeton performer who died at the age of 31 in 2020, is an idol there and not another reggaeton idol. It’s like a pride, because ours, who are humble, are progressing and we, the people of their neighborhood, have to support them.
“Now on a corner of San Francisco Street, where El Dany met with his longtime friends and played basketball, even when he was internationally famous, there is an altar in his memory made spontaneously by the people of the neighborhood.”
Joa mentioned Chano Pozo. And if we talk about Chano and Cayo Hueso, a cajon box sounds (that sociocultural manifestation of African roots, one of the pillars of Cuban identity).
Although Luciano (Chano) Pozo González was born on a tenement house in Vedado, he grew up in the streets of the Centro Habana neighborhood, where he partied and fought very hard to overcome poverty. That Cuban black who danced in Cayo Hueso with the street dancers and became an Abakuá, jumped from the Africa tenement house to beat his drums in New York and left his mark on the history of jazz. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie soaked up his charisma and talent. With Gillespie and Walter “Gil” Fuller, Chano composed “Manteca” in 1947, one of the jewels of Afro-Cuban jazz.
About Chano Pozo’s time in Cayo Hueso and a jump to the present, writer and inveterate music lover Leonardo Padura wrote “Chano Pozo. The summit and the abyss.” In that article, Padura relates:
“Actually, Cayo Hueso is no longer Cayo Hueso. Of the old and recognized ferocity of this Havana neighborhood, only the echoes of its miserable and violent fame remain; of its most renowned and gloomy tenement houses, what survives now, if anything, is an old facade incapable of capturing what was in its entrails. At present, one can retrace its most famous streets at any time of the day ― or night ― without fearing that a stealthy knife will pierce a lung or that they will frame you on a corner and even take off your underpants.
“Now in Cayo Hueso there are large, clean, even luxurious buildings, and Trillo Park is a place for kids to run and have fun.
“For many years this neighborhood, with an advantage over Pueblo Nuevo and Belén, has disputed the paternity of Chano Pozo, that street percussionist who, in record time and with his Cuban drums, managed to revolutionize the bebop revolution. Following the trail of Chano Pozo I retrace and wander through Cayo Hueso, I talk on the corners, I observe the places he frequented, I breathe the air that he breathed and suddenly I feel that the neighborhood is the same as before and I manage to hear the frenetic rumba box that has been set up on the Rancho Grande tenement house, I hear the cries of the fratricidal quarrel that is going on in Trillo Park and I watch with a foreigner’s suspicion the stormy passage of two tough men who warn out loud that they do not even believe in the mother who gave birth to them and they’ll kill anyone.…”
Cayo Hueso is much more than one of the Centro Habana municipality’s people’s councils. Much more than its well-known Trillo Park or the colorful Callejón de Hamel, it is one of the most visited places by tourists on their way through Havana. Cayo Hueso, that grid delimited by a part of the Malecón, Zanja Street, Belascoaín road and Infanta Street, is one of the most genuine and lively faces of Cuban identity and culture. That territory is a living example of the metaphorical Cubanism coined by Fernando Ortiz as “our national ajiaco” to explain the diversity and heterogeneity of our sociocultural formation. Cayo Hueso is an unsweetened Cuba, where its people persist and struggle their daily life.
***
Kaloian Santos Cabrera
With a Soviet Zenit camera, some money and a bag holding more illusions than clothes or food, I started traveling with my backpack through Cuba when I was 18 years old. Photography and journalism then appeared as a need and would become for always a form of militancy.
