With demand for fresh fruits and vegetables high, peasant production on the rise and many lots emptied by building collapses over the years, the most peculiar of places became sites for agropecuarios. Just a few blocks from where my cousin Rigoberto worked in Havana’s Santos Suárez neighborhood, the once privately owned, neighborhood movie theatre once frequented by residents as late as the 1970s was converted into a small peasant market, shown in image 5. Attesting to the unmet need for housing and for building materials, images 6 and 7 reveal how the offices of the historic, pre-Communist newspaper Cuba Libre were repurposed as residences and how Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police needed to post their own warning to those scavenging bricks that taking them jeopardized the lives of those on the other wall of this apparently abandoned, collapsed building.
