Called 'The Great Sofa,' there's nothing sleepy about Havana's Malecon
By WILL WEISSERT - Associated PressThey call it "The Great Sofa" because hundreds of Cubans sit here day and night, year-round. The fabled Malecon seawall, a concrete promenade separating a jammed six-lane boulevard and an often-angry Atlantic, is always crowded - but never with the same crowd.
"It's like New York," said Fernando Roldan, a 37-year-old masseuse who was guzzling rum as he lounged on the seawall after midnight one weekend. "It never sleeps."
A typical dawn finds fishermen on the low wall over the waves, casting into inky blue water glistening with run-off from a refinery that billows black smoke in the distance.
Children heading to school walk atop the wall, casting shadows as long as the adults on the adjacent sidewalk. A woman faces the ocean and crosses herself, mouthing a prayer before hurrying on to work, while a brigade of street sweepers fans out - sometimes steering their wooden brooms around chatty drunks still going from the night before.
U.S. military engineers first began building the Malecon in 1901, paving over scrub brush while American forces still occupied Cuba following the Spanish-American War. Today, it stretches 6 1/2 kilometres from Old Havana west, past the office of the American mission and the black flags Cuba flies outside its windows, and on to the Almendares River.
In the late morning one Friday, Luis Alvarez, a 25-year-old culinary student in a red baseball cap faded almost colourless by the sun, sat staring into the waves lapping rocks carpeted with algae. Occasionally he sprang to his feet and paced the wall, throwing bits of bread - a lopsided roll he gets daily with his ration card - into the surf.
Most fisherman use makeshift poles, but Alvarez had nothing but a spool of fishing line and a naked hook. He said men in wet suits and scuba masks obtain permits to ply the waters away from shore hunting for marlin, sometimes spooking smaller tiger fish back into the rocks where they might be hooked using the bread crumbs.
"It takes hours," he said.
Alvarez said he hoped to catch at least two fish because it was his father's birthday. One he could cook, he explained, and the second would fetch enough money for a bottle of rum to go with dinner.
A man throws his dog in for a swim during low tide in front of the seawall and promenade known as the Malecon in Havana, in this file photo. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)More:
http://travel.canoe.ca/Travel/Caribbean/LesserAntilles/2007/07/29/4376792-ap.html
Topic: Havana's 'Great Sofa' (Read 2201 times)