Eusebio Leal (with suit and tie in front) giving Fidel Castro a walking tour of the Old Havana |
By David Montgomery, The Washington Post, May 20, 2012
Eusebio Leal, a diminutive, silver-haired man in a dark suit, sips sweet
Cuban coffee in an elegant salon of the Cuban Interests Section mansion on 16th
Street NW and recalls the day they began calling him crazy in Havana.
The year was 1967,
in a country not known for rewarding dissent, and Leal, then 25, was relatively
new on the job as a city preservationist. He was leading a project to skin the
asphalt off a historic street, revealing the original wooden surface, and he had
a special load of vintage wood to restore the centuries-old grandeur. But
government officials told him the street would have to be paved over
immediately so it could be used for an important diplomatic visit.
The next morning, crews came to do the work — and Leal lay in front of
the trucks to save the street.
“The mayor had to come to persuade me,” Leal recalls in his deep
voice, through an official interpreter. “I didn’t get up until he guaranteed
that we could complete our work. He kept his word. It was a very tense moment.
Then they started saying I was a madman — but in that kind of aspect in which
being a madman is a good thing.”
All these years later, at 69, Leal’s mad passion has made him a
beloved figure in Cuba and a globally admired hero of the historic preservation
movement. With the unlikely title of city historian, he has rescued hundreds of
landmark buildings in Old Havana — Habana Vieja — the colonial section of the
city founded in 1519. He devised a mechanism to use tourist dollars to fund preservation,
making the city more attractive to visitors — thus begetting more tourist
dollars and more preservation.
He did it while taking a stand against gentrification, and against the
theme-parking of history, by insisting that real people must continue to live,
work, study and retire amid the historic plazas, palaces, museums and boutique
hotels.
Leal filled lecture halls in the District and New York last week,
sharing the human drama and professional secrets of his work with kindred
spirits for whom standing in front of demolition bulldozers is utterly sane.
“He had a vision, and he made it happen,” says Richard Moe, former president of the National Trust for
Historic Preservation, introducing a talk by Leal at the trust. “The restored
Plaza Vieja [Old Plaza] . . . is now one of the great public spaces not just in
Cuba, not just in this hemisphere, but in the world.”
One reason the licensed cultural tours to Cuba by groups
such as the trust and National Geographic are all the rage among
the cosmopolitan set is they offer a glimpse of Leal’s work. The U.S. government
permits few other opportunities to visit the island.
Back home, Leal likes to walk the streets of Old Havana. He started a
radio and television show called “Andar la Habana” (“Walking Havana”).
“I’ve
walked with him in Havana, and people come up to him to ask him favors, and,
more than favors, people come to him to thank him,” says Gustavo Araoz,
president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. “He has immense
popular support.”
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