People who use these rooms – tourists in search of very cheap sex, people having affairs or giving in to forbidden passions, low-class prostitutes denied admission at luxury hotels, young couples or humble folk who do not have a place where they can spend a few hours together – cannot be too picky.Ī night in a room in the cheapest hotel in Cuba can cost as much as two months’ worth of one’s salary. When possible, someone builds a small annex with the materials that turn up, materials that are almost always scavenged from a nearby place where a similar building has collapsed.Ī room, even one built thanks to a chance-event like that, will always be put to good use: the kids will one day become adults and need a private space of their own and, more importantly, in Old Havana, one of the city’s most densely-populated areas, renting rooms by the hour has become a business that does not require much investment. These families make the most of the few square meters of their overcrowded dwellings. Today, it is one of the many shabby tenement buildings on Aguiar street, in the heart of Havana’s old town, a working-class apartment block where more than twenty families have settled wherever they have found the space. HAVANA TIMES - Though many years of neglect have effaced some its former splendor, one can still tell the building was once a luxurious colonial mansion. Ernesto Perez Chang Apartment building on Aguiar St.
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