Photo Feature by Idania Cardenas
HAVANA TIMES – The Havana shopping center Galerias de Paseo is located facing the Havana malecon and very close to the Melia Cohiba Hotel. Today it is completely in ruins, dirty, destroyed, with peeling paint, and without lighting at the entrance. Most people head to the dollarized state market (MLC) on the first floor. Walking through its aisles is a real challenge because you don’t know if it’s a market or a warehouse. All the store aisles are filled with merchandise that accumulates up to the entrance of the market itself.
For those who don’t want to climb the access ramp, where you can stumble upon merchandise and holes in the floor, there are also stairs with several broken steps on their edges that haven’t seen a broom in months, perhaps years.
The top floor of Galerias Paseo is its boutique store area, but even those supposedly glamorous locales do not escape the dirt and crisis of the environment. You hardly find any employees or customers, there are closed departments, people with little desire to work, little stimulus.
At the entrance, the security guard with the phone selecting music to entertain the few customers who visited the stores that day. At the exit, a colorful sign that says “Magic World” a place that a few years ago was a children’s store, now only sells basic products for people living in the area that are controlled by the ration card. There, each person can buy once a month in National Currency.
And so ends this tour of Galerias de Paseo, which was once a center where people could afford to go shopping and enjoy the journey, now turned into ruins.
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