Havana, the city of columns, as it was baptized by writer Alejo Carpentier, one of the most remarkable cuban novelist, insists in the fact that time and the economic difficulties wont´t destroy it like has happened to many other cities around the world. Havana also has an important enemy: Modernity, the same one that has damaged most of the big cities of America. Havana was the favorite place for the enormous market of the XIV, XVII and XVIII centuries. It had the best walls, erected to defend it and also had the best animies of all. Of that history, there are only ruins today, but still wide and prodigious columns.

The Historical Center, the city framed inside the old walls that protected it from pirates and enemies from Spain, embraces 210 hectares and 242 blocks. There are approximately 4 000 constructions, 900 of them considered important patrimonial monuments.

More than half or its space is devoted to housing and squares, parks and bigon-residential buildings that occupy a 25% around 70 000 people live in the Historical Center, approximately the same number of inhabitants that lived there one century ago.Its historical center, settled down in 1519, is the oldest portion of the city and, at the same time, the saltpeter and economic penuries. Havana is the capital of a blocked country, besieged during 40 years, without any sure market or finances. Its saviors have granted it a value, nor very appreciated in similar cities: This is a city not simply with a tourist scenario or a cold and devastating museum: people there live, work, suffer, enjoy and love. It is city very much alive and comfortable.

The city was once considered lost. The authorities almost reached to that conclusion, but it survived, and it was thanks to the iniative, the love and the perseverance of a passionate and enterprising man: Eusebio Leal Spengler. By the end of the seventies, he convinced the highest authorities that Old Havana should be reconstructed to impede its mortal fall. It wa urgently necessary a severe rehabilitation plan and the national and international help to save the city.

The Office of the Historian of the City together with the support of the government began the titanic work of rescuing defend its substructures. It was of important to mobilize everybody, from the international organisms and the national authorities to the inhabitants of the district. It was an urgent call in all directions. A year later, UNESCO declared the Historical Center and its fortresses, World Heritage. The first battle had been won. The Cuban government assigned big attributions for its development. The oldest area of capital undertook an intense restoration process. It initially embraced a cultural, historical and architectural character. The work was praiseworthy and valid, but insufficient. It was a very expensive quest.

From that moment on, in front of your eyes, there is a colossal masterpiece: almost every day the visitor can see a restoration work finished or a beginning of a new construction. "Stone by stone" seems to be the slogan on the project and meter by meter, we realize that the Historical Center is resurrecting.The Old Havana is not only an area of museums and rescued architectural pieces, and because of its rehabilitation it cannot become a ghost city, hardly populated or full of institutions and public and gastronomic places. The Historical Center is, in indeed, alive.