Cuba Calling: Havana, a Work in Progress by Mark Jolly

But, her songs of bruised majesty won't last forever. So go now, before it’s too late. Before somebody bothers to switch the music, before it becomes South Beach.

I first found it, or rather heard it, in the roar of the cariola. I had decided, like any decent tourist, to spend Day One getting gloriously lost among the cobbled backstreets of Old Havana. No map. No route. And no ideas to trace, save my aimless meanderings. But as I wandered, mesmerized by the maze of decaying mansions, jungled courtyards and narrow passageways, I was rudely startled by a thunderous, alien rattle.

I spun around, expecting to see some monstrous machine. Instead, I was confronted by a child on a ramshackle scooter - a cariola - fashioned from scrappy wooden slats and an old car axle. In its crude bricolage construction, I saw something sturdier and eminently cooler than those trendy chrome Razor wagons that had become the fleeting accoutrements of urban America for a summer or two. I saw beauty in the life of an everyday thing. I saw Cuba.

Cariolas, I later learned, were a part of most every young Habanero's experience - and yet each model is a totally unique realization, redolent of the city itself. With a 500-year architectural heritage that jump-cuts between colonial, neo-classical and art deco, interfused with a street-style dose of 1950s Americana (courtesy of all those old Chevys and Oldsmobiles) and the odd concrete turd (courtesy of the Kremlin), Havana is a Caribbean port like no other: a composite of crumbling splendour that wears its rough-around-the-edges smile with a singular faded elegance.

In recent years, the city has undergone a mammoth restoration project - which, coupled with a legalized dollar and a global Latino fetish, has fueled a new tourist economy. Yet the new gloss has also washed away some of the old color. Since their paint lick, Old Havana's two main squares, Plaza de Armas and Plaza de la Catedral, have been taken over by the hawkers and the camera-wielding clowns. And several revitalized pockets of the city seem to have been conspicuously cleared of Cubans altogether, aside from the ones left smiling and singing and maraca-ing Buena Vista favourites for the tourists.

To really absorb the spirit of the city, you have to penetrate the less polished sections - anywhere south of Plaza Vieja - or go beyond Old Havana entirely and into the heart of adjoining Centro. You won't find any sightseers here or any of the ubiquitously posted guardia officers that patrol the tourist zones. In fact, you won't find much at all, beyond people leaning up against doorways and whiling away the hours in some of the most densely populated barrios in the world. This Havana has long quit trying to glam it up for the boys: Corinthian colonnades are gnarled to the bone; severed shutters dangle in the half-light between a thousand shades of blue and pink and gold; and layers upon layers of frescoes peel one under another, like strips of polychromatic rotting bark.

"In the United States you have all these clean, neat houses," says artist Carlos Estévez, "but with the buildings here you can really feel the old stories, the ghosts of yesterday, the lost souls." Estévez, who works out of an alleyway studio cluttered with random street collectibles he has salvaged, leads me to a tattered model airplane cheekily attached to makeshift propellers that were once the blades of three electric fans. I ask where the plane's corroded metal body comes from. Estévez frowns, as if the answer were painfully obvious. "The garbage," he says.

"I'm interested in objects that can't be replaced," he continues, "objects that are not made in a factory, objects that have a sense of history." He flashes me a knowing smile. "It flies." It what? "Well, to me it flies," he returns, "in the imagination."

It's this raw creative sense, born from a bare-basics environment, that informs so much of contemporary Cuban design. "Remember, as ordinary people we have not had any access to decorative materials," says Esther Cardosa, an actress and artist who remodelled her turn-of-the-century home in Centro using classic colonial motifs. As we look from her terrace into a decrepit art deco building opposite, where groups of teenage girls dance the rumba under a flickering fluorescent lamp, Cardosa elaborates: "No magazines for inspiration, no media culture whatsoever, no imports, no offices to contract designers, nothing."

Such constraints have bred a burgeoning recycling aesthetic, rooted in the intrinsic value of simple workaday objects, that I witnessed over and over again in Havana: in the cigar boxes of Antonio Rodríguez, who paints luminous Caribbean panoramas on the exteriors, leaving the utilitarian integrity of the interiors intact; and in the patchwork quilts of Ibrahim Miranda, who spent two years in the tobacco province of Pinar del Río collecting discarded shreds of fabric - old shirts, coverlets, tapestry - and then sewed them together to provide a multicoloured background for his monotone matchstick imprints.

"I don't like using conventional materials like canvas or paper," says Miranda, who also takes old maps of Cuba and paints over them until they are almost unrecognizable. "And I don't believe in the permanence or durability of art. For me, it's not about hanging it up on a wall your whole life but using it as an everyday piece."

Artist José Fuster treats his entire domestic surroundings as a canvas. For the past four years, he's been turning his three-story home in the sleepy fishing village of Jaimanitas, on the outskirts of Havana, into a tropical funhouse. In his own exuberant faux-cubist signature, through paint, ceramics and mosaics, Fuster has transformed every space imaginable: every pillar, beam, ceiling, fence, railing and patio tile.

From the moment you walk through the garden gates, plastered with an overwhelming collection of the artist's own ceramics, you realize you have just stepped into one of the most inventive homes in Cuba - or anywhere else for that matter. A huge heart-shaped "love window" has been carved into a ground-floor wall. In the garden, the giant leaves of a banana tree brush against the mosaic leaves of a Fuster-crafted concrete palm. A few metres away shimmers the curvaceous image a mermaid from the bottom of the artist’s bespoke swimming pool.

Fuster calls the never-ending project "a celebration of the happiness of life," which strikes me as a far better approximation of the Cuban soul than anything co-opted from Das Kapital. But what happens when he runs out of space - does the journey stop? "Oh no," Fuster chuckles. "My next-door neighbours have asked me to start on their house, then there's a mural I have in mind for the building opposite, and then after that I want to start painting the street. Who knows - maybe I'll paint the whole town."

Havana itself is nothing if not a work in progress. It is a city of limitless discovery, a kaleidoscope of unfolding dramas that spill through open doorways to vistas of quiet urban poetry - a mottled courtyard, perhaps, where an old woman hangs her wash out to dry while the old boys play dominoes; or a long, rutted stairway that seems to rise interminably to forgotten worlds.

One such stairway, in the leafy neighbourhood of Vedado, climbs four steep stories and leads to the garden terrace of artist and sculptor Adela Herrera. An impossibly rich wonderland that has taken 18 years to create, Herrera's gallery-home is based on the rustic designs of Cuba's early settlers - rough daub walls, low sloping beams - ornamented with myriad objects she has collected from nearby beaches and demolished buildings.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Vedado was a notorious gambling-nightlife Mecca for moneyed Americans, not least the Mafia, who paid off General Batista for control of the neighbourhood’s casino business (at one point the largest in the world outside Las Vegas). The good times ended in 1959, when Castro took over what is now the Habana Libre Hotel and began to unleash 40 years of socio-political lunacy - while anyone who owned anything hit the Florida Straits. Today, the area is a grid of boulevards lined with gorgeous Beaux-Arts mansions, spiritless high-rises and legendary hotels (most notably, the Nacional). But up until the 1860s, Vedado, which means "forest reserve," was exactly that - wild countryside. It was in homage to the neighbourhood’s roots that Herrera envisioned her rooftop oasis.

"When Havana's elite fled the revolution, they abandoned these beautiful mansions," she tells me as we enjoy some home-cooked malanga (taro) fritters in the sticky city air. "It was only then that the rest of us discovered how ostentatious their sense of style was - like installing fireplaces in a climate where we're constantly trying to fight the heat, not add to it!"

Herrera expresses her decorative flair by integrating a panoply of salvaged antiquities into the very structure of her home - a decrepit well; wrought iron grilles; slave chains from a former sugar-plantation. Within the walls she has sunk collared bottles, which filter the sunlight in the same iridescent way as the colonial stained-glass windows one sees everywhere in Cuba. The genius, however, lies not so much in any one detail but in the way she has crafted a rambling, homespun historical tableau of her ravaged country.

Back on the streets of Havana, and the city’s iconography seems to wink so often with a certain irony. How, for example, did the planet’s last communist outpost wind up with big cigars and flash American cars - two of the most evocative clichés of fat-cat capitalism? And consider this. Cuba's two most venerated revolutionaries, José Martí (who forged the independence movement against Spain in the 1890s) and Che Guevara - both of whom were consummate writers and surely knew a thing or two about beauty - are memorialized by two of Havana’s greatest architectural cock-ups: a horrendously frigid obelisk honouring Martí (the city’s tallest structure), and a giant bronze wall sculpture of Che, which reproduces Korda’s fêted photo (yes that photo) while blocking out half of the Ministry of the Interior.

It's also beguiling how Havana feels so airy and open despite its mighty labyrinth of tight, narrow spaces - which goes a long way in explaining why it's among the most photogenic of Latin American cities. There is, of course, a practical reason for all those open doorways and glassless windows: basic ventilation. (It's something the Cubans inherited from the Spaniards, who of course got it from the Moors.) But beyond being an advertisement for natural air circulation, Havana's industry-standard postcard of locals sitting on stoops and gazing emptily across balconies seems almost to suggest something deeper: a collective waiting game. A people waiting for something, anything, but this.

As it stumbles about in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach to change, Cuba remains locked in a groove, the needle stuck, the bittersweet bolero played over and over. You know how everybody banged on about Berlin and Prague and Budapest in the early-’90s dawn of post-Cold-War Europe? Go now. Before they rebuild the place. Before it's too late.

Of course, nobody truly knows what will happen after Castro goes. Cuba’s oldest running joke still hangs as a weary question mark - not of when Fidel dies but if he dies. However, as UNESCO continues to sift through Havana's rubble, one thing is clear: her songs of bruised majesty won't last forever; chances are, they won’t last for very long at all. So yes, go. Before somebody bothers to switch the music, before it becomes South Beach, while Havana still sparkles - to borrow from Le Corbusier - as a beautiful catastrophe.