Dr Leal made slummy Old Havana into a beautiful city

Eusebio Leal Spengler (1942-2020) was 16 when the dictator Fulgencio Batista, having made millions from bribes from mafia-run casinos, fled into exile on New Year’s Day 1959. A devout Catholic, Leal rushed to ring the church bells to usher in the new era, as heaps of Habaneros took to the streets in jubilation.

Presidential palace
made into Palace of the Revolution

After the 1959 revolution brought Fidel Castro to power, public ed­ucation in Cuba became free. Leal grew up in poverty, spending his young years in lib­rar­ies reading history and architecture. He was made an apprentice in the Office of Historian. 

At the City Hist­or­ian’s office, Leal’s role was more hands-on construction worker than chronicler of Havana’s past. Inspired by a childhood spent absorbing the colours and crowds of Old Havana, he dreamt of reversing the city’s 1960s stagnation and rekindling the magic of earl­ier eras, Baroque, Neoclassical or Art Deco.

 In 1975, earned a bach­el­or’s degree in history. Later he got a Ph.D in historical sciences from Havana University.

While Che Guevara and Castro still lurk on countless Havana bill boards, Leal was more subtle. In Cuba he commanded widespread resp­ect but outside Cuba, few have heard of him. Yet over 50 years, this academic trans­formed Old Havana from a crum­bling slum into the finest restoration project in the Americas.

His work started unpromisingly. Leal spent years on his first rest­oration project, converting the C18th governor’s pal­ace in Havana’s Plaza de Armas into the city’s main museum. In 1961 Cuba had been hit by Pres. Kenn­ed­y’s trade embargo; Castro’s post-revolutionary government was more inter­es­t­ed in its survival than revisiting Havana’s imprecise past. And see the Presidential Palace on Havana’s Plaza 13 de Marzo; in 1974, it became the Museum of the Revolution.

Leal focused his preservation efforts in the 1980s, when the old cen­tre of the capital was a ruin. Residents lived without indoor plumbing or reliable electricity, garbage piled up on the streets, and 250-year-old buildings sometimes collapsed before their eyes. By renov­at­ing Havana’s colonial core, Leal safe­guarded the best of the city’s archit­ecture, helped resuscitate the Cuban economy and enhan­ced the capital’s flag­g­ing infrastructure with many soc­ial projects. And Leal found an early ally. His museum work attracted the eye of Celia Sánchez, an historical archivist close to the new regime and an entry into the higher echelons of the Cuban gov­er­n­ment. With Sán­chez’s help, Old Havana became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. Still isolated by Kennedy’s embargo, the city’s col­onial relics looked awful but at least they were prot­ected from demolition.

Times were getting harder. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba’s economy fell over, as Cubans struggled to find enough food for their families. Ironically, the upheaval offered Leal the bigg­est opp­ortunity of his career. Note that Fidel Castro was a trained lawyer. Out of the economic crisis Castro, whom Leal had befriended, gave him unique authority to collect taxes and pro­fits from tourism in the old centre. The government was forced to turn to tourism to res­cue its stuttering economy. As hotel develop­ment was prescribed for Cuba’s northern beaches, Leal con­vinced Castro that Havana’s unique but frayed historical her­it­age, could lure visitors. 

To avoid turning the colon­ial centre into a hist­or­ical theme park, Leal redesigned the city as an authentic living space that provided social bene­fits for the quarter’s 65,000 inhab­itants. For every tourist ho­t­el and museum, there was to be a local comm­it­t­ee, care home and school. And behind the Fototeca de Cuba Gallery on Plaza Vieja, a Spanish court yard with 8 new flats were inhabited by the original families.

In 1994 Leal set up Habaguanex, a state-run company, and ploughed money in­to his projects. Armed with US$1 million from the govern­ment and the prom­ise of nurturing further investment from abroad, Haba­g­uanex converted semi-ruined colonial buil­d­ings into hotels and mus­eums, remain­ing totally faith­ful to their original designs. As the tourists arrived, the money Hab­aguan­ex banked was invested back into the city, for hist­or­ic­al preservation and urban regener­at­ion.

As Habaguanex became a self-financing entity, Leal created a mast­er­plan, splitting Old Havana into coded zones and prioritis­ing buildings by their condition, age and historical importance. The first to be renovated under the plan was Ambos Mundos Hotel, a fav­ourite of Ernest Hemingway. Ot­her hotels followed, along with mus­eums, antique shops, redesigned rest­aur­ants and muscular forts. One arcade and office building from 1917 und­erwent a city-led rest­oration and reopened in 2017 as the Hotel Manzana Kempinski.

Casa de Juan Mata on the Plaza Vieja.
It became became Fototeca de Cuba Gallery in 1986

Arcade and office building 1917, 

now Hotel Manzana Kempinski

Residential street, renewed

By 2011 Cuba was attracting 3 mill vis­itors a year and Hab­aguanex’s init­ial start-up fund of $1 mill had grown to $119 mill in annual revenue. Paradoxically Old Havana became a capitalist succ­ess story: the restored buildings drew foreign tourists whose money then paid for more restorat­ion. But the process was slow and Old Havana’s renewal came at a cost i.e some residents had to be relocated when the overcrowded buildings were modernised. 

As head of the Office of Historian, Leal had employed 3,000 workers and was hailed as a hero for conservationists every­where. Now there is hardly a street or square in Old Havana that doesn’t show Leal’s mark. He received Orders of Merit from 6 countries and in 2012, Hav­ana was named one of the 25 World Heritage sites with great conser­vation practices. Joshua David of the World Monuments Fund in New York visited Havana for Leal’s 2017 workshop on architectural rest­oration. Yet Leal remained an un­pret­­ent­ious figure who loved walking Havana’s streets. 

By the mid-2000s, c300 buildings, a third of those in Old Havana, had been renovated. Leal, who died in July 2020 aged 77, was called The Cuban who Saved Havana, a tire­less am­bassador for his city. Working within the Comm­unist system, he pion­eered a net­work that saved the district’s arch­itectural heritage at the same time as maintaining its community life.