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Terça-feira, 17/9/2002 Por que Fidel destruiu Havana Eduardo Carvalho
"Decay, when not carried to excess, has its architectural charms, and ruins are romantic: so romantic, indeed, that eighteenth-century English gentlemen built them in their gardens, as pleasantly melancholic reminders of the transience of earthly existence. But Fidel Castro is no eighteenth-century English gentleman, and Havana is not his private estate, for use as a personal memento mori. The ruins of Havana that he has brought into being are, in fact, the habitation of over 1 million people, whose collective will, these ruins attest, is not equal in power to the will of one man. "Comandante en jefe," says one of the political billboards that have replaced all commercial advertisements, "you give the orders." The place of everyone else, needless to say, is to obey. "Forty-three years of totalitarian dictatorship have left the city of Havana-one of the most beautiful in the world-suspended in a peculiar state halfway between preservation and destruction. The terrible damage that Castro has done will long outlive him and his regime. Untold billions of capital will be needed to restore Havana; legal problems about ownership and rights of residence will be costly, bitter, and interminable; and the need to balance commercial, social, and aesthetic considerations in the reconstruction of Cuba will require the highest regulatory wisdom. In the meantime, Havana stands as a dreadful warning to the world-if one were any longer needed-against the dangers of monomaniacs who believe themselves to be in possession of a theory that explains everything, including the future." Eu só faria um reparo: Dalrymple diz que a palavra usada para denominar pequenos restaurantes em Cuba, paladares, é originária da espanhola paladar. Não é. Quando restaurantes privados começaram a ser permitidos em Cuba - sob rigorosa legislação, que ainda hoje impede que tenham mais do que um determinado número de mesas -, os cubanos estavam encantados com uma dessas novelas brasileiras, que esqueci o nome, em que uma famosa atriz, que também esqueci o nome, era proprietária de um restaurante popular que se chamava justamente "Paladar". Para quem duvidava: eis aí uma de nossas importantes influências culturais em países economicamente desenvolvidos. Eduardo Carvalho |
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