Havana
Writing

Havana is the most beautiful city in the world and it is falling down.

Frozen time · Crumbling grandeur · Music from open windows

Havana's famous architectural beauty — the Malecón seafront, the colonial Old Havana, the Art Deco cinemas — is inseparable from its state of deterioration. Buildings that would be restored and monetised anywhere else are inhabited, still beautiful, actively crumbling. This gives Havana a quality no other city has: the present and the past are in the same frame simultaneously, neither dominant. The city is gorgeous and breaking and people are living inside it right now.

"In Havana the 1957 Chevrolet is not a tourist attraction. It is a taxi. It goes where you need to go. The engine sounds like something that has been repaired many times by someone who understood it better each time."

Tumbleweed Words — Havana

The Havana writing is concerned with time — specifically with what happens to a place and its people when time moves at a different pace than the world around them. Not romantically: the economic reality of Havana is not romantic. But the quality of attention that the city produces in a writer — the heightened awareness of the present moment, of what is here now and may not be later — is a genuine gift.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and The Dundee Anthology. Pushcart-nominated. Five years on Substack.