Climbing in Cuba

For most of us city dwellers, tall buildings are no big deal.  They abound in cities, and in the normal course of events we never see their stairways.  We use elevators as a matter of course.  Now I've heard of people who voluntarily take to the stairs for several flights to get their exercise, and I can see that would be  a pretty good workout, but it's not for me.  I'll take the elevator every time.

The summer I was 18, it was different.  I took a train to Washington DC for a little sightseeing.  When I got to the Washington Monument, there was a long line of tourists queued up to ride the elevators to the pinnacle, the highest point in the city.  The wait was about two hours.  In those days my energy was only exceeded by my impatience, and I discovered I could bypass the line and use the stairs to get to the top.  I started off two steps at a time.

Well, 555 feet (about the equivalent of a fifty story building) is lots of climbing, and after a few floors I settled down to a more sedate pace, but I eventually reached the top without having to stop to catch my breath.  But that was then and this is now when I couldn't hope to show such endurance.

On my first trip to Cuba I saw how the other half lives.  Havana has its share of tall buildings with the tallest at 37 floors.  Most of the tall ones run about 10 to 15 stories.  In a Communist country, the real estate belongs to the state, and so it is in Cuba.  Along with owning the buildings, the state is responsible for their elevators which in Cuba are under-maintained.  This means that in Cuba at any given time many buildings have non-working elevators as they wait for scant service or repair parts or sometimes complete replacements.

Talk about inconvenience!  To live or work on the eighth floor when the elevator doesn't work can be a big pain in the neck.  Aniplant's headquarters in 2005 and 2006 was an eighth floor apartment in a building with a broken elevator.  It had been that way for a long time, so on my second trip four of us took to the stairs.  I was fifteen or more years older than most of the others, but I kept up with them, and at the top, I was no more worn out than the others.  That experience put helping Aniplant get a new ground floor home at the top of our priorities.

Nora, Aniplant's President, lives in one of the better tall buildings in Havana near the top of the hill in Vedado.  She's on the 10th floor with a great view of the city and the sea and the building (1950's era) has two elevators with spotty service records.  More than once I've encountered elevators that didn't work and had to climb 10 floors with packages of supplies and donations of medicines.  On one trip, the lift was out and Nora told me the building was getting new replacement elevators.  Sure enough at the next trip the new elevators gleamed, free of graffiti and ready to lift silently one and all along with their luggage.

Thanks to broken elevators I've also climbed flights of stairs at Radio Progresso, Cuba's main radio station, more than one office building, and even a few times at my hotel which, at 11 floors was once (in the 1920's) Cuba's tallest building.

When you're visiting Havana you become aware there are fewer obese people in Cuba than there are here at home.  I always thought that was because of high food prices and low food supplies.

Maybe so, but for many it might also be caused by the extra exercise one gets when forced to by-pass broken elevators.

Les Inglis