The task would have been a tall order anywhere, but carried out during the crippling austerity that plagued Cuba following the demise of the Soviet Union, it was nothing short of miraculous. By rehabilitating Havana’s colonial core, Leal not only safeguarded the best of the city’s architecture, he also helped resuscitate the Cuban economy and boost the capital’s flagging infrastructure with a raft of social projects. Overlooking crumbled pastel architecture of Spanish Italian majesty, the air carries the ocean across Habana Vieja, Havana Old Town: people sit chatting. Havana’s evolution from neglected eyesore to Unesco World Heritage Site was groundbreaking in more ways than one. The genius of Leal was not just what he did, but how he did it. There is so much life on the esplanade, from regular Cuban families enjoying a stroll, to vendors selling. The Malecn is an esplanade that starts in Old Havana and then continues for 8 km, taking you away from the city and into the suburbs. Yet, over the space of five decades, this modest academic transformed Old Havana from a crumbling slum into one of the finest restoration projects in the Americas. One of the key points of Old Havana is actually something that leads you away from it. Outside the country, few have heard of him. The ancient heart of the Caribbean’s largest city, Old Havana’s (or Habana Vieja’s. While Guevara’s face has adorned a thousand T-shirts and the ghost of Castro still lurks on countless Havana billboards, Leal’s legacy is more subtle. Old Havana’s streets are narrower than a broad alleyway and almost as old as Columbus.

Cuba’s greatest revolutionary might not be Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, but Havana’s city historian, Eusebio Leal Spengler, who died on 31 July 2020, aged 77.

The old havana