The America Theater, in Galiano. Photo: Taken from www.teatroamerica.cult.cu.

It is in the 1930s when the construction of the skyscraper of the Galiano Causeway between Neptune and Concordia is projected, a building that resembles, it is said, Rockefeller Center, in New York. This building was surrounded by cinemas of more or less luxury, but Havana needed a theater of greater category. Thus arises the idea of adding to the work, on the ground floor, adjacent to Radio Cine, what would be the cinema-theater America. Its 1,775 seats would only be surpassed by the towns of Radio Cine itself, the National Theater and the Auditorium Theater.

This room and the building that houses it were inaugurated on March 29, 1941, with the premiere of Heaven and You, a film starring Bette Davis and Charles Boyer. While the hall received from the first moment the name of America, the building of 10 floors and two more levels in the tower, 67 apartments for rent, cafeteria-restaurant and two rooms for theater and cinema functions, one of which today occupies the House of Music, was never called or is called America. It is the building Rodríguez Vázquez, Spanish born in Lugo. His son, Antonio H. Rodríguez Cintras, who had it built, wanted it to be named after his father.

See and be seen

The first walk that Havana had was the Alameda de Paula. Over time, preferred sites for recreation and shopping shifted to other areas. By eighteen forty-something, the Paseo del Prado had already replaced the Alameda as a fashionable place. With the advent of the twentieth century, Cuban public life underwent important transformations, but tradition continued to prevail in the private sphere. The street walk was maintained in order to see and be seen. Obispo Street was the center of the morning visit, as the Prado was the place of appointments in the afternoons. At night, after the theatrical performances, the lobbies of the Inglaterra and Telégrafo hotels were filled and the youngest made time – or lost it – on the Sidewalk of the Louvre or in the first sections of San Rafael Street, where El Nevera, a bar of excellence, was located. After the evening shows, and also in the afternoons, it was common for families to go to El Anón del Prado, where its owner, José Cagigas, was reputed to make the best ice cream and soft drinks of the time. Adjacent to this establishment, originally located on Havana Street between Obispo and Obrapía, was the barbershop of Donato Milanés, of which Major General Mario García Menocal and Manuel Sanguily, "Don Manuel de los Manueles", as José Martí called him, were regular customers.

A legendary landmark

As in the old Théâtre de l'Opéra de Paris, in the basements of America dwells a ghost. There are many actors, stagehands and technicians who believe they hear, coming from the basement of the installation, arias from operas and anguished laments. As if the character created by Gaspar Lereox dragged through the basement of the theater the chains of his eternal despair.

Those cries have been heard for decades. Exactly since November 22, 1943, a day that marks a milestone of legend in the evolution of the show in Cuba. On that date there was a function that combined elements of theater and cinema. On the screen of the America Theater, the world premiere, at ten o'clock at night, of The Phantom of the Opera, with Claude Rains as the protagonist, while an hour before, technicians of the coliseum and the CMQ Circuit joined forces in the effort never undertaken to bring to the country in simultaneous transmission and by remote control the concert that would precede the film and that would be heard in Havana, Santa Clara, Camagüey and Santiago de Cuba. It was a gala in which more than those who could access the room were left out and in which President Fulgencio Batista appeared as a guest. (With information from Pedro Urbezo).

Beyond Belascoaín

In the early years of the twentieth century few were paved streets in Havana – asphalt began in 1908 – many were paved and others were tamped stones. For fear of mosquitoes, the water that accumulated in the street puddles was disinfected with oil. People insisted that milk be served directly from the cow's udder. So these animals remained tied up all day in front of the dairies waiting for the client, who came to the place with a jug, to ask for a real or a half of the liquid. At the end of the day the cowbells were placed on those quadrupeds and in a caravan they were moved beyond the Belascoaín Causeway, where, in the spaces that would later occupy the New Fronton – building of the CTC – and the Single Market, were the pastures. There were also herds of goats in the city, especially in the area from Galiano to Belascoaín. And fountains for mules and horses to drink that pulled cars and carts. Do not forget that, at that time, the aforementioned Manuel Sanguily affirmed that everything beyond Belascoaín "was, simply, the field".

The center of commerce

Until the early twentieth century the center of commerce and business was located around the Central Park and especially in O'Reilly, Obispo, San Rafael and Paseo del Prado. The so-called Banking District, our little Wall Street, was framed between O'Reilly and Bitterness and Merchants and Compostela. In that space were the headquarters of the main banks; Majestic buildings with facades of monumental columns that left no doubt of the solidity, wealth and eternity of the institutions they housed and that ended up crumbling some of them in the days of the banking crisis of the twenties. There were the Havana Stock Exchange, the Lonja del Comercio, the Chamber of Commerce of the Republic —in what would be the Hotel Raquel— and the chambers of commerce of several nations and also the American Chamber of Commerce of Cuba and offices of insurance and bonding companies and sugar and non-sugar companies.

Payret, bad shadow

It was inaugurated in 1877 with the name of Teatro de la Paz, in days when the Pact of Zanjón was in sight. Serafín Ramírez says in relation to this theater in his artistic Havana (1891): "Theater very unfortunate since long before opening its doors to the public. The immense back wall collapsed when it was already being finished; In its first performance there was a beginning of fire; later the whole corner of Prado and San José fell, pillaging among its rubble three or four unhappy people who perished there; in one of his grillés a gentleman died suddenly in the intermission of a function; In one of its salons there was also a duel of disastrous results, and, finally, a company that has finished well or fulfilled its commitments has not worked in it. "

Overwhelmed by so many misfortunes, which forced him to not a few monetary disbursements, and harassed by taxes and contributions, Joaquín Payret, the owner, was left in the most absolute misery, and that man who had been very rich, was forced to subsist with a meager help of the Catalan Beneficence, and his daughter, educated for princess, had to assume the lowest and most ruinous jobs.