Fly around Havana

Today's Herald has a story about Miami Today in Images, a project to photograph dilapidated buildings in Havana and integrate the high definition photos into an interactive map of the city, most of which you can already do on Google Maps--minus the high resolution photos--far more efficiently. You can find the project's website here. The resolution of the photos combined with the crumbling buildings and almost barren streets is close to macabre. You can really get lost going through the images and I found I had to remind myself that I was looking at a real city, not an Oliver Stone set.


Naphtali David Rishe, the director, says it has no "political message" yet one of the links on his site takes you to affidavit to claim specific property. That may not have an overt political message, but it'll definitely inspire some knee-jerk reaction from doddering exiles. And part of it just doesn't make sense. Most of the images are of colonial buildings like the Morro. Who is going to be claiming these buildings? The Spanish? The site's url is no-more.com, which I guess refers to the dilapidation of the city, but it also sounds weirdly political.

As the article points out, reclaiming of land after the fall of Communist regimes has never been carried out with anything resembling equity.

But whether the project will eventually help people reclaim property confiscated under Fidel Castro's regime is uncertain.

''Whether this is considered proper evidence depends on who would be processing these applications,'' says Tania Mastrapa, who runs a Miami consulting practice on property reclamation in Cuba.

''I have not heard of these claim mechanisms being used in other countries,'' says Mastrapa, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Miami examined post-Communist property claims in the Czech Republic and Nicaragua and the lessons they could have for Cuba.

Cubans are better off instituting a political and proprietary amnesty after regime change rather than try to revert the clock to 1959, which is only going to slow things down and make it all worse for those on the island.

There is tremendous value to this project, but affidavits for people to claim land play no role in it. There's really something to be said for scientifically presenting information in a responsible way and not playing to people's sensibilities. I say Rishe should stick to that.