Lenin Park

This guide to Lenin Park in Havana starts among the broken stone walls of a colonial sugar mill, built on forced labor and cut cane and left to rubble by the nineteen sixties. It follows Celia Sanchez, one of Fidel Castro's closest allies, as she pushed in 1969 to turn worn-out farmland south of the city into a park for ordinary Havanans, with workers hauling in new soil and eighty thousand trees before Castro opened it in 1972. From there it turns to the mill ruins themselves and the stained-glass screen by painter Rene Portocarrero that still glows above them today.