lunes, 6 de mayo de 2013

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Panama City Rising



THE NEW YORK TIMES - Traffic into Panama City was flowing for once, so Miguel Fábrega had only a moment to point out the crumbling ruins in the distance. They were the remains of a 16th-century New Spanish settlement that the British privateer Sir Henry Morgan eventually sacked in 1671. Ahead of us rose Old Panama’s modern replacement: a forest of green, blue and yellow glass skyscrapers that sifted the metallic Central American sky into great vertical columns.

“You’re going to hear a lot about identity, who we are and where we are going,” said Mr. Fábrega, a 37-year-old artist, writer and partner in a creative think tank called DiabloRosso, which promotes emerging artists in Panama. We had met over e-mail a few weeks earlier while I was searching for creative residents willing to show me their city, and moments ago he had picked me up at the airport.

Despite being founded in 1519, Panama is really only 13 years old, Mr. Fábrega argued, its birthday being Dec. 31, 1999, the day the United States gave the Panama Canal and its surrounding land back to the Panamanians. For the first time in a century the country was whole and independent.

“My generation inherited this blank canvas,” said Mr. Fábrega, his salt-and-pepper hair fluttering slightly in the Audi’s air-conditioning. “Now we have the chance to make it our own.”

Today, that canvas is far from blank, however. Over the past 13 years, Panama City has been racing to become a world-class metropolis, and for travelers, the changes have been enormous. In 1997 there were perhaps 1,400 hotel rooms in Panama City. Now there are more than 15,000 with another 4,582 rooms in the pipeline, according to STR Global, a London-based agency that tracks hotel markets. In the last two years alone, Trump, Starwood, Waldorf-Astoria, Westin and Hard Rock have opened hotels here. A new biodiversity museum designed by Frank Gehry is nearly complete. The country’s first modern dance festival unfolded last year, the same year Panama held its first international film festival. The Panama Jazz Festival is going strong after 10 years. The country even has its own year-old microbrewery.

“Panama was this compressed spring just ready to go,” said Keyes Christopher Hardin, a New York lawyer-turned-developer working to restore the city’s old colonial area. “When the Noriega dictator years ended and the U.S. returned all that canal land, things just took off. Everything that could go right did go right.”

Indeed, since 2008, when much of the world was in a recession, the Panamanian economy has expanded by nearly 50 percent. The canal itself, which frames the western edge of Panama City, is undergoing a $5.25 billion expansion that is expected to double its capacity and fuel even more economic growth.

Yes, Panama still struggles with crime and poverty, but foreigners are clearly intrigued with the way things are unfolding. In 1999 just 457,000 international tourists visited Panama, World Bank figures show. In 2011, more than 1.4 million came. Plenty are staying, too: sun-seeking Americans, Venezuelans and wealthy Colombian expatriates who are buying second homes and retirement properties all over Panama. In short, this city of about 880,000 people has gone from a ho-hum business center on the navy blue Pacific to a major leisure destination in record time. In doing so it has become a place full of the kind of paradoxes that occur whenever a very old place grinds against the very new. While the capital now has luxury apartments and five-star cuisine, the thing it needs most is a solid sense of identity.


“You drive in and see all these skyscrapers and you have to wonder, is it just a mirage or does it have any substance?” Johann Wolfschoon, an architect and designer, told me. “What we need to be is amazing. Not amazing for Panama, but amazing.”

IT WAS LATE MARCH, my first day of five in the city, and over the next few days I hoped to get a sense of a city as it enters its teenage years. I would hike through slums where street merchants sold black magic spices, then change my shirt to sip $15 cocktails in the neon glamour of a Hard Rock bar. I would eat terrible chicken and wonderful octopus. I’d spend time with locals, expats, artists, entrepreneurs and a former gangster.

For now, Mr. Fábrega wanted to show me his interpretation of some of the changes afoot. We peeled off the freeway, turned down a boulevard and entered Costa del Este, a section of the city with a skyline that looked like a concrete comb. Our destination was a pop-up gallery that had opened the night before inside an unfinished retail space at the bottom of a new white skyscraper. Sixteen of Mr. Fábrega’s abstract paintings with bright yellows, blues and reds hung on the concrete walls in an exhibition he called “Banana Republic.” It didn’t take long to spot some common motifs: finger-shapes that formed no hands, faucets that had no pipes and machines that could do no work.

“This is Panama,” Mr. Fábrega said with a shrug. “It’s beautiful, but it makes no sense.”


Indeed, Panama City can feel rather absurd at times. Soon a new $2 billion subway, Central America’s first, will whisk people from A to B, but a dearth of sidewalks can make it tough to go anywhere once you arrive. A modern city could use proper addresses, too. Instead, “by the old KFC” or “across from the guayacán tree” is often as precise as it gets. As we left the gallery, Mr. Fábrega said the surest way for him to get mail is to have it sent to his girlfriend in New York.
We drove a few miles west to Casco Viejo, a colonial neighborhood on the far edge of the city, where Mr. Fábrega dropped me off. Casco Viejo, which is sometimes called Casco Antiguo, is a warren of brick streets, leafy plazas and Spanish colonial rum bars blasting the 2/4 beats of cumbia. After Sir Morgan sacked Old Panama, the Spanish regrouped and started anew, this time on a defendable peninsula a few miles away on which Casco Viejo now stands.

I wandered around to get my bearings — seven squares, six churches, one fine-looking ice cream shop — and then checked into my hotel. The Canal House, near the Plaza Mayor, did not look so special from the outside: a white and gray block surrounded by steel barricades for road-working crews. Inside, it was another world, a quiet colonial refuge with rich wood floors, high windows and a cozy lounge. A woven basket sat near my bed, a shout-out to how Panamanians still lower meals from the windows of upstairs kitchens to sidewalk restaurants. On a shelf in the bar downstairs I found a framed note from the actor Daniel Craig, who had stayed while filming scenes for the James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace.” (Casco Viejo stood in for La Paz, Bolivia): “I wish we would have stayed longer.”

Panama has pretty much always been a bridge for cultures, conquerors and, well, birds, but once that mishmash gets distilled into the 50-some blocks of Casco Viejo, an eclectic, almost Noah’s Ark-like vibrancy prevails. The Chinese run so many small groceries here that Panamanians simply call the shops “Chinos.” The French left their mark on the corner of Avenida A and Calle 4, where a Parisian-style apartment building displays elegant rounded balconies. You hear German, Portuguese and English on the streets.





No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario