How real Cubans, rich and poor, live

Havana, a city that was spared the devastation of the Cuban War of Independence in the 19th century and where most of the island’s grand architecture is located, has long been a city in ruins, a city of ruins. That some buildings have been restored — and every single one photographed for a coffee-table book — does not reduce the abjectness of a city that in its heyday, as those old enough remember, literally glittered.

Inside Cuba (Taschen) is more honest than most books of its ilk, in that it shows dwellings where the grandeur has lost the war against decay, where leather upholstery seems to have exploded and exposed a lava-like outpouring of its insides, where makeshift wiring hangs exposed. And it also shows the humble homes of Cuban peasants.

In short, this is a project that has photographed where real Cubans live. Which doesn’t mean there are no magnificent colonial palacios — in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and the museum-city of Trinidad — restored to grandeur or never allowed to rot. But from the very first two-page spread inside the cover, Inside Cuba promises to be a different kind of Cuba book.

That spread — reproduced inside the back cover — is an album of one of the curios of the Cuban Revolution: baseball-like cards that depict vignettes from the struggle. Indeed, the book delivers a certain pop edginess. Alas, not enough.

Perhaps because it’s hard to draw edginess out of the fine crystal and marble statuary that adorn the palacios. Or simply because the photography is just too damn pretty. Caught between grandeur and hipness, Inside Cuba delivers a bit of both but not a satisfying amount of either.

Still, it’s nice, for a change, to see not just palacios but modernist bourgeois buildings — evidence that, as exiles have always claimed, Cuba was not exactly Third World. And it’s even nicer to go inside the home of contemporary Cuban artists like Jose Rodriguez Fuster, and see how they have transformed their living environments, as artists usually do, into art forms.

Or the ultimate architectural pleasure: an architect’s home. In this case, it’s a beach house built in 1958 with cheap materials and a nautical motif — a home that, like the “sustainable’’ projects in vogue today, manages to be both rustic and radically modernist.

No book on anything Cuban can escape the vicissitudes of ideology and this one is no exception. The text, written by Julio Cesar Perez Hernandez, is informative and clear, but its apparent objectivity is subtly tinged.

“Havana,’’ he writes, “was spared the injurious urban renewal and overdevelopment seen around the world during the second half of the 20th century.’’ Read: Socialism saved Havana from the ravages of capitalism. And that is totally true.

“ . . . but is now,’’ he continues, “ready for a sensitive revival.’’ Revival from what? The answer can be found in a Cuban film mentioned in the book, Strawberry and Chocolate, where one of the protagonists, a gifted gay intellectual estranged from the Revolution, shows his protege, a party militant, the ruins of Havana — “one of the most beautiful cities in the world,’’ he calls it — and tells him “they’’ have let it fall apart. “They’’ are the leaders of the country, who now, according to Inside Cuba, are ready to implement a sensitive revival from their own willful neglect.

The text on the famous watering hole La Bodeguita del Medio offers a recipe for the drink made famous there, the mojito. It also tells how this former grocery store (true) became “a center of bohemian life’’ (also true) and is now “jammed with foreign tourists’’ (totally true). However, the “graffiti its walls treasure’’ are of relatively recent vintage — a keen eye can see the work of the ballpoint and the magic marker. The old graffiti — by bohemians who may no longer be politically correct in Cuba — has been painted over. Oh, yes, besides tourists, La Bodeguita is sometimes jammed with local hustlers. And so it goes. But no one who might object to the subtly partisan text should be deeply troubled. Due to a design oversight hard to explain in such a lovingly done book, a lot of the text is printed over such dense motifs that it’s virtually unreadable. No matter. It’s a coffee-table book and as such it’s published for pleasure.