Havana is renowned for its crumbling elegance, and over a million visitors each year stroll among the colonial buildings of Old Havana, many of which were built between the 16th and 18th centuries and carefully restored over the last 30 years.

But Havana, like many of the island’s provincial cities, is peppered with Art Deco houses, apartment buildings, cinemas, theaters, hospitals and office buildings that range from the bold, vertical skyscraper style to streamline moderne with its cool horizontal lines and curved corners. These landmarks are not as grand as the Chrysler Building in New York, and there is no Art Deco district like Miami Beach’s, but fans say there is an unusual wealth and diversity of stock, much of which has remained standing — if poorly maintained — through 50 years of Communist rule.

On the edge of the Old Havana district, for example, stands the elaborately ornamented, French-influenced, Bacardí Building (1930), with its small ornamental ziggurat pinnacles and facade decorated with a delicate gold-leaf zigzag patterns and bronze bats, the Bacardí rum logo. On the main boulevard of the artsy Vedado neighborhood is the 1927 mansion of a famous high-society couple of the period, Catalina Lasa and Juan Pedro Baró; its interior boasts glass windows by Lalique decorated with shell-like coils and sunbursts, and a grand staircase with laminated silver-plate banisters that is lighted by tall windows of colored Baccarat crystal. Further west, on a monumental plaza, stands the imposing Worker’s Maternity Hospital (1939), laid out in the shape of a pair of fallopian tubes.

The absence of a construction boom during the past 50 years had spared many of Cuba’s historic buildings from the developer’s bulldozer. However, a lack of resources, high humidity, salty sea air and the fact that until a year ago Cubans could not buy or sell property mean that many buildings are in disrepair. Poorly enforced building codes and overcrowding in houses have resulted in cheap or tasteless alterations to houses that should be designated landmarks, architects say.