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For a distracted passerby, the University of Havana springs up all of a sudden like an anachronistic frame impossible to reach out to in time, like a unique and unrepeatable touch of a brush. That was the starting point from where higher education got off to a superb beginning and has been educating generations of Cubans for a mighty long time. In addition, its architectural layout singles out the building as a distinctive symbol of the city.

The staircase –one of Havana's architectural wonders- was built in just four weeks to have it ready for heads of state that attended the 1928 Pan American Conference. However, this center of the intelligentsia is indeed 200 years old and has since then been training men of science, artists and professionals in the highest ethical values.

Those who climb the enormous staircase that replaced a much humbler countryside-like path that used to take college students to the top of the hill, notice 82 steep steps later that they have entered a place whose ambience reveals the attenuated brilliance of an edifice with a soul of its own. The neoclassical lines and columns rub elbows with shadowy trees at the campus, as if they were expressing the flight of a unique spirit, the spirit of national culture whose style and ideals spilled onto those classrooms that, out of the shadows of a monastery, filtered free air into an inexorable flair for progress.

The university was founded in 1728, seven years after Pope Inocencius XIII signed the papal bull that gave the Royal Council of the West Indies the green light to settle down on the “ever loyal island of Cuba.” The Royal and Pontifical University of San Jeronimo was temporarily housed in the Convent of San Juan de Letran, in the old part of town. It remained there until 1902, when it was moved to the picture-perfect Loma de la Pirotecnia, a military facility that had sheltered the U.S. troops of occupation. At the time, that was a quasi-desert location, a sort of huge countryside oasis at the brink of a city that was some 437 yards below, down Infanta Avenue.

Even though the roughhewn barracks were no proper quarters for an educational facility that was claiming far more space, its geographical location, however, made the building fit in there like dovetails. The Loma de la Pirotecnia jutted out over a piece of land that later on gave rise to one of the fanciest neighborhoods of the nation's capital, El Vedado. One of the University's hottest, most original and loud-mouthed students of all time, Doctor Raul Roa, who later taught Social Sciences in that same college, called that privileged bird's-eye view position “Havana's heteroclite roof.” The true value of the symbol lied in the fact that the University of Havana was overlooking the same city whose residents had studied there and had become, in spite of countless restrictions imposed by the times and the circumstances, well-known liberators, sharp-eyed writers and bold scientists.

From Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, the Founding Father, to Fidel Castro, a majority of Cuba's most illustrious men of sciences, letters and decorum finished their studies there. Two of the most noticeable exceptions are Jose Marti and Carlos J. Finlay, who never heard a single lecture in its tradition-laden classrooms. Spain's ironfisted colonial rule forced them to attend college overseas. The leader of the 1959 Revolution –a law student at the time- decided to conduct a patriotic operation that eventually bonded together old and new generations of Cubans. In 1948, he brought to the campus the same bell that Carlos Manuel de Cespedes tolled on October 10, 1868, to free his slaves and give them a chance of building a new nation.

As the republican era began, the barracks were transformed into pavilions and later on into solid buildings touched by neoclassical soberness. The main lecture hall was built somewhere between 1907 and 1911; it also served as a makeshift mausoleum to preserve the ashes of Father Felix Varela, the forerunner of the Cuban nationality and national independence, and a notable philosophy professor who, from the classrooms of the San Carlos and Sam Ambrosio Seminars, renovated pedagogy with the introduction of the explicative method. The frescos of Armando Menocal, the painter of the 1895 Independence War, deck out the main lecture hall with national scenes.

In this architectural atmosphere that unveils nothing but a taut scholastic profile, and likened to the agora of Athens, the Ignacio Agramonte Square –named after another outstanding student who left behind his college sheepskin to become a general of the Independence War- paints a quiet environment where the past and the present seem to go hand in hand. The library rests on the west wing, while the rector's office looks to the east. And trapped between both buildings lies the university campus, the same place where thousands of students have looked up at the sky, watching their dreams go up over their heads like an offering to the future.

Today, the University of Havana remains in the same place, like a core that has spun off schools, cluster colleges and new universities in other parts of the country. When traipsing down San Lazaro Street, the same distracted passerby will catch sight of the harsh portico that stands tall with the help of hedging Greek columns and create an unbelievable image in one of the capital's most bustling corners. At the end of the nearly endless staircase, a statue of the Alma Mater lives on with a gesture of receptive tenderness. Sculpted by Yugoslav artist Mario Korbel, this female figure cast in bronze glows in an ambience brimming with spiritual expression. For a few minutes, the Alma Mater seems to calm down the world around it and arouse new sensations in those who walk past the college's threshold.

Indeed, no look of the eye stands still between these buildings and tree groves. Maybe any traveler had seen other colleges and universities around the world. Perhaps at Oxford or the Sorbonne in Paris, he or she has felt that aura that some people call the whispering of history or the echo of stones. Those are old-timed, lovely places, full of magic, intensity and vital energy with which human beings take on and carry out certain works. At the University of Havana, even though its stones are not yet a century old, you can sniff and hear a pretty ancient tradition fluttering through a spirit of light.

That's the overt confluence of arts and knowledge, liking and ideals, history and the sense of life.