Havana: La Habana Vieja

The Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception, which fills the northern side of the square, was built by the Jesuits beginning in seventeen forty-eight. When Spain expelled the Jesuits in seventeen sixty-seven, construction was barely complete, and the building passed to the Diocese of Havana. It was consecrated as a cathedral in seventeen eighty-nine. The facade is what stops you first — two asymmetrical towers flanking a deeply carved baroque front that seems almost aggressively ornate against the restrained buildings around it. It is been called, somewhat dramatically, music turned to stone.

For a period in the late eighteenth century, the cathedral reportedly housed the remains of Christopher Columbus, before they were transferred to Seville. Whether those were actually Columbus's bones has been a matter of scholarly argument ever since, but Havana makes the claim with understandable pride.

The square itself was originally a swamp. Spanish engineers drained it in the seventeenth century, and the colonial mansions that now frame three sides of the plaza were built over the following hundred years as the city's elite established their presence here. Today those palaces house museums, art galleries, and the inevitable paladares — the private restaurants that have multiplied across Havana since the Cuban government began relaxing restrictions on private enterprise in the nineteen nineties and then more substantially after two thousand eleven.

Notice the low stone wall running along one side of the square. On any given morning, you will find men sitting there with ancient American cars parked nearby — nineteen fifty Chevrolets, nineteen fifty-three Buicks, nineteen fifty-seven Plymouths, all kept running by Cuban mechanics whose resourcefulness in the face of the embargo is genuinely legendary. These are not museum pieces. They are working taxis, and their survival is one of the most vivid symbols of what the embargo has meant for this city.

Breathe in the air here — it carries salt from the Malecón a few blocks north, the faint sweetness of sugarcane, and the diesel exhaust of those vintage engines. This is the smell of Havana. You will carry it with you long after you leave.

Look at the equestrian statue of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in the center of the plaza. He is the man Cubans call the Father of the Fatherland, and with good reason. On October ten, eighteen sixty-eight, Céspedes freed his enslaved workers at his sugar plantation in eastern Cuba and launched the Ten Years' War — the first major Cuban uprising against Spanish rule. The war ultimately failed, but it established the principle of Cuban independence that the revolution of eighteen ninety-five, led by José Martí, would build upon. Cuba finally achieved independence in nineteen oh two, though the American military occupation and the Platt Amendment meant that independence was severely constrained from the beginning.

The square has been the site of some of Havana's most dramatic moments. Pirates attacked the city multiple times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — French pirates sacked Havana in fifteen fifty-five, burning much of it to the ground, which is why the Spanish subsequently built the extensive fortifications you can see across the harbour. In seventeen sixty-two, a British fleet of two hundred ships took Havana in a famous siege that lasted eleven months before Spain traded Florida to Britain to get the city back.

In the evenings, the square fills with secondhand book vendors who spread their wares on folding tables — old editions of Marx and Lenin alongside vintage magazines, Cuban baseball cards, and the occasional piece of genuine pre-revolutionary ephemera. It is one of the better places in Havana to browse without obligation, and the shade from the ceiba trees in the center makes it one of the cooler spots in the old city on a hot afternoon.

The ceiba tree beside the pavilion deserves a moment of your attention. The ceiba — known in the Caribbean as the silk-cotton tree — is considered sacred across West African and Afro-Cuban religious traditions. In Santería, the syncretic religion that emerged from the forced encounter between Yoruba religious practices and Spanish Catholicism among enslaved Africans brought to Cuba, the ceiba is home to spirits and is an object of profound reverence. Cuba's African heritage runs deep — estimates suggest that between the sixteenth century and eighteen sixty-seven, when the slave trade officially ended, somewhere between seven hundred thousand and one million enslaved Africans were brought to Cuba. Their religious traditions, their music, their food, and their language fused with Spanish and indigenous influences to create Cuban culture as it exists today.

Locals circle this tree three times on November sixteenth each year and make a wish — a tradition that blends the Catholic founding date with older African spiritual practices in exactly the kind of syncretism that defines Havana's cultural identity. You might see small offerings — flowers, candles, coins — placed at the base of the tree throughout the year.

The old city wall behind El Templete is one of the few surviving sections of the defensive walls that once enclosed La Habana Vieja. The full wall, built in the seventeenth century to defend against pirate attacks and the English, ran for nearly five kilometers around the city. Most of it was demolished in the nineteenth century as the city expanded, but what remains here gives you a sense of the scale of the fortifications that made Havana one of the most heavily defended cities in the colonial world.

But Hemingway's Havana extended beyond El Floridita. La Bodeguita del Medio, a few blocks north near the cathedral, was his other regular haunt — the place he claimed to have invented the mojito, though Cubans dispute this claim with some vigor. Both bars are genuinely historic and genuinely worth visiting, even if the prices now reflect their fame rather than their function as neighborhood bars.

Look at the buildings along Calle Obispo as you walk. Many date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the characteristic Havana feature of tall doorways opening onto interior courtyards that provide ventilation in the heat. The pharmacy at the corner of Calle Obispo and Aguiar — the Farmacia y Droguería Johnson, now a museum — preserves the interior of a late nineteenth century Cuban pharmacy with its original crystal jars, mahogany furniture, and hand-lettered labels. It is one of those small, unexpected stops that tells you more about everyday colonial life than any formal museum could.

The bookshops on Calle Obispo sell the works of José Martí, Fidel Castro's speeches, Che Guevara's diary, and a surprising amount of genuine pre-revolutionary literature. Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America — a deliberate achievement of the revolutionary government, which launched a major literacy campaign in nineteen sixty-one that sent volunteers across the country to teach reading and writing. The results are evident in the culture: Cubans read, discuss, and argue about ideas with an intensity that visitors from more economically developed countries sometimes find startling.

The church itself is no longer an active Catholic church — it was secularized after the revolution — but it now serves as a concert hall, and the acoustics inside the stone nave are remarkable. Concerts of chamber music and early music are held here regularly, and attending one is one of the finer cultural experiences Havana offers.

In the center of the square stands a bronze statue called El Caballero de París — the Gentleman of Paris. It depicts a real person: José María López Lledín, a Spanish immigrant who arrived in Cuba in the early twentieth century and, after a period of imprisonment that apparently affected his mental state, became a beloved eccentric figure on the streets of Havana. He walked the city for decades, offering philosophical conversation and flowers to passersby, living as a kind of urban hermit-saint. Touching his beard is said to bring good luck, and the beard has been polished to a bright copper sheen by generations of hands. He died in nineteen eighty-five and is buried in the church behind him. His story — a homeless man who became a city's beloved mascot — says something warm and particular about Havana's relationship with its eccentrics.

The buildings around the square house a camera obscura on the roof of one building — a Victorian-era optical device that projects a live panoramic image of Havana onto a circular table, one of only a handful still operating in the world. There are restaurants, a craft beer brewery, and on weekend mornings a market where Cuban artists sell paintings, prints, and crafts.

The architecture tells the story of Cuban prosperity and Cuban inequality simultaneously. Many of the grand buildings around this square were built on the profits of sugar, and sugar in colonial Cuba meant slavery on an industrial scale. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba was producing roughly one-third of the world's sugar, nearly all of it through enslaved labor. The ornate mansions, the baroque churches, the elegant plazas — they were built with that wealth, and walking through them with that knowledge changes how they look.

The state of the buildings around Plaza Vieja also illustrates the challenge facing Havana. Restored buildings gleam on one side of the square. On another, buildings in various states of decay show what much of the old city still looks like. The restoration effort, which began seriously in the nineteen eighties, has transformed parts of La Habana Vieja but cannot keep pace with the deterioration affecting the rest.

Havana in the nineteen forties and early fifties was, by certain measures, one of the most prosperous cities in Latin America. It had the highest per capita income in the region, a thriving middle class, and a nightlife reputation that drew American tourists, gangsters, and celebrities. Meyer Lansky and the American Mafia controlled many of the casinos and hotels. The Riviera, the Nacional, the Capri — these were world-class establishments by any standard. But the prosperity was deeply unequal. The Cuban countryside remained desperately poor, and the Batista government that took power in a coup in nineteen fifty-two was notoriously corrupt and violent.

Fidel Castro launched his revolution against Batista on July twenty-sixth, nineteen fifty-three — the date Cubans still use to name the movement — with a disastrously unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. He was captured, tried, and sentenced to prison, delivering a famous speech in his own defense that ended with the words: 'History will absolve me.' He was released in a general amnesty in nineteen fifty-five, went to Mexico, recruited Che Guevara, and returned to Cuba on the yacht Granma in December nineteen fifty-six with eighty-two men. Most were killed or captured within days. The few survivors retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains and began the guerrilla campaign that toppled Batista on January first, nineteen fifty-nine.

The Capitolio today serves as the seat of the Cuban parliament, the Asamblea Nacional. It has been extensively restored in recent years and is open to visitors.

The theater is named for Alicia Alonso, the Cuban ballerina who founded the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in nineteen forties and went on to become one of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance. Alonso became nearly blind in her twenties but continued to perform and choreograph for decades, developing techniques that allowed her to dance on stage guided by lights and the presence of her partner. She died in twenty nineteen at the age of ninety-eight, having spent most of her life building a ballet tradition in Cuba that is now recognized internationally as among the finest in the world.

The revolution had a complex relationship with the arts. On one hand, the Castro government invested heavily in culture — the National School of Arts, the Casa de las Américas literary prize, the Cuban film institute — creating institutions that produced genuinely significant work. On the other hand, artists who expressed dissent found themselves marginalized, imprisoned, or driven into exile. The famous phrase attributed to Castro — 'Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing' — defined the limits within which Cuban culture operated.

Ballet performances here are priced to be accessible to Cubans, which means they are extraordinarily affordable by international standards. If you have any interest in ballet, attending a performance at the Gran Teatro is one of the singular cultural experiences Havana offers — the company's training tradition produces dancers of exceptional technical quality, and the theater itself is one of the most beautiful performance spaces in the hemisphere.

The Hotel Inglaterra, the oldest hotel in Cuba, occupies the western edge of the park — it opened in eighteen seventy-five and its Moorish-influenced interior still functions as it has for a century and a half. The Sevilla Bar inside is worth a quick look if you want to see what a Havana hotel lobby looked like before the revolution transformed everything.

The corner of Parque Central near the Hotel Telégrafo is the site of one of Havana's great informal institutions — La Esquina Caliente, the Hot Corner, where Cuban baseball fans gather every day of the week to argue about baseball with an intensity and technical knowledge that makes sports talk radio seem superficial by comparison. Baseball arrived in Cuba in the eighteen seventies, brought by Cuban students who had studied in the United States, and became the national sport with extraordinary speed. The Cuban baseball leagues were among the best in the world before the revolution; the revolution made professional baseball state-sponsored amateur baseball, but the quality remained high enough that Cuban players have consistently been among the best in Major League Baseball when they manage to leave.

Stand here for a few minutes and listen to the city. Music from somewhere — always music in Havana. The sound of old engines. The particular quality of light in the late afternoon, golden and heavy, turning the cream and ochre buildings warm.

On stormy days — and Cuba gets serious storms — the sea breaks over the wall and floods the street and the ground floors of the buildings immediately behind it. Those buildings, many of them grand early twentieth century mansions, are in various states of salt-damaged decay. The Malecón is simultaneously one of the most romantic and most melancholy streets in the world. The combination of the spectacular setting, the beautiful crumbling buildings, and the knowledge of what those buildings represent — a prosperity that existed, was frozen, and is slowly dissolving into the salt air — gives the whole thing an emotional weight that photographs can only partially convey.

The Soviet period, from roughly nineteen sixty through nineteen ninety, brought a different kind of presence to Cuba. Soviet subsidies kept the economy functioning and Soviet technical advisors helped build hospitals, schools, and industrial facilities. The missiles the Soviets installed in Cuba in nineteen sixty-two brought the world to the edge of nuclear war before being removed as part of the agreement that resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis. When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety-one, Cuba lost its principal source of support almost overnight. The years that followed — known in Cuba as the Special Period in Time of Peace — were devastating. Food shortages, power cuts lasting sixteen hours a day, the near-complete collapse of transportation. Cubans survived through ingenuity, through the informal economy, through help from relatives abroad. The city of Havana, starved of maintenance materials, began its long process of physical decay that the restoration of La Habana Vieja has only partially reversed.

Sit on the Malecón wall as the sun goes down. Watch the light change on the water. Listen to whatever music is playing somewhere behind you. The Malecón at dusk is where Havana is most itself — unguarded, communal, defiant in its beauty despite everything. This is where the city comes to breathe. You have walked through four centuries of Cuban history today, and it ends here, at the edge of the sea, watching the horizon where the United States sits just one hundred and forty-five kilometers away, close enough on a clear night that you can almost sense it, and yet — for most of the people sitting on this wall — impossibly far.