Havana: The Frozen City

Look carefully at the two towers flanking the facade. They are not the same width. The left tower is noticeably narrower than the right. This is not a mistake or a cost-cutting measure — it is a structural consequence. The left tower was built over the remains of a Jesuit cistern, a large underground water storage tank that could not simply be filled in. The architect worked around it, producing an asymmetry that became, over time, one of the most distinctive features of the building. Cuban Baroque, at its finest, has this quality: it accommodates the contingent, the improvised, the made-do, and transforms it into something that looks entirely intentional.

The cathedral's most famous possession was, for over a century, the remains of Christopher Columbus — or at least, remains claimed to be his. When Spain ceded Cuba after the Spanish-American War of eighteen ninety-eight, the remains were transferred with considerable ceremony to Seville Cathedral in Spain, where they remain today. Recent DNA analysis has cast doubt on whether the Seville remains are actually Columbus's — and whether the remains that were in Havana were ever his to begin with. Columbus died in Valladolid in fifteen oh six, and his remains have had a complicated journey ever since. Havana may have had a stranger for a century. It hardly matters. The cathedral absorbed the ambiguity, as Havana absorbs most things, with style.

The plaza itself is at its best in the early morning, before the tourist carriages arrive and before the postcard sellers take up their positions. Come back in the evening: the buildings are lit from below, the light turns gold, and the musicians who set up at the cafe tables play son cubano while the cathedral looms above in the dark.

The bar's most famous claim is one that has generated more debate than almost any other piece of Havana mythology. Written on the wall, in what is purported to be Ernest Hemingway's own handwriting, is the following: "My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita." Hemingway scholars and Havana historians have questioned for decades whether Hemingway actually wrote it — whether he even drank mojitos, which was not his preferred cocktail, whether the handwriting matches other verified samples. The bar's defenders point out that he was a regular, that the wall was already full of celebrity signatures, that it is exactly the kind of laconic, self-promotional thing Hemingway might have written. The truth is probably unknowable, and La Bodeguita has learned to live very comfortably in the ambiguity.

What is not disputed is that this bar played a role in creating or at least popularising the mojito as the world now knows it: white rum, fresh lime juice, sugar, fresh mint leaves, and soda water, served over ice in a tall glass. The recipe is straightforward; the execution is everything. The mint must be muddled gently, not crushed into bitterness. The balance of sweet and sour is critical. The mojitos here are made quickly and made well, and they are expensive by Cuban standards — a reflection of the clientele they serve.

Look for the photographs on the wall: Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet; Errol Flynn, the Hollywood actor; Brigitte Bardot, at her most luminous; Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, who was a close friend of Fidel Castro and spent time in Havana during the revolution and after; Salvador Allende, the Chilean socialist president who was overthrown and killed in a CIA-backed coup in nineteen seventy-three. The bar is simultaneously very touristy and very genuine. This is a paradox that Havana has mastered: the authentic and the performed exist in the same space, and neither cancels the other out.

On the western side of the plaza stands the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales — the Palace of the Captain-Generals, built between seventeen seventy-six and seventeen ninety-one. It is one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial architecture in the Americas: two storeys of arcaded galleries surrounding a central courtyard, with a baroque facade facing the plaza. For nearly a century, from its completion until Cuban independence, this was the residence and seat of government of every Spanish captain-general — the colonial governors who ruled Cuba with enormous and often arbitrary power. After independence in eighteen ninety-eight, the first presidents of Cuba lived and worked here. Today it houses the Museum of the City of Havana, whose collection includes colonial-era maps, furniture, weapons, and a marble statue of Columbus that once stood in the plaza itself.

On the eastern side of the plaza is the Castillo de la Real Fuerza — the Castle of the Royal Force — which has the distinction of being the oldest surviving colonial fortress in the Americas and the oldest stone building still standing in Havana. It was built between fifteen fifty-eight and fifteen seventy-seven, replacing an earlier wooden fortification that had been destroyed by French pirates. The castle is small by the standards of later Spanish fortifications — a simple square keep with corner bastions — but it served its purpose for two centuries as the administrative centre of the military garrison.

On top of one of the castle's towers is a bronze weather vane in the form of a woman — La Giraldilla, the mythological symbol of Havana. The figure depicts Inés de Bobadilla, wife of Hernando de Soto, who was appointed governor of Cuba in fifteen thirty-eight and almost immediately left for Florida in search of gold, leaving his wife behind. She is said to have climbed the tower every day to watch for his ships. De Soto died in Louisiana in fifteen forty-two; she watched and waited and he never came. La Giraldilla became the symbol of the city, the figure on the Havana Club rum label, the woman gazing out to sea toward the horizon.

The second-hand book market that fills the central garden of the plaza is worth browsing. You will find old revolutionary posters, pre-revolution copies of Cuban magazines, back issues of Granma (the official newspaper of the Communist Party), Che Guevara memorabilia in abundance, and occasionally genuine historical documents and photographs. The prices are negotiable. Take your time.

The plaza takes its name from the Basilica Menor de San Francisco de Asís — the Church and Convent of Saint Francis of Assisi — which faces the plaza on its western side. The present building dates from seventeen thirty-eight, though there was a Franciscan convent on this site from the early seventeenth century. The convent was seized and deconsecrated after Cuban independence, and was used variously as a customs warehouse, a postal sorting office, and during the revolutionary period, as a courthouse. It has been restored and is now used primarily as a concert hall — the acoustics of the nave are excellent, and the Havana chamber music season holds many of its performances here.

The most beloved figure in the plaza is not a saint or a general but El Caballero de París — The Gentleman of Paris — a bronze statue standing near the fountain. The statue commemorates José María López Lledín, a real person who became one of the most famous street characters in twentieth-century Havana. Born in Spain in nineteen eighty-nine and brought to Cuba as a child, he suffered a mental breakdown in the nineteen twenties — accounts differ as to the cause: heartbreak, imprisonment, trauma — and from that point lived as a vagrant on the streets of Havana for over sixty years. He called himself "The Gentleman of Paris," wore a long beard and a flowing cape, carried a staff, and was known throughout the city for his philosophical and literary conversations. He was not harmless and not entirely consistent, but he was part of the fabric of the city, and when he died in a psychiatric hospital in nineteen eighty-five, Havana mourned him.

Touching the bronze beard of El Caballero de París is said to bring good luck. The beard has the polished, worn look of something that has been touched many thousands of times. You may as well.

The twentieth century was not kind to Plaza Vieja. As wealthy families moved to newer suburbs like Vedado and Miramar, the great colonial mansions were subdivided and converted into crowded tenements — solares, as they are called in Cuba — housing multiple families in spaces designed for one. The plaza's central space was roofed over and used as a parking garage. By the nineteen eighties, the surrounding buildings were in serious structural danger: the combination of neglect, humidity, and the weight of too many people had taken a serious toll.

The restoration of Plaza Vieja began in the nineteen nineties and continued through the two thousands, led by the Office of the City Historian, Eusebio Leal Spengler, who spent fifty years overseeing the restoration of Habana Vieja and died in twenty twenty. The parking garage was demolished, the central fountain — a replica of the original eighteenth-century design — was reinstalled, and the surrounding buildings were painstakingly restored to their colonial appearance. Families who had been living in the buildings were, depending on who you ask, either relocated to better housing or displaced from the neighbourhood they had always known.

What you see today is a working compromise: a restored historic plaza that is also genuinely inhabited. Look for Factoría Plaza Vieja, Cuba's first microbrewery, which opened here in twenty thirteen in the ground floor of one of the restored mansions — a remarkable anomaly in a country where the state controls most commercial activity. In the tower of the Gómez Villa building at the corner of the plaza, a Cámara Oscura — a camera obscura — projects a live image of Havana's rooftops onto a circular viewing table; it is one of only a handful of working camera obscuras in the world. Children play in the fountain on hot afternoons. Old men sit in the shade of the arcade. This is the most lived-in of Havana's plazas, and the most honest.

Ernest Hemingway first came to Cuba in nineteen thirty-two on a fishing trip, and the country never entirely let him go. He moved here permanently in nineteen thirty-nine, living at a farmhouse called Finca Vigía — the Lookout Farm — in the hills about fifteen kilometres south of Havana. He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast during his Cuban years. He left Cuba in nineteen sixty, the year after the revolution, partly because of his health and partly because the political situation made his position as an American increasingly complicated. He killed himself in Idaho in nineteen sixty-one.

During his Havana years, Hemingway would drive into the city most afternoons and drink at El Floridita. His preferred drink was the Papa Doble — a double daiquiri made with rum, lime juice, and grapefruit juice, with no sugar and no mint. The daiquiri, which El Floridita claims to have invented or at least perfected, is made here with white rum, lime juice, sugar, and maraschino liqueur, blended with ice to a smooth, pale-yellow slush. Hemingway's version, without sugar, was considerably more austere.

At the left end of the bar — the far end from the entrance, against the back wall — stands a bronze statue of Hemingway, life-sized, leaning against the mahogany counter with the expression of a man who has been at the bar for a while and intends to remain. This is the spot where he used to stand. The bar was declared a national monument to prevent its character being altered. His Nobel Prize medal — he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in nineteen fifty-four, for The Old Man and the Sea — is displayed in a case behind the bar.

The daiquiris are excellent and the bar is very crowded. Come in the late afternoon if you want any chance of standing at the counter.

The building is unmistakably modelled on the United States Capitol in Washington — the same neoclassical style, the same central dome, the same colonnaded wings. But the Cuban Capitolio is deliberately larger: the dome is ninety-one metres high, taller than the dome in Washington, taller than anything else in Cuba for thirty years. The choice of American precedent for a Cuban nationalist monument has always been somewhat ironic, and Havana's intellectuals have never quite stopped arguing about what it means.

Inside the vast entrance hall, set into the floor directly beneath the apex of the dome, is a diamond. A twenty-four-carat diamond, placed there to mark "kilometre zero" — the point from which all distances in Cuba are officially measured. The diamond was installed when the building opened in nineteen twenty-nine. In nineteen forty-six it was stolen — simply prised out of the floor — and replaced with a replica. Whether the current stone is the original or a copy is, at this point, a matter of official uncertainty.

El Capitolio served as the seat of the Cuban Congress and Senate from its completion until the revolution in nineteen fifty-nine. After the revolution, the building was repurposed — for decades it housed the Cuban Academy of Sciences and various research institutes. The government then decided to restore it to its original function: it is being renovated to serve as the seat of the National Assembly of People's Power, Cuba's legislature. The restoration, which has been ongoing for years and is now largely complete, involved stripping away decades of institutional interventions and returning the interior to its original nineteen twenty-nine grandeur.

Stand back on the Paseo del Prado and look at the dome. It is extraordinary — a statement of ambition that the country that built it could not entirely sustain, and all the more poignant for that.

The building became most significant in nineteen forty-eight, when a woman named Alicia Alonso founded the Ballet Nacional de Cuba here and made this stage its home. Alonso was born in Havana in nineteen twenty and trained as a classical ballet dancer from childhood. In her twenties, she began to lose her sight — a series of retinal detachments left her legally blind, then nearly totally blind. Most careers would have ended there. Alonso's did not.

She continued to perform as a prima ballerina by developing a system of adaptations: she memorised the position of every piece of furniture and every wing on the stage, she asked her partners to guide her precisely, she used strong lighting in the wings as reference points. She performed Giselle and Carmen and countless other roles in near or total darkness, guided by memory, technique, and the extraordinary spatial intelligence she had developed. Her performances were, by all accounts, among the most compelling of any dancer of her generation.

In nineteen forty-eight she returned to Cuba and founded the Ballet Nacional. Under her direction, and using the Soviet-influenced training methods she had absorbed during the company's years of working with Russian coaches, Cuban ballet developed into one of the most technically rigorous classical ballet traditions in the world. Cuban dancers — trained in Havana, products of the school attached to this theatre — hold principal positions in major companies on every continent. Alicia Alonso directed the Ballet Nacional until her death in October twenty nineteen, at the age of ninety-eight. She had been blind for most of her adult life. She had run the company for over seventy years.

Batista had been a significant figure in Cuban politics since the nineteen thirties — a sergeant who led a military coup in nineteen thirty-three, installed various puppet presidents, was himself elected president in nineteen forty, went into voluntary exile in nineteen forty-four when he lost the election, returned to power in a military coup in nineteen fifty-two, and governed with increasing brutality until the early hours of January first, nineteen fifty-nine, when the revolutionary forces under Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos entered Havana. Batista fled to the Dominican Republic. He died in Spain in nineteen seventy-three.

The museum inside traces the full arc of Cuban history: colonial period, independence, the early republic, the corrupt governments of the nineteen forties and fifties, and then the revolution in exhaustive and heavily curated detail. The perspective is that of the victors, which means the revolutionary period is presented with hagiographic intensity. It is also genuinely fascinating — the artifacts of a revolution that actually succeeded, in a small island country, against a US-backed dictatorship, and then survived for over sixty years.

In the garden outside the main building is the centrepiece of the museum: the Granma Memorial. Under a glass pavilion, preserved like a relic, is the yacht Granma — a sixty-foot cabin cruiser designed to carry a maximum of twelve people. In November nineteen fifty-six, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro, and seventy-nine other revolutionaries crammed themselves and their weapons and supplies onto this boat in the Mexican port of Tuxpan and sailed for Cuba. Eighty-two people on a boat designed for twelve. The crossing took seven days instead of the planned five, because the boat was dangerously overloaded and rode low in the water. When they finally reached the coast of Oriente province in southeastern Cuba, they ran aground in a mangrove swamp rather than landing on the beach. Batista's army was waiting. In the ensuing days of fighting, sixty of the eighty-two were killed or captured. Twenty-two survivors, including Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains and began the guerrilla war that, twenty-five months later, toppled the government.

The Malecón is the living room of Havana. In the evenings — especially on weekends, especially in summer — the entire population of the city seems to migrate here. Fishermen cast lines off the seawall in the afternoon light. Young couples sit on the wall with their arms around each other, watching the sun drop toward the horizon. Groups of teenagers share a bottle of rum. Old men play dominoes at improvised tables. Musicians set up wherever there is a patch of pavement and play son, salsa, and bolero until the small hours. The Malecón is where you go when you have nowhere else to go, and where you go when you have somewhere else to go but would rather be here.

To the north, across ninety miles of the Florida Straits, is Miami. On a clear day you cannot see it, but you know it is there. The relationship between Havana and Miami — between Cuba and its diaspora, between the revolution and its exiles, between the island and the mainland — is the central political and personal drama of modern Cuban life. The Malecón is where you feel it most physically: the sea between here and there, the wind coming off the water, the knowledge of distance and separation.

The buildings that line the Malecón's landward side are among the most photographed in Cuba: Neoclassical and Art Deco facades in aquamarine, coral, yellow, and ochre, five and six storeys high, their paint peeling in the salt air, their balconies rusting, their ground floors dark and damp. These buildings were not always decaying. In the nineteen thirties and forties they were fashionable apartment buildings for the Havana middle class. The revolution froze them in place — not through destruction but through the slow action of scarcity, salt, and time. No money to restore them, no incentive to tear them down. What you see is architecture preserved by poverty: beautiful because there was no money to make it otherwise, crumbling because there is no money to save it.

This is, in miniature, the story of Havana itself: a city of extraordinary beauty and genuine hardship, held together by ingenuity, music, and an extraordinary stubbornness of spirit. Stand here at the end of the afternoon, feel the spray from the waves, watch the light change over the Florida Straits, and listen to whatever music is playing. You will understand why people who leave this city spend the rest of their lives trying to come back.