Music and Missiles

Wednesday 28th March 2007
Last night we felt very lucky. The Buena Vista Social Club were playing in the hotel (they tour the world and so we were lucky to catch them here) so we booked dinner and their show and it was fantastic. The music and atmosphere was great, and it was quite emotional when they did Guantanamera. Another special night.
Today, we had a lazy day, enjoying the hotel, the pool and the beautiful weather – lovely sunshine and great temperatures. We also did the ‘official’ tour of the hotel. A woman called Estelia (she’s in her ‘60s) does the tour and it was fascinating. We went around the ‘history’ bar again and she told us about all the ‘stars’ she’d met when she worked in the hotel in her teens and early twenties (she then went on to work for a professor at the university and has now come back just to do the tours a couple of days a week). She showed us the suite where mafia bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciana stayed and how Francis Ford Cappola (?) came and took photos of the room so that he could replicate it for the scene in The Godfather (also the room where fringe Mafia man Frank Sinatra stayed, amongst others). We also went into the former casino – Havana was the mafia and gambling ‘mecca’ of the world prior to the revolution, when Las Vegas started as a result of Havana’s shows, casinos etc closing. But most interesting were the tunnels and bunkers under the hotel, built during the missile crisis of October 1962 (I remember mum buying extra sugar when I was 11!). It is a whole system which runs under the gardens and terraces of the hotel, all left intact. In one section thy have made an exhibition of the newpaper front pages from around the world, as well as the Cuban ‘explanation’ of the ‘crisis’. This evening we thought we’d try a restaurant in the old city, hoping the quality of food would improve, and asked someone at the hotel to recommend a ‘true’ Cuban restaurant. It didn’t. Everyone warns you that Cuban food is pretty crappy and it is. We can’t understand why, because all the ingredients are there, but it really is just about edible in some places and if it rises to ok, then you’re doing well. I don’t know if they realise the food is awful, and if so why they don’t do anything about it. We ended with a nightcap at the Floridita, another Hemingway favourite (they have a statue of him, propping up the bar) and that was fun. The old town at night was great – wonderful Latin music on every corner and in every bar. But that seems true in all the hotels too,three or four bands will be playing in different areas of the hotel.