Cuba Part 1: Heading for Havana

Old Havana in the evening

For a long time I have been planning to go to Cuba. I’m old enough to remember the TV coverage of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the 1962 missile crisis, when we all got close to being incinerated in an atomic war. Fidel and Che hypnotised the more deluded of my generation. More recently, I read how, following the Soviet collapse, Cuba was frozen in time, and as a heritage nut I wanted to see this place where, for whatever reason, most of the old buildings had not been swept away in the cause of urban renewal (as many of them have been in Singapore, where I live).

As a nerdy child in the 1950s I was fascinated by American cars, and knew every fact and statistic in the Observer’s Book of Automobiles. I had the first edition (1955), the only one in which all the photographs were etched out – and two or three later editions too. Famously, cars of that era are still in daily use in Cuba, although all is not as it seems mechanically. I shall write about the cars in a separate entry later. Be patient.

Anyway, it was obvious that, with the Castro era nearing an end and contacts between Cuba and the US on the up, the time to see the place was NOW, before everything changes.

The Hotel Lincoln as it once was

So on 20 March, this year, my friend Michael Hill and I arrived late at night in Havana. The outer parts of the town seemed deserted as the taxi took us to the Hotel Lincoln. You have to be impressed by the scale and formality of the colonnades lining the streets – larger, Spanish-colonial equivalents to Singapore’s ‘five-foot way’. When, well after midnight, the driver said we had arrived, I was doubtful. Were we at the right place? We seemed to be in a dodgy part of town. In the run-down street around the hotel entrance, people were hanging around, drinking and chatting.

The Lincoln Hotel as it was when we arrived

The Lincoln was grand when it was first built, in 1926. It makes a big deal of the fact that Juan Manuel Fangio, the racing driver, was kidnapped here in 1958 by followers of Fidel Castro. Now it’s run down (‘timeworn’, as Lonely Planet puts it politely), only one lift works (and that very slowly), the rooms are dingy, and the breakfasts are dreary and communistic. I learned not to look closely at the ham slices. In the restaurant (which has a fantastic view over the city) customers are often outnumbered by the staff, who like gossiping and watching local pop videos on the wall-mounted TV.  For a whole evening there was no water supply in the hotel. But the Lincoln’s cheap, it takes credit cards, and it’s within walking distance of the historic centre.

By day the area’s better than it looks at night, although that walk takes you through some areas untouched by restoration, where people live their lives on the streets once the heat of the day dies down, the kind of places you might avoid, say, in New York. In fact, I sensed no threat at all – people seemed either positively friendly or, at worst, indifferent.

The streets of Old Havana – no sense of a 'no go' area.