Waiting for Havana

November 27, 2005
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA

ON the two-hour ride from Havana to Varadero, on an expressway where light traffic rolls along with only an occasional billboard to disturb the view, you see nothing but palm-covered hills, the lapping aqua sea crashing on craggy shores, deep valleys shrouded in mist, and Matanzas, a historic onetime sugar-rich town, along a sun-sparkling bay. Along the rest of the road, there is only a nearly uninhabited countryside, and breathtaking views of the ocean on the north and vales and mountains on the south.

It doesn't take much effort to imagine cliffside resorts here, with sweeping golf courses, sprawling ranches, and roadside restaurants sprinkled up and down the coast.

Cuba is a large island, three-quarters the size of Florida, and aside from crowded hot spots like Havana and Varadero and a handful of colonial cities and resorts, it is largely underdeveloped - making it a sleeping giant of Caribbean tourism.

"The travel industry is sitting on the last virgin territory in the entire world," says Kirby Jones, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. "Americans want to go there for the same reason that dozens of companies around the world have. There's money to be made."

Ian Schrager, the New York entrepreneur who helped create the trend for stylish boutique hotels with the Royalton in Manhattan, the Delano in Miami Beach and the Mondrian in Los Angeles, went to Cuba in 1994-95. "I was completely enchanted with the country," he says. "I was completely taken with it. To me what was interesting was Old Havana, like Venice, a special place frozen in time."

There's no question he would like to put a hotel in Old Havana. "My customers are waiting for Cuba to happen," he says.

In Miami, Frank Del Rio, the chief executive of Oceania Cruises, who left Cuba as a child, is clear on the subject.

"It's got mountain ranges, colonial cities, beaches; it's got everything," he says. "No travel organization in the United States will be caught flat-footed when the travel restrictions are lifted. We are all prepared."

Cuba, with its magnificent, unspoiled beauty, seduces in many ways. To American business executives, it is an untapped market of 12 million people eager for American goods. To American hoteliers and cruise ship executives, it represents a tantalizing glimpse of the future - of future ports for their passengers, of future resorts for their customers.

To American tourists, it represents the taste of a forbidden fruit - of a land that has been off limits since 1961.

And they are all waiting for the one thing they believe will all but certainly make their dreams come true: the end of Fidel Castro.

WHILE Americans are waiting for Havana, Havana is preparing itself for Americans. To Cuban tourism officials, their island - onetime cabaret of the Caribbean, beacon of romance and the good life - is the magnet that will once again attract American vacationers and, with them, American dollars. In a recently published study given to me in Havana, several Cuban economists and tourism officials say that Americans are the most demanding and biggest spenders in the world, a conclusion that has become something of a mantra for Cuban officials.

"We're doing everything we can to upgrade our hotels, to bring up standards to the level Americans expect," Antonio Martínez Rodríguez, the director general of the Nacional, Cuba's premier hotel, tells me one afternoon.

He's talking not only about his hotel, an updated 1930's Art Deco national monument that once played host to Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner and the mobster Meyer Lansky. His gaze, steady behind thick glasses, his voice raspy, he ticks off numbers and percentages, unrolling existing plans for the further development of international tourism in his country - 80 percent of the work force at major hotels is college educated, he says, and most are multilingual; contemporary amenities like business centers, e-mail access, satellite television and, of course, air-conditioning are now routine in top hotels.

Cuba's tourist industry, he says, will revolve not only around sun and sand but will also include ecology-centered and health-oriented ventures. Leaning forward to make his point, Mr. Martínez says: "We'll be ahead of just about everyone in the world in the health tourism area. And we have culture and history and all our music and our friendly people."

By now, I have heard variations on the theme, which boils down to an image of Cuba as a prime world destination, not just a Caribbean resort. Estefanía R. Escobar Díaz, an official at the Ministry of Tourism, tells me fervently: "We see Americans as friends. We want Americans to come see."

We are meeting in a plainly furnished reception room in the modest ministry quarters, across the Malecón, not far from a wall that bears anti-American slogans. Ms. Díaz, a bubbly middle-aged woman, is leaning back on a 50's-style sofa, a stack of brochures on her lap. An assistant brings a tray with two cups of black coffee, and Ms. Díaz continues, saying: "This estrangement between you and us is forced. It is not natural."

That was a preamble to the sales pitch. In a dark skirt and pale blouse that seem to be standard office wear in Havana, Ms. Díaz hands me new tourism brochures and color-coded graphs tracing the growth of Cuban tourism in the last 10 to 15 years. Even without American tourists, who make up the majority of vacationers in the Caribbean, Cuba ranks No. 3 (after the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) among destinations in the Caribbean, with more than two million visitors in 2004, a leap from 340,000 in 1990, according to the ministry.

Now Canadians, Italians, the British, Spaniards and Germans and a trickle of Latin Americans fly to Cuba on direct and nonstop flights. This summer, Virgin Atlantic introduced twice weekly London-Havana flights. Ten airports have been built in Cuba in the past few years to accommodate the flow of travelers who may want to skip Havana and go directly to, say, Cayo Coco or Varadero.

On the narrow strip of Varadero, a spit of land connected to the mainland by a causeway, as many as 50 hotels crowd fluffy sand dunes along a beach that stretches about 12 miles. There are older, grand hotels like Meliá las Américas, with its new golf course, multiple cuisines and bars and all-inclusive rates; the sprawling couples-only Sandals Princesa del Mar, which sells itself as an idyllic honeymoon spot; and other resorts by Sol Meliá, the Spanish hotel chain, which manages some of the major accommodations in Cuba in joint ventures with the government.

Some of the development is so new that palm trees haven't had time to grow tall enough to give shade from a brutally hot sun.

BY midafternoon, the cobblestones of Old Havana sizzle, reflecting sun rays so powerful you can't look at the sky without squinting. It is the siesta hour. But people are spilling over the narrow sidewalks and strolling down the streets and into the bars, restaurants and hotels, museums and churches - all the buildings that make Old Havana one of the most photographed cities in the Americas.

Sightseers wind into the Ambos Mundos, one of a dozen or more small hotels that have been preserved or carved out of crumbling buildings, waiting to go up the elevator to visit Hemingway's room, a sun-drenched studio where some of his manuscripts and a typewriter he used when he stayed there are kept in glass cases. Pictures of Hemingway abound, and a sculpture of his face is mounted in the lobby.

Funny, in these long years when Americans have not been free to travel to Cuba, how much Hemingway figures in the island's tourism - the Finca de Vigía outside Havana, his bars, his fishing boat, the Hemingway marina. One of the most frequent photos you see in public places shows Hemingway whispering in Fidel Castro's ear. Cubans know an effective image when they see it - the American Nobel Prize winner with the revolutionary hero.

Blocks away, at the Raquel, the cool tiled lobby offers a refuge from crowds and heat, and at the Florida, where an imposing staircase leads to rooms of high ceilings and antique furnishings, guests lounge in the atrium under a stained-glass dome painted by a Cuban artist.

Just about everywhere in Havana, Cuban art takes a prominent place. Paintings and sketches hang in corridors, in rooms, in hotel lobbies. But there's only graffiti in La Bodeguita.

A block west of the Plaza de la Catedral, one of five plazas around which much of Old Havana lives and works, on a dirty alley wide enough for one car, men idle on the sidewalk and in the entryways of dark foyers. The doorway of one tiny place is blocked by a crowd.

This is the Bodeguita del Medio, at Calle Empedrado 207, probably the best-known bar in Havana, jammed floor to ceiling with Hemingway memorabilia and the photos and signatures of just about every soul that has stepped into the place. Foreigners, mostly young men in baseball caps, half sauced at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, jam around the bar and scream out their orders - mojitos! mojitos! mojitos! - to the bartender, a middle-aged fellow who mass-produces the rum and mint cocktail and, like an assembly line, slides the glasses down the counter.

AT the end of a long day in Old Havana, I meet the man most responsible for the restoration of the city, Eusebio Leal Spengler, the Historian of the City of Havana, a title that does not begin to convey his importance. He's agile, graying, wearing eyeglasses and short sleeves. There's nothing imperious about his manner.

Sitting in a stifling room in a restored building where he has his office, his rooms filled with paintings, plaques, photos and books, he quickly recounts the history of the restoration of Old Havana, which began with his master plan in the 80's. Starting with government funds and a vision, he can now count 16 hotels where there were nearly none, 65 restaurants and the restoration of 36 percent of the area.

"I won't see the full restoration of the city," he says a bit wistfully, "so much is left to be done, but this is a start."

Talking rapidly, like one who has said this many times before, he paints an overview of the restoration movement and his role in it. "Old Havana is like a small city-state," he says, but he is not a solo act. He reports to Fidel Castro; he is a member of the government.

"I am the State," he says, and there's a touch of gloating in this, even if it comes with a smile. "What we're doing here is trying to preserve the patrimony, the memory of the Cuban nation."

That patrimony presumably includes the decrepit mansion in a slummy area of the city where three young boys, barely visible in the dark stairs, approach me, tugging at my shirt, saying "money, money," their open palms stuck out. I walk by them up to the second floor and open the door to one of Havana's favorite restaurants, La Guarida, a small place that gained a spot of fame when it was featured in the 1994 Miramax film "Strawberry and Chocolate."

Posters from the movie are pasted on the walls along with a mishmash of images of santos and Jesus, something out of the hippie 60's. With its funky atmosphere, La Guarida is a hit with foreigners, from diplomats and journalists to drifters. Everybody goes to La Guarida, I am told - best food in town.

No, it isn't. Five days in Cuba and I've not had a good meal except at the Café del Oriente in Old Havana. But foreigners get the best food money can buy. Foreigners get the best of everything. Most Cubans shop for food at neighborhood markets where dogs sniff around, vegetables are rotting and flies buzz over raw meat laid on bloody counters.

With incomes ranging from $8 to $20 a month, the working-class Cuban cannot afford the Palco supermarket in the Cubanacán area, with its shelves of Kellogg's cereals and six-packs of Coca-Cola (both made in Mexico) and the slabs of fresh beef in the butcher area. That, and the preserved mansions in Miramar and Siboney (where Fidel Castro has a compound), are within reach only of retired generals like the one I met one morning there, and other members of the Havana elite - diplomats, foreign entrepreneurs, government functionaries and their families.

AMERICANS want to believe that only Fidel Castro stands in the way of their vacation plans. "Ten minutes after his death," says Mr. Del Rio, of Oceania Cruises, "there will be normalization of ties. I believe the regime will end the moment of Fidel's death."

He and other tourism executives already see their ships packed with Americans sailing for Cuban ports; ferries zipping back and forth on daytrips to Havana and Varadero; as many as 50 flights a day taking off from Florida for the island; and the flags of Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and other signature hotels flying there.

But today's Cuba is not the pre-Castro Cuba many Americans remember - or fantasize about.

"Americans are wrong if they think that once Castro is gone, everything will be as it was before," says Lissa Ree Weinmann, the director of the Cuba Project at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York. "Cubans have changed" - many Cubans today only know life under Castro - "and many of them will not accept any kind of American domination."

There does not seem to be a chance of any immediate loosening of the restrictions, says Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who is a leader in the battle to lift the embargo. But he says that if a vote in Congress were taken secretly, the ban on travel and trade would most likely fall. Cuban experts cite a range of American organizations, from the American Society of Travel Agents to food exporters across the South, which support free travel and trade.

Lifting the embargo will take as much as a decade, estimates Antonio R. Zamora, a Miami lawyer with the New York firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed who has published at least three studies on United States-Cuba relations. "The embargo is trade, buying and selling, and it is banking, credit cards, investment," he says.

There are also knotty property issues, he says, referring to the American-owned companies and industries expropriated by Cuba when Fidel Castro took over. Those issues will take years to resolve, but he is convinced that the travel ban will come down first.

When that happens, Mr. Zamora, a Cuban exile who fought at the Bay of Pigs, foresees a huge surge in travel to the island. "Cuba is like having a place as beautiful as Hawaii," he says, "only 90 miles from the United States."

"It has a very strong singular culture," Mr. Schrager says, "unlike other islands, like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, that seem like atolls next to it. Cuba is a real country with a distinct personality. It's exotic and timeless. Whether it's music or some other reason, it captures our fancy.

"And politics aside, Castro, he's the last great world leader on the world stage. He is the last one left, and to me that adds to the legend."

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Getting There

With a few exceptions, the United States government does not allow Americans to travel to Cuba, just 90 miles from Key West. Among those permitted to travel under a General License (no application necessary) are accredited journalists, full-time professionals traveling for research, and government officials.

A permit known as a Specific License, issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury, must be obtained by anyone else, including those traveling for educational activities, to visit immediate relatives, on behalf of private foundations, for research or educational institutes or for religious activities. Though some Americans travel to Cuba from a third country like Mexico or Canada, they risk substantial fines.

For more information and travel arrangements, you can contact Marazul Charters, 4100 Park Avenue, Weehawken, N.J. 07086, (201) 319-1054, www.marazul.com, a government-approved agency. Marazul has two flights a week from Miami to Havana (on leased American Eagle or Falcon Air planes); it will also book flights from Montego Bay, Jamaica; Toronto and Montreal; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Mexico City and Cancún; and Nassau, the Bahamas. The company also makes hotel reservations and books air travel in Cuba.

All licensed travelers must have a visa from the Cuban government. Visas can be obtained through the Cuban Interests Section, 2630 16th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20009; (202) 797-8518. The visa fee is $50; consular services, $20. Foreign currency must be changed to Cuban convertible pesos; for the best exchange rate, take euros or Canadian dollars.

Where to Stay

Hotel Nacional, Calle O at 21, Vedado, (53-7) 873-3564, www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com, the best hotel in Havana, designed by McKim, Mead & White, was built in 1930. The hotel has 457 rooms, a cabaret, several bars and restaurants. Room rates range from $120 to $660.

Hotel Ambos Mundos, Calle Obispo 153, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-9529, is a 54-room restored hotel where Hemingway lived in the 30's. Rooms start at $80.

Hotel Florida, Calle Obispo 252, Old Havana, (53-7) 862-4127, is a 25-room hotel with a high atrium, a stained-glass skylight, and a restaurant and bar. The ample high-ceilinged rooms have colonial appointments, marble floors, wrought-iron beds, satellite TV and minibars. Rates from $90.

Hotel Raquel, Calle Amargura at San Ignacio, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-8280, has 25 rooms decorated with art by Cuban painters and an elegant Art Nouveau lobby; the hotel's biblical name evokes Cuban-Jewish culture. Rooms from $80.

Meliá las Américas, Varadero, (53-45) 66-7600), all-inclusive; from $220.

Sandals Princesa del Mar and Sandals Royal Hicacos, Varadero, www.sandalscuba.ca, for couples only, all-inclusive; rooms from $170.

Where to Eat

Café del Oriente, Oficios 112, Old Havana, (53-7) 860-6686, an elegant but casual restaurant (with live music), has some of the best food in Havana, with a good selection of wines. A meal with a glass of wine comes to about $20.

El Aljibe, Séptima Avenida, Miramar, (53-7) 204-1583, is a favorite restaurant with foreigners and the Havana elite. A large, open terrace with a bamboo roof, it's a place for large groups and after-hours drinking and eating. Its specialty is pollo asado el aljibe (roast chicken), which comes in a steaming pot. The meal is a bargain at $15 and should be washed down with Cristal beer ($2 a bottle).

La Guarida, Calle Concordia 418, Central Havana, (53-7) 862-4940, is Cuba's most famous paladar (as Cuba's home restaurants are called). The food, which runs to chicken and pork and some seafood, is mildly interesting though not excellent. Main dishes run around $12.

What to See and Do

There's really only one main attraction: Old Havana, with museums, cathedrals, plazas, hotels, restaurants and bars. But the rest of Havana - mainly Vedado, Miramar and Siboney - are worth a car tour to get a better view of how the elite lives.

Outside Havana: Scenic Pinar del Río Province (southwest of Havana) is a three-hour drive on bus tours that leave daily from major Havana hotels. Havanatur, a government tourism agency with offices in major hotels, can arrange your tours; (53-82) 75-0100.

LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA, an editor at Sunday Styles, is the author of a memoir, "The Noise of Infinite Longing" (Harper- Collins).

Sent by Sr.Cohiba