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Behind me stood the National Capitol. No filter, no Photoshop, and it still looked like a photograph from the 1950s. That was the view from the room at the Mercure Sevilla La Habana on the night I arrived, the dome sitting in the window as if the city had arranged it.
The airport landing, the Cancún hop, the pear juice, and the vintage taxi that collected me in a dark corner of the airport car park, is in Back To 1953. What belongs on this page is the morning after, and the old city that morning opened onto.
The room was on the seventh floor. Spacious, vintage in the way Havana means it, newer aluminium frames set into an older house, and a night view that took in the Capitol and the retro roofscape beyond it. I turned on the television, found CNN, washed the flight off, and went up to the rooftop restaurant for the first meal in Cuba.
Steak, live Cuban music, the city underneath the terrace. It was a better arrival than the queue at José Martí had promised. Then the tour company called about the next morning. It was the same day Obama announced talks with Cuba, and the person on the phone was more excited about that news than about my pickup time. I went to bed looking forward to it, without knowing that the group I had imagined would not be there.
Hotel Telégrafo, and a group that never came
I was to meet the guide at Hotel Telégrafo, on the corner of Paseo de Martí, opposite Parque Central. The building is the landmark you cannot miss if you are coming from the hotel pocket around the Capitol. I was ten minutes early. There was no group standing outside, no clipboard, no matching hats. Ten minutes later, a young woman introduced herself as the guide for the day. I had booked what I thought was a city tour. It was private. That accident is why the plazas still feel like a conversation rather than a loudspeaker. She talked about daily life as we walked, and it was not quite the version a visitor is sold at the airport: the same streets, a different pressure underneath them.
We crossed the small Central Park opposite the hotel and entered Calle Obispo, Bishop Street, the shopping vein of the old town. It runs east to Plaza de Armas. Restaurants, cafés, exchange houses, galleries, markets and bars line both sides, and the street is the one visitors mean when they say they walked Havana. Early, it was only just awake. Shopkeepers were still setting out. At night it is the crowded street, and the walk that felt open at nine becomes a slow procession after dark. If you only do Obispo once, do it in the morning and come back for the atmosphere, not the other way round.
The Johnson pharmacy is the doorway I still remember from that first stretch. An eighteenth-century chemist, still operating, more visited now for the polished porcelain apothecary jars than for a prescription. It is the sort of shop that tells you what Old Havana is doing: a working room that has become a sight, without quite stopping being a shop. Window displays along the street do the same job, a Victorinox pane, a café, a restaurant already laying tables. The old city is not a museum with a ticket. It is a grid people live in, with the heritage laid over the errands.
The morning’s job was the four plazas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the sixteenth-century Spanish grid that is still the core of the port. Havana was the colony’s great harbour, established by the Spanish in the 1500s, and the squares are how it organised power, prayer, trade, and later a school playground. Walk them in the order the street suggests. Cathedral, Armas, San Francisco, Vieja. You can do it without a radio. A guide earns her place in the doorways and the stories, not in the navigation.
Hemingway, on the way into the street
“My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita.”
Hemingway is the other map of this neighbourhood, and the city has not been shy about it. His name comes up whenever Havana is introduced, sometimes before the plazas do, which is a pity. He put in here in 1928 on the way to Spain, delayed by a storm, and the stop was enough. He came back over the next decade. In 1939 he moved from Key West and stayed about twenty years, writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, Islands in the Stream, and the book that won the Nobel, The Old Man and the Sea, in and around this city. He left for the United States when he needed medical care. The house, the bars, the boat: visitors now do it as a pilgrimage, and Havana has a Hemingway Trail for exactly that reason.
I was not on a pilgrimage. I was walking to the plazas, and the bars were on the way.
El Floridita was the first of them, as we entered the street. A historic fish restaurant and cocktail bar, pink walls, an old-fashioned light over the door, still open and still trading on the association. Inside, photographs crowd the back of the bar. A life-size bronze Hemingway stands among them, which is either a tribute or a very committed piece of product placement, and possibly both.
La Bodeguita del Medio is the mojito half of the line he may or may not have written on a wall. Drink there if you want the ritual. The daiquiri at Floridita, the mojito at Bodeguita, is the pairing the city sells. See the buildings first if you only have the morning. The bars will still be there at lunch.
Plaza de la Catedral
The square takes its name from Catedral de San Cristóbal, set in the middle of the old town.
It is not a grand European cathedral in the sense of Seville or the Duomo. It is the church of a Spanish harbour settlement, and that is the historical weight it has. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer and musicologist, called it music set in stone, thinking of the Roman Baroque of Francesco Borromini.
The Jesuits built the church in the eighteenth century. The comparison stuck because of the towers.
The right one is obviously broader and taller than the left, and the asymmetry is the thing you notice once someone has pointed it out. Before that, it simply looks like Havana.
The cathedral is dedicated to San Cristóbal. Local belief has it that the holy statues can grant a wish, and a great mass is held on 16 November. The legend attached to that mass is strict. Worshippers should not talk, and should not make a sound, or the wish will not come true. Columbus’s remains were said to have rested here before they were taken to the cathedral in Seville in 1898. Havana has never been casual about a claim like that, and the story is told whether or not the bones agree.
Around the square are the old family houses that now hold cafés, bars, vendors and museums. Palacio de los Marqueses de Aguas Claras, Casa de Lombillo, the Colonial Art Museum. Take the loop. The architecture is the point, and so is the life in front of it. On the Lombillo side a life-size brass figure leans against one of the pillars of the Palacio del Conde Lombillo.
Antonio Gades, the Spanish flamenco dancer. I remember him more clearly than the postcard of the façade. He looks as if he has paused, not as if he has been installed. Come before the groups if you want the stone without the pitch. The square is beautiful. It is also a working terrace.
Plaza de Armas
Obispo ends at Plaza de Armas, on the river side of the old grid, where the shops, the hawkers and the visitors collect.
The plaza was laid out in 1519 and is the oldest of the four. It was the political centre and the place the city gathered. Events are still held here. An explosion damaged it.
The eighteenth century repaired it, and the streets around gradually became a better address, an upscale residential pocket beside the harbour. What excited me was not the politics. It was the flea market, already set up when we arrived, early enough that the day had not yet decided what it was selling. Books, old photographs, the small revolutionary debris of a city that sells its own memory. I said I would come back at the end of the day. The square has been a social hub for more than five centuries. It can survive one more promise.
Outside the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, now the Museo de la Ciudad, a walkway is paved with wood rather than stone, a softer surface from the years it took horses. The City Museum is one of the beautiful Baroque buildings of Havana, built for the captains-general in the late eighteenth century, not in 1972. Castillo de la Real Fuerza stands in this same pocket, not across Plaza Vieja. It is a star-shaped colonial fort from the mid-sixteenth century, moat and all, one of the oldest European fortifications in the Americas, and it watches the channel the way a port city expects to be watched. Palacio del Segundo Cabo and the National Museum of Natural History sit nearby. This is the square where Havana admits it was a harbour before it was a postcard.
Plaza de San Francisco
San Francisco felt more open, which is what I meant when I called it modern. The buildings around the square have been restored with care, and one side gives onto the riverfront, so the sunlight arrives across the well-paved cobbles instead of through a gap between balconies. The Basílica Menor de San Francisco de Asís gives the square its name. The tower looks over the city and the sea beyond it, and it is the view people climb for.
The plaza was built in the sixteenth century and began as a market. The market later moved to Plaza Vieja. What stayed was the life of the pier. The Sierra Maestra terminal is here, and most cruise passengers still step off at this water. The eye-catching fountain is by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Gaggini. It was not only for show. It supplied fresh water to the ships. A square that faces a harbour has always had to be useful as well as handsome.
The church was established in 1608 and repaired in 1739 after a hurricane. It is not exactly a church now. It is a music theatre, because the building was made to sound, and Havana had the sense to keep using that. Outside stands an old bronze man.
Believers shake his hand and hold up fingers for the number of children they want, and they have his blessing. I watched people put up five, or even ten, in case the promise was mean. Besides the statue, women in traditional dress play instruments and hand out flowers. Ask before you photograph them. A picture can become a fee, and the square is clear about that if you are paying attention.
Plaza Vieja
Vieja means old, and the square did not look old. Better, it looked lived in. Cuban Baroque and Art Nouveau sit peculiarly next to each other around the arcades, with outdoor cafés and shops filling the edges and the open centre left to the city. The plaza was laid out in 1559, actually much younger than Armas and San Francisco, and it was called Plaza Nueva, the New Plaza, when it was still a yard for military exercises. Today the function is not military, not religious, and not political. It is a space dedicated to the citizens: an open-air marketplace, and an exercise yard for the students of the Angela Landa primary school next door. That mix is the point. Havana did not pick one century and freeze it. The school bell belongs to the square as much as the façade does.
If the sun is already on the stone, the indoor pauses are here. The Camera Oscura throws the city onto a dish in a darkened room. The photography museum and the playing-card museum are the other doors. Gran Teatro de La Habana is the longer walk back toward Parque Central, past the Capitol side of the grid, if the morning has not already turned into lunch. I would not add it to a tired itinerary. I would add it to a second loop, when Obispo is no longer new.
After the plazas
We left the old grid for a rooftop the guide knew, the kind of place with recommendations from other travellers taped by the kitchen door and no billboard on the street. I would not have found it alone. Lunch came with the city still in the legs, and then a vintage car into the newer part of Havana. That half of the day is Miramar on Quinta Avenida, Revolution Square and the José Martí memorial, a drink at the Hotel Nacional, and the Malecón when the light goes. It is written in Driving in Miramar and along the Malecón.
If you only have one Havana day, do it in this order. Telégrafo, Obispo, Floridita if the ritual matters to you, the four plazas in the sequence above, then the car. The old city is a morning. The sea wall is the close. If you have a second day, leave Havana. The valley of mogotes and tobacco is the Viñales day. The night before, if you still need the airport and the first rooftop, is Back To 1953. The rest of the island notes sit in the Cuba archives.
Old Havana rewards the walk more than the photograph. The Capitol started it. The four squares finish it. Hemingway is the ghost on Obispo, welcome if you have the hour, and not required if the plazas are the reason you came.
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