Havana’s Adventure: Driving in Miramar and Beautiful Malecón

The morning had been the four plazas. Hotel Telégrafo, Calle Obispo, the cathedral, Armas, San Francisco, Vieja, and a guide who turned out to be mine alone. That walk is in The Best Highlights in Havana’s Old City Center. The night before, the Capitol dome in the hotel window, is in Back To 1953.

This page is the rest of the day: lunch outside the old grid, a car through Miramar, Revolution Square, and the Malecón when the light went.

Havana was still doing the thing it does to a first visit. A capital that had spent decades looking paused, and a street that could put you in a 1950s Chevrolet without anyone calling it a costume. The afternoon is where that feeling stopped being the old town and became the whole city.

Lunch at Café Laurent

The guide took me out of the old city into a business pocket, and up to a rooftop I would not have found. Restaurante Paladar Café Laurent. No billboard, no road sign, a quiet room with homey décor, and a balcony over the Havana skyline with the Gulf beyond it. Recommendations from other travellers were taped by the kitchen door. A place a visitor does not reach without someone who lives here.

The owner was friendly and insisted on a Cuban mojito. It had more rum than the ones I knew, and I am fairly sure he had added syrup. Sweeter, heavier, a drink rather than a refreshment. The mains were chicken, beef, or fish. I took the fish. It was not the best fish of a life. It arrived with a care that the rooftop had earned. Imported Coca-Cola was still in the city. I was tempted by a Cuban Coke, tried it, and could not have told you the difference. That was 2015. The bottle, like the peso, has had a more complicated life since.

Over lunch the guide, by then a friend for the day, talked about ordinary Cuban life and how people stayed in touch with the outside. Doctors and lawyers, she said, could earn less than a waitress in the United States. People paid heavily for a Mexican visa and then looked for a way north. The closed country was not as closed as the postcard. The taxi driver the night before had talked about the news. The operator had known about the US–Cuba announcement the same day as everyone else. She said she would love to travel. I sat with the mojito and thought about the freedom I treat as furniture. More on the house, if you want the meal rather than the afternoon, is on the Café Laurent Guide Page.

Rum, since the glass was in my hand

A strong rum at the end of a day in the cane is an old Cuban reward. Sugar came with the Spanish and took to the island so well it might as well have been native: heat, rain, soil. The colony grew rich on the export, and rum was the drink made from what the fields left behind. It is also, plainly, part of the colonial and slavery story. Enslaved workers drank to get through the day. Bad rum could blind or poison. In the nineteenth century the trade was large and still under Spanish control.

The origin of the word is told as a folk tale. Distillation in the West Indies in the seventeenth century, a British technique, and drinkers shouting something like “rumbullion,” later shortened to rum. It is a good story. It is not a settled etymology. What is settled is the place of the drink. People share it with music, with heat, with friends. Hemingway’s name is attached to the mojito for a reason. Cigars sit in the same agricultural history, the same soil, a different craft.

When I visited, the cheapest bottle of Añejo Blanco was about 3 CUC, Havana Club about 4.5 CUC, and a bottle of water about 1 CUC. Those are 2015 tourist prices, in a currency that no longer exists. CUC was withdrawn in 2021. Do not budget from them.

Bacardi is the chapter everyone knows. After the restrictions loosened, it became the first major locally owned producer. Facundo Bacardí i Massó refined a lighter rum and the name travelled. In 1959 the family left as private firms were nationalized. Havana Club is the other name on the glass. The Arechabala family launched it in 1934. After the revolution it became a state brand, later partnered with Pernod Ricard for sale abroad. The Arechabalas had sold their recipe toward Bacardi. The result is two products called Havana Club, made by two companies, and a trademark fight that has been in and out of court for decades, especially where the US embargo blocks one of them. I still do not know which name wins. I know which one was in the mojito.

The car, and why it still runs

The driver was already outside. Vintage-car men in Havana are often people who inherited the vehicle and then spent years keeping it alive. Parts do not walk into a shop. He offered me the wheel. The only time I had driven a stick was a lesson. I turned it down. I did not want that car, or that street, to be the place I learned.

These cars are called almendrones, from the Spanish for almond, because the rounded bodies look like one. Most are late-1940s and 1950s models. After the Second World War, Havana was open to investors, gamblers, and worse, and the hotels filled up with Chevrolet, Packard, Ford, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, and Chrysler. The embargo, tightened in the early 1960s, cut off the new ones and the official parts. What remained was repaired, repainted, and passed down. A lot of men in Cuba know these engines the way other cities know a service manual. It can be a struggle. It is also why the street still looks like a museum that has not closed. Tourists come for it. Drivers make a living from it.

We took the front seat into Miramar. It is a residential district of larger houses, diplomatic missions, international schools, a quieter money than Old Havana. The embassies give the streets a different silence.

Quinta Avenida is the one people call Havana’s Fifth Avenue, a broad residential run rather than a shopping one.

Tropical trees shade the sidewalk. The afternoon breeze came off the water side of the district, and the city opened out after the tight grid of Obispo.

From there the route picked up two greens I had not expected. Colón Cemetery is the great necropolis, a city of marble and angels that deserves more than the spin we gave it. Then Parque Almendares, hundreds of years of trees in what people call Havana’s forest, a green lung with a river through it. The volume of green in the middle of a capital was absurd. Flora and fauna both, and for a few minutes it felt like a rainforest that had tolerated a road. I would go back for the park alone if the afternoon ever needed a pause between the car and the square.

Revolution Square

Revolution Square is the city’s formal stage, a vast paved expanse that only makes sense when you remember what it was built to hold. Political rallies were held here, including Fidel Castro speaking to crowds that filled the ground on countless occasions. The scale is the message. A person feels small, which is the point of a square designed for a million. The landmark is the José Martí Memorial, a star-shaped tower of about 109 metres, not 109 feet, raised to the national hero. Martí lived from 1853 to 1895, poet and organiser of the independence war, and the tower is the city’s way of keeping him above the traffic. The plan is a five-pointed star, which is why the same building is described as star-shaped and as pentagonal. Both are true.

Across the square, steel portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos occupy the façades of the Interior and Communications ministries, the two faces the revolution chose to keep on the skyline. Under Che, the line is “Hasta la Victoria Siempre,” until the everlasting victory, always. Under Cienfuegos, “Vas bien, Fidel.” You can photograph them. You cannot pretend they are decoration.

The guide had a surprise. A three-peso note, the convertible one, with Che’s head. Most visitors, she said, dealt in dollars and never received Cuban pesos, and some wanted exactly this note to keep.

I carried it for a while beside a lucky US dollar, two leaders in one wallet. The currency on that note is gone. The gift was the point.

Hotel Nacional, because El Focsa was shut

We came back along the waterfront road. A bright afternoon, the sea on one side, and then the highly guarded US embassy as we turned into the city for a drink. The plan had been El Focsa. It was closed for a private function. We walked to the Hotel Nacional de Cuba instead, which was no consolation prize. It is one of the important houses of the city, a 1930s pile with a garden in front and a panoramic view of the water. The yard is the drink. The history can wait until you are holding the glass.

The Malecón

The Malecón is an eight-kilometre sea wall facing the Gulf, the city’s balcony and its breakwater. It runs from the harbour mouth toward Vedado and beyond, a pavement where Havana comes to sit rather than to arrive. On a rough day the waves come over the wall and wet the cars. This was not that day. The water stayed where it was meant to. Across it, Castillo de los Tres Santos Reyes Magnos del Morro stands on the rock at the harbour entrance. It was the front line of defence when Havana was the prize of the Caribbean. The Spanish added further works on the headland, and the tower inside the castle is now a lighthouse. You look at it from the wall. You do not need to reach it to understand why the city built a seat facing the sea.

I walked a stretch after the car had dropped me back toward the old town. Twilight did the usual Havana trick and turned the concrete pink. People sat along the wall, talking, doing nothing in particular. I sat with them, the Morro in front of me, the city behind, and no signal at all. For once the phone could not pull the rest of the world into the hour. It felt isolated, and it felt like the point of the day.

How the day fits

If you only have one Havana day, the order is the one I walked. Morning in the four plazas, on the Old Havana walk. Afternoon as this page: Laurent, the car, Revolution Square, the Nacional, the Malecón. The arrival, if you still need the airport and the first night, is Back To 1953. A second day leaves the city. The valley is the Viñales day. The rest of the notes are in the Cuba archives.

The plazas explain the colony. The car and the square explain the revolution’s stage. The Malecón is where the city stops talking and looks at the water. I would not skip it for a third museum.