Hola la Habana!

1) Capitolio Nacional
2) Gran Teatro
3) Museo de la Revolución
4) Habana Veija

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

It's the same hotel where Ernest Hemingway used to stay and write for ten years from 1932, before he moved to his house in Cojimar. This stylishly artistic 1920's hotel features an original metal cage elevator and a nice rooftop terrace. You'll find monuments, museums, cobblestone plazas, restaurants and cocktail bars all within easy walking distance. There's a lot of sightseeing to do...

Downtown Havana is also the place to be if you are keen on cocktails. No one should miss the great writer's favorite bars in the old quarters. Hemingway always went to the Bodeguita del Medio (Empedrado e/ San Ignacio y Mercaderes) to drink his usual tripple, a mojito, and then he usually went straight to El Floridita (Monserrate esq. Obispo) to taste the excellent daiquiris served there, shaken not stirred. The Bodeguita del Medio is made famous by Hemingway. This immensely popular classic was the hangout for Havana's bohemian crowd in the 1940s. The walls of this usually overcrowded bar are covered in autographs and scribbled messages and therefore some of the old spirit has retained.

Downtown Havana is also the place to be if you are keen on cocktails. No one should miss the great writer's favorite bars in the old quarters. Hemingway always went to the Bodeguita del Medio (Empedrado e/ San Ignacio y Mercaderes) to drink his usual tripple, a mojito, and then he usually went straight to El Floridita (Monserrate esq. Obispo) to taste the excellent daiquiris served there, shaken not stirred. The Bodeguita del Medio is made famous by Hemingway. This immensely popular classic was the hangout for Havana's bohemian crowd in the 1940s. The walls of this usually overcrowded bar are covered in autographs and scribbled messages and therefore some of the old spirit has retained.

If you don't want to follow in Hemingway's footsteps, there is another cozy open-front bar near the Ambos Mundos hotel in the tighly packed shopping street of Obispo. If you follow the luring tunes that cascade from the corner of Obispo and San Ignacio you will find a predominantly local crowd and an extremely relaxing port at Café Paris. I stopped here for an inexpensive mojito, while I watched street vendors sell cigars to other tourists or beautiful mulata women passing by. This little bar, with a worn simplicity that belies the party atmosphere stirred up by a live band, is always packed with a mix of tourists and locals.

As you see, I like to hang out in a cheerful café. It always a nice place to spy on other people's habits or to write some notes about my experiences into my dairy. Did I already mention that Lluvia de Oro (Obispo esq. Habana) is a very lively and busy bar too!

Hungry? The best option for lunch is to grab a snack in one of these bars or from one of the street stalls dotted around Habana Veija. You need pesos to pay for a snack in these stalls.

After strolling through narrow atmospheric streets bristling with life , some of them with refined colonial mansions, we ended up in Central Havana. Without knowing it, we stood in front of Havana's most memorable landmarks- the awesome Capitolio Nacional. Its solid, columned front gloriously dominates this part of the skyline. Modelled after the U.S. Capitol, though smaller, it was home to the Cuban Congress before the Revolution. It now houses the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Library of Science and Technology.

I was silenced once inside the magnificent polished entrance hall. A plushly decorated interior full of striking and extravagant Rococo-style details. The seat of the House of Representatives and the Senate prior to the revolution, both beautifully furnished in Cuban mahogany, are two fantasticly ornate main chambers that make this place really worth seeing!! The walk round, with a free tour guide, is surprisingly brief and shouldn't take you more than twenty minutes. In front of the Capitolio Nacional there's a parking place for taxis. You can see hundreds of classic American cars - Chevrolets, Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs - from the 1940s an 50s, which have survived in isolation from the outside world since the 1959 revolution, ply the roads. Some are beautifully maintained, others are rolling scrapheaps. Almost all of them are now employed by their owners as taxis.

Another attention-grabber is undoubtedly the Gran Teatro, next to the Capitolio Nacional. As it looks good on the outside with its balustrated balconies, colonnaded cornices and sculpted stone figures it's even more impressive on the inside. Nowadays, the Gran Teatro itself is still used for theatrical and opera performances. Other parts of the buidling are used as ballet or theatre classrooms. You don't need to attend a performance to get a proper look inside. For only 2 USD, you are able to get a guided tour by a beautiful young Latino lady. An enormous marble staircase led us to the second floor where there used to be a casino in the good old times. Because it was Saturday, there weren't many students practicing for a performance but we were lucky to see some artists paint the decor for the famous opera 'Swan Lake' of Tchaikovsky. It was painful to see that so many fresco pictures were affected because of water that oozes through the ceiling.

The Museo de la Revolución is only a few blocks away from the Gran Teatro. Because I didn't make time to visit the Museo 26 de Julio at the Cuartel Moncada in Santiago, I decided to visit this one and it was soon entirely clear that the Museo de la Revolución must be the country's most comprehensive celebration of the revolution. And would it be a coincidence that the museum is housed in the sumptuous presidential palace of dictator Bastista? The revolutionary war was surprisingly well-documented photographically and there are some fantastic dramatic pictures and interesting quotes. At first, I read most of the annotations with enthusiasm but after an hour, it became monotonous. There is just too much to see and not all of it is that interesting.

On the second floor, some exhibits were vaguely relevant and I lost attention. I would like to share with you a quote of Fidel I wrote down during my visit: 'The guerrilla's formation process is an uninterrupted appeal to each man's conciousness and honour. Che knew how to get into the most sensible feelings of the revolutionaries'.

Unfortunately, time flies and there is still so much to see in Havana- the oldest cigar factory in the country, Fábrica de Tobacos Partagás, the famous seawall Malecón, Casa Natal de José Martí and the cultural heart of the city known as Vedado, to mention only a few. These are all good reasons to come back again...

Inasmuch as I'm already able to summarize my stay here, Havana seems to be a melting pot of cultures and races, an open-air museum under the strict direction of the bearded Fidel Castro. And I guess many Habaneros are proud of their capital city. Meanwhile, I'm glad I have seen it. Havana is a virus, resistant to any medicine.