It looked like a twenty month long hibernation, until the first foreign tourists returned on November 15. The Nacional Hotel in Havana, Cuba is an iconic place that has received many celebrities and film shoots. The building with more than 400 rooms took the opportunity to get a facelift: the facade has been restored, the floors have been changed, the swimming pool renovated and some windows have been replaced, including that of room 211, on the second floor.
This is where Lucky Luciano stayed in December 1946, during a summit meeting of the heads of the Italian-American mafia he chaired, immortalized in 1974 in fiction. The Godfather 2 by Francis Ford Coppola: the clan chiefs share a cake decorated with a drawing of the Cuban island at the same time as the attributions of the various illicit activities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49tIqyeNu3E
Some 500 gangsters had taken over the hotel for the convention, and guest of honor Frank Sinatra had accompanied with his crooning voice the lavish parties celebrated that Christmas. “Las Vegas did not exist, and Cuba was the perfect place for gambling, with the proximity to the United States, the climate, the beaches, the rum”, Havana was the perfect place to become “the capital of the game”, says Arleen Ortiz, specialist in the history of the hotel.
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On the famous Malecon, facing Havana Bay, the monumental H-shaped building with its English porcelain still intact, its clocks imported from Germany and its chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings, opened its doors on December 30, 1930, funded in part by organized crime.
This work, undertaken during the lethargy imposed by the closing of the borders, should enable “tourists to find the hotel of the thirties, by bringing the past to life in the present in even greater comfort”, Explain Arleen Ortiz.
The past has left its scars on the stone and concrete building, like the bullet holes that once marked the facade, vestiges of a rebellion in 1933, and in the gardens the network of tunnels dating from the Cuban missile crisis. in 1962.
When Fidel Castro’s revolution triumphed in 1959, the hotel for some time became a dormitory and a workshop for 900 peasant women who had come to the capital to study sewing. “These young women who had never left their homes without electricity, with dirt floors” suddenly found themselves in these elegant rooms, emphasizes Arleen Ortiz. This is the only time in its history when the Nacional did not welcome foreign guests in its art-deco decor tinged with neoclassicism, apart from the extensive renovation in the 1990s imposing a long closure.
In the corridors and rooms of the hotel are exhibited photos, objects and even letters from illustrious clients and which have earned the palace to be classified since 1982 in the Unesco Memory of the World register.
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Actors Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn, Johnny Weissmüller, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, pianist Nat King Cole, writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez or even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a great fan of Cuban cigars , are part of the long list of passing personalities immortalized on the walls.
“It’s magical to be here, I love the energy, it’s incredible (…) I would like to know more, I want to know more about the hotel and its history”Sierra, a 39-year-old American teacher, says while drinking a glass of wine facing Havana Bay. Tania Fernandez, a doctor from a province in the center of the island, took her children to visit this historic place: “no matter how many modern hotels” in Cuba she said, “what foreign tourists want is to sit where so many famous people have been.”