After that delightful breakfast described in the previous post, we set out to explore Old Havana. In the morning light, we took a good look up and down Jesus Maria Street from the balcony on the second floor of the B&B.
Old Havana, founded 503 years ago, is a city of great contrasts. People's opinion about the state of the city will vary greatly depending on how recently they visited. Conditions of buildings vary from poor to magnificent.
We began our exploration on foot and by the end of the day we would cover much of the old town.
We headed east down Jesus Maria Street toward the harbor and came to the Alameda de Paula, one of Havana's oldest promenades dating from 1777. From our B&B, the harbor was visible in the distance including the fountain named for Leopoldo O'Donnell.
We headed north along the promenade and shortly came to a life-size statue of Nicolas Batista. Not knowing one Batista from another, I assumed that this was the dictator, Batista, overthrown by Castro in 1959. It's not. Nicolás Guillén Batista was a writer, political activist and the national poet of Cuba.
Our next stop was at Our Lady of Kazan Russian Orthodox Cathedral. Construction of the church began in 2004 and the project was conceived by Fidel Castro as as a monument to Russian-Cuban friendship. I have to say that the idea of Fidel Castro and Russia building a cathedral goes against pretty much everything I knew about these two countries sixty years ago when I was a student at Central Catholic High School in Portland.
Continuing along the promenade, we reached the Plaza de San Francisco Asis. This huge plaza lies in front of the Terminal Sierra Maestra where cruise ships dock. Anyone who has visited Havana on a cruise ship likely landed here. The plaza is named for the Minor Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and associated convent located on its edge.
Here's a view of the same scene captured in 1770.
Looking out across the water from the plaza, the famous statue of Christ overlooking the harbor is barely visible in the distance.
Viewed from across the water, the plaza is visible in the lower right of this photo of the Terminal
Linda spotted a group of entertainers on stilts and we moved over to watch from a closer vantage point.
At the entrance to the plaza, there is a beautiful little garden dedicated to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is easy to miss so I put a sign on the gate post in the picture so you won't miss it. Inside there is also a small Greek Orthodox cathedral and a graveyard that is the final resting place for a number of prominent Havana intellectuals and artists. Much of the garden is visible in this Youtube video tour in Spanish, but I suggest you put off watching it until you reach the bottom of this post.
Over in a corner of the square, there is a much-photographed statue of Father Junipero Serra with a young indigenous Juaneño/Acjachemen boy. The presence of the statue raises the question of whether Fr. Serra ever visited Cuba. The answer appears to be "no." This statue was placed here by the Spanish hotel chain, Iberostar, in 2004 when they opened a large hotel in Havana. One California blogger explored the subject extensively and has a post here.
As I turned around after taking a couple more pictures, I found Linda talking with a tour guide who had caught up to us in the plaza. Abel Martinez had an official "Tour Guide" badge, a printed price list and seemed pretty legitimate, so we signed on for a three hour carriage ride around the rest of Old Havana.
Abel (as in Cain and Abel, he explained) did a good job filling us in on a few sights we had missed as we doubled back along the Promenade and began a circle that would take us around the outside of Old Havana and to the door of our B&B.
As you might expect on any kind of a tour like this we were given the opportunity to buy some souvenirs (which we did not), sign up for a dinner show the next night (which we did), and have lunch at an overpriced restaurant (which we also did.)
As we approached the beautiful Cuban Capitol building, we came upon this marketplace.
Nearby, there was a restaurant offering a "Legendarios del Guajirito" dinner show along the lines of the Buena Vista Social Club. We climbed the several winding flights of stairs that are required to reach the second floor of any building here to the ticket office and dining room.; we learned that yes, credit cards do work in Cuba - well, at least Linda's did.
We also passed by the gate to Havana's Chinatown. As Abel put it, "Chinatown but no Chinese!" For information on the rise and fall of the Chinese community in Cuba, see the Wikipedia entry. Some reviews of the area can also be found at Trip Advisor.
The Capitol building is truly beautiful. It is among the numerous buildings that have been carefully restored over the past twenty years or so.
Across the street from the Capitol is the Grand Theater of Havana, home to the Cuban National Ballet.
Not far from the theater is the Floridita bar, an Earnest Hemingway haunt. We stopped in to check if his spirit was still there at the bar. It was.
Also in this area, we passed the Museum of the Revolution. Up until the 1959 revolution, this was the presidential palace of Fulgencio Batista. Trip advisor notes that the museum presents the story of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and includes vivid exhibits like blood-stained and bullet-riddled uniforms.
On a plaza opposite the Museum of the Revolution, there is a statue of Jose Marti (1853 - 1895), the national hero of Cuba, for whom the Havana airport is named. This statue was just unveiled in 2018 and is a duplicate of one that is found in Central Park in New York City.
We had now circled back to the waterfront and our next stop was Plaza de Armas. There is a great deal to see in this area and we would come back to it on another day. But today we walked through and looked at the blooming flowers.
In the center of Plaza de Armas, there is a beautiful marble statue (there are lots of statues in Old Havana) of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, revolutionary hero and the first president of Cuba.
Here Abel patiently explains de Cespedes role in history to me. Abel was a great guide, helping us to understand both the culture and economy of the country as well as its history.
By this point, it was almost 2:00 p.m. and we were getting hungry. Of course, Abel had a suggestion of a good place to have lunch. A paladar is a small restaurant located in a private home, often on the second floor. We headed for Paladar Don Lorenzo. This paladar is located on an open balcony on the second floor of a building just a couple of blocks from our B&B. (Google maps makes it a three minute walk.) Since this was our second day in Havana, we recognized that the prices were very high. The food was OK and the accompanying music (I believe every restaurant we visited had live music) was good.
When we returned to our carriage for the return to our B&B, the local "tout" for the restaurant trying to drum up business from the street asked us how was our food. "The music was good," we said. "But what about the food?" "The music was very good," we said again.
We took a break for an hour or so back at the B&B to cool off in the air conditioning before heading out on foot again. This time, we headed north in the direction of Plaza Vieja (Old Square), another of the updated and attractive squares in Old Havana about five blocks away. We walked along Cuba Street going beyond the square when Linda recognized a picture of Albert Einstein on a building we were passing.
This turned out to be the former Acamedia de Ciencias (Academy of Sciences), the oldest active national academy of sciences outside Europe. The building now contains the Carlos J. Finley museum of science.
The Einstein connection? He stopped off in Havana for a day in December of 1930 to speak at the academy while he was in route from Germany to California. There is even a picture posted to Pintrest, taken in front of the building.
Next door to the academy museum, we saw another of the many Catholic churches in Old Havana. This one, The Templo de San Francisco, had open doors and we visited briefly.
We browsed the neighboring area for a while. The narrow streets contain a wide variety of residences. Folks sit outside to catch the evening breeze (there is very little air-conditioning in this area) and there is constant foot traffic along with children playing up until late at night.
Many residences have a few plants growing in pots hanging on the buildings, but we spotted one "greenscape" that was amazing.
We ended up back at Plaza Vieja where we were going to have dinner. This is a truly beautiful square with carefully restored buildings on all sides.
But as we approached the square, we noticed this poster with the admonition, "Para no Alvidar", (don't forget) and pictures of Plaza Vieja from some years back. The poster shows the disastrous, "bombed out" appearance of the square before its restoration.
Such was the state of Old Havana by the 1970s. The recovery and renaissance of the district is largely due to a single man, Eusebio Leal Spengler.
From his New York Times obituary in 2020:
Mr. Leal began his preservation efforts in the 1980s, when the old center of the capital city was a ruin. Residents lived without indoor plumbing or reliable electricity, garbage piled up on the streets, and 250-year-old buildings sometimes collapsed before their eyes.
As a historian and director of the Havana City Museum, Mr. Leal was passionate about saving Cuba’s architectural history. He once lay down in front of a steamroller to save a colonial-era wooden street from being paved over. Through his campaigning, Old Havana was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982.
There is a lengthy piece in Smithsonian Magazine about his work here. Also a nice series of maps showing the extent of restoration and future plans can be found here. And finally, it should be noted that Leal is buried in that small Jardín Madre Teresa de Calcuta that we visited back toward the beginning of this post. You might want to go back and view that Youtube video.
For dinner, we chose Mojito Mojito, on the recommendation of our B&B host. It's a lovely restaurant on one of the side streets just off the square. Naturally, Linda started off with a Mojito.
For the main course, she selected a salad Nicoise and I had the restaurant's Chicken Supreme. We split a Flan for dessert. We sat outside and watched the passing pedestrians while we dined.
The restaurant is next to a small art gallery and the owner placed several paintings on the fence across the street to advertise his wares while we there.
The total bill, including a ten percent service fee came to almost 3500 Cuban Pesos! But that converts to $22 U.S. Not a bad price at all. We raised the tip a bit higher and also put $5 in the hat that the musicians passed around.
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