Cuba - Lonely Planet [64]
Havana entered the 20th century on the cusp of a new beginning. With the quasi-independence of 1902, the city had expanded rapidly west along the Malecón and into the wooded glades of formerly off-limits Vedado. There was a large influx of rich Americans at the start of the Prohibition era, and the good times began to roll with a healthy (or not-so-healthy) abandon; by the 1950s Havana was a decadent gambling city frolicking to the all-night parties of American mobsters and scooping fortunes into the pockets of various disreputable hoods such as Meyer Lansky.
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HAVANA STREET NAMES
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For Fidel, it was an aberration. On taking power in 1959, the new revolutionary government promptly closed down all the casinos and then sent Lansky and his sycophantic henchmen back to Miami. The once-glittering hotels were divided up to provide homes for the rural poor. Havana’s long decline had begun.
Today the city’s restoration is ongoing and a stoic fight against the odds in a country where shortages are part of everyday life and money for raw materials is scarce. Since 1982 City Historian Eusebio Leal Spengler has been piecing Habana Vieja back together street by street and square by square with the aid of Unesco and a variety of foreign investors. Slowly but surely, the old starlet is starting to rediscover her former greatness.
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ORIENTATION
Surrounded by Havana province, the City of Havana is divided into 15 municipalities (Map).
Habana Vieja, sometimes referred to as the Old Town, sits on the western side of the harbor in an area once bounded by 17th-century city walls that ran along present Av de Bélgica and Av de las Misiones. In 1863 these walls were demolished and the city spilled west into Centro Habana, bisected by busy San Rafael (the dividing line between the two is still fuzzy). West of Calzada de Infante lies Vedado, the 20th-century hotel and entertainment district that developed after independence in 1902. Near Plaza de la Revolución and between Vedado and Nuevo Vedado, a huge government complex was erected in the 1950s. West of the Río Almendares are Miramar, Marianao and Playa, Havana’s most fashionable residential suburbs prior to the 1959 Revolution.
Between 1955 and 1958, a 733m-long tunnel was drilled between Habana Vieja and Habana del Este under the harbor mouth, and since 1959 a flurry of ugly high-rise housing blocks have been thrown up in Habana del Este, Cojímar (a former fishing village) and Alamar, northeast of the harbor. South of Habana del Este’s endless blocks of flats are the prettier colonial towns of Guanabacoa, San Francisco de Paula and Santa María del Rosario. On the eastern side of the harbor are Regla and Casablanca.
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SCAMS
Well-documented jinetero (tout) problem aside, Havana is a remarkably safe city – particularly when compared with other Latin American capitals. Stroll through the atmospheric backstreets of Centro Habana or Habana Vieja of an evening, and your biggest worry is likely to be a badly pitched baseball or a flailing line of household washing.
But innocents beware. Scams do exist, particularly in the more touristy areas where well-practiced hustlers lurk outside the big hotels waiting to prey on unsuspecting foreign visitors.
One popular trick is for young men in the street to offer to change foreign currency into Cuban Convertibles at very favorable rates. Accept this at your peril. The money that you will be given is moneda nacional or Cuban pesos, visually similar to Convertibles, but worth approximately one-twenty-fifth of the value when you take them into a shop.
A second scam is the illicit sale