Cuba - Lonely Planet [82]
Also worth looking out for are the graves of novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), scientist Carlos Finlay (1833–1915), the Martyrs of Granma and the Veterans of the Independence Wars.
ALONG THE MALECóN
The Malecón, Havana’s evocative 8km-long sea drive, is one of the city’s most soulful and quintessentially Cuban thoroughfares.
Long a favored meeting place for assorted lovers, philosophers, poets, traveling minstrels, fishermen and wistful Florida-gazers, Malecón’s atmosphere is most potent at sunset when the weak yellow light from creamy Vedado filters like a dim torch onto the buildings of Centro Habana, lending their dilapidated facades a distinctly ethereal quality.
Laid out in the early 1900s as a salubrious oceanside boulevard for Havana’s pleasure-seeking middle classes, the Malecón expanded rapidly eastward in the century’s first decade with a mishmash of eclectic architecture that mixed sturdy neoclassical with whimsical art nouveau. By the 1920s the road had reached the outer limits of burgeoning Vedado and by the early 1950s it had metamorphosed into a busy six-lane traffic highway that carried streams of wave-dodging Buicks and Chevrolets from the grey hulk of the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta to the borders of Miramar.
Today the Malecón remains Havana’s most authentic open-air theater, a real-life ‘cabaret of the poor’ where the whole city comes to meet, greet, date and debate.
Fighting an ongoing battle with the corrosive effects of the ocean, many of the thoroughfare’s magnificent buildings now face decrepitude, demolition or irrevocable damage. To combat the problem, 14 blocks of the Malecón have recently been given special status by the City Historian’s office in an attempt to stop the rot.
The Soviet-era 24-story Hospital Nacional Hermanos Ameijeiras, built in 1980, dominates the center section of the Malecón. Some of its clinics specialize in treating foreigners (Click here). Lying in its shadow is the Monumento a Antonio Maceo, a bronze representation of the mulato general who cut a blazing trail across the entire length of Cuba during the First War of Independence. The nearby 18th-century Torreón de San Lázaro is a watchtower that quickly fell to the British during the invasion of 1762.
West beyond Hotel Nacional is the Monumento a las Víctimas del Maine (1926), monument to the victims of USS Maine, the battleship that blew up mysteriously in Havana harbor in 1898. Once crowned by an American eagle, the monument was decapitated during the 1959 Revolution.
The modern seven-story building with the high security fencing at the western end of this open space is the US Interests Office, first set up by the Carter administration in the late 1970s. Surrounded by hysterical graffiti, the building is the site of some of the worst tit-for-tat finger-wagging on the island. Facing the office front is the Plaza Tribuna Anti-Imperialista, built during the Elián González affair to host major in-your-face protests (earning it the local nickname protestódromo). Concerts, protests and marches – some one-million strong – are still held here.
Tucked away behind the square is the López Serrano building (Calle L btwn Calles 11 & 13), an art-deco tower that looks like the Empire State with the bottom 70 floors chopped off.
Statues of illustrious Latin American leaders line Calle G (Av de los Presidentes), including Salvador Allende (Chile), Benito Juárez (Mexico) and Simón Bolívar. At the top of the avenue is a huge marble memorial to José Miguel Gómez, Cuba’s second president. At the other end, the monument to his predecessor – Cuba’s first president – Tomás Estrada