The Hotel National

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba has seen mobsters and missiles alike during the more than 70 years that it has served as one of the world’s great celebrity hangouts, a role it continues today.

The five-star hotel, which opened Dec. 30, 1930, quickly turned into a meeting place for everybody who was somebody, with entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Cesar Romero, John Wayne, Betty Grable, and Fred Astaire hobnobbing in a property that also drew such famed athletes as boxers Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano and baseball great Mickey Mantle, and heads of states, among them Winston Churchill.

A darker side to the hotel’s past was it often hosting such American mobsters as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who stopped frequenting it after the Cuban revolution, when Cuba’s new leaders rolled up the welcome mat when it came to gangsters. The hotel, nevertheless, played a role in the movie The Godfather II, although another stately looking non-Cuban property was used as a Hotel Nacional stand-in. The celebrity tradition continues today, with such entertainers as model Naomi Campbell, actors Michael Keaton and Kevin Costner, and musicians Robert Plant and Peter Frampton now among those whose pictures join their counterparts of half a century ago on the walls. “Nowadays, they’re still coming,” hotel spokeswoman Yamila Fuster says of household names.

And the Nacional also was in the thick of things during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when an antiaircraft battery was placed on its grounds, but which remained silent.

The landmark hotel remains easily visible, with its long, palm tree-lined driveway found on one side, while extensive grounds on the other side are only separated by the Caribbean Sea by a street and Havana’s Malecon.

The Nacional’s Cabaret Parisien is a long-running entertainment venue featuring Cuban music and shows in a city known for its many entertainment options, while walls in the hotel’s Vista al Golfo bar are coated with pictures of the rich and famous who have visited it.

Reminders of how Cuba has changed since the Nacional first opened its doors can be seen in the lobby, where pictures of guerilla leaders who were pivotal in the Cuba’s revolution are found, guerillas whom after they came to power closed the hotel’s casino because of their disapproval of gambling. Guests staying at the property will find a choice of restaurants, a meeting room and a swimming pool.

But Fuster suggests that those features may be somewhat overshadowed by the Nacional’s having hosted the very rich and very famous for more than half a century, during which Cuba underwent dramatic changes.

“We have many historic hotels in Havana but they may not have as much history as the Nacional,” she states.

More information is found at the www.hotelnacionaldecuba.com.