Mapped
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
Greene's Havana is the tourist capital of Batista's Cuba, all cocktail bars, floodlit cabarets and the sea breaking over the Malecon, where a downtrodden vacuum-cleaner salesman is recruited as a British agent and invents his network out of thin air. The map anchors in Old Havana, runs out to the seafront and the Tropicana, and slips east to Santiago as the revolution gathers.
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Three Trapped Tigers
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
A pun-drunk, nocturnal portrait of Havana in 1958, the last months before the revolution, following a handful of night owls, a photographer, a writer, an actor, a bongo player, through the cabarets and bars until dawn. Cabrera Infante maps the real nightlife: the open-air Tropicana cabaret, the neon strip of La Rampa in Vedado, the seawall of the Malecón where the friends drive and talk, and the older boulevard of the Prado. Over it all towers the doomed, magnificent singer La Estrella.
5 places →