Avenida 23
Sloping Vedado avenue lined with midcentury hotels and a giant flying-saucer ice cream hall.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Avenida 23 in Havana's Vedado district centers on Coppelia, the flying-saucer ice cream hall that once employed over four hundred workers to serve thirty-five thousand customers a day. It traces the parlor back to Celia Sanchez, the revolutionary organizer who dreamed it up in the mid-1960s, and to architect Mario Girona's opening-day menu of twenty-six flavors in 1966. From there it follows the workers who kept scooping through the shortages of the 1990s, when the freezers held whatever sugar and milk the island could find. Stand in the line that still wraps the block and you're standing where that history is still being served.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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