Hotel Nacional de Cuba

This guide to the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana traces two very different crowds who filled the same marble lobby a generation apart. It opens with the rushed fourteen-month build that raised the hotel by the end of nineteen thirty, and the decades of gangsters, presidents and film stars later served by staff who stayed invisible in the background. Then, in nineteen sixty-one, it follows young peasant women brought in from the Cuban countryside to learn a trade in these same halls. Look up at the gilded lobby ceiling both crowds worked beneath.