Miramar

This guide to Havana's Miramar district starts with a 1994 decree and works backward to the sugar barons and tobacco magnates who built its Beaux-Arts and Art Deco mansions along Fifth Avenue in the 1920s and 1930s, only to lose them almost overnight after the revolution. It follows the neighborhood through decades as an elegant ghost of embassies and shuttered facades, then to the Special Period famine that forced Cuba to legalize home cooking for cash, and to Lilliam, one of the first Habaneras to open her mansion's garden to paying diners. Walk the street today and you'll pass an embassy gate on one side, a paladar's menu board on the other, both behind the same iron gates.