In March, deputy François-Michel Lambert led a French parliamentary delegation to Havana. Four deputies from the France-Cuba friendship group for a week “fruitful exchanges with a wide variety of interlocutors”, says the report drawn up on the return. They were lodged at the Hotel Nacional, one of the most famous establishments in the city.
Since Churchill, there are countless ministers and presidents, crowned heads and dictators, artists or famous sportsmen who have paraded in this palace classified by Unesco in the Memory of the World register. The “Nacional” concentrates that of Cuba since 1930 in its style architecture “mediterranean revival”, which mixes two Andalusian towers and gargoyles of French inspiration, Sevillian earthenware and the arcades of the Californian missions opening onto a vast tropical garden facing the sea.
At the edge of the Vedado district, chosen by the Creole bourgeoisie after independence in 1902, dominating the famous Malecón cornice, it has become one of the emblematic monuments of the Cuban capital. And if other, more modern establishments have sprung up since, if government residences are available to them elsewhere in town, diplomats like to descend into this prestigious setting, to put their feet where so many great figures have done before them. .
A luxury inaccessible to Cubans
But for ex-MP Lambert (former environmentalist elected in 2017 under the label of the presidential majority), it was a bit like coming home. He was born in Havana in 1966 and took his first steps in the hotel grounds: “My father was an agricultural engineer, one of those commissioned by René Dumont [qui deviendra une figure de l’écologie politique] for FAO [Organisation pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture]. UN recognition of the government and its land reform was important for the new regime. He treated officials as VIPs and accommodated them in whatever was available. For lack of international tourism, the Nacional was. »
At the time, it was rather the Habana Hilton, in its large modernist cube, which embodied the 1959 revolution. El Comandante settled there and renamed it Habana Libre. In 1966, Castro received the Tricontinental Conference there, 82 delegations from the Third World plus Régis Debray as a young theoretician who promised to work for the big night. Most guests stay at the Habana Libre, a few at the Nacional: “The council of the poor was bathed in luxury”will ironically Régis Debray thirty years later (Praised be our lords, Gallimard, 1996).
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