Lifestyle

The 90 dizzying years of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba

Havana, Jan 26 (EFE).- The American mafia plotted assassinations in its halls, its gardens were turned into trenches during the missile crisis and Tarzan used the second floor as a springboard to jump into the pool: few places in the world house as many stories as the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. (Camera: FELIPE BORREGO)SHOT LIST: B-ROLL OF THE NATIONAL CUBAN HOTEL.SOUND BITES: HISTORIAL EXPERT OF THE HOTEL ALEEN ORTIZ (IN SPANISH)Translations:1. The hotel reached its ninety years on December 30, just a few days ago, and it was the moment of the reopening of the hotel as well, after several months closed by the epidemic itself.2. Within everything we do to improve the hotel services, the standards, there is always the premise that the hotel is a national monument, therefore we cannot transform it. Our task is to preserve the heritage of Cuba and offer people that history that is what they are looking for with the convenience and comfort of the present.3. Many things are said about the gangsters, but they were even friendly. They interacted with customers, with employees. There are still those who recall it, most of them do not live anymore but we have their testimonnials, about how they were even asked about theit families. But behind the mafia is the other side of the coin. And it was right at the hotel where the murder of Ben Siegel, who they call the Las Vegas procursor, was planned.4. Once you discover the stories of the hotel, it allows you to broadly tell the history of Cuba, from the aborigines to the present.5. The hotel does not stop making history, and then personal experiences come, that is, when our guests come they want to sleep where Frank Sinatra and Aba Garner slept, where Luc and Luciano stayed, where Winston Churchill was. It's reliving the past a bit.6. It was scene of the missile crisis, or the October crisis as we call it here in Cuba, of October 1962, after the Cuban revolution when the world was on the brink of World War III. From the hotel garden, the hotel already existed because the hotel was founded in the 1930s. Well, from this garden you could protect yourself from a possible American invasion expected after the invasion of Bay of Pigs.