Characterful:Many famous names have stayed at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana.Credit:Alamy
Keith Austin is entranced by the faded glory of a landmark.
There are little brown earwiggy bugs at the iconic Hotel Nacional in Cuba. One on my wall has been squashed flat and is dry and flaky,which is how I like them. Why didn't housekeeping think to scrape it off,paint over it or,I don't know,frame it and make a feature of the thing?
I think they call this"shabby elegance"in travel-trade parlance. This pastel pile,built on a rocky outcrop on the Malecon Boulevard sea wall near Havana's delightful old town,is a Norma Desmond of hotels - a once beautiful star turned faded legend.
It was opened in December,1930,29 years before Fidel Castro's revolution turned Cuba on its head,and was where mobsters and movie stars mixed - and mixed the drinks they couldn't get legally in Prohibition-era United States.
A hotel visitors'book from those rum-soaked days would include the signatures of Jean-Paul Sartre,Ernest Hemingway,Errol Flynn,Rita Hayworth,Fred Astaire,Nat King Cole and mobsters such as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.
It is where Winston Churchill,post-World War II,smoked Cuban cigars in the bar,and where Frank Sinatra supposedly slipped into his Mafia buddies'rooms via secret passageways.
At least so says Estela Rivas,our 82-year-old guide and former professor at the University of Havana who runs free tours of the hotel. Her afternoon tour starts in the hotel's soaring foyer,where she explains that the small squares inset into the floor tiles are the coats of arms of cities in Spain. This is,after all,a hotel in Havana,designed by American architects in an eclectic mish-mash of baroque,art deco and Spanish colonial styles,with a touch of Moorish Alhambra tile-work thrown in.
Rivas points out two Isadora Duncan statues by the hotel lifts,then runs us quickly through the hotel's history,including tales of the Mafia summit held here in 1946 to divide the spoils of the city's gambling,drug and prostitution rackets - a meeting immortalised in the 1974 movie The Godfather Part II.
What's in the Hotel Nacional's gardens is fascinating,too. Beneath the sea-facing oval,where a wedding party is sipping mojitos and taking in the afternoon sun on the day we visit,is a network of once-secret tunnels from the Cuban Missile Crisis-era.