Americans in Havana

By the 1850s, the development of the sugar industry, the railroad, the tobacco industry, produced a booming economy that led to Cuba to be an enormously rich country.

In the 1860s, Cuba was richer than ever, and Havana was a vivid reflection of this wealth and prosperity. In 1863 the city walls were demolished to enable it to expand the city and build new and splendid buildings. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthier classes moved to the fashionable neighborhood of Vedado, with its numerous villas and palaces.

In the late nineteenth century, Havana, after two wars of independence waged by the Cuban patriots, was living the last moments of Spanish colonization in America, which definitely reached its end when the U.S. battleship Maine was sunk in its harbor, according to latest research accidentally, giving the U.S. a pretext to invade the island.

The turn of the century saw in Havana, and therefore in Cuba, occupation and the government of the United States. On 20th May 1902, they passed the powers of government to Cuban hands, symbolically when the flag was hoisted by Narciso Lopez and with the national emblem, the Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro. However it wasn’t until 1959 that the U.S. influence stopped being consistent and decisive, especially economically.

Under U.S. influence, the city grew and was enriched with numerous buildings in the 30s, with the building of sumptuous hotels, casinos and nightclubs. Examples of these constructions are the Focsa, the Habana Libre (as it is currently appointed) and the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.

Mafia money was used, to beautify the city, known as the Gomorrah of the West Indies because of its nightlife. But the shantytowns surrounding the city were developing apace. Havana became the capital of gambling and corruption.

A gallery of black and white portraits of characters from that time decorate, even today, the walls of the bar Nacional. These include Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, the great bullfighter Luis Miguel Gonzalez Lucas, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and many others of gangsters and artists mingled in a fragile happiness.