Stephen McGinty: Cuba comes in from the cold
I was swimming in the pool of the Hotel National in Havana, beneath a Caribbean sky once light blue, now bruised with darkening clouds, when a beautiful woman in a blue dress suddenly dived straight in. A dozen clean strokes later and she approached a fellow swimmer, a portly, middle-aged man, to whom she began making an offer which he would have been wise to refuse.
After a week in Havana, it wasn’t hard to recognise the genuine couples from those for whom a financial arrangement had been struck. At lunch, the genuine couples tended to look quite glum. It was February 2005 and I was visiting Communism’s Caribbean outpost to research a book, Churchill’s Cigar, about the prime minister’s love affair with rolled tobacco, and was staying at the Art Deco hotel, whose eucalyptus-scented gardens overlooked the Malacon, the famous ocean boulevard, to the blue sea beyond, and whose previous guests included Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, not to mention gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel.
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