Americans in Havana

Interesting report in the New Yorker by Rubén Gallo:

“The Americans are coming,” a waiter announced at Mediterráneo, a private seafood restaurant in Vedado, one of Havana’s trendiest districts, where eateries and bars of all sorts have opened rapidly over the past two years. Some have set up shop in leafy villas that were, until recently, home to at least one Cuban family; others have taken over rooftops or penthouses in apartment buildings; and a few, like the flashy Saraos bar on Calle 17, are slick architect-designed spaces, complete with bouncers and valet parking, that would be more at home on South Beach than amid the tree-lined (and potholed) streets of a neighborhood still filled with ruined nineteenth-century mansions and populated by stray cats.

The waiter was referring not to the impending arrival of mass tourism but to a more immediate invasion: a tour bus had just pulled up by…