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Hotel Tryp Habana Libre in Cuba

Tuesday, 11 February 2025 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: Caribbean / Karibik
Category/Kategorie: General, Hotels Reading Time:  7 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post Hotel Tryp Habana Libre is one of the larger hotels in Cuba, situated in Vedado, Havana. The hotel has 572 rooms in a 25-floor tower at Calle 23 (“La Rampa”) and Calle L. Opened in 1958 as the Habana Hilton, the hotel famously served as the residence of Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries throughout 1959, after their capture of Havana.

The Habana Hilton was constructed at a cost of $24 million, under the personal auspices of President Fulgencio Batista. It was built as an investment by the Caja de Retiro y Asistencia Social de los Trabajadores Gastronomicos, the pension plan of the Cuban catering workers’ union, with additional financing from the Banco de Fomento Agricola e Industrial de Cuba (BANFAIC). It was operated by the American Hilton Hotels International group and was designed by the well-known Los Angeles architect Welton Becket, who had previously designed the Beverly Hilton for the chain. Becket designed the 27-story Habana Hilton in collaboration with Havana-based architects Lin Arroyo and Gabriela Menéndez. Arroyo was the Minister of Public Works under Batista. The hotel was constructed by the Frederick Snare Corporation.

When it was completed, the Habana Hilton was Latin America’s tallest and largest hotel. It boasted 630 guest rooms, including 42 suites; an elegant casino; six restaurants and bars, including a Trader Vic’s and a rooftop bar; a huge supper club; extensive convention facilities; a shopping arcade; an outdoor pool surrounded by cabanas; and two underground garages with a capacity of 500 cars. The hotel also featured artwork commissioned from some of the most important Cuban modern artists of the day, including an enormous mosaic mural by Amelia Peláez over the main entrance and a tiled wall mural by René Portocarrero in the second-floor Antilles Bar overlooking the pool terrace.

The casino in the hotel was leased for $1 million a year to a group consisting of Roberto “Chiri” Mendoza, his brother Mario Mendoza, Clifford “Big Juice” Jones, Kenneth F. Johnson, and Sidney Orseck. Roberto Mendoza was a wealthy Cuban contractor and sugar planter who was a business associate of President Batista; Mario Mendoza was a lawyer; Orseck was an attorney from New York; Johnson was a senator in the Nevada state legislature and Jones was a former lieutenant governor of Nevada who had ownership interests in a number of Las Vegas casinos. Hilton officials said that 13 groups tried to lease the casino and 12 were “turned down because they either had underworld connections or had refused to subject themselves to rigid investigation.” Speculation surfaced that the murder of Gambino crime family boss Albert Anastasia in October 1957 was tied to his interest in securing an ownership stake in the Hilton’s casino. Roberto Mendoza and Santo Trafficante Jr., who had substantial gambling interests in Cuba, were both in New York at the time of Anastasia’s murder. The police investigation of the murder focused on this theory for a while but later looked at other theories. The murder was never solved.

The hotel remained in operation as a Hilton while relations between the US and Cuba worsened, until June 11, 1960, when the Cuban government nationalized the property. On June 15, 1960, Castro announced in a speech to the Restaurant and Hotel Workers Federation that he was renaming the hotel the Hotel Habana Libre (“Hotel Free Havana”). That year, Hilton Hotels International, Inc. wrote off $1,854,575 that had been invested in the Cuban subsidiary that operated the hotel. The first Soviet embassy in Havana was soon temporarily established on two floors of the hotel.

In March 1963, Castro is reputed to have survived another assassination attempt at the hotel, by the US Mafia and the CIA. Cuban intelligence chief Fabian Escalante claimed that a poison pill was to have been slipped into one of the chocolate milkshakes Castro regularly ordered in the hotel’s cafeteria, and that Castro was saved only because the pill became stuck to the hotel’s kitchen freezer that it was hidden in, and that the pill broke open as the would-be assassin tried to remove it from the ice. Escalante called it “the closest the CIA got to assassinating Fidel.”

In 1964, Soviet female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, gave a press conference at the hotel. From January 3-12, 1966, the Habana Libre hosted the first Tricontinental Conference of Asian, African and Latin-American peoples. Fidel Castro stayed in the hotel’s Castellana Suite, room 2224, during the conference, and made the suite his home thereafter for all major diplomatic events. The suite is now kept as a museum, with all the original furniture and artwork from 1958. From October 23 to November 20, 1966, the Habana Libre hosted the 17th Chess Olympiad, with guests including Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. In 1967, the hotel hosted Marxist Chilean politician Salvador Allende.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban government focused on rebuilding the tourism industry. In 1993, they brought in the Spanish Guitart Hotels chain to manage the property as the Hotel Habana Libre Guitart. Then, in 1996 the Spanish Sol Meliá chain assumed management of the hotel from Guitart. It was placed in their Tryp division of urban hotels and renamed Hotel Tryp Habana Libre. The hotel was extensively renovated between 1996 and 1997. Much of the interior was gutted and modernized. The guest rooms were remodeled, with the balconies all glassed in, except those of the historic Castellana Suite. The supper club on the second floor was converted to a buffet restaurant. Among the highlights of the work was the restoration of the huge Peláez mural on the exterior, which had spent decades hidden from public view. The hotel reopened on December 22, 1997, with a speech by Eusebio Leal, who spearheaded the restoration and conservation of the historic district of Old Havana.

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