The Inglaterra opened in 1875 and has been operating continuously since — through two Cuban republics, Prohibition, the revolution, the Special Period, and the current era of uncertain normalization. That survival is itself a historical artifact. The building was constructed in the Mudéjar-Andalusian neoclassical hybrid style that characterizes the grandest buildings of late colonial Havana: arched loggias, azulejo tile work on the interior columns, high coffered ceilings, and proportions that feel civic rather than commercial.

The Café Louvre terrace on the ground floor — a semi-enclosed arcade open to Parque Central — was where Havana’s intellectual class gathered in the 1890s during the final push for Cuban independence from Spain. José Martí, Cuba’s national poet and independence hero, was a regular. The conversations that happened at those marble tables between 1891 and 1895 shaped the political framework of the Cuban Republic that came into existence seven years after Martí died at the Battle of Dos Ríos. You can sit at those same marble tables today and order a cortado for approximately the same price as anything else in Havana.

The rooms themselves are what they are — state-managed, maintained to a standard that has seen better decades, furnished in a way that suggests the 1980s renovation rather than the 1875 original. The Inglaterra’s value proposition is the address, the terrace, the lobby proportions, and the fact that you are sleeping in the oldest hotel in Cuba. That’s either compelling or irrelevant depending on what you came to Havana for. For travelers who find it compelling, it’s very compelling indeed.

The Sevilla was built by American interests in 1908 in a Moorish Revival style — the ornate arched entrance, the patterned tilework, the Moorish columns in the interior patio — that made it the most architecturally distinctive hotel in Havana when it opened. It expanded significantly in 1917 with the construction of a new ten-story tower, which at the time was one of the tallest buildings in Cuba. The combination of architectural ambition and American money made it the obvious choice for the kind of guests who came to Havana precisely because it was beyond American law.

Al Capone arrived in 1928 for what historians now call the Havana Conference — a gathering of American organised crime figures to divide territory, settle debts, and agree on the management of the Cuban gambling and entertainment operations that were already enormously profitable. The seventh-floor suite where Capone stayed has been marked ever since. The bar on the rooftop (which Graham Greene described in Our Man in Havana as the place where Havana’s double agents conducted their business over daiquiris) still operates. The view from that bar — north over the Parque Central, east toward the harbour — is one of the better rooftop perspectives in the city.

The Sevilla is now managed under the Iberostar brand, which means the infrastructure is better maintained than most historic hotels in Havana — the bathrooms work, the Wi-Fi is more reliable than the city average, and there’s a pool on the roof terrace. The Moorish lobby has been carefully preserved. This is the historic Havana hotel that combines genuine story-depth with the most reliable day-to-day hospitality standards of any property in this guide.

The Hotel Nacional is the most architecturally significant building in Havana’s Vedado district and one of the most important examples of early twentieth-century eclectic architecture in the Caribbean. It was designed by the American firm McKim, Mead & White — the same practice that designed Pennsylvania Station in New York and the Boston Public Library — and opened in December 1930 on a limestone bluff above the Malecón with views across the Florida Straits to the north and west. The twin towers, the colonnaded Mudéjar arcades, the formal gardens stepping down toward the sea: the building announced itself as permanent from the day it opened.

The 1946 Havana Conference is the Nacional’s defining historical moment. Meyer Lansky had been quietly building a casino and hotel operation in Cuba throughout the early 1940s, working through Fulgencio Batista’s government. When Lucky Luciano was deported from the United States to Italy in 1946, he quietly relocated to Havana and used the Nacional as his base. The December conference — attended by Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, the Trafficante family, and others — was ostensibly organized around performances by Frank Sinatra (who was also present and photographed with Luciano, a connection that haunted his career for years). The real agenda was dividing the postwar American crime landscape and formalizing the Cuban gambling operations that would define Havana’s late Batista era until 1959.

The sala de historia — a free-to-enter room off the main garden terrace — contains the most comprehensive documentation of the Nacional’s story of any hotel museum in Cuba. Photographs of Luciano, Lansky, Sinatra. Photographs of Churchill, of Brando, of Ava Gardner at the pool. The framed bill from a 1950s Nat King Cole performance. The bullet marks in the garden wall from the 1933 siege. This room alone is worth visiting even if you’re not staying — it compresses a substantial slice of twentieth century history into a single annotated space.

The rooms themselves range from functional to genuinely beautiful. The sea-view rooms on the upper floors — looking north across the Malecón toward the Florida Straits with the Havana harbor arc to the east — are among the best hotel views available in Cuba. The garden terrace is extraordinary for sunset drinks. The service is Gaviota-standard, which means it can be excellent or variable depending on the day. The Nacional is not a well-oiled luxury machine; it’s a significant historic building managed by the Cuban state. Know what you’re choosing.

Hemingway arrived in Havana in 1932 for what was supposed to be a deep-sea fishing trip. He stayed for most of the next twenty-seven years. Room 511 at the Ambos Mundos was his base of operations during the years before he moved out to Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula — a small farm east of the city that became his home until 1960 and is now the Museo Hemingway. Room 511 is a corner room on the fifth floor with two windows: one facing east toward the Havana harbour, one facing south toward the rooftops of Old Havana. The view hasn’t changed in any essential detail since 1937. You can stand at the window and see exactly what Hemingway saw between paragraphs.

The room itself is preserved as Hemingway left it — or as closely as a hotel room can be preserved after eighty years of institutional management. The Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter. The safari hat on the hook. The rum glass on the desk with the ring mark of innumerable previous rum glasses beneath it. The fishing photographs on the wall. It costs a few dollars to enter if you’re not a guest (payable at the front desk). Every year, tens of thousands of people pay it. Most of them stand at the window for a few minutes looking at the harbour and then take approximately the same photograph.

The rooftop bar is where you go if you want to understand the geography. The Nacional is visible to the west across Vedado. The Castillo de la Real Fuerza — the oldest surviving fort in Cuba, completed in 1577 — is directly below to the north. The Cathedral of Havana is two blocks to the northwest. From the rooftop at 6pm on a clear day, with a mojito, the full scale of what Havana is becomes visible in a way that walking at street level doesn’t provide. Go before the evening crowds arrive.

The building that became the Kempinski was constructed between 1894 and 1917 as the Manzana de Gómez — a Beaux-Arts commercial arcade in the style of the European gallerie of the same period (think Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, smaller but spiritually related). It occupied the full city block between Obispo, O’Reilly, Monserrate, and Zulueta, and its iron-and-glass galleries contained stores selling everything from imported European clothing to Cuban tobacco. For the first half of the twentieth century it was the most commercially prestigious address in Havana.

After the revolution, state management and shifting commercial priorities left the building gradually emptying. By the 1980s it was partially occupied by state shops and partially abandoned. The German Kempinski group entered a joint venture agreement with the Cuban state in 2012 to restore and convert the building, a project that took five years and produced Cuba’s first genuinely internationally-standard luxury hotel. It opened in May 2017.

What Kempinski built inside the old Manzana shell is exceptional by any Caribbean standard: 246 rooms and 30 suites, a rooftop pool with 360-degree views over Old Havana and the harbour, a spa, three restaurants, and a cigar lounge that stocks the full Habanos S.A. range at prices that are genuinely better than buying abroad. The Beaux-Arts gallery structure of the original building runs through the common areas — the iron columns, the arched glass ceiling, the gallery-style circulation — and the contrast between that 1917 framework and the contemporary luxury fit-out is genuinely striking rather than awkward. This is the best hotel in Havana by measurable standards of comfort and service consistency.

The Saratoga’s story before May 2022 is straightforward: a turn-of-the-century building on Prado converted into a 96-room luxury hotel that opened in 2005 after a careful restoration. The rooftop pool with its view over the Capitolio — Havana’s version of the Washington Capitol building, completed in 1929 — was one of the most photographed hotel amenities in Cuba. The rooms were decorated in a restrained colonial style. The bar served excellent mojitos. Travel magazines consistently ranked it among the best hotels in the Caribbean.

At 10:48am on May 6, 2022, a gas explosion in the hotel’s basement caused the partial collapse of the Saratoga’s façade onto Paseo del Prado. Forty-six people died, including hotel workers, people in the street, and residents of nearby buildings. The structural damage was extensive. Within hours, the photographs of the collapsed corner — the recognisable roofline now absent, the rooms exposed to the street — had circled the world. For those who knew the Saratoga well, the images were disorienting in a specific way: this was a building that had survived the Batista era, the revolution, the Special Period, and forty years of state management, undone in a few seconds by a gas line.

Cuban state media announced reconstruction plans within months. As of June 2026, the building remains closed and structural work is ongoing. The timeline for reopening has not been officially confirmed. The Prado-facing block has been partially stabilized, and there is evidence of active construction on the upper floors. Whether the restored Saratoga will carry the same atmosphere as its predecessor — the specific quality of a genuinely old building rather than a rebuilt simulation of one — is an open question. But the building will reopen, and when it does, the story it carries will be heavier and more complicated than before.