Hotel Nacional de Cuba Casino

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba is one of the Americas' most historically charged hotels — a 1930 Spanish-Moorish–neoclassical landmark on Havana's Malecón waterfront that served as the setting for the 1946 Havana Conference (the most significant gathering of American Mafia leadership ever held outside the United States), the base from which Meyer Lansky built Havana into the Caribbean's gambling capital, and the temporary home of Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and hundreds of other 20th-century figures. The hotel is a Cuban national monument and a UNESCO heritage candidate.

Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba — and particularly Havana — was the western hemisphere's premier gambling destination, a city where American tourists arrived by daily Pan Am flights to visit the casinos that Meyer Lansky and associates operated in the Nacional, the Riviera, the Habana Hilton, and the Capri. Fidel Castro closed all casinos in 1960 and outlawed gambling for Cuban nationals. Today, a small casino operates in the Hotel Nacional for foreign tourists only — a vestige of the pre-revolutionary gaming economy, operated by the Cuban state.

The casino offers roulette, blackjack, baccarat, and slot machines on a modest scale in keeping with Cuba's approach to tourist gaming. The draw is less the casino floor than the extraordinary setting: the hotel's clifftop garden terrace overlooking the Malecón and Havana Harbour, the 1950s décor of the bar where Ernest Hemingway drank, the Hall of Fame corridor with photographs of every celebrity and head of state who has visited, and the city beyond — Old Havana's UNESCO-listed baroque streetscapes, 1950s American cars, and remarkable state of time-preserved decay make it the most atmospherically unique casino destination in the Americas.