March 6

Our last day together in Havana, I fear I shall never see my friend again, but oh what a time we have had.  She let me sleep in while she did an early morning run along the Malicon

sunrise on the Havana Harbour

We procured an old police car as a taxi to take the tunnel under the Harbour to Castille de Morrow

Traffic Tunnel to Old Havana

In the late fifties Cuban dictator Batista planned to expand the city to the East, by building a new modern suburb with large avenues, palm trees and luxury buildings. A new interconnection between Old City and the Eastern side across the Bay was needed.
The new tunnel under the Havana Bay was built by the French company : Societé de Grand Travaux de Marseille between 1957-58. 
The tunnel begins at the Paseo de Prado in Old Havana, is 733m long and 12m below ground level. In 1959 Batista fled to Miami and after the Revolution the Cuban government had other priorities.

On the other side, my friend poses with her peeps

 Looking at Havana across the Harbour

The Lighthouse and I

Inside the gates is an exhibition on the lighthouses of Cuba –- El Morro once housed a school for lighthouse keepers. There was actually a watchtower here until the British blew it up during their successful siege in 1762. The Faro Castillo del Morro lighthouse was added in 1846.

 The cannons around the fort are now badly rusted, but the walls are well preserved. The fort has central barracks up to four stories high.

Our lovely Guide

  Inside the walls of the fort

      The Cannons are HUGE and it took 8 soldiers to rotate them on metal tracks

A historical trip through the past, but it is time to head back to the city.  This is our last day together so we revisited a couple favorite haunts, first the Hotel Mundo for a last look around the city from atop the roof restaurant and one last dessert

Hotel Ambos Mundos

since has gained international note from its most famous long-time tenant: in 1932 a room on the upper (5th) floor became the “first home” in Cuba of writer Ernest Hemingway, who enjoyed the views of Old Havana, and the harbor sea in which he fished frequently in his yacht Pilar. Hemingway rented the room for $1.50 per night  until mid-1939, when he transferred his winter residence from Key West(a U.S. island 90 miles from Cuba) to a house in the hills near Havana, Finca Vigia, which he shared with Martha Gellhorn (they were married in 1940). Hemingway began his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel of the Spanish Civil War which he had witnessed over the previous several years, in the room in the Ambos Mundos, on March 1, 1939.

Today, his hotel room, No. 511, is presented as if the author might have left it, and is a small museum in the middle of the establishment, with tours given regularly in the daytime.^[5] The corner of the ground floor hotel lobby also has two walls of framed photographs dedicated to Hemingway

 A view from the top

candied Guayabo (Guava) with coconut creme

and for the grand finale we went to one of Hemingways' haunts, La Floridita a bar immortalized in Islands in the Stream, a book my friend had just read before coming to Cuba, the characters in the book were real people who hung out with the  bartender at this bar.

Our farewell Daiquiris