Hotel Saratoga

The Hotel

The Saratoga occupied a curved neo-Renaissance corner at Paseo del Prado and Dragones, in the seam between Old Havana and Centro Habana, directly facing the Capitolio Nacional and the Fuente de la India. The shell was built in 1880 as a warehouse, converted to a hotel in 1933, expanded in the 1920s, and gut renovated in 2005 by a partnership between Cuban operators and the British investor Joe Sierra. From its 2005 reopening until the May 2022 incident, it was the closest thing Havana had to a true international five-star: the rooms had the finishes, the staff had the training, and the address could not be improved upon.

The 96 rooms and suites occupied five floors above the lobby and ran from generously proportioned Deluxe rooms at roughly 30 square metres up to two Presidential Suites of 90 square metres with private Capitolio-facing terraces. The interior vocabulary was a calm reading of Cuban colonial: high ceilings, dark mahogany joinery, polished Spanish marble bathrooms, large French doors opening onto Juliet balconies over the Prado. Beds were European, linens were imported, and the in-room dining ran twenty-four hours, all of which were unusual at the time inside the local market. The rooftop, the eighth floor, held a small but properly executed pool with a tiled deck, day beds, and the city's most-photographed view of the Capitolio dome.

The food and bar offer ran across the Anacaona Restaurant on the ground floor, the Mezzanine bar with its Cuban-jazz programme, and a cigar lounge that drew the city's collectors. The cocktail programme, anchored by a daiquiri that became a quiet local benchmark, sat alongside a proper rum selection that ran from contemporary Havana Club expressions to small-batch Santiago bottlings. Service across the building leaned formal but warm, with concierge staff who could solve the harder Havana problems: classic-car drivers who actually showed up, a private viewing at the Fabrica de Arte Cubano, a table at La Guarida on the night the line ran around the block.

On 6 May 2022 a gas truck supplying the building's kitchens leaked into the lower floors, and the resulting explosion killed forty-seven people, injured many more, and removed the facade and the first three storeys of the Prado-facing elevation. The hotel has been closed continuously since. Restoration is being managed through Habaguanex and Gran Caribe, the state hospitality companies, with structural work on the historic shell and a full rebuild of the lobby and lower public floors. No reopening date has been confirmed at the time of writing. We list the Saratoga here as a historic profile because the property and its standard remain the single most useful reference point for what central Havana can be at the top of the market, and because the restoration is worth following.

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Practical Information

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