Rooftop pools and fine food: Cuba’s decadent revolution

And here we are again. But this pool is something else. Being here, amid this beauty, on this elegant rooftop, with this view — frankly it’s all rather fabulous, darling.

The Kempinski, which has just opened, is the first five-star luxury hotel in Cuba since the revolution and the 246-room grande dame is a game-changer, a return to world-class luxury for a country that had only been playing around the edges of top-end tourism. It has six restaurants and bars, a cigar lounge and a vast European-style spa with floor-to-ceiling views that you can enjoy from lavish cabanas, which gaze south over the ruined beauty of Old Havana’s sun, rain and time-ravaged streetscape. In the bedrooms, Louis XV-inspired furniture and oversized modern candelabra join a dove-grey palette with dashes of shocking pink that smack of contemporary opulence.

The high ceilings and French windows are not a coincidence — the hotel is a revival of the former Manzana de Gomez site, the first European-style shopping arcade in Cuba. The new shopping mall at its base is home to outposts of Mango, L’Occitane, an expensive camera store, Giorgio Gucci’s “Giorgio G VIP”, Lacoste, and a Versace store selling garish shoes that would catch the eye of a Miami pimp, Michael Kors bags and — most incongruously — a Montblanc store. Peeking in one store, I note a watch costing $3,435. The average Cuban salary is $25 (£18.90) a month, so window shopping it is then with local families content to snap themselves next to the displays with their mobile phones.

My elegant room gazes over the green square of Parque Central, from which the El Paseo del Prado runs — the fabled colonnaded boulevard based on the Madrid original that was the catwalk for Chanel’s cruise show last year. This part of Old Havana hosts Unesco’s golden mile — the best preserved part of the city Across the treetops I can see the scaffolded dome of the almost-restored Capitolio building and the uplit gothic beauty of the Gran Teatro de la Habana, home to the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where every Cuban ballet legend from Alicia Alonso to Carlos Acosta has danced. Next to it is the Hotel Inglaterra, soon to be restored by the Starwood Luxury Collection, with a planned opening date of New Year’s Eve 2019.

As European chic has always been the aspiration in this part of Old Havana, it is fitting that Kempinski, Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group, has been chosen for the management contract. Over lobster ceviche in the top-floor San Cristobal restaurant, Xavier Destribats, the urbane general manager, agrees with me. Destribats has a job to do and he is doing it with aplomb, a Cohiba in his hand and eyes in the back of his head.

From this stylish base I venture on fascinating bespoke outings. Katia Gil, a former model, takes me on a personalised shopping trip that’s worlds apart from the carved maracas and crocheted boob tubes on offer in the markets. What she brings is bespoke, so if you want contemporary Cuban fashion designers, Tiffany lamps, aged rum, the best tobacco houses or vintage and contemporary film posters, you can find them. I ask for custom-made jewellery and vintage clothes. She takes me, in a vermillion 1948 Dodge, to the home of the self-taught jeweller Mayelín Guevara. Accustomed for the past 40 years to making art with sparse materials, she fashions beautiful pieces from electrical cables, cast-off plastic and children’s balloons and elastic bands, as well as silver and gold bought from neighbours and friends.

The Kempinski is a stylish base from which to explore Havana

Gil takes me to another true artiste, the welcoming Cuban fashion and costume designer Ismael de la Caridad, who designs clothes for cabaret, films, Cuban couture shows and for sale. Havana is full of vintage items, but there are no vintage stores so, if you want to find them, it has to be via someone like Gil. De la Caridad’s apartment, overlooking the American embassy on the Malecon, is crammed with Cuban and Spanish antiques and pieces by the Mexican sculptor Jorge Marín.

De la Caridad is preoccupied with the Bata Cubana, the classic Cuban dress, working to bring it back to relevance. “We need to understand our roots and what we were once, in order to understand what we could become,” he says. He keeps a collection of vintage Cuban clothes as inspiration, which he is amassing to create a museum.

He tells me that most of his seamstresses are in their eighties and nineties “because they are the only ones who know how to work in macramé and chiffon”, especially the extremely intricate crochet that he favours, which is called miñardi. He shows me an exquisite dress that took a month to make: it could be mine for $1,500. “I have everything that you can possibly imagine,” he tells me. There are clutches, cuffs, tiaras, mantillas and pearls from the 1940s, 1950s costume-jewellery-encrusted belts and hand-stitched bed linen from the 1920s that he upcycles into ra-ra skirts.

While self-employment is the name of the game in Havana’s tourism sector these days, socially minded cultural projects are still being rolled out. I visit the Galeria Taller Gorria in Old Havana, the project of the Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría Rodríguez, whom everyone calls Pichi and who is best known for his role in the 1993 Cuban gay comedy Fresa y Chocolate. He is also an artist and spent two years turning the gallery into an impeccable, cavernous space. While I am there, the gallery is showing portraits of Cuban celebrities by the photographer Danay Nápoles. This is a place for contemporary Cuban art and it’s also a community project welcoming local schools and their creative productions.

The Kempinski has six restaurants and bars, a cigar lounge and a spa

The sea change in Cuba isn’t all about new hotels and private tours — it’s also obvious in the quality of the food. Since the incremental changes led by Raúl Castro began in 2008, I have eaten in many paladares — small private restaurants — that offer something magical and innovative, but rarely world-class.

During this trip I noticed a paradigm shift. The most pronounced is at the San Juan Bar & Grill. Regis Fontaine Santamaria, a former government mechanical engineer, turns his hand to being a maître d’ spectacularly. Overlooking Parque Cervantes in Old Havana, San Juan opened in December. The menu focuses on creole food and is based on Cuban charcuterie, sauces, condiments, seafood and pork cuts.

Santamaria explains why the best prawns are from Cienfuegos, why they eschew the cheap chicken that Cuba imports from America and why they offer three levels of chilli seasoning. Vegetables come in daily from their own farm. It’s the first time I’ve heard a restaurateur who doesn’t complain about supply issues and waxes lyrical about provenance — it’s refreshing.

There are more luxuries to be found in the colonial town of Trinidad, where I am driven as I recline on the back seat of a pillar-box-red 1956 Pontiac Sedan with chocolate-brown suede upholstery and a souped-up sound system. Here, I’m staying at Finca Kenia on the edge of town, a dramatically beautiful Cuban colonial house with views to the Escambray Mountains and Santa Rosa Valley, superior feasts of local lamb cooked by Kenia herself, and a garden flanked with stables for venturing into the valley.

Lavish cabanas at the Kempinski face south over Old Havana

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I’m not going riding, though — I’m off on a magical-mystery diving tour with the diving impresario Riccardo. Fidel Castro loved to dive, and he did so countless times with Riccardo and his father; I flick through the family photo album, which he started showing after Castro’s death last year.

Eschewing the tourist beaches, Riccardo takes me to the local hangout La Boca, where the July Cuban crowds have stormed the waters; we motor to a rocky outcrop and descend for 75 minutes and to a depth of 17m. This is only my second time diving. The first time I jumped off a commercial vessel on the Great Barrier Reef with a posse of passing tourists.

Now I discover the point. Riccardo takes me by the hand and shows me the sandy seabed thronging with coral and ridges, tunnels and channels. We play with a giant conch, watch a vast barracuda gliding by and see an infinity of sponges and feathery corals, sea snails, a giant devil ray and schools of green morays, parrotfish, squirrelfish and lionfish. The coral is alive and pulsating, all delicate purples and soft greened yellows; the fish are profuse and unafraid; the waters are Yves Klein blue and clear. At one point we hover over a steep wall cut by a jagged tunnel, wisped by wavering coral, and it’s so beautiful I want to weep at the thrill of being alive and in this moment.

After we emerge from the deep I sit breathless on a rock, bathed by the afternoon sun. I reflect on how, thread counts and service aside, luxury in the new Cuba remains that privilege of being taken by the hand by the cream of the crop and led into a world that feels as if it has been made just for you.

Need to know
Lydia Bell was a guest of Black Tomato (020 7426 9888, blacktomato.com), which can arrange a tailor-made seven-night holiday to Cuba from £6,000pp. The price includes flights with Virgin Atlantic, four nights’ B&B at the new Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana in Havana, three nights at Finca Kenia in Trinidad, private transfers and tours