The Generator Question: Picking a Havana Bed After the Chains Left

For most of the past twenty years, the answer to this question was settled enough to be dull. Sleep in Habana Vieja if you want the plazas outside your door, in Vedado if you would rather feel like a resident than a visitor, and accept that Cuban hotels charge four-star money for three-star plumbing. Very little of that advice survives 2026 intact.

In the first half of this year the international operators left the island, one after another. Melia Hotels International, present in Cuba for thirty-six years, ended management of its Cuban portfolio in late July; Iberostar gave up around a dozen properties tied to the military-run conglomerate GAESA; the Canadian group Blue Diamond and Indonesia's Archipelago International withdrew as well, and Minor had already stepped back from the NH-branded tower in Vedado earlier in the year. Cuban and industry reporting through 2026 has put national hotel occupancy at roughly ten to thirteen per cent. Official figures showed about 329,000 international visitors in the first four months of the year, down by more than half against the same period a year earlier. Layered over all of it is an electricity grid that has been failing in long, unpredictable blocks since late 2024.

The practical consequence for someone planning a trip is that the name over the door now tells you very little. Three other things tell you a great deal: which neighbourhood you sleep in, how big the building is, and whether your bed has back-up power behind it. Get those right and Havana is, at the time of writing, emptier and cheaper than it has been in two decades, which is a real argument for going rather than against it.

Ask about the generator before you ask about the view

This is the question that has quietly become more important than the star rating, and almost nobody puts it in an enquiry email.

Cuba's power cuts are not brief. Outside Havana they routinely run for the better part of a day; the capital is treated more gently than the provinces but still loses power in long blocks, and the pattern shifts week to week. Larger hotels generally hold diesel generators, but generators need fuel, and fuel is precisely what the country is short of. Smaller properties often run an inverter instead: a battery bank that will keep fans, lights, the router and your phone charger alive through an outage, though not air conditioning.

What this does to a room is not obvious until it happens to you. Water in most Havana buildings is pumped up to a roof tank by an electric pump, so a long outage eventually becomes a dry shower on the upper floors. Lifts stop, which turns a bargain on the eighteenth floor of a tower into eighteen flights of stairs in August. Air conditioning stops, which matters enormously in a sealed modern room and much less in a high-ceilinged old one with shutters and a cross-breeze.

So before you book anything, message the host or the hotel directly and ask, in writing: is there a generator or an inverter, roughly how many hours will it hold, does the water keep running during a cut, and is there a fan in the room as well as air conditioning. A private house with two batteries and a ceiling fan is a more reliable place to sleep this year than a twenty-five-storey tower without them. Bring a power bank and a head torch regardless; both are close to essential and neither is easy to buy once you land.

Habana Vieja: the shortest walk, the loudest morning

The UNESCO-listed old town is roughly a square kilometre of baroque and neoclassical streets strung between five plazas, and if your trip is three nights long it is the honest choice. You will walk out of your door into Plaza Vieja or Plaza de la Catedral, and you will not need transport at all.

The hotel stock here is almost entirely the old Habaguanex portfolio, restored by the City Historian's Office and now run under Gaviota. These are small, characterful and inconsistent. Hotel Santa Isabel occupies the former Santovenia mansion on Plaza de Armas and has been taking guests since the nineteenth century; Hotel Florida sits on the Obispo pedestrian run in an 1830s building with a colonnaded courtyard; Hotel Ambos Mundos trades hard on Ernest Hemingway, who genuinely did keep a room there; Hotel Raquel is a 1908 art nouveau pile near Plaza Vieja with a stained-glass ceiling; Hotel Los Frailes is a converted monastery whose monastic theming is either charming or a great deal, depending on you. At the top sits the Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski, opened in 2017 inside the Manzana de Gomez, the island's first European-style shopping arcade, with a rooftop pool looking over the old town.

Two warnings. First, availability across these hotels is erratic in 2026 and some have been closed for stretches, so confirm directly rather than trusting an aggregator's calendar. Second, this is where you will pay the most for the least: restaurant prices on the plazas are set for cruise-ship money that no longer arrives, the street hustle is heaviest here, and the mornings start early and loud. Stay three nights, not ten.

Centro Habana: cheapest beds, hardest streets

The long dense wedge between the old town and Vedado is where the cheapest rooms in the city are, and where the city is most itself. Its eastern edge holds the Capitolio and the Gran Teatro; the Barrio Chino sits in the middle of it; the Callejon de Hamel, with its Afro-Cuban murals and its Sunday rumba, is near the Vedado end. The Malecon runs the whole northern length.

It is also the most dilapidated part of central Havana. Partial building collapses in the oldest housing stock are a documented and recurring problem, not a rumour, and the city's own inspectors condemn buildings regularly. That should shape the room you take rather than scare you off the district: prefer a casa on an upper floor of a solid, maintained building with a host who clearly lives there, and treat a suspiciously cheap ground-floor room in a propped-up tenement as the warning it is.

A block or two inland from the Malecon is usually better than on it. The seafront looks magnificent and takes salt spray and traffic noise all night, and in winter the waves come over the wall. Walk with ordinary city attention after dark; violent crime against visitors remains rare by regional standards, but the streets are unlit during outages and the pavements are genuinely broken.

Centro suits a second or third visit, a traveller with some Spanish, and anyone whose budget is the binding constraint. Expect to pay roughly EUR 25 to 40 a night for a double room in a decent casa here, as a rough guide at the time of writing, often with breakfast available for a few euros more.

Vedado: the one I would book

If you are staying five nights or more, sleep in Vedado. It is a green grid of 1920s to 1950s villas and apartment blocks laid out west of Centro, with proper pavements, shade, and the Malecon along its northern edge. Avenida de los Presidentes and the Paseo run inland as broad planted boulevards; La Rampa slopes down to the sea past the university and the old ice-cream pavilion at Coppelia, which has had a thin few years and opens erratically. The Necropolis de Colon, a nineteenth-century cemetery of marble mausoleums, and the Plaza de la Revolucion are both within a long walk.

The landmark hotels are here. The Hotel Nacional de Cuba opened in 1930 on the bluff above the Malecon, designed by the New York firm McKim, Mead and White in a mix of Sevillian, Moorish and art deco, and its guest list runs from Winston Churchill to Ava Gardner; UNESCO has inscribed its documentary archive on the Memory of the World register. The Habana Libre, the slab tower finished in 1958, still dominates the skyline above La Rampa. Vedado also holds Torre K, the forty-two-storey hotel completed in recent years, which for many Cubans has become the emblem of a state that kept building hotels while the grid went dark.

But the reason to sleep in Vedado is the casas, which are the best value in the city by a distance: whole floors of 1950s apartments with terrazzo, ceiling roses, balconies and hosts who cook. On the western edge, near the Almendares, the Fabrica de Arte Cubano runs a converted oil factory as a gallery, cinema, bar and concert hall; it typically opens on weekend evenings only and closes for long breaks in the calendar, so check before you build an evening around it.

Getting to the old town is easy. It is roughly a forty-minute walk along the Malecon, which is a pleasure in the late afternoon, or a few minutes in a shared almendron running along Linea or Neptuno for the equivalent of small change. Agree the fare before you get in; foreigners are quoted a different number, and a private taxi across the same distance will cost several times more.

Miramar and Playa: quiet, green, and taxi-dependent

Across the Almendares river, Miramar is embassies, sea-almond trees and 1950s mansions along the Quinta Avenida, with its planted central promenade. The hotels out here are the big 1990s and 2000s builds, including the former Melia Habana and the Comodoro, all now back under Cuban management after the chain exits. Rooms are larger, there are gardens and functioning pools, and the bigger properties are more likely to hold generator capacity.

The cost is mobility. You are a twenty to thirty minute taxi ride from Vedado and longer from the old town, taxis are themselves hostage to fuel supply, and there is no casual walking out for dinner. It works for families with small children, for stays of a fortnight or more, and for anyone with business near the trade centre. For a first visit of under a week it is the wrong side of the river.

Three budgets, and what each actually buys

All figures below are rough guides at the time of writing, quoted per double room per night, and Cuban pricing moves.

At the bottom, around EUR 25 to 40, take a casa particular in Centro Habana or the southern half of Vedado. You get a private room and bathroom in a family home, air conditioning that works when the power does, and a host who will cook you breakfast for a little extra and is by far the most useful person you will meet in the city. Book two nights to begin with and extend if it suits you, which is easy in a year with this much empty stock.

In the middle, around EUR 60 to 120, you have a genuine choice: the best casas, which at this level means an entire apartment floor in Vedado with a terrace, or a small pool in Miramar, or one of the restored boutique hotels in the old town. My preference is the casa every time. It costs less, the breakfast is better, someone will find you a driver, and the building is small enough that an inverter covers it.

At the top, from roughly EUR 200 and climbing well past it at the Manzana, the realistic options are the Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski and the Hotel Nacional. The Kempinski is the newest of Havana's five-star hotels and the only one built to an international brand standard; the Nacional is not that, and is not trying to be, and people book it for the history and the garden terrace above the sea rather than the bathrooms.

One hard constraint for American readers: the US State Department maintains a Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List, which by 2026 runs to several hundred properties and covers most state-owned and military-linked hotels in Havana, including the Manzana. Persons subject to US jurisdiction are generally barred from lodging at or paying for a listed property, whatever their travel category. Check the current list before you book anything. Casas particulares are private homes and are generally not on it, which is a large part of why they became the American traveller's default in the first place.

Booking and paying, which is the fiddly part

Do not build a trip on Airbnb. Since payment routes into Cuba were cut in 2025 the platform has delisted large numbers of Cuban properties, and travellers have reported bookings cancelled after confirmation through 2026. Book direct with the host by WhatsApp or email, or use a specialist platform such as Homestay or RentalHo, where a card takes the deposit and the balance is settled in cash on arrival.

Confirm in writing, before you fly: the nightly price and the currency it is quoted in, whether breakfast is included, whether airport collection can be arranged and for roughly what, and the generator question above. Expect to pay somewhere around EUR 25 to 30 for a pre-arranged car from Jose Marti airport into Vedado, agreed in advance rather than negotiated at the kerb.

On money: carry cash, and carry euros. Cards issued by US banks do not function in Cuba at all, other foreign cards work inconsistently and stop working entirely when the power is out, and ATMs are unreliable. The gap between the official exchange rate and the informal street rate is enormous and has widened through 2026, so change modest amounts at a time and never change more than you will spend. Keep the room money separate and in euros; almost no casa owner has a card terminal.

Havana is at a low ebb, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the low ebb is exactly why a good room in a Vedado apartment, with a fan, a battery and someone in the kitchen who knows which bakery has flour this week, is the most reliable booking in the city right now, and costs less than it has in twenty years.