How Graham Greene spoilt my tropical rapture

On the patio of my hotel in Havana…

No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana.

Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B: a result of the partial liberalisation of the island’s economy, allowing ordinary Cuban families with a spare room to take a paying tourist or two into their homes. You enter Casa Delia by way of the massive, shabby wooden door that’s the common entrance to the block, but once you’re through her internal steel-gated front door you’re in her family’s little world: a spick-and-span apartment with much-loved pictures on the walls, favourite knick-knacks on the polished furniture, and a small kitchen where you take your delicious breakfast of fruit, ham, cheese, slices of deep red tomato, toast, honey and strong dark coffee.