Cabaret Parisien.
23 STREET. OLD HABANA
In Cabaret Parisien you’ll enjoy a great show “Cubano, Cubano” inspired in the fusion of Indo-American, Hispanic and African cultures that led to the Cuban culture.
You’ll be able to visit the Cabaret Parisien every day from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. The show starts at 10:00 p.m. and afterwards from 12:00 a.m. you can learn how to dance. The cabaret is inside the National Hotel. This hotel was designed by the prestigious architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, which also designed such iconic buildings as Columbia University in New York City and the Boston Public Library. The architecture is similar to The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. Both hotels look nearly identical from the outside, although the Cuban property is adorned with chess pieces in tribute to a national pastime and José Raúl Capablanca, one of Cuba’s greatest heroes, world chess champion between 1921 and 1927.
A lot of famous have visited the hotel, and by extension the cabaret as well. Among those are Gary Cooper and Erroll Flynn in the 1930s, Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in the 1940s, and Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and Walt Disney in the 1950s, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, Gabriel García Márquez, author of “Love in the Time of Cholera.” More recent visitors include Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Danny Glover, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Keaton, and Paris Hilton.
Diplomats and world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bolivian President Evo Morales, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Chinese President Xi Jinping, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry are among the list. The Mafia also had a large presence in Cuba, and the hotel’s former casino served as the setting for the Havana Conference, a meeting between the U.S. and Sicilian Mafia in 1946. This meeting is depicted in the film “The Godfather Part II,” though the actual scenes were filmed in the Dominican Republic.