What a new Chinese restaurant in Havana says about Cuba

A PHOTO OF Fidel Castro, the late Cuban dictator, shaking hands with Xi Jinping, China’s living one, hangs in the entrance to the newly opened “Beijing” restaurant in Havana. Around it are snapshots of Chinese and Cuban bigwigs past and present. One from 1961 shows a smiling Mao Zedong and Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, then Cuba’s president, on a balcony. On a flight in 2014 from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, the birthplace of Cuba’s revolution, Mr Xi promised Raúl Castro, then its president, a fine Chinese restaurant. That visit, too, is memorialised in the vestibule.

It took five years, and millions of dollars in rent and renovation, before the Beijing was ready to serve its first dandan noodles. It opened in August at last, two years later than planned. Even when the Chinese and Cuban autocrats bless the enterprise, doing business in Cuba is hard.