All she wanted was a pancake

Returning from Varadero... oh, I can hardly bring myself to admit that I have ever been to that place, so I will say no more at the moment than...

Arriving at twilight, we pushed through the jungle fringe until we broke through the mosquito infested foliage, finding that all the holiday brochures depicting an impossibly turquoise sea fronted by white sand were not - as I had always suspected - the product of a graphic artist's imagination.

You know how it looks when a blue swimming pool is tastefully illuminated under the water by an unseen light-source, and the water itself seems to be emanating the light from every particle? Well that's how the entire ocean looked that night, and every other night thereafter. H.I. and I just stood there for about an hour, gobsmacked by the sheer beauty of it.

Our little mini-bus back to Havana wound it's way through the city fringes, and then - about 200 yards from the Nacional Hotel where we were booked for our final few nights of the trip - was stopped by a young man in T-shirt, jeans and cheap trainers, carrying a gun.

A few words in Spanish with the driver, then the coach took a wild detour away from the hotel, and we traversed some back streets, arriving at the Nacional about 15 minutes later. Someone asked him what the problem was, and he simply said, "Castro".

The Nacional is one of the three top hotels of Havana, and is the one favoured by all the super-stars of today, including - we were told - Naomi Campbell. Well we didn't see her when we were there. Just as well, judging by later reports of her behaviour in hotels elsewhere.

I turned on the T.V. in our spacious room, high over the fountain gardens of the place, and saw the reason for our little detour and our late arrival. Fidel was giving a speech in a garden about 200 yards away from the Nacional, and his jumpy security men did not want a mini-bus full of foreigners getting any closer than where we were stopped and turned around.

Despite having no Spanish, I managed to watch about 1 hour of the president's speech, but I am told it went on for about 2 hours before I tuned in, and about 3 hours after I turned off.

The great man seemed to be in good form, though faltered a little in the heat of the night, making up for blank spaces in his dialogue by rolling his 'Rs' a little longer than I had heard any other Cuban doing in the last few days.

Occasionally, the camera would pan around the crowd - illuminated in insect infested flood-lights - and the older folk at the front could be seen stifling yawns with the huge fans which they used to little effect to cool themselves off. The younger ones at the back could be seen laughing and talking amongst each other, and one had the strong impression that they - if they had access to them - would have been communicating via mobile phones as the father of the nation bored the shit out of the adults.

There are three top-class hotels in Havana; The Sevilla, The Cuba Libre and The Nacional. We had already stayed in the Sevilla a week before and now we were sampling the luxury of the Nacional, simply because the Cuba Libre just did not seem to have the same sort of old kudos as the others. Maybe we were wrong.

High up in the 4th or 5th floor of the huge building, we entered our room for the first time and handed the obligatory $1 bill to the bell-boy. The crisp, white towels on our beds were folded into the shapes of swans, and a little note had been left by the cleaners, written on Nacional paper in blue biro. It read, "Dear Stephenson, we hope you enjoy your stay, love... etc."

We had seen from the satellite T.V. in the room that a massive hurricane was sweeping the states of Texas and Florida, about 150 miles away, and seemed to be heading in our direction. It veered away at the last moment however, and although we felt quite safe in the steel and concrete hotel, we breathed a sigh of relief for all the people in the crumbling buildings of old Havana. It still produced some shockingly strong winds, though, and people battled through them beneath the bending palm trees as they made their way to work at the Nacional, to clean our rooms, cook our food and generally make our holiday as pleasant as possible.

In the restaurant downstairs that night, I asked the waiter if he had been following the progress of the hurricane on CNN news as we had, and he said, "No. We are not allowed to watch it."

For a couple of nights, we used the second-class restaurant at the Nacional, simply because the first-class one looked too expensive. But on the third day, it was H.I.'s birthday, and we decided to treat ourselves.

Upon entering the glass doors of the place, we were greeted by a troupe of waiters and the Maitre D. - all dressed in tuxedos, black-tie and shiny shoes. We were ushered to a little table for 2 in the middle of the room, and seats were pushed beneath our descending arses.

The food was mediocre in the extreme - if there can be such a thing - but the over-the-top service made the experience well worth the extra money. A young, female pianist kept us entertained with classical renditions of Guantanamera on a sleek and shiny, grand piano, and the waiter/customer ratio seemed to be about 5 to one.

A young English couple were sitting at a tiny table right next to us, and the woman made the mistake of ordering a Crepe Suzette.

This seemingly simple request set off a series of events which almost culminated in disaster. With theatrically exaggerated gestures, the Maitre D arrived pushing a trolley which seemed to bear half the contents of the kitchen, accompanied by at least three assistants, and proceeded to whip up the batter for the crepe in a large bowl in front of the bemused and embarrassed young couple.

The whole thing took about ten minutes, during which time the couple sat with fixed smiles on their faces, attempting to hide their obvious regret at making the order in the first place. I was transfixed by the ritual, and came to believe that this was probably the first time anyone had ordered the dessert in this establishment. It certainly looked like the first time the the Maitre D had ever prepared it. When the finale came, it was truly spectacular.

With stately and deliberate gestures and flourishes, the man began heating about half a pint of brandy in a metal receptacle until it was at flash-point. He then poured the lot over the tiny pancake, and fumbled about with a box of matches. I could not believe what he was about to do.

He struck a match, then put it to the huge quantity of hot brandy in which the crepe was drowning on the woman's plate.

There was a muffled explosion and a blast of searing heat which could be felt from our table about 12 feet away, then the woman's head disappeared behind a six-foot column of flame which took about 30 seconds to subside. During this 30 seconds, I could see the waiters begin to panic and look around for a fire-extinguisher, and one of them reached for a napkin to wrap around the head of his customer.

She must have had the instinctive good sense to move backwards when the lot went up though, because she reappeared with what seemed to be the same amount of hair that she started with, and the waiters hung around for a while like dutiful firemen, just in case it reignited, then retreated to allow her to continue her dinner.

I leaned over and said to them, "I'm glad I didn't order that."