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.