Requiem for La Guarida: An Interview with Enrique Núñez (Part 2/5)

Easily Cuba’s most famous private “paladar” restaurant, La Guarida served its delectable cuisine to a host of visiting dignitaries, including the King and Queen of Spain, movie actor Jack Nicholson, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, and, of course, to yours truly. 

[This is part two in a five part series. Click here to read part one and here for part three.]

This tradition seems to have ended last week when the famed Cuban paladar was forced to close its doors.

The reason for La Guarida’s great success and popularity begins with the fact that it is located in the apartment in where the wildly successful, breakthrough Cuban film "Fresa y Chocolate" (Strawberry and Chocolate) was filmed in 1993. Co-directed by Cuba’s late master filmmaker, Tomás “Titón” Gutiérrez Alea, together with Juan Carlos Tabío, the film treated the taboo subject of homosexuality in socialist Cuba in a sensitive and sympathetic way. (Go here to view a great 5-minute clip from the film).

Roughly translated as “The Hideout,” the restaurant’s name originates with the nickname Diego, the homosexual character in the film, gave to his own third-floor apartment in the building. (He also nicknamed his hardworking American refirgerator "Rocco," which will be the subject of a future post in this series).

The founder, owner, and operator of La Guarida, the affable entrepreneur Enrique Núñez (pictured to the left with his wife), jumped on this opportunity after the film became a world-wide success, initially converting a small part of what had been his parents’ third third-floor apartment in this truly impressive ruin of a building into what up to last week was Cuba’s most renowned paladar.

In our interview, Enrique explained that following the international release of the film, foreigners began to show up unannounced at the third floor apartment to get a glimpse of the place where the film had been staged.

“People came to the apartment because of the film,” explained Enrique. “Again and again, they would tell us that the film changed their black-and-white image of Cuba, making Cuba real, close, and personal for them.”

As Enrique related to me during our interview back in early 2001, the tale of La Guarida’s origin began when his brother-in-law, Andrés Olea (director's assistant on the film), showed him a copy of the screenplay to an upcoming film based on the Senel Paz short story entitled, “The Wolf, the Forest, and the New Man.”

“As I read the screenplay, it occurred to me that the place Senel was describing was this very apartment. I suggested that they use it to shoot the film. Soon, Titón showed up and looked at the place and decided to do the film here.”

Cuba’s film institute, ICAIC, put his parents up in a separate apartment for the three months it took to shoot the film. After this (early 1993), his parents returned to their apartment and resumed a normal life, unaware of the success the film was destined to have or of the way that success would ultimately effect their lives.

Enrique even admitted that at that point it never crossed his mind that he could later turn the apartment into a successful private restaurant.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Requiem for La Guarida: Strawberry, Chocolate, and the (In)famous Cuban Paladar (Part 1/5)

Photo of "Rocco," the nickname of the Diego's old faithful Frigidaire refrigerator, being laid to rest at an art show in Havana in 2006 during the revolucion energetica.  Rocco was the only "American" character in the 1994 Cuban film "Strawberry and Chocolate".

 

The famed Cuban restaurant, La Guarida, inspired by the even more famous film "Fresa y Chocolate" has closed.

While its website is still up and running as of Christmas day, it seems the famed Cuban paladar restaurant, La Guarida (The Hideout), has finally closed its doors after years of struggling against the twin forces of bureaucracy and politics. Running a private business in a socialist country must be like a fish trying to ride a bicycle...

Yesterday the blog Penultimos Dias reported the bad news:

"The emblematic Havana restaurant La Guarida closed its doors today for good. It was perhaps the last paladar that remained with a certain level of quality and attention, and doubtless the best known... La Guarida survived almost everything, but in the end the government's hachet fell and cut it to pieces, giving its owner a final chance to close it today and avoid jail and a painful bureaucratic process..."

Readers of Generacion Y will remember Yoani Sanchez's post, "La envidia de fiesta" (Feast envy), from earlier this year about the similar forced closing of another famed Havana paladar, "El Hurón Azul."  Deeply embarrased by a system that criminalizes such entrepreneurship, Sanchez wrote:

"As if it wouldn’t be much easier to authorize the sale of those creatures with antennae who live in our sea [lobsters], to congratulate Juan Carlos for his work in promoting culture, and to allow each paladar to have whatever number of chairs and employees they decide. But no, to authorize all that would set off too strong a competition with the inefficient restaurants and cultural centers of the State...

"Above all, I think about the old gentleman who looked after the cars at the entrance to the paladar, and the lady who washed the dishes, now left without work, and especially the children of Juan Carlos. Possibly they have understood, given the example of the Hurón Azul, that in order to prosper one must get off this Island."

Her post also embedded a truly fascinating and deeply disturbing Power Point presentatioin put together by state prosecuters of economic crimes against the owner.  It reads like the script of an episode of "The Twilight Zone."