Having Coffee with the Ghost of Fidel

During my wanderings around Mexico City, I came upon one of the most traditional and well-known cafés in the city... Café La Habana.

I´ve been there before, and the food is nothing special.  But they are one of the few places that serve "café con leche", also known as "café lechero".  It's the Hispanic version of the French "café au lait"... a bit of concentrated coffee added to steamed milk.  Since I had been walking for quite a while I decided I should sit down and have a  "lechero" break.

I ordered a piece of cheesecake to go along with the coffee.  The "lechero" is served, as it should be, in a glass with a metal frame.

However, unlike the even more famous Café La Parroquia, here the waiter does not make a big production number of pouring the milk from a kettle.  He simply poured the little cup of coffee into the glass of milk.  At least I didn't have to pour... I usually end up dripping coffee.

During its seventy year history, Café La Habana has had many famous customers.  

The most notorious were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.  While Castro was in exile, he and the Argentinian revolutionary Guevara met regularly here and plotted the Cuban Revolution.  However the café was also the hangout of less nefarious figures.  Among them were the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, and the Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, both recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature.