HAVANA – From the moment the van I was riding in pulled alongside the restaurant , that was tucked between century-old homes on a narrow cobblestone street in the Old Havana section of the Cuban capital , I was full of anticipation .
The San Cristóbal restaurant is one of Havana ’ s most famous eateries . Housed in an old building , it is the product of a fairly new idea in this socialist country : privately owned restaurants that Cubans call a paladar .
In 2013 , Beyoncé and Jay Z had dinner here . Three years later , President Barack Obama and his family ate here during his historic trip to Cuba . I arrived here with none of the fanfare that attached to those visits to San Cristóbal .
I am not a celebrity , but I came here to meet one .
This was the last stop on my whirlwind mission with a distinguished group of Americans who had come to this embattled island nation to get a better understanding of what ’ s going on in Cuba . Highlights of our journey included a visit to a maternity home in Old Havana for women with troubled pregnancies , a conversation with filmmaker Gloria Rolando , and an audience with two high-ranking members of Cuba ’ s leadership : Rubén Remigio Ferro the president ( chief justice ) of Cuba ’ s Supreme Court , and Salvador Valdés Mesa , the country ’ s vice president .
But my dinner this night was with Víctor Dreke , a legendary commander of the forces Cuba sent to Africa during the 1960s to help independence movements in Guinea-Bissau , the Republic of Guinea and the Congo .
An officer in Cuba ’ s Armed Forces , Dreke spent the past 60-plus years working to free Cuba and several African nations from external domination . He fought alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s , led two companies of the Cuban army ’ s 117th Battalion in the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion , and served as second in command under the Guevara-led force that Cuba dispatched to the Congo as the people there fought to throw off the yoke of colonial rule . Upon their return to Cuba , Che wrote of that fight that Dreke was “ one of the pillars on which I relied .”
I thought about all of this when , shortly after the members of our group were seated in one of the restaurant ’ s private dining rooms , Dreke walked in . There was so much that I wanted to talk with him about . Cuban support for African independence was a fact , and Dreke is a living testament to these efforts .
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