![]() ![]() In 1940, he opened Centro Vasco, and he made it into one of the most popular restaurants in Havana. When he first arrived in Havana, he pretended to be a world-famous jai-alai player, and then he became a cook at the jai-alai club. Saizarbitoria had grown up in the Basque region of Spain, and he had made his way to Cuba in the late thirties by sneaking onto a boat and stowing away inside a barrel of sardines. ![]() The owners of The Garden were nostalgic Austrians, who, in 1965, finally got so nostalgic that they sold the place to a Cuban refugee named Juan Saizarbitoria and went back to Austria. ![]() It was a speakeasy in the twenties, and for years afterward it was an Austrian restaurant called The Garden. Out front are a gigantic round fountain, a fence made from a ship’s anchor chain, and a snarl of hibiscus bushes and lacy palm trees. The exterior of Miami’s Centro Vasco is a hodgepodge of wind-scoured limestone chunks and flat tablets of Perma-stone set in arches and at angles, all topped with a scalloped red shingle roof. ![]() In Little Havana, in Miami, there is another Centro Vasco, on Southwest Eighth-a street that starts east of the Blue Lagoon and runs straight to the bay. In Havana, the restaurant called Centro Vasco is on a street that Fidel Castro likes to drive down on his way home from the office. ![]()
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