When President Obama made his historic visit to Cuba in 2016, he was taken on a walking tour of Old Havana, or Habana Vieja, by Eusebio Leal. Three years later the dapper-suited Leal escorted the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall on their visit to mark the city’s 500th anniversary, unveiling a statue of William Shakespeare with the prince and quite possibly regaling them with his tales of the British invasion of Havana in 1762.
This was a man known for speaking truth to power, not always an advisable thing in communist Cuba. In 1967 the 25-year-old Leal, a self-taught historian, had discovered remnants of a rare, colonial-era wooden street that, it was said, had been laid so that the governor’s wife could