John Lennon Statue in Havana's John Lennon Park (Parque John Lennon)

The John Lennon statue in Cuba is a life-size bronze of Lennon sitting on a park bench in John Lennon Park (Parque John Lennon), on Calle 17 between Calles 6 and 8 in Havana's Vedado district. Cuban sculptor José Villa Soberón made it, and Fidel Castro unveiled it on 8 December 2000, the 20th anniversary of Lennon's murder.

Why is there a John Lennon statue in Cuba?

It does look odd at first. The Beatles' music was frowned on in revolutionary Cuba, yet the same government later put Lennon on a bench in a Havana park, with Castro himself doing the unveiling. Getting from one to the other took more than three decades.

First, the music was discouraged or banned from the mid-1960s. How long that lasted depends on who you read. CNN says Castro declared a ban in 1964. The Cuban site CubaConecta says the Beatles were prohibited from 1964 to 1966 and then got radio play. A Reuters report from 2000 describes a longer chill, with Beatles songs branded "ideological diversionism" through the 1960s and 1970s and heard mostly at private parties from smuggled tapes. These may be describing different things (a formal ban versus years of official disapproval), so no single date range is safe to state.

Then, in December 1990, Cuban musicians claimed the park. Havana Times tells the story: a group of musicians, including Carlos and Ele Alfonso, the band Síntesis, Carlos Varela and Santiago Feliú, planned a tribute to Lennon on a rooftop. Officials blocked that venue, so they held an improvised concert in this park instead. Varela proposed naming the park after Lennon. Until then it was Parque Menocal.

On 8 December 2000 the state made it official. The date was the 20th anniversary of Lennon's death. According to Reuters, Castro, in military fatigues, unveiled the bronze together with singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez while "All You Need Is Love" played. Castro told reporters he shared Lennon's dreams and was a dreamer himself, one who had seen his dreams come true. By then officials were presenting Lennon as a rebel who had been harassed by the US government for opposing the Vietnam War. The same day there was a Lennon documentary by Castro's personal cameraman, Roberto Chile, and an open-air concert at the Tribuna Antiimperialista stage opposite the US mission. EcuRed, the Cuban online encyclopedia, says musicians from the 1990 tribute, among them Rodríguez, Varela, Gerardo Alfonso and Feliú, attended the unveiling.

So the short answer: fans made this Lennon's park in 1990, and in 2000 the government adopted him as an anti-war figure it could honour. Some write-ups tell it as Castro's idea from start to finish, which leaves out the musicians. Others credit the author Ernesto Juan Castellanos with leading the project. We found no source for that. Castellanos wrote a 2005 book about the Beatles ban in Cuba.

Lennon never visited Cuba. That's the answer to the quiz question doing the rounds: the musician who got a full-size statue in a Havana park in 2000, without ever having been to Havana, is John Lennon.

A statue you can sit next to

Villa Soberón didn't put Lennon on a pedestal. The Havana city government describes a relaxed Lennon in shirt sleeves and jeans, wearing his glasses, legs crossed, on an ordinary park bench that rests on a marble slab at ground level. The empty end of the bench is there for visitors. EcuRed puts the weight at more than two tonnes.

A Spanish version of a line from "Imagine" is set into the ground at his feet. Sources disagree on one word of the inscription, so we're not quoting it here. Read it on the spot.

The guards of Lennon's glasses

The round bronze glasses kept disappearing. Rather than keep replacing them, custodians were given the job of holding a pair and putting them on the statue when someone wants a photo. That's why the statue usually sits there without them.

Reporters have met several of these guards. In 2013 The World (PRX) spoke to Juan González, then in his 90s, who did the job four days a week. In 2016 CNN profiled Aleeda Rodríguez Pedrasa, aged 72, who was paid 245 Cuban pesos a month for it. Accounts of the schedule don't match: CubaConecta mentions a guard around the clock, while English Wikipedia describes a custodian during the day. The arrangement has probably changed over the years, so don't count on specific hours.

More Lennon in the same park

On the corner of the park, at Calle 17 and 6, is El Submarino Amarillo (the Yellow Submarine), a Beatles-themed club that used to be called Club Atelier, where bands play Beatles songs.

Elsewhere in the park is a metal sculpture called Éxtasis de amor by Setsuko Ono, Yoko Ono's sister. She installed it in November 2003 during the 8th Havana Biennial. CubaNet reported in 2019 that plants had grown over it, so it is easy to walk past.

The statue has had famous visitors too. Prince Charles and Camilla stopped here on 26 March 2019, arriving in a 1953 MG. OpenStreetMap tags the site as having limited wheelchair access.

Villa Soberón's other John Lennon statues

You can see Villa Soberón's Lennon in two more cities, one of them a straight copy of the Havana bench.

The San José statue repeats the Havana pose. The Tampa statue is a different work: a Colorado collector who had seen the Havana bench asked Villa Soberón for a Lennon, and the sculptor made a walking figure instead. For Lennon memorials in other countries, see the map.

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