Havana is the principal Cuban setting of the eighth floor, called The Ghosts of Earth, in The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Carl and Princess Donut begin the floor inside a sealed version of the city's capitol building. Once the outdoor area opens, they cross a reconstruction populated by apparent inhabitants, traffic, monsters, other crawlers, and locations altered for the floor's card game. Their first journey takes them from Old Havana toward a second stairwell near Miramar; they later return to the city during the struggle over the remaining exits. The floor's imitation of a living city becomes increasingly damaged as the crawlers' fights and the final demon crisis spread through it.
Arrival at the capitol
Donut chooses Cuba as the squad's starting region after deciding that an immediate arrival in the Bahamas would be dangerous. She and Carl materialize in the rotunda of El Capitolio Nacional de Cuba on December 10, the first day of the eighth floor. The room is empty, with its windows looking into darkness. Carl finds that the building's doors are locked, that a stairwell requires a key, and that the exterior has not yet been unlocked. Their arrival therefore gives them shelter and time to prepare, but no immediate access to the surrounding city or to the next floor.
Other crawlers report similarly enclosed starting points across the reconstructed Earth. Carl tells their chat group that he and Donut are in Havana, while Katia reports Iceland and Li Na reports Beijing. These locations are separate starting areas within the same floor. When Bomo later identifies another stairwell in the Cuban region, Mordecai explains that the areas initially function as separate locations; the floor has not simply placed every squad on an unrestricted, continuous Earth. Carl's concern is more immediate: if the second stairwell has its own starting group, he needs to learn who else is in Havana before either group reaches a locked exit.
Carl also makes their capitol entrance defensible. Before going outside, he places alarm and teleport traps around its stairwell and sets their condition against crawlers outside Safehome Yolanda. The precaution matters because the building is both their point of arrival and a possible route out. It later becomes the site of a fight over an exit key, giving the opening chamber a second role near the floor's end.
Old Havana and the memory ghosts
The first exterior area Carl and Donut enter is labeled Old Havana. From the capitol steps, Carl sees a dense urban landscape of aging multicolored buildings, sidewalks, vendors, cars, scooters, and buses. The weather is warm and humid despite the floor's December date. For Carl, the sensory detail is painful: the streets resemble a busy human world after the destruction of Earth. Donut, meanwhile, notices an immediate mechanical anomaly. The apparent pedestrians do not appear on her map as ordinary nearby beings.
Those pedestrians are memory ghosts rather than living residents Carl can speak to. They continue routines without acknowledging the crawlers, and Samantha cannot get an answer when she tries to ask one for help. Their clothing and carried objects can nevertheless be displaced. A tourist walks through the party, catches Donut in his clothes, and keeps moving after she falls down the steps. Carl recovers the tourist's trousers, wallet, and working rental phone while the man's image proceeds as though nothing has happened. The episode shows that the replay has physical components even though the represented person is inaccessible.
The traffic makes that distinction dangerous. Carl fears that a moving vehicle can strike a crawler or start a collision whose consequences extend beyond the first impact. He keeps Mongo in his container at first and orders Samantha to scout without interfering with pedestrians or cars. Donut proposes creating a roadblock so the accumulated wrecks will clear a route, but Carl worries about the resulting pileup near their entrance and about relying on the city's apparent normality. Later streets do contain wrecked vehicles and ghosts continuing their journeys without the objects that had been carrying them.
Carl takes a paper tourist map from one of the memory figures to orient the party. It shows downtown and the outer neighborhoods, allowing him to identify Miramar as distinct from Old Havana. He plans to use the coast road to reach the other stairwell. The journey is not simply a move between names on a map: the group must avoid traffic, locate safe rooms, find monsters for the floor's card system, and assess whether the other starting squad will cooperate. Havana's urban layout shapes all of those choices.
The other crawlers and the coast
The second Cuban starting group consists of Paz Lo, Anton Lopez, and Sister Ines Quiteria. Carl and Donut encounter them after leaving their first stairwell. The meeting nearly becomes a fight. Anton distrusts Carl because of the conflict involving Prepotente and Osvaldo's hawk, while Donut reacts to Ines's Havana brown cat form with open hostility. Carl pulls back rather than force an alliance. The three other crawlers have already killed local bosses, so they are neither helpless newcomers nor people the pair can safely ignore.
Ines offers a practical reason to cooperate: the group has encountered monk seals on the shore and wants help capturing one as a card totem. Carl and Donut need cards too. The local encounter draws both squads toward the coastline, where the monk seals are involved in a conflict with red land crabs. Their uneasy collaboration lets Carl learn more about the nearby crawlers while gaining access to a useful creature. It also connects a recognizable seaside setting to the eighth floor's artificial ecology; the animals of the ghostly city and the combatants designated as monsters are governed by different rules.
The relationship remains fragile after the first card hunt. Donut's prejudice against Ines's chosen appearance is a recurring source of friction, and Carl does not treat Anton's anger as proof that the entire group must be an enemy. Their proximity within one city makes avoidance difficult. The two parties repeatedly have to decide whether to share information, cooperate against stronger threats, or separate before a disagreement turns into a lethal crawler fight.
Colón Cemetery
The Colón Cemetery becomes one of Havana's major altered sites. Carl, Donut, and the other group reach it after seeing traffic stalled around the area. The surrounding roadway is crowded with memory ghosts going through the motions of a traffic jam. At the cemetery itself, a high black fence and fog create a boundary unlike the open, lived-in place Paz remembers. Anton says a relative is buried there; Paz recognizes the entrance but says the dungeon's enclosure is wrong. Their reactions establish that the floor has transformed a place with personal meaning to the Cuban crawlers, rather than merely choosing a convenient horror setting.
Donut detects numerous moving enemies behind the fence, including different sizes of undead. She also sees a church near the center but cannot read its interior clearly. Carl considers the cemetery a large boss area and wants to inspect its perimeter before entering. Ines initially strides toward the gate, while Paz worries about being trapped inside. The group ultimately agrees to circle the boundary first. Their disagreement is a concrete example of how the city's familiar landmarks can conceal new dungeon constraints: knowing a place's real-world layout does not reveal the strength of its monsters, the behavior of its gate, or the conditions for leaving.
The cemetery later changes again as the local quest progresses. Its tombs become shops while it remains recognizably a graveyard, and Ines departs back into Havana. The site supplies much more than scenery for the group's card collection and their strained alliance. Its altered boundaries and undead population also foreshadow the danger of treating the ghosts on the streets as the only strange inhabitants of the city.
Movement beyond the center
After leaving the ghommid settlement, Carl and Donut set a southwest course through Havana. They want to leave the city, gather more cards, and find both safe rooms and a Desperado Club. Carl continues to look for Ines because of what has happened to Paz, although Donut would rather regard her as an enemy. He again uses the tourist map. The route carries them past the cemetery entrance, through streets occupied by memory ghosts, and toward a highway where they hope to travel faster.
The city's ordinary services and infrastructure are unreliable guides to safety. A zoo on the route appears to contain animals that are part of the replay rather than capturable monsters. Several small mobs do yield utility cards, but Carl is wary of filling the deck with cards that make its more important totems harder to draw. Safe rooms are plentiful. An empty stretch of freeway allows him to deploy the royal chariot, but heavier traffic farther on forces the group off the road. Havana thus permits moments of rapid movement without offering a clear, continuous escape corridor.
Return to a burning city
Near the end of the floor, Carl is teleported deeper into the Havana area, in a wooded patch near the city. He estimates that he is about five kilometers from the church exit and fifteen from the capitol building. Both distances matter because exit keys have become scarce and the remaining routes are separated by dangerous streets. Carl's return is to a city already under much greater pressure than the one he first explored. The fight with Quan and Tserendolgor reaches the capitol chamber where Carl and Donut began.
Carl enters that chamber while Quan and Tserendolgor's group are fighting. Donut is elsewhere, and Carl attempts to use Samantha and his teleport devices to bring Donut's summoned totems into the fight without exposing her directly to Quan's card tactics. At the same time, an area message announces that the Madre de Aguas has succumbed to a zombism curse and that the demon Amayon has entered the realm. Fire rises elsewhere in Havana. The contest for a stairwell key is now taking place amid a crisis that affects the whole region.
The key rules turn the capitol encounter into a fatal choice. Donut holds keys for both the capitol and church exits, while Tserendolgor's squad cannot simply accept one from Carl. The time remaining on the capitol door is short, and surrendering or transferring a key through a card battle risks losing control of which exit remains available. Tserendolgor ultimately refuses to take a path that would require killing another group for passage. After Carl leaves, she destroys the capitol chamber with her magical bracer and dies. The rotunda that had been an apparently safe, empty starting point becomes a ruined exit site.
Carl heads west through downtown toward the church and Imani. He sees Amayon using the possessed snake's body atop a tall building, sending fire upward while demonic birds circle it. Zombie seals and crabs spread away from the coast, and some of the undead become possessed demons moving toward Amayon. The streets have accumulated wreckage, hostile creatures, and fire. Carl reunites with Donut by using Samantha in a difficult teleport maneuver, then tries to avoid drawing the attention of the possessed mobs as they cross the city.
The later evacuation also draws crawlers from other regions into Havana. Imani, Katia, Elle, and others meet Carl near the church. Their plan requires more than obtaining a key: the physical structure around a stairwell can bury access to its chamber, so the group considers demolition and a route from below. Across the way, the FOCSA building becomes the focus of Ines's actions and the demon presence. Carl's group advances through its lower commercial space and stairwell while other crawlers protect the approach. Havana's separated exits, large buildings, congested streets, and multiplying enemies all affect whether anyone can reach a usable way down before the floor collapses.
By this point, the apparent residents still move through parts of the city as memory ghosts, while real crawlers and dungeon creatures fight among damaged buildings. Carl later remembers Havana as a place whose people were already dead and whose city had already been destroyed, yet whose losses felt real to him. That recognition gives the location its particular force: the dungeon presents a convincing human place, then makes the crawlers navigate and damage that imitation in order to survive.