It’s counted diamond dealers, foreign soldiers and an ill-fated president among the guests. It’s been occupied by rebels who left behind astronomical bar tabs. It’s been splattered with bullets, littered with corpses, battered, broken, bruised and rebuilt. In the city immortalized by Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the Palm Beach Hotel has seen it all, and survived — much like the country itself. “It’s been difficult really, but we managed. In Congo, we always manage,” says Gaspar Mande, the soft-spoken chief receptionist. The brainchild of a general once close to the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Palm Beach opened in 1995 — just in time for an anti-Mobutu rebellion that swept the country a year later. Full Story
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