Cuba

Cuba is the largest and most populous island in the Caribbean, with around 11 million people. Spain held it until 1898, longer than almost anywhere in the Americas, and the 1959 revolution left a one-party state and a largely state-run economy. Its tobacco, grown mainly in Pinar del Rio, is the basis of the world's best-known cigars.

Known for hand-rolled cigars, son and rumba, 1950s American cars, colonial Havana and sugar cane and rum.

Highlights

  • Old Havana, Havana: The colonial core of the capital, with four main squares, Spanish fortifications and buildings spanning the 16th to 19th centuries. UNESCO listed it in 1982, and restoration has been funded partly from its own tourism income.
  • Vinales Valley, Pinar del Rio: A karst basin where limestone mogotes rise hundreds of metres out of flat red soil. Tobacco for premium cigars is still grown in small plots and air-cured in thatched barns; UNESCO lists it as a cultural landscape.
  • Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus: A town founded in 1514 that grew rich on sugar and then stopped changing, leaving cobbled streets and single-storey colonial houses. It is UNESCO listed with the nearby Valle de los Ingenios and its mill ruins.
  • Cienaga de Zapata, Matanzas: The largest wetland in the Caribbean: swamp, mangrove and flooded forest along the southern coast, protected as a biosphere reserve. It holds the endemic Cuban crocodile and the bee hummingbird, and the Bay of Pigs cuts into it.

Places in Cuba

Getting around

Travel between Cuban cities is mostly by coach, and Viazul is the operator visitors use; Varadero has its own Viazul terminal serving the main destinations. In Havana the Bus Turístico runs one route around the city and another out to the Playas del Este. Taxis work the streets of both cities: the state Cuba Taxi fleet, cocotaxis and the vintage almendrones in Havana, and in Varadero cars that all carry a meter.