Cuba

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean: 1,250 kilometres of sugarcane, tobacco fields, limestone mogotes, coral reef and crumbling-yet-magnificent Spanish colonial cities, home to roughly 11.1 million people and one of the most powerful cultural identities on Earth. Since 1959 it has lived under a one-party socialist state that, for all its contradictions, produced near-universal literacy and a globally exported medical system, in a country where scarcity looks nothing like the poverty of comparable economies.

For the traveller Cuba offers three immediate pleasures and one long aftertaste. The pleasures: Havana's impossible, decaying beauty; the music that seems to rise out of the streets themselves; and rum-drenched cocktails served in the bars where they were invented. The aftertaste is subtler — the warmth of Cubans, the conversations on front stoops, the sense that here, more than almost anywhere, the human connection outweighs the infrastructure. You come for the classic cars and you leave remembering the people.

This guide covers the whole island: Havana and its Malecón, Trinidad's cobblestone time capsule, the tobacco valleys of Viñales, Santiago de Cuba's Afro-Caribbean heart, the cays and beaches of the north coast, and the practical realities of travel in a country that still runs largely on cash, improvisation and the kindness of strangers.

Set expectations correctly and Cuba is one of the great trips. Set them wrongly and it is a frustration. The electricity goes off. The restaurant is out of three of the five things on the menu. Your card does not work anywhere, at all, ever. None of that is a malfunction of your holiday — it is the country, and Cubans navigate it daily with a resourcefulness that is itself the most interesting thing about the place.

The name Cuba comes from the Taíno word cubao, variously translated as "where fertile land is abundant" or simply "great place". Christopher Columbus, who landed on the north-eastern coast on 28 October 1492, believed he had reached mainland Asia and named the island Juana after the Spanish heir-apparent. The indigenous name survived four centuries of colonial rebranding and became official when Cuba gained formal independence in 1902.

The country's full formal name is the República de Cuba. Cubans call their home La Isla ("The Island"), La Mayor de las Antillas ("The Largest of the Antilles"), or affectionately El Cocodrilo Verde — the Green Crocodile, a reference to the island's elongated, reptilian shape on a map.

The flag, designed in 1849, carries three blue and two white stripes, a red triangle and a single white star — the Estrella Solitaria, the Lone Star, symbolising independence. It predates the republic it represents by more than half a century, which tells you something about how long the idea of Cuba took to become a country.

Identity here rests on layers that do not cancel each other out: Spanish colonial inheritance, a vast and living African cultural presence carried by the enslaved and their descendants, the revolution of 1959, and the exile diaspora in Florida. Cubans argue about all of it, constantly and loudly, and a visitor who listens rather than pronounces will learn a great deal.

Cuba sits at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, 150 km south of Florida and 210 km east of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The main island stretches 1,250 km west to east but averages only about 100 km across, giving 109,884 km² of territory — roughly the size of Bulgaria, and about 1.4 times Czechia.

The highest point is Pico Turquino (1,974 m) in the Sierra Maestra. Most of the island, however, is flat to gently rolling — which is why it became a sugar colony, and why cycling and driving are physically easy even where the roads are not.

Cuba's elongated shape — stretched like a crocodile from Cabo de San Antonio in the west to Punta Maisí in the east — is best appreciated from above. The Carretera Central and the Autopista Nacional run the spine of the island; almost everything worth seeing is within an hour of one of them.

Distances matter more than they look. Havana to Viñales is a comfortable 2.5 hours; Havana to Trinidad about 4; Havana to Santiago de Cuba is 870 km and a full day by road, which is why most itineraries either stay west or fly east. A common two-week route runs Havana → Viñales → Cienfuegos → Trinidad → Santa Clara → Havana.

Cuba's human story begins around 4000 BCE with the Guanahatabey and later the Taíno — Arawak-speaking farmers and fishers whose culture was effectively extinguished within a few generations of Columbus's arrival. Spanish colonisation, formalised by Diego Velázquez from 1511, turned the island into a strategic waypoint for the silver fleets returning from Mexico and Peru.

It also turned it into a brutal slave-labour sugar economy that by the 19th century was the largest sugar producer in the world. Cuba was one of the last places in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1886. Everything about modern Cuban culture — the music, the religion, the food, the demography — descends from that fact.

Three wars of independence between 1868 and 1898 culminated in the 1895 uprising led by the poet-revolutionary José Martí, who was killed in his first battle and became the country's secular saint. US intervention in 1898, following the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbour, ended Spanish rule but replaced it with a de-facto American protectorate that lasted in various forms until 1959.

The Cuban Revolution — Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Raúl Castro — toppled the Batista dictatorship on 1 January 1959 and turned sharply socialist after the failed US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the subsidies the whole economy rested on and triggered the Período Especial: a decade of extreme scarcity — blackouts, bicycles instead of buses, a measurable fall in average calorie intake — that reshaped Cuban society and is still the reference point for every conversation about hardship. Raúl Castro succeeded Fidel in 2008 and allowed cautious private enterprise; Miguel Díaz-Canel became the first non-Castro president in 2019. The US embargo, in place since 1962, remains the single largest external constraint on the economy, and the internal command system the largest internal one.

Cuba's eleven million people are the product of five centuries of forced and voluntary migration: Spanish colonists, enslaved West and Central Africans, Chinese indentured labourers, Haitian and Jamaican cane cutters, and 20th-century arrivals from across Europe. Official statistics give roughly 65% white, 25% mixed and 10% Black, but the categories are contested and self-identification varies enormously. What unites Cubans is a national identity forged through independence struggle, revolution and shared hardship.

Music permeates Cuban life to a degree that is hard to overstate. Son — the foundation of what the world calls salsa — emerged from the fusion of Spanish guitar and African rhythm in the east. Rumba, born in the solares of Havana and Matanzas, is pure percussion and dance. Contemporary Cuba produces timba, reggaetón and a sharp hip-hop scene alongside the traditional forms. You hear live music everywhere: concert halls, casas de la trova, street corners, buses.

Santería — properly Regla de Ocha — blends Yoruba religion carried by the enslaved with Catholic imagery. Orishas map onto Catholic saints; initiates dress in white for a year and wear beaded necklaces in their orisha's colours. It survived official atheism, and since the 1990s it has been practised openly. Treat it as a living religion rather than a photo opportunity: ask before photographing a ceremony, and accept no for an answer.

Cuban hospitality is genuine rather than performed, and it operates in conditions that would make most people ungenerous. The culture values education intensely — literacy is close to universal and the country produces extraordinary numbers of doctors, teachers and artists relative to its economy. That combination of warmth, education and creative energy is Cuba's actual attraction; the classic cars are the poster.

It would be dishonest to describe the culture without the emigration. Since 2021 several hundred thousand Cubans — by some estimates over a million, on an island of eleven — have left, mostly young and mostly for the United States and Spain. Nearly every family you stay with will have someone abroad. It comes up in conversation quickly, and it is the single biggest thing happening in Cuban society today.

Spanish is the only official language, and Cuban Spanish is fast, consonant-dropping and full of local slang. Final s disappears (¿cómo estás? becomes ¿cómo etá?), d between vowels softens away (pescado → pescao), and speed is a point of pride. If your Spanish works fine in Spain or Mexico, expect a week of adjustment.

English is spoken in tourist-facing jobs in Havana, Varadero and Trinidad and rarely elsewhere. Russian is still understood by an older generation of engineers and doctors trained in the Soviet bloc, which occasionally gives Czech and Slovak visitors an unexpected conversational opening.

One piece of etiquette: Cubans are extremely direct in conversation and will ask about your salary, your rent and your politics within ten minutes. Answering honestly, including about what things cost at home, is taken as respect rather than boasting — as long as it is a conversation and not a lecture.

If you take one thing seriously in Cuba, take the music. This island of eleven million people invented or shaped son, mambo, chachachá, rumba, danzón, bolero, timba and Latin jazz, and exported them so thoroughly that most of the world dances to Cuban rhythms without knowing it. Salsa as played in New York is Cuban son with a Puerto Rican accent.

Dancing is not a spectator activity here. Casa de la Música venues in Havana and Trinidad, the open-air staircase in Trinidad, and every neighbourhood party will pull you in. Nobody expects a foreigner to dance well; refusing repeatedly is what looks odd. Salsa lessons in Havana cost a few euros an hour and are the single best investment a visitor can make in their evenings.

Havana is unlike any other city on Earth. Two million people inhabit a metropolis where baroque churches face art deco apartment blocks, 1950s Chevrolets share the street with horse carts, and revolutionary murals fade on walls that are visibly failing. The city demands time — not just to see it but to absorb its rhythm, to sit on the Malecón at sunset, to wander without a destination through neighbourhoods that reveal themselves slowly.

Habana Vieja

The colonial core, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, is organised around four squares: Plaza de la Catedral, Plaza Vieja, Plaza de Armas and Plaza de San Francisco. Calle Obispo runs through the middle of it. Restoration by the City Historian's office has been genuinely careful in places and stalled in others, so a restored palace often stands next to a building with a tree growing out of the third floor. Both are real Havana.

Centro Habana & the Malecón

Between the old town and Vedado lies the part of the city where most Havanans actually live: denser, shabbier, louder, and far more interesting than the postcard. The Capitolio, modelled on Washington's and slightly taller, anchors it. The Paseo del Prado leads to the Malecón — eight kilometres of seawall where the whole city eventually turns up to fish, flirt, drink rum and watch waves break over the road.

Vedado & Miramar

Vedado is the early-20th-century city: tree-lined streets, eclectic mansions, the Hotel Nacional (Churchill, Sinatra, and the 1946 mafia summit), the vast Plaza de la Revolución with the Che Guevara portrait on the Interior Ministry, and the Colón cemetery. Miramar, further west, holds the embassies and the mansions abandoned in 1959.

Essential Havana

A daiquiri at El Floridita and a mojito at La Bodeguita del Medio, both touristed and both worth it once. The Fábrica de Arte Cubano in a converted cooking-oil factory — gallery, concert hall and bar in one, and the best night out in the country. The Museo de la Revolución in Batista's former presidential palace. A classic-car ride along the Malecón at sunset, agreed at €25–30 for the hour. And at 21:00 every night, the cañonazo — the cannon fired from the Cabaña fortress across the harbour since the 18th century.

Trinidad is Cuba's most perfectly preserved colonial town — a UNESCO site that looks much as it did in the 1850s, when sugar wealth built its mansions. Cobbled streets wind between pastel houses with terracotta roofs, wrought-iron window grilles and interior courtyards. The Plaza Mayor, ringed by 18th-century palaces now serving as museums, is the heart of a living town rather than a preserved one: people still hang laundry above the cobbles.

The wealth came from the Valle de los Ingenios, the Valley of the Sugar Mills, itself UNESCO-listed. The 45-metre Manaca Iznaga tower, built so overseers could watch enslaved workers in the cane, survives as an unambiguous monument to how the money was made. The valley today offers horseback riding, a slow steam-train ride when it is running, and an honest confrontation with Cuba's sugar-and-slavery history.

Trinidad's nightlife concentrates on the Casa de la Música — an open-air staircase beside the church where live bands play salsa and timba under the stars, free or nearly so. Playa Ancón, 12 km away, is the best beach on the south coast. The Topes de Collantes in the Escambray mountains offer waterfall hikes and coffee plantations, and are 10 °C cooler than the coast.

The Viñales Valley looks like nowhere else. Massive limestone mogotes — rounded karst hills draped in vegetation, the remnants of a collapsed cave system — rise abruptly from a flat floor of rust-red soil where tobacco is grown by methods little changed in two centuries. The UNESCO-protected landscape is genuinely prehistoric-looking: oxen still plough the fields and the leaf still dries in thatched casas de tabaco.

This is Cuba's premier tobacco region and the source of the leaf that becomes the world's best cigars. Farm tours explain the process from seed to smoke, and the vegueros will usually roll one in front of you. Be clear-eyed about what you are buying: farmers are legally required to sell 90% of their crop to the state, and what they roll from the remainder is genuine, freshly made, unbanded and not exportable in quantity. It is not a discounted Cohiba, and anything sold to you as one on the street is not either.

Viñales town itself is a single main street of casas particulares, private restaurants and bars with nightly live music. It is the easiest place in Cuba to be a traveller: everything is walkable, everyone rents a room, and the valley starts at the end of the street.

Santiago de Cuba, 870 km east of Havana, is the island's second city and insists it is the more Cuban one. Founded in 1515, hemmed between the Sierra Maestra and the sea, it is hotter, blacker, louder and more Caribbean than the capital — closer to Haiti and Jamaica than to Florida, in geography and in culture.

It is also the cradle of Cuban music. Son was born in these hills; the Casa de la Trova on Calle Heredia has been the place to hear it for a century. Carnaval de Santiago in late July is the loudest, most Afro-Caribbean celebration in the country, with the conga santiaguera parading through the streets behind a Chinese cornet.

Getting east is the practical question. The road journey from Havana is a full day; the domestic flight is an hour but subject to cancellation; the Viazul bus is 15 hours overnight. Most visitors who go east fly one leg and drive the other, and almost everyone who goes says the country changed shape for them when they did.

Cuba has over 5,700 km of coastline and some of the least crowded white sand in the Caribbean, largely because the American market has been closed to it since 1962. The trade-off is that the best beaches are attached to all-inclusive resorts, which are the least Cuban environments on the island.

Diving is Cuba's underrated attraction: the reefs are in better condition than most of the region precisely because of decades of low development and strong marine protection. María la Gorda, Playa Girón, Isla de la Juventud (Punta Francés) and the Jardines de la Reina are the four names that matter. Bring your own mask and computer — rental kit exists but can be tired.

Cuban cooking is Spanish in structure, African in seasoning and Caribbean in ingredients — and since 1959 it has been shaped as much by scarcity as by tradition. The honest verdict: it is comfort food that is very good when done well and dispiriting when done badly, and where you eat decides which. State restaurants often disappoint; private paladares range from home cooking to genuinely sophisticated.

The core dishes are ropa vieja (shredded beef stewed with peppers and tomato — "old clothes"), lechón asado (roast pork marinated in mojo, the celebration dish), arroz con pollo, and the ubiquitous moros y cristianos — black beans cooked with the rice, "Moors and Christians". Tostones (twice-fried green plantain) and yuca con mojo accompany nearly everything. Seafood, especially lobster and prawns, is excellent when available — and is often technically restricted, which is why it appears on paladar menus as "the special".

Coffee is strong, short and very sweet: a cafecito is espresso with the sugar whipped in. Cuban coffee from the Sierra Maestra and the Escambray is genuinely good and one of the best things to take home. Ice cream matters more than a visitor expects — Coppelia in Vedado is a socialist ice-cream cathedral and a national institution.

Cuba is one of the most important drinking nations on Earth. The island that gave the world the mojito, the daiquiri, the Cuba libre and the Presidente, and whose rum tradition goes back to the 16th-century colonial sugar mills, has shaped global bar culture far beyond what its size would suggest. Rum here is not a souvenir category; it is social infrastructure.

Havana Club and the Cuban rum houses

Havana Club is the flagship, unknown to most Americans because the embargo has kept it off US shelves since 1962. The range runs from 3 Años (the default mojito rum) through the excellent-value 7 Años (sip it, or use it in an old fashioned) to Selección de Maestros and the ultra-premium Máximo. Production is column distillation, aged in white oak in a tropical climate where the angel's share is brutal — a Cuban seven-year-old has done more work than a Scottish one.

Beyond it: Santiago de Cuba rum from the eastern city that claims to be the spirit's Cuban birthplace, plus the everyday Cubay and Legendario labels. All of it falls under the protected designation Ron de Cuba, which fixes production methods and minimum ageing and makes Cuban rum among the most tightly regulated in the Caribbean. Legendario Elixir de Cuba, sweet and raisiny, is what Cubans actually give as a gift.

The bar as institution

El Floridita, the "cradle of the daiquiri", keeps its art deco fittings, its live son band and its bronze Hemingway on a barstool. La Bodeguita del Medio's walls are signed by everyone from García Márquez to Nat King Cole. Both are tourist landmarks and both are worth doing once, at a tourist price. The real drinking happens elsewhere — on front porches, in paladares, and over a shared bottle of ron con hielo on a warm Havana evening, which is as central to Cuban social life as the family dinner is to an Italian one.

Beer and the rest

Cristal (light lager) and Bucanero (stronger, maltier) are the two national beers, both brewed by Cervecería Bucanero. Supply is erratic — there have been long stretches when neither was available. Guarapo, freshly pressed sugarcane juice sold from hand-cranked presses on street corners, is electric green, intensely sweet and the great Cuban non-alcoholic drink; ask for it with lime.

Three Cuban drinks belong on any short list of the world's essential cocktails. These are the authentic proportions — the ones Cuban bartenders actually pour, not the sugary resort versions.

Two more worth knowing: the Presidente (rum, dry vermouth, a dash of curaçao and grenadine, stirred — Havana's elegant answer to the Manhattan), and the Canchánchara from Trinidad, an old cane-cutter's drink of aguardiente, honey, lime and water served in a small earthenware cup.

Cuba produces the world's finest cigars, and the reason is agricultural rather than mystical: the red soil of the Vuelta Abajo in Pinar del Río, plus two centuries of accumulated craft in fermentation and rolling. Everything is state-run under Habanos S.A.; the famous marques — Cohiba, Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, Partagás, H. Upmann, Hoyo de Monterrey — are brands within one system rather than competing companies.

The Festival del Habano each February is the world's largest cigar event, and the week when Havana fills with collectors bidding six figures for humidors at the closing gala. If you are in the country then, the city's bars are considerably more interesting.

Cuba has a tropical climate with two clear seasons. The dry season, November to April, is the peak travel window: sunny, 22–28 °C, low humidity, almost no rain. December and January can bring cool nortes blowing down from the Gulf, which occasionally drop Havana nights to 15 °C — bring one layer.

The wet season, May to October, is hot and humid, with short, intense afternoon downpours that clear as fast as they arrive. It is not a bad time to travel — mornings are usually fine and prices are much lower — but August to October is hurricane season. Direct hits are infrequent but disruptive when they come, and travel insurance that actually covers weather cancellation is worth the money in that window.

One weather-adjacent practicality: blackouts. The national grid is in poor condition and scheduled outages of four to twelve hours are routine outside central Havana, worst in the hot months when demand peaks. Casas particulares in tourist areas often have a generator; ask when you book. Carry a torch and a power bank regardless.

José Martí International (HAV) in Havana takes most international flights, with regular service from Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt, Toronto, Mexico City, Panama and Bogotá. Varadero (VRA), Santa Clara (SNU), Holguín (HOG) and Camagüey (CMW) receive charter and resort traffic, mostly from Canada.

US travellers must qualify under one of twelve authorised OFAC categories — "support for the Cuban people" is the usual one — and standard tourism is not among them. The rules change with US administrations; check the current position before booking, and note that a Cuban stamp in your passport also removes your eligibility for the US ESTA visa waiver on later trips.

Two road realities: highways are unlit at night and shared with horses, bicycles, ox carts and pedestrians, so do not drive after dark; and signage is poor, so an offline map (Maps.me or organic maps with Cuba downloaded) is close to essential.

There is no direct flight from Prague, Vienna or Bratislava to Havana on a scheduled basis — seasonal charters to Varadero and Holguín aside. Everyone connects, and the routing decides the price and the pain.

The tourist card (tarjeta del turista) is required for almost all European visitors, valid 30 days and extendable once in the country. It is sold by the airline at check-in, by Cuban consulates, and by agencies online — buy it before you leave, not at the gate. Note that the card sold for flights originating in the US is a different (pink) form.

Since 2024 Cuba also requires an online arrival form, D'Viajeros, completed within 48 hours before departure; you arrive with a QR code. Travel insurance covering medical care in Cuba is mandatory and is occasionally checked at immigration — bring a printed confirmation, and check that your policy does not exclude Cuba, as several Czech and Austrian policies quietly do.

Two things Cubans will not do that surprise visitors: they will not criticise the government to a stranger in a public place, and they will not accept that you cannot get something. The first is discretion learned over sixty years and should be respected — let political conversation come from them. The second is resolver, the national verb: whatever you need, someone knows someone. It is how the country works.

Emergency numbers: 106 police, 105 fire, 104 ambulance. Asistur (+53 7 866 4499) is the state agency that handles foreign visitors' medical and insurance emergencies and is the number your insurer will route you through.

Cuba's money situation is the single most important practical thing to understand, and it is genuinely unlike anywhere else. Bring all the cash you need for the entire trip, in euros. There is no fallback if you run out.

The honest advice: ask your casa host on the first evening what the current rate is and how they recommend changing. Rates move sharply — this is a country with real inflation — so any figure printed in a guidebook, including this one, is a snapshot. What does not change is the rule: arrive with enough cash, keep it in two places, and do not rely on any machine.

Cuba is mid-priced by Caribbean standards, and cheap or expensive depending almost entirely on whether you travel through the private economy or the state one. The figures below are in euros because that is what you will be carrying; treat them as indicative, since prices move with inflation.

A realistic daily budget: €60–90 per person for comfortable mid-range travel staying in casas and eating in paladares, or €120+ if you want private drivers, a rental car and the better restaurants. Backpacking below €40 is possible but requires Spanish and patience.

One budgeting rule specific to Cuba: add 20% and carry it in cash. Not because you will overspend, but because a cancelled flight, a fuel shortage or a closed bank cannot be solved here with a card the way it can everywhere else.

The single best decision you can make in Cuba is to stay in casas particulares — licensed private homestays, marked by a blue anchor-shaped sign on the door. You get a private room, usually with private bathroom, a large Cuban breakfast, local knowledge no guidebook can match, and your money goes directly to a Cuban family rather than to a state enterprise.

A note on the host relationship: your casa owner is not hotel staff. They will arrange your onward taxi, your salsa lesson and your dinner, they will worry if you are late, and they will usually be a retired professional — an engineer, a doctor, a teacher — for whom renting a room pays several times a state salary. Tip well and leave the toiletries.

Cuba has nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites — seven cultural and two natural — which is a remarkable density for a country of its size and reflects both the colonial wealth of the 18th and 19th centuries and the biodiversity of an island isolated for millions of years.

Cuba also carries UNESCO intangible-heritage listings for rumba, the punto tradition of the countryside, and the light rum masters' knowledge — a fair reflection of a country whose heritage is at least as much sound as stone.

Cuba's festival calendar is dense and, unusually, mostly aimed at Cubans rather than tourists — which is what makes attending one worthwhile. Dates shift; confirm before planning a trip around any of them.

Two civic dates shape the calendar too: 1 January (the Triumph of the Revolution, a public holiday) and 26 July (the Moncada anniversary, the national day, which sits conveniently alongside Santiago's carnival).

Skip the resorts and try these. All of them are reachable on public or shared transport, and all reward the extra day it takes to get there.

Cuba has one of the most restrictive media environments in the Western Hemisphere. Every major outlet — Granma, Juventud Rebelde, Cubavisión and the national radio network — is state-owned, and the constitution reserves the press to the state and to social organisations.

Independent journalism exists and does real work: 14ymedio, founded by Yoani Sánchez; El Toque, whose informal exchange-rate tracker has become the country's de-facto price reference; and Periodismo de Barrio. All operate under legal harassment, and their domestic domains are blocked. Cuba ranks near the bottom of the Reporters Without Borders index, consistently in the company of the world's most closed media systems.

Since mobile data arrived in December 2018, social media has become the de-facto alternative public sphere — and a flashpoint. The protests of 11 July 2021, the largest since 1959, were organised and broadcast on it, and the state's response included a national internet shutdown and hundreds of prosecutions.

What this means for a visitor is modest but worth knowing: some sites and apps are blocked or slow, a VPN is useful and legally grey, and public criticism of the government by a foreigner can create problems for the Cubans standing next to you rather than for you. Listen more than you broadcast.

Baseball — pelota — is the national obsession, and Cuba has produced an astonishing number of major-league stars despite the embargo: Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig, José Abreu, Yordan Álvarez. Nearly all of them left by defecting, which is one of the country's rawest subjects. The domestic Serie Nacional runs November to April; a ticket to Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano costs a few pesos and the atmosphere is worth ten times that.

For the purest version of the obsession, go to the Esquina Caliente — the "Hot Corner" in Parque Central, Havana, where men argue baseball at full volume every single day, all year, with statistics from 1974 deployed as evidence. Foreigners are welcome to listen and, if their Spanish holds, to be shouted at good-naturedly.

Cuba rewards the prepared traveller more than almost any destination, because the things you forget generally cannot be bought once you arrive. Pack for self-sufficiency.

Leave behind: anything that only works with a card, expectations of fast Wi-Fi, and drone equipment, which requires permits Cuba does not readily issue and which is regularly confiscated at the airport.

Our Cuba photo library is still small — three images so far. Been to Cuba? Send your photos to photos@kaufmann.wtf to be featured here with full credit.

Havana — the Malecón

Eight kilometres of seawall, and the city's living room

Ron con hielo

Rum on the wall at dusk: the most Cuban of evenings

Mojito, Havana

Sugar, lime, bruised mint, white rum, soda — in that order

Photographs most wanted: the Viñales valley at dawn, Trinidad's Plaza Mayor, Santiago's Casa de la Trova, the Bay of Pigs reef, and any working almendrón with its bonnet up.

Before travelling, check your own foreign ministry's current advisory — for Czech readers mzv.gov.cz, which also operates the DROZD registration system for travellers abroad. Cuba's entry requirements and the US rules affecting later travel to the United States both change with some frequency.

Ernest Hemingway first came to Cuba in 1928 on a fishing trip and stayed, on and off, for the next three decades. More of his Cuba survives than most visitors expect — and it is spread across the city and the coast rather than gathered into one museum.

The man who sailed with him

On screen: Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999) for the music; Fresa y Chocolate (1993) for Cuban cinema at its best; and Simon Reeve's BBC Cuba documentary for a recent and reasonably even-handed look at the country as it is now.