Cayo Santa María

Indigenous people lived along this coast long before the Spanish arrived, and traces of their settlements have been found around Caibarién and on Cayo Conuco. Inland, Remedios was founded by Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa sometime between 1513 and 1524, making it the oldest Spanish settlement in the old province of Las Villas; settlers from Remedios began moving to the coast in the 1820s, and Caibarién was formally founded on 26 October 1832.

Caibarién grew as a port, shipping sugar, tobacco and fruit and serving as a centre for sponge fishing, while the cays offshore stayed empty. The building of the central highway, the port of Cienfuegos and new railways drew trade away, and the town's economy did not flourish in the decades before 1959. Its two sugar mills later closed; the largest, Reforma, became a museum.

In 1989 Fidel Castro announced plans to link the province's cays to the mainland and make them a tourist area, and work on the causeway began that year. The 48 km road across the shallows was fully paved by 2000, and it won the Puente de Alcántara prize for civil engineering. Resorts followed on Cayo Santa María and the neighbouring cays, and an airport was built at Las Brujas. In 2020 the tourism ministry reported that the causeway's crash barriers and several of its bridges needed repair.

The cays are a resort area, and the living culture is on the mainland, and above all in the parrandas, the Christmas-season contests for which Remedios is known as the cradle. Promoted at first by a priest of the town's main church, the festival took its present form in 1871. When the church bells toll at nine on the night of 24 December, the neighbourhoods of San Salvador, red and blue with a rooster as its symbol, and El Carmen, brown with a globe, unveil a year's work on floats, lantern towers and fireworks and compete through the night.

Caibarién holds its own parrandas twice a year, and Camajuaní nearby has another, so the whole north of Villa Clara shares the rivalry. Remedios also has a museum of the parrandas, opened in 1980, and a main square that is the only one in Cuba with two churches.

Caibarién calls itself La Villa Blanca, the White Town, after its sands. It is a fishing town with a strong local identity and its own radio station, and in 1948 Cuban scouts held their second national jamboree on Cayo Conuco just offshore.

No population is given for the cay itself. It is administered as part of the municipality of Caibarién, which had about 40,800 people in 2022; the neighbouring municipality of Remedios had about 42,100. Life on the cays revolves around the resorts, while the people who live in the area are on the mainland.

Tourism is the main source of jobs and foreign currency for the area, and between 1992 and 2008 some Cuban hotels and resorts were open only to foreign tourists. Caibarién's older trades have faded: its sugar mills have closed. The town has suffered decay of its historic buildings and infrastructure and the loss of much of its population, especially young people, to emigration, mainly to the United States.

On the mainland, daily life follows the national pattern of low state wages, rationing, queues and long power cuts, with water shortages too. The resorts depend on visitors arriving by air, and since February 2026 Cuba has stopped refuelling airliners and several foreign airlines have suspended their routes.

On the cays, nearly all eating is done in the resorts, where meals are part of the package and buffets and restaurants serve international dishes alongside Cuban ones. Rum cocktails such as the mojito and the Cuba libre are poured at the beach bars.

Cuban home cooking is found on the mainland, in the casas particulares and paladares of Caibarién and Remedios: rice and black beans, often cooked together as congrí, roast pork, chicken, yuca and fried plantain. Caibarién, a fishing town, adds fish and seafood, and roast pork cooked slowly over an open fire is the dish for celebrations in the countryside.

The surrounding plains grow sugar cane and tobacco, and guarapo, juice pressed from sugar cane, is a Cuban drink. Strong sweet coffee marks the day here as everywhere in Cuba. Outside the resorts, ingredients can be limited by the shortages, and many basics are rationed, so what a paladar or casa can cook on a given day depends on what has reached the market.