Havana, Viñales & the West

Before the Spanish arrived, western Cuba was home to the Guanahatabey, a people of fishers and gatherers on the Guanahacabibes peninsula, and to Taíno communities further east. The town of San Cristóbal de la Habana was founded in 1514 on the south coast and moved to its present harbour on the north coast by 1519. That deep, sheltered bay made Havana the meeting point of Spain's treasure fleets, which gathered there before sailing for Seville, and the crown built the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Morro and a ring of walls to defend it. Havana became the capital of the colony in the 16th century.

A British force captured the city in 1762, and Spain recovered it the next year in exchange for Florida. After the occupation Spain built the vast La Cabaña fortress, and the opening of trade fed a boom in sugar in the plains east of the city, while the hills of Pinar del Río turned to tobacco. The Vuelta Abajo district there became famous for the finest cigar leaf.

The 20th century brought American money, casinos and hotels to Havana. The Isle of Pines, off the south coast, had an unsettled status, with many American landowners, until a treaty ratified in 1925 confirmed it as Cuban; its Presidio Modelo later held Fidel Castro after the 1953 Moncada attack. After the 1959 revolution Havana became the seat of the one-party state, the island was renamed the Isle of Youth in 1978, and in 1962 Soviet missile sites in Pinar del Río were at the centre of the missile crisis. The anti-government protests of July 2021 began with demonstrations in San Antonio de los Baños, in Artemisa, and Palma Soriano, in the east, before spreading to Havana and across the country.

Havana is the country's cultural capital: home of the Gran Teatro, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the film institute ICAIC and the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema each December, as well as the Havana Biennial of visual art. Habaneros are known across Cuba for quick talk and a certain big-city confidence, and the rest of the island returns the compliment with jokes about the capital. Rumba lives on in the barrios of Centro Habana and Guanabacoa, and the neighbourhood of Regla, across the bay, is a centre of Santería and of Afro-Cuban religious brotherhoods.

The countryside of Pinar del Río is guajiro land — the Cuban word for a rural farmer — and its identity is bound up with tobacco. Farming families of the Vuelta Abajo pass down the craft of growing, curing and sorting leaf, and many descend from Canary Island settlers. The punto guajiro, a sung form of improvised ten-line verses called décimas, belongs to this rural culture, and cockfighting and rodeos are part of country life.

The Isle of Youth has a character of its own, shaped by its early 20th-century American settlers, by migrants from the Cayman Islands whose descendants still speak English, and later by the thousands of young people from Cuba and abroad who studied at its schools in the countryside.

Havana has about 2.1 million people, around a fifth of Cuba's population, spread across districts that range from the crowded colonial blocks of Old Havana and Centro Habana to the 20th-century grid of Vedado and the villas of Miramar. Pinar del Río city has close to 190,000 people, and Artemisa, San José de las Lajas and Nueva Gerona, on the Isle of Youth, are the other provincial centres.

Havana holds most of the country's ministries, embassies, hotels and private businesses, and the growth of small private enterprises since 2021 is most visible there, in shops, cafes and delivery services. Many of its old buildings are in poor repair, and partial collapses make the news every year. The provinces around it grow vegetables, fruit, sugar cane and tobacco, and Mariel, in Artemisa, has a container port and a special development zone.

Days in the capital are shaped by the national crisis: long blackouts, queues for bread and fuel, erratic water supply and high prices at private shops. Emigration has emptied many households, and remittances from relatives abroad keep many others going. Evenings still gather people on the Malecón seawall, on doorsteps and in parks where the Wi-Fi signal is strongest.

Havana has the widest choice of food in Cuba, from state cafeterias selling cheap pizza and sandwiches to private paladares that serve Cuban and international cooking to visitors and the city's better-off residents. Classic Havana dishes include ropa vieja, shredded stewed beef, and ajiaco, a thick stew of root vegetables, plantain and meat; croquetas and pan con lechón, a roast-pork roll, are the street snacks.

The capital claims a share of the world's cocktails. El Floridita, near the Parque Central, is known for its frozen daiquirí, a drink linked to Ernest Hemingway, and La Bodeguita del Medio for the mojito of rum, lime, sugar, mint and soda. Havana also rolls many of Cuba's cigars, using leaf from Pinar del Río.

In the west the food is farm food: roast pork for celebrations, rice and black beans, root vegetables and fruit from the family plot. Viñales farms offer guests home-grown coffee, honey and fruit, and Pinar del Río is the home of guayabita del Pinar, a liqueur made with a small wild guava that grows in the province. The Isle of Youth is known for its citrus groves, which once supplied grapefruit for export.

Havana is the first stop. Old Havana and its fortifications form a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Plaza de Armas, the Plaza de la Catedral, the Plaza de San Francisco and the Plaza Vieja, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, and across the harbour El Morro and La Cabaña, where a cannon is still fired at nine each evening. The Capitolio, the Gran Teatro and the Museum of the Revolution in the former presidential palace sit on the edge of the old town, and the Malecón leads west to Vedado and the Plaza de la Revolución. Hemingway's house, Finca Vigía, stands on the city's southern outskirts.

West of the capital, Las Terrazas in the Sierra del Rosario is a planned rural community in a once heavily deforested area, with the ruins of old coffee estates and swimming spots on the San Juan river; nearby Soroa has an orchid garden and a waterfall. The Viñales Valley, another World Heritage Site, is the region's best-known landscape: tobacco farms, drying barns and the rounded mogotes, with caves such as the Cueva del Indio.

Off the north coast, Cayo Levisa offers a long beach and snorkelling in the Colorados archipelago. At the western tip, the Guanahacabibes Peninsula has forest, turtle-nesting beaches and the dive sites of María la Gorda. The Isle of Youth, to the south, has the circular cell blocks of the Presidio Modelo, now a museum, and a diving centre.