Trinidad, Cienfuegos & the Centre

Diego Velázquez founded both Trinidad and Sancti Spíritus in 1514, among the first Spanish towns on the island, and Remedios, near the north coast, dates from the same early decades. For two centuries they remained small towns. Trinidad's fortunes changed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when dozens of sugar mills were built in the valleys outside the town, worked by enslaved Africans; the planters' wealth built the mansions around the Plaza Mayor. When the wars of independence in the later 19th century ended the valley's sugar boom and the mills declined, Trinidad stopped growing, which is why its centre survived almost intact.

Cienfuegos had a different origin. In 1819 the Spanish authorities settled French colonists from Bordeaux and Louisiana, led by Louis de Clouet, on the bay guarded since the 18th century by the Castillo de Jagua, and the city was laid out on a regular grid. Santa Clara was founded in 1689 by families from Remedios.

The region's place in modern history was fixed in December 1958, when rebel columns under Che Guevara took Santa Clara and derailed an armoured government train, a defeat that led Batista to flee on 1 January 1959. After the revolution the Escambray mountains became the base of an armed anti-government insurgency that the new state fought until the mid-1960s. In 1997 Che Guevara's remains, found in Bolivia, were brought to the mausoleum in Santa Clara.

Each city in the centre has its own character. Trinidad keeps the manners of an old colonial town, with families still living in 19th-century houses around the old squares. Cienfuegos takes pride in its French origins and its neoclassical buildings, calling itself the Pearl of the South, and in Benny Moré, the great singer of the 1940s and 1950s, who was born in the province. Santa Clara is a university city, and its El Mejunje cultural centre has long been a gathering place for artists and the LGBT community.

The towns of northern Villa Clara are known for the parrandas, a Christmas-season rivalry in which neighbourhoods compete with floats, lanterns and fireworks. In Remedios, on 24 December, the San Salvador and El Carmen districts try to outdo each other through the night.

Sancti Spíritus is a quieter provincial capital, and local tradition claims that the guayabera, the pleated shirt worn across the Caribbean, first appeared among its farmers.

Santa Clara, with about 240,000 people, is the largest city in the region and the main university and transport hub. Cienfuegos has about 180,000, Sancti Spíritus about 140,000, and Trinidad around 75,000 in its municipality. Smaller towns include Remedios, Caibarién, Placetas and Cabaiguán.

The economy combines tourism in Trinidad and the northern cays with farming, sugar and tobacco on the plains, and industry around Cienfuegos, which has a port, an oil refinery and a cement works. Near the bay stands the unfinished Juraguá nuclear power station, where work stopped in 1992 after Soviet aid ended.

In Trinidad many households rent rooms or cook for visitors, and the town's economy rises and falls with international arrivals. Elsewhere daily life follows the national pattern of low state wages, rationing, queues and long power cuts, and the centre, like the rest of the country, has lost many young people to emigration in recent years.

Central Cuba eats the national staples — rice and beans, pork, chicken, yuca and plantain — with fish and shrimp along the coasts at Cienfuegos and Playa Ancón. Roast pork cooked slowly over an open fire or in a pit is the dish for celebrations in the countryside, and Trinidad's paladares serve seafood and Cuban classics to visitors in colonial courtyards.

Trinidad's signature drink is the canchánchara, a mix of aguardiente, a raw cane spirit, with honey, lime and water, served in small clay cups. The drink is linked by tradition to the independence fighters of the 19th century, and was revived in Trinidad in the 1980s.

The sugar and tobacco plains supply guarapo, fresh sugar-cane juice, and the Escambray grows coffee on small farms around Topes de Collantes. The plains around Placetas in Villa Clara and Cabaiguán in Sancti Spíritus are also tobacco country.

Trinidad is the region's main draw. The Plaza Mayor and the streets around it hold museums in former sugar barons' mansions, including the Palacio Cantero, now the Municipal History Museum, and the Romantic Museum. Outside the town, the Valle de los Ingenios holds the ruins of sugar mills and plantation houses and the Manaca Iznaga tower, whose bell once marked the working day for the enslaved workers; the whole valley shares the UNESCO listing with the town. Playa Ancón, a sandy beach a short drive south, is the nearest coast.

Above Trinidad, the Topes de Collantes park in the Escambray mountains has pine and rainforest, coffee farms and trails to waterfalls and river pools, including the Salto del Caburní. Lake Hanabanilla lies on the Villa Clara side of the range.

Cienfuegos' historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is built around the Parque José Martí, with the Tomás Terry Theatre and the cathedral; the Moorish-style Palacio de Valle stands near the bay, and the Castillo de Jagua guards the mouth of the bay. Santa Clara has the Che Guevara Memorial and the Tren Blindado monument. In the north, Remedios has a richly gilded parish church, and the resort cays of Cayo Santa María are reached by causeway.