Varadero & Matanzas

The Spanish founded Matanzas in 1693 on a deep bay between the Yumurí and San Juan rivers, and for a century it was a small port. It boomed in the 19th century, when the plains around it and Cárdenas were covered with sugar mills worked by enslaved Africans, and by 1841 enslaved people made up more than three-fifths of the population of Matanzas. Resistance followed: an 1843 uprising at the Triunvirato estate, led in local memory by a woman named Carlota, and the harsh repression of the alleged La Escalera conspiracy in 1844, when many free Black and enslaved people were tortured or killed.

Sugar money built the city's theatres, libraries and mansions and earned Matanzas the name Athens of Cuba for its poets and musicians. In 1850 the filibuster Narciso López landed at Cárdenas and raised the flag that later became Cuba's national flag. In the 20th century the American industrialist Irénée du Pont bought land on the Hicacos Peninsula and built the mansion known as Xanadu, and Varadero grew into a resort for wealthy Cubans and Americans.

In April 1961 about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs, on the southern coast; they were defeated within three days at Playa Girón. After the Special Period of the 1990s Varadero became the centre of the state's drive for foreign tourism. In 2022 a lightning strike set off a fire at the oil storage base in Matanzas that burned for days.

Matanzas is one of the great sources of Cuban music. Danzón, the elegant couple dance long treated as the national dance, was first performed in the city in 1879 with Miguel Faílde's Las Alturas de Simpson, named after a Matanzas neighbourhood. Rumba, born in the poor neighbourhoods of Matanzas and Havana among Afro-Cuban workers, is a point of fierce local pride, and the group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, founded in the 1950s, is among its best-known performers.

The African heritage of the sugar plantations remains strong. Santería is widely practised, and the province has Abakuá men's societies and of Arará traditions of Dahomean origin; drumming ceremonies are held in homes and cabildos. The city's Teatro Sauto, opened in 1863, still hosts plays, opera, ballet and concerts, and Matanzas still has a lively literary and book-arts scene.

Varadero has little of this: it is a resort town where most visitors see Cuban culture as hotel shows, although the older part of the town has local homes, a church and a small museum. On the Zapata peninsula, charcoal burners, fishermen and park guides live in scattered settlements with a strong sense of their swamp.

Matanzas city has about 160,000 people and is the provincial capital, with a working port and oil installations around the bay. Cárdenas, a sugar and fishing town, lies near the neck of the Hicacos Peninsula, and Colón and Jovellanos are market towns on the inland plains. Varadero itself has a small permanent population, and many of its hotel staff commute from Cárdenas and Matanzas.

Tourism is the province's largest earner, and a job in Varadero, with access to tips in foreign currency, is one of the most valued in Cuba. Sugar, once the base of the economy, has shrunk sharply as many mills have closed, and the plains now also grow citrus, vegetables and cattle feed. Oil fields along the north coast between Havana and Matanzas produce heavy crude.

Everyday life follows the national pattern of shortages, blackouts and queues, and the province has lost many young people to emigration. The Zapata settlements depend on fishing, charcoal, beekeeping and, increasingly, homestays for birdwatchers and divers.

Matanzas food is the Cuban staple repertoire of rice and beans, pork, chicken and plantain, with seafood along the coasts. In Playa Larga and Playa Girón, family homestays serve fish, shrimp and, when available, lobster, cooked with garlic and lime. Casabe, a flat cassava bread with Taíno roots, is still made in parts of the countryside.

Cárdenas has a place in Cuban drinking history: the Arechabala family's distillery there created the Havana Club rum brand in the 1930s. Rum from the region's sugar cane underpins the mojitos and Cuba Libres served in Varadero's bars.

The resorts serve buffets aimed at international tastes, so Cuban cooking is better found in the paladares of the old Varadero grid and in Matanzas city, where pork and congrí rice appear on menus. Guarapo, freshly pressed sugar-cane juice, is sold at roadside stands in the cane country.

Varadero's beaches run for around 20 kilometres along the Hicacos Peninsula, with shallow turquoise water, a marine park and more than 30 dive sites offshore. Du Pont's Xanadu mansion now houses a restaurant beside the golf course, and the Ambrosio cave near the tip of the peninsula has pre-Columbian drawings.

Matanzas itself rewards a slow walk: the bridges over the Yumurí and San Juan rivers, the Teatro Sauto, the pharmaceutical museum, a preserved 19th-century French chemist's shop, and the Ermita de Monserrate on the Alturas de Simpson. The Cuevas de Bellamar, on the edge of the city, are a national monument. In Cárdenas, the city museum occupies the first building in Cuba built as a museum.

To the south, the Ciénaga de Zapata National Park is a biosphere reserve of mangroves, marshes and forest. Its landscapes include the Laguna del Tesoro, and birders come for the bee hummingbird and Cuban endemics. At the Bay of Pigs, Playa Larga and Playa Girón have reef diving, and the museum at Playa Girón tells the Cuban government's account of the 1961 invasion.