Cuba travel guide

Guía de Arquitectura La Habana Colonial, La Habana (1995), Sevilla. Useful guide to Old Havana, with maps, ground plans and photos.

Calder, Simon and Hatchwell, Emily, In Focus: Cuba, A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture, Latin America Bureau (ISBN 0-906156 -95-5). One of an excellent series of books on Latin America and the Caribbean, covering history, economics, politics and culture.

Daniel, Yvonne, Rumba, Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba (1995), Indiana University Press. Also in the series: Blacks in the Diaspora (ISBN 0-253-31605-7, paperback ISBN 0-253-20948-X). A good general book on Cuba as well as on music, portrait of life on the streets, the author is a professional dancer who completed her research in 1991.

Lumsden, Ian, Machos, Maricones and Gays, Cuba and Homosexuality (1996), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, also published in the UK by Latin American Bureau (ISBN 1-56639-371-X). Very readable account of the attitudes of Cubans towards gays since the days of slavery, with related treatment of blacks and women.

Pérez Sarduy, Pedro and Stubbs, Jean (Editors), AfroCuba, an Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993), Ocean Press, Melbourne, Australia, also by the Latin American Bureau (ISBN 0-906156-75-0). Collection of fiction, theatre, poetry, history and political commentary, dealing with the relationship between Africa and Cuba.

Collier, Simon, Skidmore, Thomas E and Blakemore, Harold (Editors), The Encyclopaedia of Latin America and the Caribbean (1992), Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition. Useful reference book which includes cultural, geographical and economic information on Cuba in the Latin American context.

Ferguson, James, The Traveller’s Literary Companion, The Caribbean (1997), Windrush Press. A good introduction to Cuban literature and writings on Cuba, with chapters by Jason Wilson. Includes a good reading list.

Parry, JH, Sherlock, PM and Maingot, Anthony, A Short History of the West Indies (1987), Macmillan. Academic but very readable.

Stubbs, Jean, Cuba, the Test of Time (1989) Latin American Bureau, London (ISBN 0-906156-42-4). Short historical and economic analysis of the first 30 years of the Revolution, still useful even without the upheaval of the 1990s.

Thomas, Hugh, Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (2002), Eyre and Spottiswoode, London. First published in 1971, this is the best history book specifically on Cuba.

Williamson, Edwin, The History of Latin America (1992), Penguin, London. Excellent general history of Cuba’s colonial past and independence and revolutionary struggles, set in the context of the Spanish Empire and independent Latin American republics.

Arenas, Reinaldo, Antes que Anochezca (Before Night Falls, 1994, Viking). Autobiography of a homosexual growing up in Cuba after the Revolution, facing persecution, censorship and imprisonment. Arenas left Cuba in the Mariel boat lift but never settled in the USA, finally committing suicide in 1990 aged 47, when dying of AIDS.

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, Tres Tristes Tigres (1967) (Three Trapped Tigers, 1989, Faber & Faber). One of the funniest novels in Spanish, a tableau of Havana’s nightlife in the time of Batista, written after the author emigrated.

Ferguson, James, A Traveller’s History of the Caribbean (1998), Windrush Press. Concise and easy to dip into, from Columbus to Castro, with interesting asides on recent issues such as drugs trafficking, characters such as Fidel and the US influence and intervention throughout the Caribbean.

García, Cristina, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) Flamingo, London (1982) Knopf, New York. Cuba as seen by 3 generations of women, the grandmother who stayed behind, the daughter who emigrated to the USA and the granddaughter, who returns to visit.

Greene, Graham, Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (1958), William Heinemann. Spy thriller set in Havana at the end of the Batista regime as the Revolutionaries close in.

Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan, Dirty Havana Trilogy, translated by Natasha Wimmer (2001), Faber and Faber. Pedro Juan gives up his job as a reporter to re-educate himself in his attitude to life and what makes him happy. This involves lots of sex, drugs, rum, music and other good things in life, highly explicit and with insights into what makes Havana tick.

Padura Fuentes, Leonardo, Havana Quartet: Havana Red, Havana Black, Havana Blue, Havana Gold, translated by Peter Bush (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), Bitter Lemon Press, and Adiós Hemingway, translated by John King (2005). Prize-winning detective fiction, all featuring Lieutenant Mario Conde of Havana, whose musings on life in the city, sex, friendship and drinking are as important as the plots, eminently readable, hugely atmospheric, take them with you.

Calvo Ospina, Hernando, Salsa! Havana Heat, Bronx Beat (1995), Latin American Bureau. An avid salsa dancer traces the development of modern salsa from the slave ships to New York commercial cut-throat business, via son, jazz and cha-cha. Other Latin styles are covered, including Colombian cumbia and Dominican Republic meringue.

Roy, Maya, Cuban Music (2002), Latin American Bureau. Comprehensive and accessible, all you wanted to know about the historical and ethnic roots of Cuban music, the political dimension and the artists involved. Rumba, danzón, son and guaracha are all explained. It includes the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon.

There is a vast array of reading matter on Afro-Cuban religions, most of which is in Spanish. Those titles published in Cuba are available in dollars at large hotel bookstores (eg the Habana Libre), or at Librería Fernando Ortiz (opposite the Habana Libre, esq 23 y L), or possibly at La Moderna Poesía in Old Havana, esq Obispo y Bernaza. Ediciones Unión has its own bookshop at the UNEAC (Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba) headquarters Calle 17 351, esq H, Vedado. Casa de las Américas is on Av 3 y G, Vedado. Letras Cubanas has its own bookshop in the Palacio del Segundo Cabo, O’Reilly 4 (Plaza de Armas, Old Havana).

Barnet, Miguel, Cultos afrocubanos: la regla de Ocha, la regla de Palo Monte(1995), Ediciones Unión, Havana.

Bolívar, Natalia, Los orishas en Cuba, Editorial Unión, Havana.

Bolívar, Natalia and González Díaz de Villegas, Aróstegui & Carmen, Mitos y leyendas de la comida afrocubana(1993), Colección Echú Bi, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana.

Cabrera, Lydia, El Monte: Igbo, Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda(Colección del Chicherekú, Ediciones Universal, 3090 SW 8th Street, Miami, Florida, ediciones@kampung.net, 1992, first published in Havana 1954); Reglas de Congo: Palo monte mayombe (Ediciones CR, Miami, Florida, 1979).

Feijóo, Samuel, Mitología cubana(1985), Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana.

González-Wippler, Migene, Santería – the religion: a legacy of faith, rites and magic(1994), Llewelyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota, Legends of Santería(1994), Llewelyn Publications, St Paul, Minnesota.

Martí, Agenor, Mis porfiados oráculos(1992), Fuentetaja Ediciones, Madrid.

Núñez Cedeño, Rafael A, The Abakuá secret society in Cuba: language and culture(1988), Hispania, vol 71, No 1.

Ortiz, Fernando, Los negros esclavos(1987), Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana. Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba(1985), Letras Cubanas, Havana.

Sasa Rodríguez, Enrique, Los ñáñigos(1982), Casa de las Américas, Havana.

Miller, T, Trading with the Enemy: a Yankee travels through Castro’s Cuba (1996). Set in the early 1990s this is a sharply observed travelogue. Detailing Miller’s encounters with colourful Cubans from bartenders to baseball players, it steers away from political issues.

Smith, Stephen, Land of Miracles (1998), Abacus. A quirky travelogue set in the Special Period when times were hard and the Cubans had to be inventive to survive. Written by a British TV Channel 4 reporter, whose search for the real Cuba turns into a search for Castro.

Flieg and Sander, A Photo Guide to the Birds of the West Indies, http://johnbirding.wolweb.nl. A report on a private birding trip to Cuba in 2001 with maps and photos of sites, GPS locations and species list.

Garrido and Kirkconnel, Birds of Cuba (2000) Helm/Black, London, or Cornell University Press. Essential if you are visiting only Cuba.

Raffaele et al, A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies (1998), Princeton University Press. Birdwatching in the wider Caribbean, thorough and heavy.

The oldest house in Cuba still standing today is Diego Velázquez’s residence in Santiago, built in 1522. However, the most important architectural works of the 16th century were the forts of Havana and Santiago, built in response to the many pirate attacks Cuba suffered. The original fort on the site of the Castillo de la Real Fuerza in Havana was burnt to the ground in 1555 by the French pirate Jacques de Sores. Felipe II commissioned a new fortress but the work was delayed when the architect was replaced in 1562 by Francisco de Calona, who completed the reconstruction in 1582. The building is a technological marvel, considering the primitive resources available when it was built: the walls are 6 m thick and 10 m high, with huge triangular bulwarks at each corner; a drawbridge leads over the wide moat to the vaulted interior. The early 17th century saw the construction of two castles in Havana and Santiago, by the Italian architect Juan Bautista Antonelli. They are both known as Castillo del Morro, and both still stand. Also built in the 17th century were the Havana city walls. One and a half metres thick and 10 m high, they ran for nearly 5000 m around the edge of the bay. A few fragments remain at Calle Egido y Avenida del Puerto.

Until the 19th century Cuban artists were mainly concerned with emulating the styles fashionable in Spain at the time, to gain favour with their colonial rulers. But then painters began to develop styles that were endemic to the island. Even at the end of the 19th century, when Impressionism was revolutionizing painting in France, the Cuban style still retained its roots in the academic tradition of landscape and portrait painting. One of the artists known for his major contribution to the emerging Cuban style of painting was Leopoldo Romañach, born near Coralillo in Villa Clara in 1862, although he spent most of his life abroad.

It was the 1920s that saw Cuban artists finally developing their own avant-garde movement and the art magazine Avance made its appearance in 1927. Víctor Manuel’s (1897-1969) 1924 painting Gitana Tropical, with its echoes of Cézanne and Gaugin, caused a sensation when the public first saw it. Now it has become the painting that symbolizes the beginning of modernism in Cuban art. US encroachment on the failing Cuban sugar industry in the 1920s led to a new nationalism among artists and intellectuals, with painters looking to Afro-Cuban images for inspiration. The generation of painters of 1927-1950 are known as La Vanguardia. They combined the modernism of post-Impressionist European artists with the vibrant landscapes and people found in Cuba. Today, their paintings are worth a small fortune and there is a ready market in forgeries.

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) is still Cuba’s most famous painter. He spent many years in France and Spain, becoming friends with Picasso and André Bréton, who introduced him to primitive art. Lam blended synthetic cubism, African masks and surrealism to create an essentially Cuban vision. Although he did most of his major work in Cuba, he always intended to show those outside Latin America the reality there.

Amelia Peláez (1896-1968) looked west for her inspiration, to the mural painting of Mexico, although her early work was influenced by Matisse, Braque and Picasso. Her brightly coloured murals can be seen in the Tribunal de Cuentas building and the Office of the Comptroller in Havana. It was this divergence of influences that characterized Cuban art during the 1940s.

Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957) lived in Cuba, New York, Paris and Madrid, while his style evolved through surrealism to expressionism.

René Portocarrero (1912-1985) was one of the few painters not to be influenced by the movements in Europe. His big colourful paintings incorporate Afro-Cuban imagery. He travelled to Haiti, Europe and the USA and worked with ceramics and murals.

Mariano Rodríguez (1912-1990) studied under Mexican muralists. His most popular work is his series ‘Gallos’ (roosters) produced in the 1940s and he exhibited widely in the USA.

Mario Carreño (1913-1999) was a nomad for the first half of his life, working as a graphic artist in Spain, a muralist in Mexico, a painter in Paris before the war and an abstract painter in New York after the war, with only visits to his homeland. In 1957, he took up permanent residence in Chile and lived there until his death.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a big influence on painting of imagery from the cinema; a major group of artists around this time were known as the Grupo de los Once, and included Luis Martínez Pedro (1910-1990), originally an architect who exhibited his paintings worldwide and designed theatre sets and costumes for contemporary dance, and Raúl Milián (1914-1986), who didn’t start painting until 1952 and never worked in oils, preferring water-based inks.

The Revolution had a strong influence on developments in the art world: the first national art school was founded in the early 1960s; and in 1976 the Escuela Superior de Arte was founded. These institutions gave more people access to the serious study of applied art. Raúl Martínez (1927-1995) was the most well known of the Cuban Pop Artists. Unlike their North American contemporaries, the imagery of Cuban Pop Art came from the ubiquitous faces of revolutionaries, seen on murals all over Cuba.

The 1970s was the most difficult era for artists in Cuba, with many political restrictions on their work; of the few that made it past the censors, Flavio Garciandia (born 1954) was the most notable, producing paintings which mixed abstract and figurative styles together.

The 1980s saw the emergence of conceptual art in Cuba, as elsewhere, and many alternative groups were formed, such as Artecalle – street art. There was also the Puré group, the most important member being José Angel Toirac (born 1966) who famously put Castro’s image on Marlboro cigarette advertisements and Calvin Klein’s Eternity. Though most of the better-known artists were now abroad, the art scene still flourished. Some, like the sculptor Alejandro Aguilera (born 1964), distorted patriotic symbols in a confrontational way. In Cuba, as in other parts of the world, the 1980s was a decade in which everything was questioned and deconstructed.

The 1990s saw the rise of performance art as a means of expression. Carlos Garaicoa is one of the bigger names in this field, already having taken part in the 1997 Havana Biennal along with Tania Bruguera, who had also exhibited in the 1996 Sao Paulo Biennal. Many alternative galleries have sprung up, the best being ‘El Espacio Aglutinador’, founded in 1994 by two well-known artists from the 1980s, Sandra Ceballos and Esequiel Suárez. The gallery, which gave an exhibition space to many up-and-coming artists ignored by state cultural institutions is in Sandra’s home in the Vedado area of Havana, Calle 6, 602 entre 25 y 27. The 1990s also saw a return to painting, after the vogue for installation of the 1980s. This reflects the economic need, during the special period , for artists to make saleable objects again, although it also has its conceptual roots in post-modernism.

The Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes reopened in 2001 and is essential viewing for anyone interested in colonial and modern Cuban art . The national collection is divided between two buildings in Old Havana, one for Cuban art and the other for world art, with many pieces having been in private collections before the Revolution. Other state-run galleries in Havana are the Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales and the Wifredo Lam Centre, which has shows by contemporary artists. You can also see some small exhibitions of avant-garde work at the Casa de Las Américas. Look out for the many small private galleries around Old Havana and Central Havana as well. In the provinces there are several places where you can see local artists exhibit their work, either in galleries or in provincial museums. Online you can keep up with what’s going on at http://www.cubarte.cult.cu.

One of the great success stories of the Cuban Revolution is the Cuban film industry. The Film Institute, known familiarly as ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry), was set up by the new government in March 1959, only three months after the victory of the Revolution. Headed by Alfredo Guevara, it aimed to produce, distribute and show Cuban films to as wide a domestic audience as possible, to train film-makers and technicians, and to promote film culture generally. Open to anyone with an interest in film, excepting pro-Batista collaborationists, the institute built up an industry with an international reputation within 10 years, virtually from scratch.

Before the Revolution, films had been made in Cuba by foreign companies or amateurs. The staple diet of the Cuban filmgoer, even in 1959, was Hollywood movies. In the early 1960s, after the Bay of Pigs episode (1961) and the missile crisis (1962), several film directors (including Néstor Almendros), cinematographers and technicians, left the island, taking their precious equipment with them. Adequate government funding, which depended on the fluctuating Cuban economy, and state-of-the-art training and technology, became critical problems following the US trade embargo. The majority of the crew working on Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s comedy The Twelve Chairs, for example (the assistant director, director of cinematography, camera operator, focus puller, camera assistant and continuity girls), were first-timers. Yet in learning to make the most of their scant resources, the Cuban film-makers introduced striking new techniques which, in addition to their youthful enthusiasm, improvisation and revolutionary focus, created a forceful impact on the world of film. Five Cuban films won international awards in 1960 alone. As Francis Ford Coppola remarked, “We don’t have the advantage of their inconveniences”. Measures such as the launch of the film journal Cine cubano, the inauguration of the Havana Cinemateca (1960), a national network of film clubs, and a travelling cinema (cinemóvil) showing films to peasants in remote rural districts, the nationalization of the film distribution companies, and the 1961 literacy campaign enabling 700,000 viewers to read the subtitles of undubbed foreign films for the first time, placed cinema at the forefront of revolutionary cultural innovation. Even the posters, designed under the auspices of ICAIC by individual artists, became world famous.

The types of films made during the 1960s were national, nonconformist and cheap. ICAIC aimed to keep as independent a criteria as possible over what constituted art, and encouraged imaginative, popular films, directly relevant to the Revolutionary process and challenging the mass culture of acquiescent consumption. The preferred format was the documentary shot on 8-mm or 16-mm film (40 were made in 1965), honed to perfection by Santiago Alvarez, but there were a good number of excellent features too: Cuba Baila (Cuba Dances), Historias de la Revolución (Stories of the Revolution), El Joven Rebelde (The Young Rebel, based on a script by Zavattini), La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat) and Aventuras de Juan Quinquin (The Adventures of Juan Quinquin), the most popular feature in Cuba of all time, until the release of Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate).

In 1967, the film director Julio García Espinosa published his seminal essay For an Imperfect Cinema which, with the work of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas in Argentina and Glauber Rocha in Brazil, laid the basis of the New Latin American cinema movement, also known as Third Cinema, a key concept in film culture today. Cuban cinema reached its high point in 1968, with groundbreaking films such as Lucía (Lucia) and Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) and, in 1969, La Primera Carga al Machete (The First Charge of the Machete). Cuban film-makers, a number of whom had been trained in the Centro Sperimentale in Rome in the 1950s, were influenced predominantly by Italian Neorealism, French New Wave Cinema and cinéma verité – British Free Cinema (Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson), and the Soviet classics. Films shot on location, with hand-held cameras featuring ordinary people engaged in a revolutionary process, have remained the trademarks of classic Cuban cinema ever since.

By the 1970s, however, uncomfortable questions were being asked about the appropriateness of avant-garde art for the needs of the Cuban mass public. Tensions between creative artists and government bureaucrats exploded in the Padilla affair (1970), resulting in a five-year government clampdown. ICAIC’s production programme was reduced to three features a year, while young, often amateur film-makers (average age 36), were favoured over the more experienced. Nevertheless, important films were produced, tending to focus on women’s issues, historical and/or multiracial themes (particularly slavery and African-Cuban culture), with a view to consolidating a strong, cohesive sense of national identity. The black film director Sergio Giral’s El Otro Francisco (The Other Francisco) and Gutierrez Alea’s La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), both depicting the courage and resistance of Cuban slaves, black director Sara Gómez’s De Cierta Manera (One Way or Another), highlighting the problem of machismo among black men, and Pastor Vegas’ Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa), denouncing sexist attitudes in post-revolutionary society, all date from this period.

In 1976, the Ministry of Culture was set up, ushering in yet another episode in Cuban film history. In 1982, Julio García Espinosa took over from Alfredo Guevara as the Head of ICAIC, and the organization was incorporated into the ministry. Until 1980 it had been self-financing. Nevertheless, despite the increasing influence of the Hollywood format (favouring sentimental melodrama and romance), perhaps indicative of a deeper crisis of belief, films still tended to be critical of Cuban social reality. Production figures increased to some six features a year during the 1980s, many of these co-productions with countries such as Mexico and Spain. By the end of the 1980s there were 60 million film goers, each Cuban visiting a cinema on average six times a year. The Cuban audiences, mostly young white-collar workers, technicians and specialists, tend to be educated and demanding. A network of video clubs and libraries were set up in the 1980s to meet their needs.

In the late 1980s, ICAIC recovered its independence and was restructured on the basis of three ‘creation groups’ each under an experienced film director in charge of encouraging and training young film makers. But, as Cuba moved into the special period (1990-1994) in response to the fall of the Eastern block and the intensified US trade embargo, ICAIC faced another crisis. After the release of a controversially critical film, Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in Wonderworld), in a climate of political tension, moves were made to incorporate the Institute into Radio and Television, directly controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This strategy was actively resisted by leading filmmakers, such as Gutiérrez Alea, the plans were scrapped, and Alfredo Guevara was appointed director once more. Paradoxically, at a time when resources were scarcer than ever before, ICAIC produced its most successful film, Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), suggesting, perhaps, that the best Cuban films are made when circumstances are at their worst.

Daniel Díaz Torres followed his Alicia hit with Kleines Tropikana (Little Tropicana, Cuba/Germany/Spain, 1997), a hilarious pastiche of Gutiérrez Alea films and a fitting homage to the master. This satirical snapshot of Cuban xenophobia, played by the actors starring in Alicia and Vladimir Cruz (Fresa y Chocolate), features a detective fiction writer, a dead German tourist and a British hippy girl, cleverly targetting European audiences. Music, laughter and social critique dominate the scene. Films of the late 1990s to watch out for are Fernando Pérez’s award-winning La vida es silbar (Life is to whistle, Cuba/Spain, 1998), Manuel Herrera’s Zafiros locura azul (Zafiros [Sapphires], Blue Madness, 1998) and Juan Carlos Tabío’s El elefante y la bicicleta (The Elephant and the Bicycle, 1998), all of which starred Luis Alberto García (‘Plaff!’ and ‘Adorables mentiras’). The first film is yet another sharp-edged comedy about life’s illusions and disappointments, a bitter-sweet genre that the Cubans have made their own. As might be expected, the three protagonists (a dropout, a nurse and a ballet dancer) all have sexual hang-ups and are seen attempting to make sense of their chaotic lives in today’s Havana. The second film is a musical biopic partly produced in the USA, again starring García. It tells the story of Miguel Cancio (the producer’s father), founder of the 1960s quartet Los Zafiros who developed a unique blend of up-beat r&b and bolero music.

The international explosion of Cuban music, old and new, has led to a trend in Cuban musical documentaries. The film that has made the greatest impact in recent years is without doubt Wim Wender’s documentary Buena Vista Social Club (Cuba/Germany, 1998), a nostalgic reconstruction of the lives and times of the band of the same name, whose original members are now in their 80s and 90s. The late Rubén González’s piano playing, Ibrahim Ferrer’s crooning, accompanied by Ry Cooder on guitar (with his son, Joaquín Cooder, on drums) practising for two gigs in Amsterdam (April 1998) and New York (July 1998) and – above all – the stunning colour photography are quite unforgettable. Two Grammy Award-winning CDs are available: Buena Vista Social Club (WCD050) and Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer (WCD055). The rhythmic soundtrack of Tropicola (Cuba 1998), directed by Steve Fagin, is exciting too, although this film is more concerned with today’s problems in Cuba: the harmful effects of tourism and the dollar economy. Entirely different, but just as Cuban, is the wonderfully evocative short Misa cubana (Cuban Mass, Cuba, 1998), a collage of 16th- and 17th-century sacred music with a score written by maestro José María Vitier.

Cuba has once again hit the headlines in several films made about the island in the USA and elsewhere. First there was Cosas que dejé en la Habana (Things I left in Havana, 1998) by Spanish film director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón starring Jorge Perugorría (of Fresa y Chocolate fame). The film, funny yet critical, tells the story of three Cuban sisters who come to Madrid in search of a better world but are exploited by their aunt who, among other things, tries to marry the youngest girl to her gay son. Then Roger Donaldson’s political thriller Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner, released in 2000, presented yet another version of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world was pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Despite its length (over two hours), the film received favourable reviews and was screened in Cuba. Costner and the producers were invited to dinner with Fidel and then collaborated with ICAIC to get the film put on in the island. Costner is still a frequent visitor to the island.

The most controversial film about Cuba in recent years (when aren’t films about Cuba controversial?) is Julian Schabel’s Before Night Falls (2001), which is loosely based on the autobiography of gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’ Antes que anochezca (Barcelona, 1992) (Before Night Falls, London, 1993). Arenas was born near Holguín in 1943 and was self-taught. After the Revolution he was given posts in the National Library and as editor of the famous Gaceta de Cuba (1968-1974). His first novel was published in Cuba in 1967, but in the early 1970s he ran into trouble with the authorities and was imprisoned for two years (1974-1976). He left Cuba in the Mariel exodus of 1980 and was employed in the USA as a literature professor. He contracted HIV and committed suicide in New York in 1990. His autobiography, although beautifully written, is hyperbolical (he boasts of having had 5000 gay sexual encounters before the age of 25) and especially hostile to Castro. It should not be read as documentary fact, as several of Arenas’ Cuban friends and colleagues have since pointed out. The film represents events at an even further remove from historical reality, yet has been widely reviewed as the most recent indictment of Castro’s apparently brutal government. In other words, the film is deliberately politically biased. This is not to say it is not a good film; it is, but it is fiction and should be viewed as such. The Spanish actor Javier Bardem, playing Arenas, is powerful and convincing; the film also features famous Hollywood actors (Sean Penn, Johnny Depp) in cameo roles. Although the camera work is excellent, if you don’t know Arenas’s story you may be confused by the complex plot.

At the 2002 International Film Festival, the largest crowds queued to see Balseros (Rafters), a film documentary about seven Cubans who set sail for Miami in 1994, a time of economic crisis when Castro allowed thousands to flee on any home-made craft for Florida. Their stories show the pain of leaving families behind and the culture shock of living and working long hours in the USA. Directors Carles Bosch and Josep Domenech presented a frank account of the poverty driving Cubans to leave, but also the harsh reality of life elsewhere. In 2003, one of the most talked about films was a silent movie directed by Fernando Pérez, Suite Habana, a documentary of a day in the life of the city and its inhabitants, with a sound track limited to music and city noises. It can be interpreted as either a subversive criticism of Castro’s system, or as a tribute to the courage and resilience of Habaneros, struggling against all odds to survive without losing their revolutionary dreams.

The big foreign film of recent years is the monumental Che (Steven Soderbergh, 2008), which was so long that it was divided into two films, Che Part 1: The Argentine, and Che Part 2: The Guerrilla. This blockbuster biopic of Che Guevara, starring Benicio del Toro, who won the Best Actor Award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, was filmed mostly in Spanish for veracity. The first part covers the Cuban Revolution, but was filmed in Mexico and Puerto Rico because of the US embargo. The second part is about Guevara’s attempt to export revolution to Bolivia, with disastrous consequences. The film was shown to huge acclaim in Havana as part of the 2008 Latin American Film Festival, although Benicio del Toro was understandably anxious about such a knowledgeable audience. The state newspaper, Granma, gave del Toro a glowing review, while the 2000-strong audience at the Yara cinema gave him a 10-minute standing ovation.

In Cuba, meanwhile, Cuba mourned the death from cancer of film-maker Humberto Solás (1941-2008). He had a prolific output but first came to international attention with his 1968 film, Lucía, charting the lives and fortunes of three women called Lucía in different stages of Cuban history. It was filmed in Gibara, north of Holguín, a small town with which he maintained a long association. Solás was the first Cuban director to be nominated for an Oscar, with his film Un Hombre de Exito (1985). In 2001 he brought out Miel para Oshún (Honey for the Goddess Oshun, 2001), the story of a Cuban, Roberto (played by Jorge Perugorría, yet again), who was taken to the USA as a child after the Revolution and returns 30 years later to find his mother. Like Alea’s Guantanamera, this is a road movie, more notable for its outstanding photography of the Cuban landscape than for its penetrating character analyses. Some of this film was again shot in Gibara and in 2003 Solás founded a festival for ‘poor’ cinema to be held annually in the town. The festival is dedicated to movies made against seemingly overwhelming odds and no film shown there has cost more than US$300,000 to make. After Solás death the film festival was renamed in his honour as the Festival Internacional del Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás.

Lovers of wry humour at the expense of the Cuban predicament should seek out the films of Juan Carlos Tabío. His 2001 award-winning comedy, Lista de Espera (Waiting List) was scripted by Senel Paz and Arturo Arango and stars Vladimir Cruz (of Fresa y Chocolate fame) and Jorge Perugorría (now playing a blind man). The action takes place in a remote, dilapidated bus station. The passengers wait and wait for a bus but they are all full so they try and repair an old Soviet wreck in a collective effort to repair the broken dream. The bus is a metaphor for the better times that never materialize and the passengers’ solidarity a comment on the resilience and blind optimism of those that try to make things work despite all odds. Tabío’s more recent comedy, El Cuerno de la Abundancia (Horn of Plenty, Cuba/Spain 2008), again starring Jorge Perugorría, follows the hopes and aspirations of the extended Castiñeiras family from a small town in Cuba who hear they’ve inherited a fortune from the 17th century, left to them in a bank in London by three nuns. To escape the poverty and stagnation of their lives in Cuba they go through bureaucratic hoops to prove their parentage, squabbles between different factions of the family, love affairs driven by greed, but it all comes to nothing when they hear it has gone to a branch of the family in Miami. They are left with debts and broken marriages but at the end there is new hope of an inheritance and the cycle starts all over again.

In short, the Cuban film industry is progressing well in the 21st century and the International Film Festivals (Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, http://www.habanafilmfestival.com, Festival Internacional del Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás, http://www.festivalcinepobre.org) are major events that should not be missed.

The earliest known work of Cuban literature was a poem called Espejos de paciencia, published in 1605 by Silvestre de Balboa. An epic canto about the struggles between a Spanish bishop and a French pirate, it is an esteemed work for its time, though it now retains only historical value. Early schools of writers in Cuba were too influenced by Spanish literature to produce anything essentially Cuban and it was not until the first half of the 19th century that poets begin to formulate a voice of their own: the first collection of verse by a native Cuban was Ignacio Valdés Machuca’s (1792-1851) Ocios poéticos, published in 1819.

José María Heredia y Heredia (1803-1839) is considered the turning point for Cuban letters. His Meditación en el teocalli de Chobula (1820) marked the beginning of Romanticism, not only in Cuba, but in the Spanish language. He was also the first of many Cuban writers to be involved in the struggle for independence. He was expelled from the country for his part in anti-colonial conspiracies, and wrote most of his work while in exile in Mexico and the USA.

Cuba’s most prolific woman writer was Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873). Her anti-slavery novel Sab (1841) was the first of its kind to be published anywhere in Latin America, its theme predating Uncle Tom’s Cabin by a decade. A glut of abolitionist novels followed, the most notable being Cecilia Valdés (1882) by Cirilio Villaverde (1812-1894). The poet Domingo Delmonte (1804-1853) led a protest against Cuba’s continued acceptance of slavery after its official abolition in 1815, and many writers had to publish their anti-slavery novels in New York.

The most influential figure in Cuba’s struggle for independence was José Martí (1853- 1895). He was deported to Spain in 1880 for his part in the independence movement. He later died in battle during the second War of Independence in 1895. He wrote Versos Sencillos (1891), based on the drama of his own life, while in exile in the USA. Martí also wrote highly acclaimed prose, which appeared in political journals published in Argentina and Venezuela. Many of his prophesies about Cuba’s political future have been fulfilled.

Two poets associated with the transition from romanticism to modernism are Enrique Hernández Miyarés (1859-1914) and Julián del Casal (1863-1893). The latter, influenced by Baudelaire, praised the value of art over nature in Hojas al Viento (Leaves in the Wind, 1890). His posthumous Bustos y Rimas (Busts and Rhymes, 1893) has been compared with the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Another important modernist poet was Regina Eladio Boti y Barreiro. Although she only published three collections of verse, she was responsible for taking Cuban poetry from modernism to post-modernism.

In the 1920s, the negrismo movement began, which created non-intellectual poetry based on African dance rhythms. The poet Lydia Cabrera (1899-1999) dedicated her life to research of Afro-Cuban culture. As well as numerous stories, in which she created a prose based on the magical-mythical beliefs passed orally through black folklore, she published many books on the ethnography and linguistics of Afro-Cubans. The negrismo group consisted of poets both black and white, although its most famous member, Nicolás Guillén Batista (1902-1989), was mulatto. Motivos de son (1930), in which he incorporated African rhythms in his son poetry, is considered his best work. He joined the Communist party and after the Revolution, was made president of the Union of Cuban Writers, and declared the National Poet by Castro.

Two of Guillén’s former colleagues on the Communist newspaper Hoy were the writers Lino Novás Calvo (1905-1983) and Carlos Montenegro (1900-1981). Novas Calvo is recognized as one of the finest short story writers in Latin America. He used the narrative techniques of Hemingway and Faulkner to capture the feel of Havana slang. He was the first of many writers to go into voluntary exile with the instalment of Castro’s régime. La Luna Nona y Otros Cuentos (The Ninth Moon, 1942) is his best collection. Carlos Montenegro’s Hombres Sin Mujer (Life Without Women) has been compared to Céline and Genet. He was jailed for life aged 18 for killing a sailor who sexually assaulted him. The novel is based on the sexual exploits of his 15 years in prison.

The major writers at the time of the 1959 Revolution were the novelists Virgilio Piñera (1914-1979) and Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) and the poet José Lezama Lima. All publishers were merged into the National Printing Press, with Alejo Carpentier as manager. The founder of magical realism, Carpentier’s early novels are among the most highly rated in Latin American literature. Many are available in English, including Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps), the most accessible of his richly baroque tales.

José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) scandalized post-Revolution Cuba with his novel Paradiso (Paradise, 1966), a thinly disguised account of his homosexual experiences. Primarily a poet, Lezama was one of the driving forces behind the criollismo movement of the 1940s and 1950s. His rebellious, apolitical stance is an inspiration to the young Cuban poets of today, who seek to create a non-politicized poetry with a more spiritual dimension.

One of the most famous dissident novelists was Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). Dogged by state security for most of his youth, he was imprisoned several times as a dissident and a homosexual, and only managed to publish his novel El Mundo Alucinado (Hallucinations, 1971) by smuggling the manuscript out of the country through foreign friends. He finally escaped to Miami in the Mariel exodus, but, suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide in New York. His memoirs, Antes Que Anochezca (Before Night Falls) were published posthumously and have since been made into a film . This and his other works are available in translation. Also available in English are the works of Guillermo Cabrera Infante (born 1929). In 1959 he became editor of the literary weekly, Lunes de la Revolución, but it was closed after two years when he got into trouble with the government. In 1962, he went to Brussels as cultural attaché, but resigned in 1965 and began exile in London in 1966. His witty novel about Havana nightlife during Batista’s dictatorship, Tres Tristes Tigres, first version 1964, second version 1967 (Three Trapped Tigers, 1971), brought him literary fame. The book won him the Premio Biblioteca Breve in Barcelona in 1964, but led to him being expelled from the Cuban Union of Writers in 1968. Conflict between artistic creativity and the Revolution exploded in the 1970s with the Padilla affair. Herberto Padilla, a poet, won a literary prize in 1971, but instead of guaranteed publication, his book of satirical and questioning poems was blocked. He was imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary and forced to make a public confession of crimes he had not committed, a humiliating act which caused an outcry among the intellectuals of Europe.

As a reaction to the political restrictions placed on writers after the Revolution, a movement of experimental literature sprang up in the 1960s, influenced by the French avant-garde and North American pop culture. Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), who left Cuba for Paris immediately after the Revolution, was the leading member; his ¿De dónde son los cantantes? (From Cuba with a Song, 1967), with its complex layering of cultural history and linguistic puzzles, is still regarded as a classic by Cuban intellectuals. Sarduy became a citizen of France in 1967 and lived there until his death.

Nowadays Cuban writers find it easier to express their ideas in public. Havana has its first legally recognized literary group. At the centre of the group is Reina María Rodríguez (born 1952), a poet who has gained admiration outside Cuba. Many young poets and writers see themselves as carrying on where literature left off after the 1960s, when the repressive measures of the Revolution induced a state of creative inertia and self-censorship. Writers such as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Leonardo Padura Fuentes openly discuss the difficulties of life in Havana and question the ethics of state-imposed hardship with the toll it takes on friendship, work and sex. There is also a new generation of Cuban American writers, whose parents fled in the 1960s, who are now discovering their roots.

There are few countries in the world with so rich a musical heritage as Cuba. No visitor can fail to be moved by the variety of sounds that surround them, whether it be a street corner rumba or a septeto in the Casa de la Trova. Music is everywhere – it seems that nothing can happen without it.

The origins of Cuban music lie in the movement of numerous, primarily European, and African cultures. Through the inauspicious conditions of migration, enslavement, war and colonization, elements of these disparate identities have fused into a Cuban identity, forged in the villages and on plantations, in tenements and dockyards. African music and dance forms whose paths might never have crossed on their own vast continent did so in Cuba, enriching each other, and drawing also upon European forms. The mirror image is equally true with European dances finding new, African interpretations, while musicians have absorbed African harmony and chorus styles as well as rhythm. Most of today’s popular genres are neither Yoruba nor French, Ekiti, Ashanti, nor Spanish, but fusions from this vast cultural gene pool.

The Cuban music most universally accepted on the island is surely the son, which, in spite of its more urban variations and offspring, remains essentially rural. Played by Cuba’s oldest and youngest musicians, it is a principal root of salsa, and, however unlikely it might at times seem, also timba. In its various forms son still thrives both in the countryside and cities throughout the island, pointing to the nascent character of urban culture. Son began its life in Oriente where old songs from Spain combined with African call-and-response choruses. The syncopated notes of the guitar and tres (a small guitar-like instrument) contributed to other genres such as guaracha, full of satire and humour, and soon evolved new ones such as the guajira, resulting in the famous ‘guajira Guantanamera’, and nengón. With the addition of bongo, maracas and marimbula, nengón developed into the style known as son changüí. From Guantánamo (where changüí is still strong), the son reached Havana around 1909, along with elements of the new Permanent Army, and gained there the disdain of society, which disregarded and feared it as the music of the lower, particularly black, class. Persecuted by the authorities, son simmered in a few black neighbourhoods, existing there through illegal parties for some ten years. However, given Society’s taste for expropriating the surplus value of the lower orders’ uncouth labour, it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually appropriate also their dynamic culture. By the early 1920s, and with tasteful modifications, small son combos were beginning to displace the cumbersome and expensive danzón orchestras from La Habana’s exclusive dance salons. Capturing the most gifted writers and band leaders of the time this gentrification of son was not entirely without benefit to its continued evolution and precipitated its spread not just across social but also national boundaries. Although few if any recordings were made of son prior to this, a multitude followed, and whatever criticisms one might make, they remain a rich source of material for inspiration and re-interpretation.

As the 1930s approached, Ignacio Piñero formed his Septeto Nacional. (A septeto is a seven-piece band, including guitars, percussion, brass, vocals, playing traditional Cuban music.) Their sones not only featured his exceptional vocal improvisations (honed in the large choral societies called Coros de Clave), but added a hot trumpet to the central rhythm of the clave. Nicolás Guillén busied himself composing sones and son was now recognized as the sound of Cuba (to stand alonside such ‘exotic’ names as samba, conga and tango, in Europe and the USA it was marketed as the ‘rhumba’). The septeto style is still heard today in the popular music bars and Casas de la Trova. Piñero continued to innovate by mixing styles, creating guajira son, bolero son (also popularized by Santiago’s Miguel Matamoros) and even son pregón son which used Havana street cries, including the famous echalé salsita.

A new development in the 1930s was Arsenio Rodriguez’ conjunto style, which marked the beginning of modern salsa. To the traditional septeto came conga drums, timbales (or ‘paila’ – optional), piano and more trumpets. This ‘big band’ son made much of the final, wild call-and-response or montuno section of the song. The later Descargas were improvised jam sessions over strong paila, conga and bongo rhythms, which had major influences on US jazz. The tumbao played by the tumbadoras is derived from rumba, so salsa combines elements of the three most prominent musical traditions: son, danzón and rumba.

During the 1950s, Beny Moré emerged as Sonero Mayor (meaning greatest singer and lyric improviser more than interpreter of son) and he remains one of the most revered figures in Cuban music history. Beny and his Banda Gigante were as adept with the newer styles, mambo and cha cha cha, as with son and its variations. Of equal importance, the size of his orchestra allowed the introduction of American Big Band Jazz to the Cuban melting pot. The era also saw the arrival of such artists as La Sonora Matancera and Celia Cruz, both of whom found fame in exile. There, in the USA, Celia (died 2003) won world wide acclaim as the Queen of Salsa. Back in Cuba, Miguel Cuní, Félix Chapottín and Lilí forged a somewhat harder edged urban son to serenade the arrival of Castro’s nationalist Revolution.

If Cuba of the sixties is remembered more in connection with Russian nuclear missiles than for earth-shattering music, the foundations were being laid for future musical revolutions. It’s hard to find any virtue in the frankly awful experiments with pop music by Elio Revé and Juan Formell, but both talents went on to lead bands of enormous importance and popularity through the 1970s and 1980s. Formell’s band, Los Van Van, have undergone a number of reinventions and remain very much at the cutting edge of today’s music.

No less than the development of a popular education system on the island following the Revolution, US policy towards Cuba has had a powerful effect on the subsequent unfolding of popular Latin music in both countries, actually creating something of a schism. Cut off from its source, the music of Cuban exile and Puerto Rican communities has tended to become bogged in old musical language in the way of ex-pats, at the same time absorbing the economic ethos of the host nation. Polished and manicured and formularised, salsa has become a multi-million dollar industry in the USA and its southern sphere of influence, its product as personal as any other factory-produced commodity. Cubans on the other hand have never ceased to import, fuse and re-fuse ideas from their rich musical larder and from elsewhere and, less driven by market trends, their bands tend to develop distinctive sounds. Through the 1970s and 1980s the distinctions between genres such as son and charanga blurred somewhat, however, while economic pressure forced the replacement of acoustic with electric bass guitar. The Baby Bass (a substitute electric upright electric bass) which is de rigueur in salsa bands was almost unheard of in Cuba. This reality alone sent Cuban music off on its own path. Some bands began to borrow heavily from funk and other urban black American styles, but overall the feel of music from this era is quite rustic. As well as the bands mentioned above, Orquesta 440 (not to be confused with Juan Luis Guerra) stands out, as do Son 14, and Adalberto Alvarez y su Son, both the latter two being led by the same Adalberto.

Not for the first time, the new generation has continued the tradition of innovation to the point of creating a new music, timba. That a prominent pioneer such as Giraldo Piloto should protest his music to be merely progressive son alludes to the power of this revered tradition, the strength in Cuban culture of lineage principles as against individuation and, within this, the dependence of urban culture on its rural roots. Timba and Cuban rap were born not in the hills, but in the cities. They incorporate musical ideas from the outside urban world that resonate with city dwellers and certainly timba is the product of musicians who have enjoyed a technical training their predecessors could not have imagined. This is fundamentally urban music which perhaps has yet to become fully self aware, and you will hear little of it outside La Habana.

While son was appearing in Cuba’s countryside, an African rhythm known as the yuka, which had survived on the sugar plantations, was joining forces with the Spanish décima and livening up the ports of Havana and Matanzas. This style soon came to be known as rumba. African rhythms were played on whatever came to hand: boxes used to pack fish or candles gave a good tone. Characters such as Mama’buela were created in mime and singers commented on current events or battled with each other for honours. This rumba de cajón also involved the stately yambú dance, where following the vocal section, a couple would mime courtship. Soon the rhythms passed onto drums, the large tumba providing a solid bass, the conga a repeated cross rhythm which was accompanied by brilliant improvisations on the small quinto. There are other terms like llamador, trabajador, tres dos, and tres golpes to describe the deeper-sounding drums, which seem to be named after their role in the rumba. To this was added a pair of claves and a struck length of bamboo known as the guagua or cata. The more sexual dance form known as guaguancó (still the main rumba style) demanded more rapid playing. Great rumberos emerged, such as Florencio Calle, Chano Pozo, Estéban Latrí and Celeste Mendoza, as well as groups who specialized in rumba, such as Los Papines, Conjunto de Clave y Guaguancó and the well-travelled Muñequitos de Matanzas, who used the rhythms of the Abakuá religion in their rumbas. The Muñequitos also play the Matanzas style known as Columbia. This rumba echoes African solo dancing, involving an element of danger such as the use of knives. Even faster playing underpins a singing style which makes use of Bantu phrases and ends in a call-and-response.

Rumba is a playfully competitive art form, although sometimes the competitiveness is not always so playful. The men, particularly the ‘guapos’, or ‘hard guys’, take it very seriously and people do get hurt, sometimes even killed. The rhythms have got faster, break dancing and karate moves have been incorporated into the dance, rumberos sing about the special period; in this way, rumba survives as a true reflection of Cuban street life.

Matanzas is also the birthplace of the danzón. The popular Típica orchestras, influenced by the great cornettist Miguel Faílde, added subtle African rhythms to the European Contradanza, along with a call-and-response montuno section, creating a balance between formal dance and syncopated rhythm, almost a Cuban ragtime. The Orquesta Típica slowly changed, adding piano and further percussion, while the 1920s saw a new arrival, the charanga francesa. Of French Haitian descent, this was another development of the típica, featuring wooden flute and strings as well as pailas. It is in this format, so different from its origins, that danzón is generally remembered and occasionally interpreted. It was the beginning of the Charanga style developed by contemporary Cuban groups such as Orquesta Aragón and Los Van Van.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Orestes López (Cachao) and the violinist Enrique Jorrín created the new mambo and cha cha cha styles directly from danzón. These driving rhythms are still popular all over Cuba, and were fundamental to the explosion of Latin music and dance worldwide.

The canción habanera is regarded as the first truly Cuban vocal style. Emerging in the 1830s as a mixture of the so-called tongo congo rhythm and Spanish melodies, it had its greatest exponent in Eduardo Sánchez. Habaneras were also composed by Eduardo Lecuona, a pianist who was internationally feted during the 1930s and 1940s.

Another canción style, involving simply a singer and a guitar, was developed during the 19th century in Oriente by Pepe Sánchez. His simple, beautiful songs, such as Rosa No 1 and Rosa No 2, inspired others such as María Teresa Vera and the remarkable Sindo Garay, who claimed to be the only man who had shaken the hand of both Jose Martí and Fidel Castro! The romantic style known as bolero soon developed from canción.

Realizing the potential for expression offered by canción, young musicians like Silvio Rodríguez, Sara González and Pablo Milanés created the nueva trova. Their songs reflect the path of the Revolution, Silvio’s ‘Playa Girón’ telling its own story. ‘Pablito’ is an exceptional composer and interpreter, especially of Guillén’s poetry.

Cuban jazz is exceptionally healthy. Orquesta Irakere continue to renew themselves, inspired by the pianistic genius of Jesús ‘Chucho’ Valdéz, while Grupo Afro-Cuba fuse jazz with traditional Cuban rhythms, including the bata drums of Santería. Among the generation of the 1980s and 1990s the incredible pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba is supreme, composing pieces using danzón rhythms amongst others. The annual Jazz Festival in Havana was for years attended by Dizzy Gillespie, whose influence is evident in the playing of Cubans such as Arturo Sandóval and has recently heard British jazzers giving their all. Less well known but of no less virtue as the above are Los Terry, a family-based band which plays an unusually rural form of Latin jazz. Lacking the polish of its New York equivalent that tends to struggle self-consciously to integrate Afro-Cuban elements, Los Terry have nothing to prove. If their jazz is elementally powerful, it is also totally absorbing in its complexity, dipping into Afro-Cuban folklore intuitively and naturally, rather than to make a point.

The rhythms and songs of Santería remain strong across the island. The three African bata drums are regarded as the most complex of all to master and the rhythms, each assigned to a particular deity, accompany the singing in old Yoruba. Merceditas Valdés is loved throughout Cuba for her interpretation of these songs. Meanwhile, ‘bembe’ parties on Saints’ days are accompanied by singing and drumming. The singer Lázaro Ros has developed a band, Síntesis, who combine traditional Santería music effectively with jazz rock.

The music of the Cuban carnival, recently revived following the debilitating effects of the special period, is truly exhilarating. Both Havana and Santiago have their own styles of conga, the thunderous music which drives on the parade. During August in Havana, the conga drums, bells and bass drums of groups such as Los Dandy La Jardinera, support brass players as they belt out popular melodies, the lanterns spinning in the dancers’ hands. In Santiago, each barrio is represented by massed ranks of bocué drums, bass drums and brake drums. The cloaked and masked revellers of Los Hoyos and San Agustín sing in response to the wailing corneta china, a remnant of Cuba’s Chinese communities. Other bands’ paseos combine brass players with the usual barrage of percussion during the late July festivities.The carnival procession usually features the old Cabildos, whose drums keep alive the rhythms of Africa. In Oriente, the Tumbas Francesas parade the rhythms and dances developed by Africans in Haiti, before the 18th-century Revolution forced yet another move across the ocean.

All of this music can be heard in Cuba now: at the Casas de La Trova, at the Focos Culturales, in the theatres and the cafés, in the parks, the backyards and on the streets. From changüí to cha cha cha, from rumba to bolero, from son to Santería, the music of Cuba is gloriously, vibrantly alive.

The major characteristic of Cuban culture is its combination of the African and European. Because slavery was not abolished until 1886 in Cuba, black African traditions were kept intact much later than elsewhere in the Caribbean. They persist now, inevitably mingled with Hispanic influence, in religion: in Santería, for instance, a cult which blends popular Catholicism with the Yoruba belief in the spirits that inhabit all plant life. This now has a greater hold in Cuba than orthodox Catholicism, which has traditionally been seen as the religion of the white, upper class: opposing independence from Spain in the 19th century and the Revolution in the 1950s.

During the second decade of the Revolution, Cuba became firmly entrenched as a member of the Soviet bloc, joining COMECON in 1972. Technicians came from Eastern Europe and Cubans were trained in the USSR. The Communist Party grew in strength and size and permeated all walks of life, influencing every aspect of Cubans’ day to day living, while putting more central controls on education and culture. The Revolution was institutionalized along Soviet lines and the Party gained control of the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the local and national assemblies. Communist planners controlled the economy and workers were organized into government-controlled trade unions. A new socialist constitution was adopted in 1976. In 1971-1975 the economy grew by about 16% a year, but fell back after then and never recovered such spectacular growth rates again.

Cuba’s foreign policy during this period changed from actively fomenting socialist revolutions abroad (such as Guevara’s forays into the Congo and Bolivia in the 1960s) to supporting other left wing or third world countries with combat troops and technical advisers. Some 20,000 Cubans helped the Angolan Marxist government to defeat a South African backed guerrilla insurgency and 15,000 went to Ethiopia in the war against Somalia and then the separatist rebellion in Eritrea. Cuban advisers and medical workers went to Nicaragua after the Sandinista overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979; advisers and workers went to help the left wing Manley government in Jamaica and to the Marxist government in Grenada (until expelled by the US Marines in 1983). In September 1979, Castro hosted a summit conference of the non-aligned nations in Havana, a high point in his foreign policy initiatives.

The decade also marked a period of intellectual debate at home and abroad about the path the Revolution was taking. In 1971, the poet Herberto Padilla was arrested for cultural deviation and forced to confess his crimes against the Revolution. His treatment and cultural censorship brought accusations of Stalinization of cultural life. The Padilla affair split the Hispanic intellectual world, with writers such as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Juan Goytisolo of Spain renouncing their support for the Revolution, while Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina reaffirmed their support. Free expression was stifled and during this time the best Cuban art and literature was produced by émigrés. The debate widened to include civil liberties and political rights, and official secrecy made it difficult to gauge accurately the persecution of political prisoners, religious believers, intellectual opponents and homosexuals.

By the 1980s, the heavy dependence on sugar and the USSR, coupled with the trade embargo, meant that the expected improvements in living standards, 20 years after the Revolution, were not being delivered as fast as hoped and the people were tiring of being asked for ever more sacrifices for the good of the nation. In 1980, the compound of the Peruvian embassy was overrun by 11,000 people seeking political asylum. Castro’s answer to the dissidents was to let them go and he opened the port of Mariel for a mass departure by sea. He also opened the prisons to allow prisoners, both political and criminal, to head for the USA in anything they could find that would float. It was estimated that some 125,000 embarked for Miami, amid publicity that it was the criminals, delinquents, homosexuals and mental patients who were fleeing Cuba. At the same time huge demonstrations were organized in Havana in support of the Revolution. Some relaxation in controls was allowed, however, with ‘free markets’ opening alongside the official ration system.

This was the decade of the Latin American debt crisis and Cuba was unable to escape the pressures brought to bear on its neighbours. Development projects in the 1970s had been financed with loans from western banks, in addition to the aid it was already receiving from the USSR. When interest rates went up in 1982, Cuba was forced to renegotiate its US$3.5 billion debt to commercial banks and, in 1986, its debt to the USSR. The need to restrain budget spending and keep a tight control over public finances brought more austerity. The private markets were stopped in 1986 and the people were once more asked for voluntary labour to raise productivity and achieve economic growth. Excess manpower, or unemployment, was eased by sending thousands of Cubans abroad as internationalists to help other developing countries, whether as combat troops or technicians.

The collapse of the Communist system in the Eastern European countries in the late 1980s, followed by the demise of the USSR, very nearly brought the end of Castro’s Cuba as well. Emigrés in Miami started counting the days until they would re-enter the homeland and Castro’s position looked extremely precarious. There were signs that a power struggle was taking place at the top of the Communist Party. In 1989, General Arnaldo Ochoa, a hero of the Angolan campaign, was charged with drug trafficking and corruption. He was publicly tried and executed along with several other military officers allegedly involved. Castro took the opportunity to pledge to fight against corruption and privilege and deepen the process of rectification begun in 1986.

In an effort to broaden the people’s power system of government introduced in 1976, the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party adopted resolutions in 1990 designed to strengthen the municipal and provincial assemblies and transform the National Assembly into a genuine parliament. In February 1993, the first direct, secret elections for the National Assembly and for provincial assemblies were held. Despite calls from opponents abroad for voters to register a protest by spoiling their ballot or not voting, the official results showed that 99.6% of the electorate voted, with 92.6% of votes cast valid. All 589 official candidates were elected. Delegates to the municipal assemblies of people’s power serve a two-year term. Delegates are directly nominated in neighbourhood meetings (the PCC does not put forward candidates), and ballot boxes are guarded by primary school children. Provincial delegates and national deputies are elected for a five-year term. The slate consists of up to 50% of the municipal delegates and the remainder selected by a national commission on the basis of proposals from the mass organizations. In the October 1997 elections, 97.6% of the electorate voted and 92.8% of the votes were valid (7.2% blank or spoiled).

Economic difficulties in the 1990s brought on by the loss of markets in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, together with higher oil prices because of the Gulf crisis, forced the government to impose emergency measures and declare a special period in peace time (1990-1994). Rationing was increased, petrol became scarce, the bureaucracy was slashed and several hundred arrests were made in a drive against corruption. In 1993, Cuba was hit on 13 March by a winter storm which caused an estimated US$1 bn in damage. Agricultural production, for both export and domestic consumption, was severely affected. In mid-1994, economic frustration and discontent boiled up and Cubans began to flee their country. Thousands left for Florida in a mass exodus similar to that of Mariel in 1980 on any craft they could invent. It was estimated that between mid-August and mid-September 30,000 Cubans had left the country, compared with 3656 in the whole of 1993. In contrast, the number of US visas issued from January to August was 2059 out of an agreed maximum annual quota of 20,000. Eventually the crisis forced President Clinton into an agreement whereby the USA was committed to accepting at least 20,000 Cubans a year, plus the next of kin of US citizens, while Cuba agreed to prevent further departures.

As the economic crisis persisted, the government adopted measures (some of which are outlined below) which opened up many sectors to private enterprise and recognized the dependence of much of the economy on dollars. The partial reforms did not eradicate the imbalances between the peso and the dollar economies, and shortages remained for those without access to hard currency.

Cuba then intensified its economic liberalization programme, speeding up the opening of farmers’ markets throughout the country and allowing farmers to sell at uncontrolled prices once their commitments to the state procurement system were fulfilled. Importantly, the reforms also allowed middlemen to operate. It had been the emergence of this profitable occupation which had provoked the government to close down the previous farmers’ market system in 1986. Markets in manufactured goods and handicrafts also opened and efforts were made to increase the number of self-employed.

From 1960 onwards, in the face of increasing hostility from the USA, Castro led Cuba into socialism and then Communism. Officials of the Batista regime were put on trial in ‘people’s courts’ and executed. The promised new elections were not held. The judiciary lost its independence when Castro assumed the right to appoint judges. The free press was closed or taken over. Trade unions lost their independence and became part of government. The University of Havana, a former focus of dissent, and professional associations, all lost their autonomy. The democratic constitution of 1940 was never reinstated. In 1960, the sugar centrales, the oil refineries and the foreign banks were nationalized, all US property was expropriated and the Central Planning Board (Juceplan) was established. The professional and property-owning middle classes began a steady exodus which drained the country of much of its skilled workers.

CIA-backed mercenaries and Cuban émigrés kept up a relentless barrage of attacks, but failed to achieve their objective. In March a French ship carrying arms to Cuba was sabotaged. At the burial of the victims, Castro first used the slogan, ‘Patria o Muerte’. Diplomatic relations were re-established with the USSR, North Korea and Vietnam, while China and Cuba signed mutual benefit treaties. Meanwhile, the USA cancelled Cuba’s sugar quota and put an embargo on all imports to Cuba.

At the beginning of 1961, the USA severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and encouraged Latin American countries to do likewise. This was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a fiasco which was to harden Castro’s political persuasion. On 14 April 1961, some 1400 Cuban émigrés, trained by the CIA in Miami and Guatemala, set off from Nicaragua to invade Cuba with the US Navy as escort. On 15 April, planes from Nicaragua bombed several Cuban airfields in an attempt to wipe out the air force. Seven Cuban airmen were killed in the raid, and at their funeral the next day, Fidel Castro addressed a mass rally in Havana and declared Cuba to be socialist. On 17 April the invasion flotilla landed at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), but the men were stranded on the beaches when the Cuban air force attacked their supply ships. Two hundred were killed and the rest surrendered within three days. The invaders’ aircraft also took a beating when 11 were shot down, including all the B-26 bombers flown from Nicaragua. A total of 1197 men were captured and eventually returned to the USA in exchange for US$53 million in food and medicine. In his May Day speech, Fidel Castro, who had personally taken control of the defence of Cuba, confirmed that the Cuban Revolution was socialist.

The US reaction was to isolate Cuba, with a full trade embargo and heavy pressure on other American countries to sever diplomatic relations. Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) and the OAS imposed economic sanctions. Crucially, however, across the border in both Canada and Mexico, governments refused to toe the line and maintained relations (a policy which has now borne fruit for many Canadian and Mexican companies at the expense of US businesses). Nevertheless, in 1961-1962, the trade embargo hit hard, shortages soon appeared and by March 1962 rationing had to be imposed.

At this stage, Cuba became entangled in the rivalry between the two superpowers: the USA and the USSR. In April 1962, Russian President Kruschev decided to send medium-range missiles to Cuba, which would be capable of striking anywhere in the USA, even though all Castro wanted were short-range missiles he could point at Miami to deter invasion. In October, President JF Kennedy ordered Soviet ships heading for Cuba to be stopped and searched for missiles in international waters. This episode, which became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, defused only by secret negotiations between JFK and Kruschev. Kennedy demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and arms from Cuba and imposed a naval blockade. Without consulting Castro and without his knowledge, Kruschev eventually agreed to have the missiles dismantled and withdrawn on condition that the West would guarantee a policy of non-aggression towards Cuba. In November, Kennedy suspended the naval blockade but reiterated US support for political and economic aggression towards Cuba. In the following year he made a speech in Costa Rica, in which he stated, “We will build a wall around Cuba”, and Central American countries agreed to isolate the island.

Castro’s decision to adopt Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Revolution was followed by the fusion of the 26 July Movement with the Communist Party, at that time known as the Popular Socialist Party (PSP). The PSP had opposed the Revolution until the final stages of the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship and it took several years and two purges before the ‘old’ Communists were expunged and the new Communist Party was united behind the new official ideology. In October 1965, a restructured Cuban Communist Party (PCC) was founded and Cuba has been Communist ever since.

Economic policy during the 1960s was largely unsuccessful in achieving its aims. After a spell as head of the Central Bank, Che Guevara was appointed Minister of Industry, a key position given that the government wanted to industrialize rapidly to reduce dependence on sugar. However, the crash programme, with help from the USSR, was a failure and had to be abandoned. Sugar was king again but productivity plummeted and there were poor harvests in 1963-1964. The whole nation was called upon to achieve a target of 10 million tonnes of sugar by 1970 and everyone spent time in the fields helping towards this goal. It was never reached and never has been, but the effort revealed distortions in the Cuban economy which in effect increased the island’s dependence on the Soviet Union. Castro jumped out of the frying pan into the fire: he escaped domination by the USA only to replace it with another superpower.

Even after the repeal of the Platt Amendment, the USA dominated the Cuban economy. Around two thirds of sugar exports went to the USA under a quota system at prices set by Washington; two thirds of Cuba’s imports came from the USA; foreign capital investment was largely from the USA and Cuba was effectively a client state. Yet, despite the money being made out of Cuba, its people suffered from grinding rural poverty, high unemployment, illiteracy and inadequate healthcare. The good life, as enjoyed by the socialites in the casinos and bars of Havana, highlighted the social inequalities in the country and politics was a mixture of authoritarian rule and corrupt democracy.

From 1924 to 1933 the ‘strong man’ Gerardo Machado ruled Cuba. He was elected in 1924 on a wave of popularity and set about diversifying the economy and investing in public works projects. However, a drastic fall in sugar prices in the late 1920s led to strikes and protests which he forcefully repressed. In 1928 he ‘persuaded’ Congress to grant him a second term of office, which was greeted with protests and violence from students, the middle classes and labour unions. Widespread Nationalist popular rebellion throughout Machado’s dictatorship was harshly repressed by the police force. The USA was reluctant to intervene again, but tried to negotiate a deal with its ambassador. The Nationalists called a general strike in protest at US interference and Machado finally went into exile. The violence did not abate, however, and there were more strikes, mob attacks and occupations of factories, which the new government was unable to quell. In September 1933, a revolt of non-commissioned officers including Fulgencio Batista, then a sergeant, deposed the government and installed a five-member committee chosen by the student movement, the Directorio Estudiantil. They chose as president a professor, Dr Ramón Grau San Martín, but he only lasted four months before Batista staged a coup. Batista then held power through presidential puppets until he was elected president himself in 1940.

Batista’s first period in power, 1933-1944, was characterized by Nationalist and populist policies, set against corruption and political violence. Batista himself was a mulatto from a poor background who had pulled himself up through the ranks of the military and retained the support of the armed forces. He was also supported by US and Cuban business interests while gaining control of the trade unions by passing social welfare legislation, building low cost housing and creating jobs with public works projects. The students and radical Nationalists remained opposed to him, however, and terrorism continued. In 1940, a new Constitution was passed by a constituent assembly dominated by Batista, which included universal suffrage and benefits for workers such as a minimum wage, pensions, social insurance and an eight-hour day.
In 1944, Batista lost the elections to the candidate of the radical Nationalists: Dr Ramón Grau San Martín, of the Partido Revolucionario Cubana-Auténtico, who held office from 1944-1948. His presidential term benefited from high sugar prices following the Second World War, which allowed corruption and political violence to continue unabated. Grau was followed into the presidency by his protégé, Carlos Prío Socarrás, 1948-1952, a term which was even more corrupt and depraved, until Batista, by then a self-promoted general, staged a military coup in 1952. Constitutional and democratic government was at an end. His harshly repressive dictatorship was brought to a close by Fidel Castro in January 1959, after an extraordinary and heroic three-year campaign, mostly in the Sierra Maestra, with a guerrilla force reduced at one point to 12 men.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Cuba began its transformation into a slave plantation society. After the French Revolution, there were slave revolts in the French colony of Haiti, which became the first independent black republic. French sugar planters fled what had been the most profitable colony in the Caribbean and settled across the water in Cuba, bringing their expertise with them. Cuba soon became a major sugar exporter and, after 1793, slaves were imported in huge numbers to work the plantations. The island was under absolute military control with a colonial elite that made its money principally from sugar. The tobacco monopoly was abolished in 1816 and Cuba was given the right to trade with the world in 1818. Independence elsewhere in the Spanish Empire bred ambitions, however, and a strong movement for independence was quelled by Spain in 1823. By this time the blacks outnumbered the whites in the island; there were several slave rebellions and little by little the Creoles (or Spaniards born in Cuba) made common cause with them. On the other hand, there was also a movement for annexation by the USA, Cuba’s major trading partner, supported by many slave owners who had a common interest with the southern states in the American Civil War. The defeat of the South and the abolition of slavery in the USA ended support for annexation.

By the 1860s Cuba was producing about a third of the world’s sugar and was heavily dependent on African slaves to do so, supplemented by indentured Chinese labourers in the 1850s and 1860s. Although Spain signed treaties under British pressure to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade in 1817 and 1835, they were completely ignored by the colony and an estimated 600,000 African slaves were imported by 1867. Independence from Spain became a burning issue in Cuba as Spain remained intransigent and refused to consider political reforms which would give the colony more autonomy within the empire.

On 10 October 1868, a Creole landowner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, issued the Grito de Yara, a proclamation of independence and a call to arms, while simultaneously freeing his slaves. The first war of independence was a 10-year rebellion against Spain in the eastern part of the island between 1868 and 1878, but it gained little save a modest move towards the abolition of slavery. In 1870, the Moret Law freed all children of slaves born after 1868 and any slave over 60, but complete abolition was not achieved until 1886. In 1878, the Convention of Zanjón brought the civil war to an end. This enabled Cubans to elect representatives to the Spanish cortes (parliament) in 1879, but did not suppress the desire for independence. Many national heroes were created during this period who have become revolutionary icons in the struggle against domination by a foreign power. Men such as de Céspedes, Máximo Gómez and the mulatto General Antonio Maceo have inspired generations of Cuban patriots and are still revered with statues and street names in nearly every town and city on the island. One consequence of the war was the destruction of much agricultural land and the ruin of many sugar planters. US interests began to take over the sugar plantations and the sugar mills and, as sugar beet became more important in Europe, so Cuba became more dependent on the market for its main crop in the USA.

From 1895 to 1898, rebellion flared up again in the second war of independence under the young poet and revolutionary, José Martí, who had organized the movement from exile in the USA, together with the old guard of Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez. José Martí led the invasion but was killed in an ambush in May 1895 when the war had barely begun, and Maceo was killed in 1896. Despite fierce fighting throughout the island, neither the Nationalists nor the Spanish could gain the upper hand. However, the USA was now concerned for its investments in Cuba and was considering its strategic interests within the region. When the US battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour on 15 February 1898, killing 260 crew, this was made a pretext for declaring war on Spain. Spain offered the independence fighters a truce but they chose instead to help the USA to defeat the colonial power. American forces (which included Colonel Theodore Roosevelt) were landed, a squadron blockaded Havana and defeated the Spanish fleet at Santiago de Cuba. In December 1898 peace was signed and US forces occupied the island. The Nationalists had gained independence from Spain but found themselves under US military occupation for four years and then with only limited independence granted to them by the USA.

During the occupation, the USA put the Cuban administration and economy back to rights. It eliminated a famine, introduced improved sanitation and helped to eradicate yellow fever with the scientific discoveries of a Cuban doctor, Carlos J Finlay. State education was introduced, the judiciary was reformed and an electoral system for local and national government was introduced. In 1901, an elected assembly approved a liberal constitution which separated Church and state and guaranteed universal adult male suffrage.

The Republic of Cuba was proclaimed in 1902 and the Government was handed over to its first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, the elected candidate of José Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party, on 20 May. However, the new Republic was constrained by the Platt Amendment to the constitution, passed by the US Congress, which clearly made it a protectorate of the USA. The USA retained naval bases at Río Hondo and Guantánamo Bay and reserved the right of intervention in Cuban domestic affairs, but granted the island a handsome import preference for its sugar. The USA intervened several times to settle quarrels by rival political factions but, to quell growing unrest and a reassertion of pro-independence and revolutionary forces, repealed the Platt Amendment in 1934. The USA formally relinquished the right to intervene but retained its naval base at Guantánamo. (The lease on Guantánamo Bay expires in 2033.) Resentment against the USA for its political and economic dominance of the island lingered and was a powerful stimulus for the Nationalist Revolution of the 1950s.

The recorded history of the Caribbean islands begins with the arrival of Christopher Columbus’ fleet in 1492. Knowledge of the native peoples who inhabited Cuba before and at the time of his arrival is largely derived from the accounts of contemporary Spanish writers and from archaeological examinations as there is no evidence of indigenous written records.

The Amerindians encountered by Columbus in Cuba and the other Greater Antilles had no overall tribal name but organized themselves in a series of villages or local chiefdoms, each of which had its own tribal name. The name now used, ‘Arawak’, was not in use then. The term was used by the Amerindians of the Guianas, a group who had spread into Trinidad, but their territory was not explored until nearly another century later. The use of the generic term ‘Arawak’ to describe the Amerindians Columbus encountered arose because of linguistic similarities with the Arawaks of the mainland. It is therefore surmised that migration took place many centuries before Columbus’ arrival, but that the two groups were not in contact at that time. The time of the latest migration from the mainland, and consequently, the existence of the island Arawaks, is in dispute, with some academics tracing it to about the time of Christ (the arrival of the Saladoids) and others to AD 1000 (the Ostionoids).

The inhabitants of Cuba and the other Greater Antilles were generally referred to as Taínos, but there were many sub-groupings. The earliest known inhabitants of the region, the Siboneys, migrated from Florida (some say Mexico) and spread throughout the Bahamas and the major islands. Most archaeological evidence of their settlements has been found near the shore, along bays or streams, where they lived in small groups. The largest discovered settlement has been one of 100 inhabitants in Cuba. They were hunters and gatherers, living on fish and other seafood, small rodents, iguanas, snakes and birds. They gathered roots and wild fruits, such as guava, guanabana and mamey, but did not cultivate plants. They worked with primitive tools made out of stone, shell, bone or wood, for hammering, chipping or scraping, but had no knowledge of pottery. The Siboneys were eventually absorbed by the advance of the Arawaks migrating from the south, who had made more technological advances in agriculture, arts and crafts.

The people now known as Arawaks migrated from the Guianas to Trinidad and on through the island arc to Cuba. Their population expanded because of the natural fertility of the islands and the abundance of fruit and seafood, helped by their agricultural skills in cultivating and improving wild plants and their excellent boat-building and fishing techniques. They were healthy, tall, good looking and lived to a ripe old age. It is estimated that up to eight million may have lived on the island of Hispaniola alone, but there was always plenty of food for all.

Their society was essentially communal and organized around families. The smaller islands were particularly egalitarian, but in the larger ones, where village communities of extended families numbered up to 500 people, there was an incipient class structure. Typically, each village had a headman, called a cacique, whose duty it was to represent the village when dealing with other tribes, to settle family disputes and organize defence. However, he had no powers of coercion and was often little more than a nominal head. The position was largely hereditary, with the eldest son of the eldest sister having rights of succession, but women could and did become caciques. In the larger communities, there was some delegation of responsibility to the senior men, but economic activities were usually organized along family lines, and their power was limited.

The division of labour was usually based on age and sex. The men would clear and prepare the land for agriculture and be responsible for defence of the village, while women cultivated the crops and were the major food producers, also making items such as mats, baskets, bowls and fishing nets. Women were in charge of raising the children, especially the girls, while the men taught the boys traditional customs, skills and rites.

The Taínos hunted for some of their food, but fishing was more important and most of their settlements were close to the sea. Fish and shellfish were their main sources of protein and they had many different ways of catching them – from hands, baskets or nets to poisoning, shooting or line fishing. Cassava was a staple food, which they had successfully learned to leach of its poisonous juice. They also grew yams, maize, cotton, arrowroot, peanuts, beans, cacao and spices, rotating their crops to prevent soil erosion.

Cotton was used to make clothing and hammocks (never before seen by Europeans), while the calabash tree was used to make ropes and cords, baskets and roofing. Plants were used for medicinal and spiritual purposes, and cosmetics such as face and body paint. Also important, both to the Arawaks and later to the Europeans, was the cultivation of tobacco, as a drug and as a means of exchange. It is still of major economic importance in Cuba today.

They had no writing, no beasts of burden, no wheeled vehicles and no hard metals, although they did have some alluvial gold for personal ornament. The abundance of food allowed them time to develop their arts and crafts and they were skilled in woodwork and pottery. They had polished stone tools, but also carved shell implements for manioc preparation or as fish hooks. Coral manioc graters have also been found. Their boatbuilding techniques were noted by Columbus, who marvelled at their canoes of up to 75 ft in length, carrying up to 50 people, made of a single tree trunk in one piece. It took two months to fell a tree by gradually burning and chipping it down, and many more to make the canoe.

The Arawaks had three main deities, evidence of which have been found in stone and conch carvings in many of the Lesser Antilles as well as the well-populated Greater Antilles, although their relative importance varied according to the island. The principal male god was Yocahú, yoca being the word for cassava and hú meaning ‘giver of’. It is believed that the Amerindians associated this deity’s power to provide cassava with the mystery of the volcanoes, for all the carvings – the earliest out of shells and the later ones of stone – are conical. The Yocahú cult was wiped out by the Spaniards, but it is thought to have existed from about AD 200.

The main female deity was a fertility goddess, often referred to as Atabeyra, but she is thought to have had several names relating to her other roles as goddess of the moon, mother of the sea, the tides and the springs, and the goddess of childbirth. In carvings she is usually depicted as a squatting figure with her hands up to her chin, sometimes in the act of giving birth.

A third deity is a dog god, named Opiyel-Guaobiran, meaning ‘the dog deity who takes care of the souls of the immediately deceased and is the son of the spirit of darkness’. Again, carvings of a dog’s head or whole body have been found of shell or stone, which were often used to induce narcotic trances. Many of the carvings have holes and Y-shaped passages which would have been put to the nose to snuff narcotics and induce a religious trance in the shaman or priest, who could then ascertain the status of a departed soul for a recently bereaved relative.

One custom which aroused interest in the Spaniards was the ball game, not only for the sport and its ceremonial features, but because the ball was made of rubber and bounced, a phenomenon that had not previously been seen in Europe. Roman Catholicism soon eradicated the game, but archaeological remains have been found in several islands, notably in Puerto Rico, but also in Hispaniola. Excavations in the Greater Antilles have revealed earth embankments and rows of elongated upright stones surrounding plazas or courts, pavements and stone balls. These are called bateyes, juegos de indios, juegos de bola, cercados or corrales de indios. Batey was the aboriginal name for the ball game, the rubber ball itself and also the court where it was played. The word is still used to designate the cleared area in front of houses in the country.

The ball game had religious and ceremonial significance but it was a sport and bets and wagers were important. It was played by two teams of up to 20 or 30 players, who had to keep the ball in the air by means of their hips, shoulders, heads, elbows and other parts of their body, but never with their hands. The aim was to bounce the ball in this manner to the opposing team until it hit the ground. Men and women played, but not usually in mixed sex games. Great athleticism was required and it is clear that the players practised hard to perfect their skill, several, smaller practice courts having been built in larger settlements. The game was sometimes played before the village made an important decision, and the prize could be a sacrificial victim, usually a prisoner, granted to the victor.

The Amerindians in Cuba were unable to resist the Spanish invasion and were soon wiped out by disease, cruelty and murder, with only a few communities surviving in remote areas such as in the mountains behind Baracoa. The Spanish exacted tribute and forced labour while allowing their herds of cattle and pigs to destroy the Amerindians’ unfenced fields and clearings. Transportation to the mines resulted in shifts in the native population which could not be fed from the surrounding areas and starvation became common. The 500 years since Columbus’ arrival have served to obliterate practically all the evidence of the indigenous civilization in Cuba. Nevertheless, the legacy of the Taínos remains in names of places (Havana, Baracoa, Bayamo, Camagüey), rivers (Toa, Duaba, Yumurí, Caonao), domestic artefacts (bohío – farmer’s cottage, hamaca – hammock, cohiba – tobacco) and in some areas farmers still use the same tools and plant the same crops (beans, yucca, maize) according to the four lunar phases as their forefathers did. Archaeologists and anthropologists have made significant discoveries around the country, but particularly around Baracoa, where a Taíno museum has recently been opened in a cave.

A spate of bombings targeted at the tourist industry caused alarm in 1997. The first was in April at the hotels Meliá Cohiba in Havana, followed by one in July at the Capri and another at the Nacional. The Meliá Cohiba was hit again in August, while in September three hotels on the seafront were bombed and an Italian was killed by flying glass. In an extraordinarily successful piece of detective work, it only took about a week for the Interior Ministry to announce it was holding a former paratrooper from El Salvador, Raúl Ernesto Cruz León, who confessed publicly on TV to working as a mercenary and planting six bombs. He did not say who he was working for, but it was assumed in Cuba that the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was behind the bombings. Two Salvadorians were sentenced to death in 1999 for their part in the 1997 bombing campaign.

1997 was the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, whose remains were returned to Cuba in July. The country held a week of official mourning for Che and his comrades in arms. Vast numbers filed past their remains in Havana and Santa Clara, where they were laid to rest on 17 October. In December 1998 the remains of the 10 more guerrillas killed in Bolivia in 1967 were also interred in the Che Guevara memorial in Santa Clara . They included Haydée Tamara Bunke, known as Tania, who was believed to be Che’s lover.

In January 1998, the Pope visited Cuba for the first time. During his four-day visit he held open-air masses around the country, attended by thousands of fascinated Cubans encouraged to attend by Castro. The world’s press was represented in large numbers to record the Pope’s preaching against Cuba’s record on human rights and abortion while also condemning the US trade embargo preventing food and medicines reaching the needy. The visit was a public relations success for both Castro and the Pope. Shortly afterwards, 200 prisoners were pardoned and released.

In November 1999 a six-year-old boy, Elián González, was rescued from the sea off Florida, the only survivor from a boatload of illegal migrants which included his mother and her boyfriend. He was looked after by distant relatives in Miami and quickly became the centrepiece of a new row between Cuban émigrés, supported by right-wing Republicans, and Cuba. The US Attorney General, Janet Reno, supported the decision, by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on 5 January 2000, that the boy should be repatriated and reunited with his father in Cuba by 14 January, but she postponed the deadline indefinitely to allow for legal challenges. Mass demonstrations were held in Havana in support of Elián’s return but legal manoeuvres by US politicians stalled any progress and caused further disputes. Amid enormous controversy, the US authorities seized Elián on 22 April and reunited him with his father, who had travelled to the USA earlier in the month with his second wife and baby. The family finally took him home, amid celebrations in Cuba, where the boy had become a symbol of resistance to the USA.

The election of George W Bush to the US presidency was bad news for any prospects of a thaw in relations with the USA. A crackdown on spies was ordered and in June 2001, five Cubans (arrested in 1998) were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and murder in a US Federal Court in Miami. Castro referred to them as ‘heroes’, who he said had not been putting the USA in danger but had been infiltrating Cuban-American anti-Castro groups and defending Cuba. Their faces are on billboards across Cuba and their case is still part of the propaganda war between Cuba and the USA. The prisoners known as the ‘Miami Five’ are being held in separate prisons across the USA and are being denied access to their families because their wives have been denied US visas.

However, 2001 saw the first commercial export of food from the USA to Cuba, with a shipment of corn from Louisiana to Alimport, Cuba’s food-buying agency. The debate on the lifting of sanctions was fuelled by the visit of former US President Jimmy Carter in 2002 and an ever-increasing number of Americans travelled to the island, legally or illegally. However, the thaw came to a grinding halt in 2003 when Castro had three ferry hijackers executed and imprisoned 75 journalists, rights activists and dissidents, many of whom had allegedly been encouraged by the head of the US Interests Section in Havana. Amid universal condemnation, the EU announced a review of its relations with Cuba and curtailed high-level governmental visits. In 2002, Osvaldo Paya, leader of the dissident Varela project (Félix Varela was an independence hero), delivered a petition with 11,020 signatures to the National Assembly demanding sweeping political reforms, but it was dismissed. Undeterred, Paya submitted a second petition in October 2003 with 14,384 signatures, calling for a referendum on freedom of speech and assembly and amnesty for political prisoners. At the same time, the US administration announced a clampdown on its citizens travelling to the island. Immigration and Customs officers were ordered to carry out the letter of the law, with thousands of baggage searches and the first prosecutions were announced. In January 2004, the USA cancelled semi-annual migration talks as relations deteriorated. With 2004 being another presidential election year in the USA, Cuba knew it was in for a rocky ride, but this time Bush hit out at ordinary Cubans as well as their government. Remittances were sharply curtailed and Cuban Americans were limited in their travel to the island, with only one trip permitted every three years to see a close relative, even if they were dying.

In August 2006 Fidel Castro had his 80th birthday. The occasion was to have been marked by national celebrations, parades and speeches, but shortly beforehand Castro made the surprise announcement that he was about to undergo major abdominal surgery and that he was handing over the reins of power temporarily to his brother, Raúl. The nature of his illness, operation and subsequent condition was shrouded in secrecy, with rumours of terminal illness and even his death circulating in Cuba and in Miami. Coinciding with Fidel dropping out of the limelight, in the USA the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress and there were moves towards closer relations. Raúl made conciliatory noises to the USA, which the Bush administration rebuffed. By mid-2007, Fidel was well enough to receive foreign dignitaries and write articles on world issues. Nevertheless, he was still not seen in public and in 2008 the temporary handover of power became permanent. Raúl initially made attempts to liberalize the economy, allowing certain materialistic freedoms for Cubans with access to foreign exchange (permission to own laptops, stay in hotels. etc) and introduced bonuses for workers who exceed their targets, but was stymied by the arrival of three devastating hurricanes, which between them caused US$10 bn in damage. This, together with the world financial crisis and a dramatic fall in the price of nickel, completely stalled the economy and seriously hampered the government’s room for manoeuvre. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 2009 was a low-key, no-frills, low- budget affair. Many factories had to close or cut output, energy was rationed, transport restricted and imports and budgets slashed as further austerity was required.

The succession to the Castro regime had long been thought to lie with the group of protegées groomed by Fidel, but in 2009 Raúl took Cuba and the world by surprise by replacing ten members of the Council of Ministers and other key personnel. Fidelista loyalists were removed while army and communist party officials were promoted to run the economy. Hopes were raised when US President Obama took office and lifted travel restrictions on Cuban Americans visiting the island. However, he kept the US trade embargo in place to press Cuba to improve human rights and political freedoms. Castro agreed to talks on migration and other issues, but refused to make concessions.

The dictator, Batista, was opposed by many, but none more effective than the young lawyer, Fidel Castro, the son of immigrants from Galicia and born in Cuba in 1926. He saw José Martí as his role model and aimed to continue the Revolution Martí had started in 1895, following his ideals. In 1953, the 100th anniversary of José Martí’s birth, Castro and a committed band of about 160 revolutionaries attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26 July. The attack failed and although Castro and his brother Raúl escaped, they were later captured and put on trial. Fidel used the occasion to make an impassioned speech, denouncing corruption in the ruling class and the need for political freedom and economic independence. The speech has gone down in history for its final phrase, “History will absolve me”, and a revised version, smuggled out of prison on the Isle of Pines, became the basis of a reform programme. In 1955, the Castros were given an amnesty and went to Mexico. There Fidel continued to work on his essentially Nationalist revolutionary programme, called the 26 July Movement, which called for radical social and economic reforms and a return to the democracy of Cuba’s 1940 constitution. He met another man of ideas, an Argentine doctor called Ernesto Guevara , who sailed with him and his brother Raúl and a band of 82 like-minded revolutionaries, back to Cuba on 2 December 1956. Their campaign began in the Sierra Maestra in the east of Cuba and after years of fierce fighting Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on 1 January 1959. Fidel Castro, to universal popular acclaim, entered Havana and assumed control of the island.

Cuba was visited by Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) during his first voyage to find a westerly route to the Orient on 27 October 1492, and he made another brief stop two years later on his way from Hispaniola to Jamaica. Columbus did not realize it was an island when he landed; he had heard from the inhabitants of the Bahamas, where he first made landfall, that there were larger islands to the south where there was gold, which he hoped was Japan. He arrived on the north coast of ‘Colba’, but found little gold. He did, however, note the Amerindians’ practice of puffing at a large, burning roll of leaves, which they called tobacos or cohiba.

The Arawaks told Columbus of the more aggressive Carib tribe and he headed off towards the eastern islands to find them, discovering La Isla Española , or Hispaniola, which occupied the Spanish for the next few years with attempted settlements, feuds, rebellions and other troubles. On future expeditions, more settlers were brought from Spain to Hispaniola; adventurers who wanted to get rich quick and return to Spain. Although most died of tropical diseases, enough survived to impart their own European viruses on the Amerindians, decimating the local population. The Spaniards also demanded a constant supply of Amerindian labour which they were ill equipped to provide, having previously lived in a subsistence barter economy with no experience of regular work. The Spaniards’ cruel treatment of the native inhabitants led to many of them losing the will to live. On the other hand, the need for a steady supply of labour pushed the Spanish into further exploration of the Indies. Slavers went from one island to another in search of manpower. Puerto Rico was conquered in 1508, Jamaica in 1509 and Cuba in 1511. From there they moved on to the mainland to trade in slaves, gold and other commodities.

Cuba was first circumnavigated by Sebastián de Ocampo in 1508, but it was Diego Velázquez who conquered it in 1511 and founded several towns, called villas, including Havana. From Cuba, Velázquez sent out two expeditions in 1517-1518 to investigate the Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico. On the basis of their information he petitioned the Spanish Crown for permission to set up a base there prior to conquest and settlement. However, before the authorization came through from Spain, his commander, Hernán Cortés, set off without permission with 600 men, 16 horses, 14 cannon and 13 muskets to conquer Mexico, leaving Velázquez in the lurch.

The first African slaves were imported to Cuba in 1526. Sugar was introduced soon after but was not important until the last decade of the 16th century. When the British took Jamaica in 1655 a number of Spanish settlers fled to Cuba, already famous for its cigars. Tobacco was then made a strict monopoly of Spain in 1717 and a coffee plant was introduced in 1748. The British, under Lord Albemarle and Admiral Pocock, captured Havana and held the island from 1762-1763, but it was returned to Spain in exchange for Florida. Up until this point, the colony had been important largely as a refuelling depot for Spanish ships crossing the Atlantic, but the British occupation and the temporary lifting of Spanish restrictions showed the local landowning class the economic potential of trading their commodities with England and North America.

In 1996, a US election year, Cuba faced another crackdown by the US administration. In February, Cuba shot down two light aircraft piloted by Miami émigrés, allegedly over Cuban air space and implicitly confirmed by the findings of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) report in June. The attack provoked President Clinton into reversing his previous opposition to key elements of the Helms-Burton bill to tighten and internationalize the US embargo on Cuba and on 12 March he signed into law the Cuban Freedom and Democratic Solidarity Act. The new legislation allows legal action against any company or individual benefiting from properties expropriated by the Cuban government after the Revolution. Claims on property nationalized by the Cuban state extended to persons who did not hold US citizenship at the time of the expropriation, thus including Batista supporters who fled at the start of the Revolution. It brought universal condemnation: Canada and Mexico (NAFTA partners), the EU, Russia, China, the Caribbean community and the Río Group of Latin American countries all protested that it was unacceptable to extend sanctions outside the USA to foreign companies and their employees who do business with Cuba. In 1997, the EU brought a formal complaint against the USA at the World Trade Organization (WTO), but suspended it when an EU/US agreement was reached under which Clinton was to ask the US Congress to amend Title IV of the law (concerning the denial of US entry visas to employees and shareholders of ‘trafficking companies’). Clinton was also to carry on waiving Title III (authorizing court cases against ‘trafficking’ of expropriated assets).

In 1999, Human Rights Watch produced a report that strongly criticized the US embargo, arguing that it had helped Castro to develop and maintain his repressive regime, restricting freedom of speech, movement and association. It had also divided the international community, alienating Washington’s potential allies who, it argued, should be working together to push for change in Cuba. The same year, the UN Human Rights Commission expressed concern about ‘continued repression’ in Cuba, following the trial and conviction of four Cubans for sedition. They were jailed for receiving funds and instructions from the USA aimed at obstructing foreign investment. A civil suit brought in Cuba claimed US$181 bn in damages from the US government for its aggressive policing over the previous 40 years, causing the deaths of 3478 Cubans. The case was seen partially as a retaliation for the Helms-Burton Law.

When the Spanish arrived at the end of the 15th century, more than 90% of Cuba was covered with forest. When Fray Bartolomé de las Casas visited the island, he said “La isla tiene de luengo cerca de 300 leguas y se puede andar toda por debajo de los árboles” (the island is 300 leagues long and you can walk the length of it beneath the trees). However, clearance for cattle raising and sugar cane reduced this proportion to 54% by 1890 and 14% by 1959, although reafforestation since the Revolution has increased this figure. Some 75% of the land is now savannah or plains, 18% mountains and 4% swamps. The mesophytic semi-deciduous tropical woodland which covered most low-lying areas was hardest hit by forest clearance. Besides semi-deciduous woodland, vegetation types include rainforest, coastal and upland scrub, distinctive limestone vegetation found in the Sierra de los Organos and similar areas, savannah vegetation found on nutrient-deficient white silica sands, pine forests, xerophytic coastal limestone woodland, mangroves and other bird-rich coastal wetlands.

Cuba is characterized by extraordinarily high rates of biodiversity and endemism, particularly concentrated in four regions: the Montañas de Moa-Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa, which have the greatest diversity in all the Caribbean and are among the highest in the world, and 30% of the endemic species on the island; Parque Nacional Sierra de los Organos and the Reserva de la Biósfera Sierra del Rosario come a close second, with high rates of endemism, followed closely by the Reserva Ecológica del Macizo de Guamuhaya. There is a high proportion of endemic species, found only in Cuba, one region of Cuba, or in the extreme case of some snail species, only on one small mountain in the Sierra de los Organos. Around half the plant species, 90% of the insects and molluscs, 82% of the reptiles and 74 bird species are endemic.

Why the high proportion of endemics? Cuba has a five million-year history as an isolated land mass, with species following their own evolutionary path. There are also a number of specialized environments with geological or soil constraints such as chemical toxicity, poor water retention, low nutrient retention, on ultrabasic igneous rocks, silica sands and limestones. A catalogue is in preparation of all the flora and fauna found in Cuba’s protected areas as well as a large percentage of those outside the reserves.

Geologically at least, Cuba is part of North America; the boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates runs east–west under the Caribbean Sea to the south of the island. Along the plate margin is a deep underwater rift valley, which runs between Cuba and Jamaica. This feature is quite close to the Cuban coast to the south of the Sierra Maestra, with water plunging to 6000 m only a few miles offshore. Earth movements along the plate boundary make the eastern region of Cuba the most earthquake-prone part of the country, with earthquakes in Bayamo in 1551 and Santiago de Cuba in 1932.

Current plate movements are pushing Cuba to the west and the Caribbean plate to the east. What is now the Sierra Maestra in southern Cuba was probably joined 40 million years ago to geologically similar areas on the north coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Plate movements since then have caused a displacement of around 400 km. Cuba is also being tilted gradually to the north. The northern coastline is gradually emerging from the sea. Old coral reefs have been brought to the surface, and now form much of the coastline, so that much of the northern coast consists of coral limestone cliffs and sandy beaches. A short way inland, old cliff lines marking stages of coastal emergence form a series of coral terraces, one of which runs just northeast of the Hotel Nacional in Havana. There are well-developed series of old cliff lines and coral terraces on the southeast tip of the island near Baracoa and to the west of Santiago near Cabo Cruz. By contrast the southern coastline is being gradually submerged, producing a series of wetlands and mangroves running from the Ensenada de Cortés in the west to the Gulf of Guacanayabo in the east, with fewer sandy beaches than the north of the island.

During the glacial periods of the last million years, sea levels worldwide fell by about 120 m; as much of the world’s water was locked up in the northern ice sheets. The shallow seas which now form Cuba’s continental shelf were dry land, and the coastline generally followed the line of Cuba’s 4000-plus offshore islands: the Sabana island chain to the north and the Canarreos and Jardines de la Reina to the south. At this time, central Cuba was separated from the Bahamas by a narrow channel, about 32 km wide.

Cave systems which formed during glacial periods in what were then coastal limestone plains have since been flooded by the sea. In coastal areas such as the western Guanahacabibes peninsula and Playa Girón, there are small, deep lakes known to English-speaking geologists as Blue Holes where these submerged cave systems meet the surface.

There is no clear agreement about Cuba’s more distant geological origins. The curve of the island follows the line of a collision in the Cretaceous period around 100 million years ago between an arc of volcanic islands and the stable Bahamas platform which then formed the southern edge of the North American plate. There is disagreement about whether this arc faced north or south, and about how the collision took place. But the powerful forces associated with the process produced a complex pattern of folding and faulting, while many rocks were greatly altered by heat and pressure. Many of Cuba’s rocks predate this collision. These include the Caribbean’s only pre-Cambrian rocks, metamorphics more than 900 million years old in the province of Santa Clara; and the Jurassic limestones, around 160 million years old, which form the Sierra de los Organos.

After the collision, what is now Cuba was submerged for long periods, and there were new deposits of limestone and other rocks. For most of the tertiary period, from 35 million years ago, Cuba was a series of large islands and shallow seas, emerging as a single land mass by the start of the Pliocene period five million years ago. Limestones of various types cover about two-thirds of the island. In most areas, there is a flat or gently rolling landscape. The most common soils, both formed on limestone, are terra rossa, stained bright red by iron oxides, and vertisols, black, fertile, and developing deep cracks during the dry season.

There are three main mountain areas in the island. In the west, the Cordillera de Guaniguanico is divided into the Sierra del los Organos in the west, with thick deposits of limestone which have developed a distinctive landscape of steep-sided flat-topped mountains; and the Sierra del Rosario in the east, made up partly of limestones and partly of lavas and other igneous rocks. Another mountainous area in central Cuba includes the Escambray mountains north of Trinidad, a double dome structure made up of igneous and metamorphic rocks, including marble.

The Sierra Maestra in the east has Cuba’s highest mountains, rising to Pico Turquino (1974 m) and a different geological history, with some rocks formed in an arc of volcanic activity around 50 million years ago. Older rocks include marble, and other metamorphics. The country’s most important mineral deposits are in this area; nickel mined near Moa is the third largest foreign currency earner, after tourism and sugar.

For those interested in further information on the physical and human geography of Cuba, the Nuevo Atlas Nacional de Cuba (Geocuba, Calle F y 13, Havana, T7-323494) provides a beautifully produced series of detailed thematic maps on every possible topic down to the distribution of ants and spiders, with informative commentaries.

For a cheap meal you are better off trying the Cuban version of fast-food restaurants, such as El Rápido, or Burgui, or try a cafetería, of which there are many all round the island. As well as chicken and chips or burgers, they offer a ‘wide’ range of sandwiches: cheese, ham, or cheese and ham, but they do come in different sizes. A sandwich in a restaurant or bar in Havana costs about CUC$4, a coffee costs CUC$1. In a provincial town you can pay as little as CUC$2 for a sandwich and beer for lunch. Breakfast and one other meal may be sufficient if you fill in with street or ‘dollar shop’ snacks. All towns and cities have peso street stalls for sandwiches, pizza and snacks; change about CUC$10 for a two-week stay if planning to avoid restaurants. In out-of-the-way places, you will be able to pay for food in pesos, but generally you will be charged in CUC$.

Paladares are privately owned restaurants, licensed and taxed and limited to 12 chairs, as well as having employment restrictions. Some very good family-run businesses have been set up, offering a three-course meal in Havana for CUC$10-20 per person, less than that outside the capital. Things like olives and coffee are usually charged as extras, be sure to check what the meal includes. They are not allowed to have lobster or shrimp on the menu as these are reserved for hotels and the export market. However, if you ask, there are often items available which are not on the menu. Remember that if someone guides you to a paladar he will expect a commission, so you end up paying more for your food. There are also illegal paladares, which will serve meals with meat for CUC$3-5 per person. We do not list them. The cheapest, legal, way of getting a decent meal is by eating in a casa particular. This is generally of excellent quality in plentiful, even vast, proportions, with the advantage that they will cook whatever you want. Vegetarians can be catered for. They usually charge CUC$6-10 for a meal, chicken and pork is cheaper than fish, while some casa owners seem to have access to all sorts of delicacies (illegal of course). Breakfast is usually CUC$3-5 and far better value than in a state hotel. You can negotiate a package of dinner, bed and breakfast which can give good value. While quality and style of cooking naturally varies, as a general rule you will get fresher food in a casa particular than you will in a restaurant or paladar, both of which now have the reputation of recycling meals and reheating leftovers.

State-owned ‘dollar’ restaurants are recognizable by the credit card stickers on the door, where meals are about CUC$10-40, paid only in CUC$. Some can be quite good and there are variations in menus, so you can find Italian, Spanish or French restaurants. Be warned that the Cuban idea of Chinese food is unlike anything you might find in your home country and very sweet. You get what you pay for, and at the cheap end of the market you can expect poor quality, limited availability of ingredients and disinterested staff. Generally, although restaurants have improved in the last few years, the food in Cuba is not very exciting. Restaurants are more innovative in Havana than elsewhere and some of the paladares are eccentric in their tastes. Always check restaurant prices in advance and then your bill. Discrepancies occur in both the state and private sector. Resort hotels tend to serve buffet meals, which can get tedious after a while, but breakfast here, and in large, urban hotels where buffets are served, is usually good and plentiful and you can stock up for the day. Breakfast in other hotels can be particularly slow. If not eating at a buffet, service, no matter what standard of restaurant or hotel, can be very slow (even if you are the only customers).

For vegetarians the choice is very limited, normally only cheese sandwiches, spaghetti, pizzas, salads, bananas and omelettes. Even beans (and congris) are often cooked with meat or in meat fat. If you are staying at a casa particular or eating in a paladar, they will usually prepare meatless meals for you with advance warning. Always ask for beans to be cooked in vegetable oil. Some vegetarians even recommend taking your own oil and lending it to the cook so that you can be absolutely sure that lard has not been used. Hotels usually have quite extravagant all-you-can-eat buffet spreads you can choose from.

The most common affliction of travellers to any country is probably diarrhoea and the same is true of Cuba. Tap water is good in most areas of the country, but bottled water is widely available and recommended. Swimming in sea or river water that has been contaminated by sewage can be a cause of diarrhoea; ask locally if it is safe. Diarrhoea may also be caused by viruses, bacteria (such as E-coli), protozoal (such as giardia), salmonella and cholera. It may be accompanied by vomiting or by severe abdominal pain. Any kind of diarrhoea responds well to the replacement of water and salts. Sachets of rehydration salts can be bought in most chemists and can be dissolved in boiled water. If the symptoms persist, consult a doctor. There is no malaria in Cuba but dengue fever has been reported and there are lots of mosquitoes in the wetlands, so take insect repellent and avoid being bitten as much as possible. Sleep off the ground and use a mosquito net and some kind of insecticide. Remember that DEET (Di-ethyltoluamide) is the gold standard. Apply the repellent every 4-6 hrs but more often if you are sweating heavily. If a non-DEET product is used, check who tested it. Validated products (tested at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) include Mosiguard, Non-DEET Jungle formula and non-DEET Autan. If you want to use citronella remember that it must be applied very frequently (ie hourly) to be effective. The climate is hot; Cuba is a tropical country and protection against the sun will be needed. To reduce the risk of sunburn and skin cancer, make sure you pack high-factor sun cream, light-coloured loose clothing and a hat.

Medical service is no longer free for foreign visitors in areas where there are international clinics that charge in CUC$ (credit cards accepted). Visitors requiring medical attention will be sent to them. Emergencies are handled on an ad hoc basis. Make sure you have adequate insurance . Remember you cannot dial any toll-free numbers abroad so make sure you have a contact number. Charges are generally lower than those in Western countries. According to latest reports, visitors are still treated free of charge in parts of the country away from Havana, with the exception of tourist enclaves with on-site medical services. Doctors and health facilities in major cities are listed in the Directory sections of this book.

http://www.btha.org British Travel Health Association. http://www.cdc.gov US government site that gives excellent advice on travel health and details of disease outbreaks. http://www.fco.gov.uk British Foreign and Commonwealth Office travel site has useful information on each country, people, climate and a list of UK embassies/consulates. http://www.fitfortravel.scot.nhs.uk A-Z of vaccine/health advice for each country. http://www.numberonehealth.co.uk Travel screening services, vaccine and travel health advice, email/SMS text vaccine reminders and screens returned travellers for tropical diseases.

There are no vaccinations demanded by immigration officials in Cuba.

Raúl Castro has increased wages and removed the cap on salaries to allow bonuses to be paid but still most state employees earn no more than 300-500 pesos cubanos a month, whatever their profession. Housing, education and medical care is provided at no cost and some basic foodstuffs are still rationed and heavily subsidized , but making ends meet is extremely hard. Most consumer goods are priced in pesos convertibles, and families have to have access to CUC$ to buy nice things for their home and family. It is therefore not surprising that Cubans will do almost anything to earn divisa and many families make sure that at least 1 member works in the dollar economy, eg tourism. The entire peso economy is subsidized, and although there are opportunities for travellers to use pesos cubanos, it is understandable that you will be expected to pay your way in CUC$. You earn hard currency, so you pay in hard currency. It is important to remember that Cuba is competing in the Caribbean, rather than the Latin American, market and its neighbours are selling themselves as luxury destinations. Compared with islands like the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands, it is cheap, but if you have just come from a backpacking trip through Latin America and want a stop-off on an island before you go home, you will find your last few dollars don’t go very far. However, by Caribbean standards, Cuba has it all. You can stay at luxury hotels (over CUC$100 a night for a double room), dine in elegant restaurants (up to CUC$50 per person) and frequent world-famous nightclubs (CUC$70 at Tropicana), or for those on a mid-range budget you can stay in pleasant colonial hotels (CUC$60-80 for a double room), eat reasonably well (CUC$15-20 for a decent dinner) and find plenty to do in the evenings in the clubs, theatres and cinemas (CUC$2-10). Anyone with a more restricted budget should consider staying with Cuban families in the casa particular system (CUC$15-35 per room), which is the equivalent of a bed and breakfast place in Europe. You can eat at private restaurants (CUC$7-15) or on the street, changing a few dollars into pesos to make resources stretch further, and head for the Casa de la Trova (CUC$1-5) for entertainment. At the bottom end of the scale you could get by on CUC$40 a day, including transport, but few treats. It depends what you want to do, after all, sitting on the beach is free if you don’t want a sunbed. A beer can cost CUC$1-3 depending on where you go and a mojito can vary from CUC$2 in a local bar to CUC$6 in the touristy Bodeguita del Medio, a Hemingway haunt. Based on 2 people sharing, this budget would include a simple casa particular of CUC$20 per room (CUC$10 each), CUC$3 for breakfast and CUC$7 for dinner in the casa particular, CUC$10 for transport or an excursion and CUC$10 for snacks, entry fees and entertainment, assuming you manage to buy some of your food with pesos cubanos. Increasing that budget by 50% would give you flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, stay in a more comfortable casa and have the freedom to explore a bit more.

In 2004 Cuba introduced a 10% tax on exchange transactions involving the US dollar and in Apr 2005 an 8% revaluation/tax was introduced for all currencies such as the euro, sterling, US dollar or the Canadian dollar. While the peso convertible was formerly fixed at US$1 = CUC$1, you now get 18% less when you exchange dollars and 8% less when you exchange euro, etc. It is best to bring lots of cash, but take care not to bring any notes with writing or extraneous stamps on them as they will not be accepted. There are banks and CADECAS (casas de cambio) for changing money. The latter have longer opening hours and are usually open at weekends. If arriving at Havana airport, change what you need for a couple of days at the exchange desk there, then go to a Cadeca in town for larger amounts. Wear a money belt to store your cash safely.

Traveller’s cheques (TCs) and credit cards issued in the USA will not be accepted. Most British banks will not issue TCs for use in Cuba. A British credit card issued by a US bank (eg MBNA) is not valid. Visa or MasterCard credit cards are acceptable in most places. American Express, no matter where issued, is unacceptable. You can obtain cash advances with a credit card at banks and Cadecas, but it is best to bring plenty of cash to avoid hefty fees and commissions. ATMs (dispensing CUC$ only) have been installed in most banks, but it is often quicker and easier to queue at the counter. All credit card transactions are converted from CUC$ into US dollars at point of use, and your bank or credit card company will then convert that into your own currency. This means that you pay the US dollar conversion tax as well as bank fees and commissions, making all credit card transactions very costly. There are no toll-free numbers for you to call if your credit card is lost or stolen. You will have to phone home to the financial institution that issued you the card in order to put a stop on its use. Make a note of this number before you leave home, together with your credit card account number and keep them separate from your card. If you get really stuck and need money sent urgently to Cuba, you can get money transferred from any major commercial bank abroad direct to a Cuban bank, to Asistur immediately for a 10% commission, or to Western Union which is used largely by Cubans abroad to send money home to relatives.

Whether you are a man or a woman travelling on your own, and whatever your age and physique, you will be approached by hustlers, known as jineteros/as looking to make a quick buck out of you. Be careful who you allow to become attached to you, for obvious reasons, and if you choose to have a companion make sure that the terms and conditions are fully understood by both parties. Single men and women are targeted by Cubans of the opposite sex, not only for their dollars, but also as a way out of the country if they can find a marriage partner. Single women will encounter the usual macho attitudes found in all Latin American countries and can expect to receive stares, hissing and comments on their attributes. Rape is not common, but the usual precautions should be taken to avoid getting into a compromising situation, trust your intuition, as always.

There are no private schools but language courses are available at the universities of Havana and Santiago. They generally start on the 1st Mon of the month and you study 20 sessions of 45 mins a week, Mon-Fri 0900-1320. There are different levels of study and Cuban cultural courses are also available. At the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Havana, latest prices for beginners, intermediate and advanced are 1 week CUC$100, 2 weeks CUC$200, 3 weeks CUC$240, 4 weeks CUC$300. A 4-week upgrade course is CUC$360. A Cuban culture course, held every other month is CUC$360 for 3 weeks, or you can do a joint Spanish and Cuban culture course of 320 sessions for CUC$960, 480 sessions CUC$1392. Commercial Spanish and Intensive courses in Spanish are also available. Contact Damaris Valdés, Of de Postgrado, Calle J 556, entre 25 y 27, Vedado, T7-832 2445, damarys@rect.uh.cu. 2-week courses in Spanish language with Cuban dance and a cultural programme are offered in Havana and Santiago all year round by Càlédöñiâ, The Clockhouse, Bonnington Mill, 72 New Haven Rd, Edinburgh, EH6 5QG, T0131-621 7721, www.caledonialanguages. com. They also do round-the- island cultural tours of 10 days or more, a 10-day Revolutionary Trail trip in Feb and Oct, visiting all the main sites associated with the Revolution as well as trekking tours, music and dance trips for individuals and groups all year round. Julio César Muñoz Cocina, José Martí 401 entre Fidel Claro y Santiago Escobar, Trinidad, T/F41-993673, http://www.trinidadphoto.com, runs photography workshops. Cubaism, Unit 30, DRCA Business Centre, Charlotte Despard Av, Battersea Park, London, W11 5HD, toll free T0800-298 9555, T44 20-7498 7671, www.cubasalsa holidays.com, offers dance holidays in Cuba.

Adventure World, T1300 363055, http://www.adventureworld.com.au.

Amistur, T7-834 4544/830 1220, http://www.cubasolidarity.net/amistur.

Cuba Deportes, T7-204 0945-7, http://www.cubadeportes.cu.

Cuba Linda, http://www.cubalinda.com.

Cubamar Viajes, T7-833 2523, http://www.cubamarviajes.cu.

Cubanacán, T7-204 1658, http://www.cubanacan.cu.

Cubatur, T7-833 3569, http://www.cubatur.cu.

Ecotur, T7-649 1055, http://www.ecoturcuba.co.cu.

Gaviota Tours, T7-204 7683, http://www.gaviota-grupo.com.

Havanatur, T7-830 8227, http://www.havanatur.cu.

Paradiso, T7-832 9538, http://www.paradiso.cu.

Sol y Son, T7-833 3271, http://www.solysonviajes.com.

Vacacionar Travel, T7-204 6457, http://www.vacacionartravel.com.

Air Transat Holidays, T1-866-322 6649, http://www.transatholidays.com.

Cuba Travel Services, T800-963 2822, http://www.cubatravelservices.com.

Global Exchange, T415-255 7296, http://www.globalexchange.org.

Marazul Charters, T800-223 5334, http://www.marazulcharters.com.

Signature Vacations, T1-866-324 2883 http://www.signaturevacations.com.

Viñales Tours, T01-800 202 2937, http://www.vinalestours.com.

Nouvelles Frontières, T0825-000747, http://www.nouvelles-frontieres.fr.

Sol Meliá, T 902 144440, http://es.solmelia.com.

STA Travel Worldwide, T01805-456422, http://www.statravel.de.

Càlédöñiâ, T0131-621 7721, http://www.caledonialanguages.com.

South American Experience Ltd, T0845 277 3366, http://www.southamericanexperience.co.uk.

Steppes Latin America, T01285-885333, http://www.steppeslatinamerica.co.uk.

Trips Worldwide, T0800 840 0850, http://www.tripsworldwide.co.uk.

Captivating Cuba, T08444 129916, http://www.captivatingcuba.com.

Cubanacán UK Ltd, T020-7537 7909, http://www.cubanacan.cu.

Cuba Welcome, T020-7584 6092, http://www.cubawelcome.com.

Havanatour UK Ltd, T01707-646463, http://www.havanatour.co.uk.

The Holiday Place, T020-7431 0670, http://www.holidayplace.co.uk.

Interchange, T020-8681 3612, http://www.interchangeworldwide.com.

Journey Latin America, T020-8622 8464, http://www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk.

Regent Holidays, T0117-9211711, http://www.regent-holidays.co.uk.

The US Government does not normally permit its citizens to visit Cuba. US citizens should have a US licence to engage in any transactions related to travel to Cuba, but tourist or business travel is not licensable, even through a 3rd country such as Mexico or Canada. For further information on entry to Cuba from the US and customs requirements, US travellers should contact the Cuban Interests Section, an office of the Cuban Government, at 2630 16th St NW, Washington DC 20009, T202-797 8518. They could also contact one of the travel agencies listed above for the latest information on how to sidestep the regulations. US citizens on business in Cuba should contact Foreign Assets Control, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 33 Liberty St, NY 10045. Many US travellers conceal their tracks by going via Mexico, the Bahamas, or Canada, where the tourist card is stamped, but not the passport. On your return, make sure that you have destroyed all tickets and other evidence of having been in Cuba. US travellers returning through Canada are stopped at the border and threatened with massive fines. If you are stopped by an immigration official and asked whether you have been to Cuba, do not lie, as that is an offence. If they want to take it further, expect a letter from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC; Department of the Treasury). This will either ask for information on your suspected unlicensed travel, in which case you should refuse to incriminate yourself, or it will be a pre-penalty notice assessing a civil fine, often US$7500, based on the money OFAC believes you would have spent in Cuba without a licence. The latter gives you 30 days to pay the fine or request an official hearing. The National Lawyers’ Guild has drafted specimen letters you can use to reply to OFAC in either case; for further information see http://www.cubalinda.com. It is hoped that the Obama administration will overturn the travel restrictions at some stage, as restrictions have already been eased for Cuban Americans returning to visit relatives, but Congress had not voted to change anything when we went to press.

There are over 1600 solidarity organizations in some 120 countries. Many organize work brigades, charity tours and donations of medical supplies and equipment to beat the US trade embargo, and produce newsletters and magazines. Their support for the government is usually uncritical. The link organization in Cuba is the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), in Havana, T7-838 2388. Australia: Australia Cuba Friendship Society, in Canberra, http://www.geocities.com/australiacubafriendship; in Brisbane, http://www.acfs-brisbane.org.au; in Sydney, http://www.sydney-acfs.org. Canada: Canadian Cuban Friendship Association (CCFA), T416-410 8254, http://www.ccfatoronto.ca. UK: Cuba Solidarity Campaign , T020- 8800 0155, http://www.cuba-solidarity.org.uk. USA: National Network on Cuba, http://www.cubasolidarity.com; Pastors for Peace, T212-926 5757; http://www.ifconews.org; Center for Cuban Studies , T212-242 0559, http://www.cubaupdate.org; Global Exchange, Cuba Project, T415-255 7296, http://www.globalexchange.org.

Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás in Gibara, a film festival to showcase low-budget movies, contact Sergio Benvenuto, festivalcinepobre@icaic.cu.

A very popular event is the Copa Cuba Ciclismo track cycle racing competitions. Contact Jackeline, T7-204 0945, agenciaco@cubadeportes.cu.

Que Siempre Brille el Sol baseball tournament is always a popular event. Contact Higinio Vélez Carrión T7-879 7980, or Cubadeportes, T7-2040945, agencia@cubadeportes.cu.

Cubadanza, the 2nd of the year, with workshops and courses.

International Festival of New Latin American Cinema shows prize-winning films (no subtitles) at cinemas around Havana. This is the foremost film festival in Latin America with the best of Cuban and Latin American films along with documentaries and independent cinema from Europe and the USA. See the stars as well as the films, as the festival attracts big-name actors and directors, festival@festival.icaic.cu, http://www.habanafilmfestival.com.

Happy End of Year Regatta at the Marina Hemingway for 3 days with social events that always accompany the racing fraternity. Contact José Miguel Díaz Escrich, T7-204 6653, yachtclub@cnih.mh.cyt.cu.

International Jazz Plaza Festival is held every other year at theatres and the Casa de la Cultura de Plaza. It is one of the world’s major jazz festivals with the best of Cuban and international jazz. There are masterclasses and workshops available and the event is organized by Grammy winner Jesús ‘Chucho’ Valdés. CUC$20 entrance per concert or CUC$120 unlimited access to all the events, workshops etc, www.festival jazzplaza.icm.cu.

Havana International Book Fair is held at La Cabaña; a commercial fair in the castle, immensely popular with book-hungry families, who come for a day out. Look out for new book launches. Also held in many cities around the island, http://www.cubaliteraria.com.

Vuelta a Cuba de Ciclismo is a cycle through every province. Contact Alberto Puig de la Barca, T7-2040945, agencia@cubadeportes.cu.

Cigar Festival, http://www.festivaldelhabano.com, introduced in the last few years, is for true aficionados of Habanos. Held at the Palacio de las Convenciones, you can learn about the history of cigars and there are opportunities for visits to tobacco plantations and cigar factories.

New Year is celebrated around the country with great fanfare, largely because it coincides with Liberation Day, marking the end of the Batista dictatorship, on 1 Jan. There is lots of music and dancing, outdoor discos and general merriment, washed down with copious quantities of rum.

Cubadanza is a twice-yearly dance festival. Contact Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, Eddy Veitía or Leonor Rumayor, T7-8796410, danzacontcuba@ cubarte.cult.cu.

Festival de la Trova ‘Longina’ in Santa Clara, celebrating the life of the great trovador, Manuel Corona, with a pilgrimage to Caibarién, his birth place on 9 Jan.

Cuballet de Verano is a summer dance festival. Contact Lourdes Bermejo, T7-265 0848, prodanza@cubarte.cult.cu.

Festival del Caribe ‘Fiesta del Fuego’ is held in the 1st week of Jul in Santiago with theatre, dancing and conferences, continuing later in the month to coincide with the Moncada celebrations on 26 Jul.

Carnival in Santiago (18-27 Jul) is a week-long musical extravaganza taking in the city’s patron saint’s day, 25 Jul, but it traditionally stops for a day on 26 Jul for a day of more serious political celebrations. Contact Orlando Vergés Martínez, caribe@cultstgo.cult.cu.

International Ernest Hemingway White Marlin Fishing Tournament is one of the major events at the Marina Hemingway. Contact José Miguel Díaz Escrich, T7-204 6653, yachtclub@cnih.mh.cyt.cu.

Cuculambeana Festival, Las Tunas. Celebration of traditional folk music of the area. Contact Lourdes Medina Pérez, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

Bienal de la Habana is held over a month and takes place every 2 years (next in 2011), gathering over 200 artists from 40 countries in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Centro de Arte La Casona, Parque Morro-Cabaña, Pabellón Cuba and other venues, http://www.bienalhabana.cult.cu.

Festival Danzón Habana, held at the Teatro América, Centro Hispanoamericano de Cultura y Unión Fraternal, at the end of the month and into April, musicians and dancers celebrate danzón, contact José Loyola, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

International Electrical Acoustic Music Festival takes place every other year (next in 2010) in Havana, with workshops and performances. Contact Emmanuel de Juan Blanco Hernández of the Laboratorio Nacional Música Electroacústica (LNME), T7-8303983, lnme@cubarte.cult.cu.

Festival Internacional de la Trova ‘Pepe Sánchez’ is held at the Casa de la Trova and the Sala de Concierto Dolores in Santiago with concerts, roving musicians, conferences and other events. Contact Leydis Torres, cpmusica@cultstgo.cult.cu.

Romerías de Mayo, Holguín. A cultural festival with young and old artists, musicians and intellectuals from Cuba and overseas, events take place all over the city. Contact Alexis Triana Hernández, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana at the Basílica Menor de San Francisco de Asís and other locations. The Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) gathers poets from all corners for a celebration of poetry. Contact Alex Pausides, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

International Tournament of Wahoo Fishing at the Marina Hemingway. Contact José Miguel Díaz Escrich, T7- 204 6653, yachtclub@cnih.mh.cyt.cu.

Marabana, Havana’s marathon, T7-204 0945/8, agencia@cubadeportes.cu, or for more information contact the Federación Cubana de Maratones, marabana@inder.cu.

Festival Internacional de Coros held at the Sala de Concierto Dolores in Santiago. Contact Raúl Fernández Campanioni, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

Havana Contemporary Music Festival held at UNEAC and theatres at the end of the month. Contact Guido López Gavilán, T7-832 0194, promoven@uneac.co.cu.

Festival Internacional del Son ‘Matamoros Son’ at Teatro Heredia, Santiago. Music and dancing to celebrate son and famous soneros.

Havana International Ballet Festival held every other year in the 2nd half of the month at the Gran Teatro, Teatro Nacional and Teatro Mella. Run by Alicia Alonso, head of the Cuban National Ballet, bnc@cubarte.cult.cu.

Fiesta de la Cubanía, Bayamo, with celebrations in the plazas of traditional folklore, music, dance and other cultural activities.

Fiesta de la Cultura Iberoamericana, in Holguín, celebrating all things Spanish and Latin American at the Casa de Iberoamérica. Contact Alexis Triana Hernández, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

Havana Theatre Festival, at theatres and plazas all over the city at the end of Oct and into Nov, contemporary international and Cuban drama, workshops and seminars, contact Bárbara Rivero, eventos@paradis.artex.cu.

International Blue Marlin Fishing Tourna- ment at Marina Hemingway. The marina fills up with mostly US fishermen eager to pit their strength against marlin and their fellow competitors, with lots of après-fishing social events. Contact José Miguel Díaz Escrich, T7-204 6653, yachtclub@cnih.mh.cyt.cu.

Local The local word for a bus is guagua. Urban transport is varied; buses can be motorized or horse drawn (coches). Horses made a comeback during the crisis of the 1980s when fuel shortages limited services and are still common in provincial towns, where buses are only used between towns rather than within them. The huge double-jointed buses pulled by a truck, called camellos (camels) because of their shape, also irreverently known as ‘Saturday night at the cinema’ because they are full of ‘sex, crime and alcohol’ have been withdrawn from the streets of Havana and are now found only in the provinces. There are also regular buses in Havana and other major towns. The urban bus fare throughout Cuba is 20 centavos for camellos and 40 centavos for all others; it helps to have the exact fare. Urban tickets can only be bought in pesos cubanos. Foreigners are not encouraged to use buses. The Government prefers tourists to use taxis.

Long distance For bus transport to other provinces from Havana there are two companies: Víazul and Astro, but foreigners can travel on only Víazul (Viajes Azul), at Avenida 26 entre Avenida Zoológico y Ulloa, Nuevo Vedado, T7-8811413, http://www.viazul.cu, 0900-2300. The buses are reasonably comfortable, are air conditioned, and films are shown on the longer journeys. Tickets can be bought online, but you pay 8% more than in the ticket offices. Children aged 0-4 travel free, those aged 5-11 are half price when the fare is over CUC$10, CUC$5 when it is less than CUC$10.

It is essential to book in advance during peak season and August, which can be very busy with an increased number of Cuban tourists. Even booking up to two or three days in advance may not be sufficient to guarantee a seat, especially if you are a family with children or travelling in a group. If you are picking up a Víazul bus en route between Havana and Santiago, for example, it’s worth bearing in mind that a minimal number of seats will be allocated.

Baggage handlers in Havana, Trinidad and some other tourist towns have an irritating habit of demanding a tip even though they hardly touch your bag. Any small coin will satisfy them. Astro is based at the Terminal de Omnibus Nacional, Boyeros y 19 de Mayo, T7-8703397, daily 0700-2100. Cubans often have to book tickets (in pesos) months in advance at busy times of the year. Away from the capital and off the beaten track, it is not so controversial to travel on Astro to minor towns and pay in pesos, in fact you may have no option. The Víazul terminal in Havana is a long way from the centre and you will have to get a taxi. In other cities Víazul and Astro use the same bus terminal. There is a weight limit for luggage of 20 kg on all long-distance bus journeys and the bus-ferry to Isla de la Juventud.

Hiring a car is recommended, in view of the difficulties of getting public transport to out-of-the-way places and you can save a considerable amount of time, but it is the most expensive form of travel. Breakdowns are not unknown, in which case you may be stuck with your rented car many kilometres from the nearest place that will help you. Be careful about picking up hitchhikers, although it can be an interesting way of meeting Cubans, as well as being a useful talking road map.

Petrol stations are not self-service. Petrol and diesel is available in Servi Cupet stations and must be paid for in CUC$ at around CUC$1 per litre for Regular and diesel and CUC1.10 for Especial. If possible, get the rental company to fill the car with fuel, otherwise your first day will be spent looking for petrol. A number of hire cars use diesel, which can be more difficult to get hold of than petrol. Only the main fuel stations sell diesel.

Autopistas were incredibly empty of traffic during the 1980s and 1990s, but as the economy picked up, traffic increased. Cubans often use the hard surface for other purposes, such as drying rice on the roadside. Oxen, horses, donkeys, bicycles and tractors will be sharing the fast lane with you. A military band was seen practising as though the soldiers were on a parade ground. The dogs on the side of the road are often not dead, just asleep. Watch out for low-flying vultures preying on any animals that really are dead. Cubans slow right down and give them a wide berth; they can do enormous damage to your car if you do hit one. Main roads can be good places to shop for fresh fruit and vegetables, vendors stand by the roadside (or in the road) or sell from broken down trucks. Most ordinary roads are in reasonable condition, but minor roads can be very badly maintained and signposting is uniformly atrocious or non-existent. Even when there are road signs they are usually so bleached by the sun that they are illegible until you draw level with them. Finding your way across a large city like Havana can present problems, in spite of the courteous assistance of police and pedestrians. Your best bet is to get the Guía de Carreteras (Road Guide) and follow the distances marked between junctions. Getting into towns is usually easy, finding a road out again has been described as a nightmare. There are numerous police checks on the roads. They will sometimes stop hired cars and try to impose a fine of CUC$30 for a traffic violation you may or may not have committed. If you can speak Spanish, try and discuss the matter with them and ask for evidence of the violation. They will usually not be able to produce any and will let you go.

Driving at night can be extremely hazardous and is not recommended. Even in major cities many streets are not lit. You are likely to encounter horses, cattle, pigs, goats and sheep monopolizing the road without any semblance of lighting. In addition, cyclists, bullock carts and other vehicles without lights are common. It is best to travel early in the day and reach your destination before nightfall. During the winter months, November to March, sunrise is at 0700 and sunset at 1830 (2000 in summer months). Cubans drive on the right-hand side.

There are state rental companies at international airports and most large hotels, or try the companies direct. During July and August it is extremely difficult to hire a car without booking well in advance. It is advisable to arrange car hire from home before you travel. Drivers need to be minimum of 21 years of age, although for some vehicles the age limit goes up to 25 years. You must present your passport and home driving licence. All car rental agencies are state owned and operated by one or other of the four state corporations (Cimex, Cubalse, Cubanacán and Gaviota), so there is no real competition on prices. Cubacar: http://www.transtur.cu. Havanautos: http://www.havanautos.cu. Rex: http://www.rexcarrental.com. Transtur: http://www.transtur.cu. Vía Rent-a-Car: www.gaviota- grupo.com. Try also http://www.havanacarhire.com or http://www.carrentalcuba.com. Minimum CUC$40 a day (or CUC$50 for air conditioning) with limited mileage of 100 km a day, and CUC$10-20 a day optional insurance, or CUC$50-88 per day unlimited mileage; cheaper rates over seven days. Non-US credit cards accepted for the rental. If you pay cash it will have to be in advance and they will still need a credit card for a deposit, which may be debited for the whole rental even if you have paid up front. Credit cards will be debited in CUC$, converted immediately to US$ plus tax – even if your bank is non-US – and then convert the charge to euro, sterling, yen, or whatever. In practice, you may find car hire rates prohibitively expensive when small cars are ‘unavailable’ and a four-door sedan at CUC$93, unlimited kilometres, insurance included, is your only option. Staff have been reported as ‘unhelpful’ in finding what you want. However, it pays to shop around, even between offices of the same company. If you want to drive from Havana to Santiago and return by air, try Havanautos. They will charge at least CUC$100 to return the car to Havana, but most companies will not even consider it. Vía Rent-a-Car (Gaviota) charges CUC$160, calculated at CUC$0.18 per km on a distance of 884 km from Santiago to Havana, but this is reduced to CUC$0.09 if the car is hired for more than 15 days. If you hire in Havana and want to drop off the car at the airport, companies will charge you extra, around CUC$10, although this is sometimes waived if you bargain hard. Check what is required concerning fuel, you don’t always have to leave the tank full, but make sure the tank is really full when you start. Fly and drive packages can be booked from abroad through Cubacar, part of the Grupo Cubanacán, who have a wide range of jeeps and cars all over the country and can even arrange a driver. Or you can do it through Cubanacán in the UK, who can organize rentals of Suzuki Samurai jeeps (or equivalent). Most vehicles are Japanese or Korean makes, Suzuki jeeps can be hired for six to 12 hours in beach areas. Watch out for theft of the radio and spare tyre; you will have to pay about CUC$350 if stolen unless you take out the costly extra insurance. Campervans are also available, see http://www.vacacionartravel.com or http://www.cubamarviajes.cu. A suggested tour of the whole island covers 2550 km with demarcated stops for overnight and refueling. Moped rental (moto) is around US$24 per day, cheaper for longer.

For people who really want to explore the country in depth and independently, cycling around is excellent. A good-quality bicycle is essential if you are going to spend many hours in the saddle, although that does not mean it has to be very sophisticated. We have heard from cyclists who have toured Cuba without gears, although they did have plenty of muscle.

With the shortage of fuel and decline in public transport since 1991, Cubans have taken to organized hitchhiking to get about. At every major junction outside towns throughout Cuba you will find the Azules, traffic wardens who organize a queue, stop traffic to find out where the trucks or vans are going, and load them with passengers. Foreigners are no longer allowed to use this service, nor to travel on trucks. Cubans also hitchhike (a botella) unofficially and get rides in ancient cars without floors, trucks and other makeshift vehicles. Cubans are not allowed to carry paying foreigners in their vehicles, so if stopped it is the Cuban’s problem not yours, but you should be aware that you could cause him/her trouble.

There are three types of taxi: tourist taxis, Cuban taxis (colectivos) and private taxis (particulares). Tourist taxis, paid for in CUC$, can be hired for driving around; you pay for the distance, not for waiting time. On short routes, fares are metered. Cuban taxis, or colectivos, also operate on fixed routes and pick you up only if you know where to stand for certain destinations. The flat rate fare is 10 pesos. Travelling on them is an adventure and a complicated cultural experience. If you are lucky enough to get into a colectivo, sit at the back and keep quiet. Tourists are not supposed to use this service. Cubans are not allowed to carry foreigners in their vehicles, but they do. Private taxis, particulares, are cheaper than other taxis. A particular who pays his tax will usually display a ‘taxi’ sign, which can be a hand-written piece of board, but have a private registration plate. Some have meters, in others you have to negotiate a price in CUC$. For long distances you can negotiate with official taxis as well as particulares, and the price should be around CUC$10 per hour. Taxis can work out cheaper than going on organized tours, if you are in a group and are prepared to bargain. As a general rule, the cost will depend on the quality of your Spanish and how well you know the area. One family paid CUC$80 to travel from Havana to Viñales by taxi, although someone else was quoted CUC$50 for the return journey.

Aeroflot, T020-7355 2233 (UK), T+7 (495) 223 5555 or T8 800 333 5555 (Russia), http://www.aeroflot.ru.

Iberia, T0870-6090500 (UK), T34-902 400500 (Spain), http://www.iberia.com.

LTU/Air Berlin, T0871 500 0737 (UK), T01805 737800 (Germany), http://www.ltu.com, http://www.airberlin.com.

Martinair, T31-2060 11767 (Netherlands), http://www.martinair.com.

Mexicana, T0808-101 7600 (UK), T 1-800- 531 35850 (USA/Canada), T52-55 2881 000, http://www.mexicana.com.

Air Canada, T1-888-247 2262 (Canada) http://www.aircanada.com. Air Europa, T0871-222 9122 (UK), T034- 902 401501 (Spain), http://www.aireuropa.com.

Air France, T0871-663 3777 (UK), T33- 820 820820 (France), http://www.airfrance.com.

Air Jamaica, T020 7590 3600 (UK), T876- 922 3460 (Jamaica), T1-800-523 5585 in the USA and the Caribbean, http://www.airjamaica.com.

Condor, T +49 (0) 180 5 707202 (Germany), http://www.condor.de, http://www.flythomascook.com.

Cubaism, UK Toll-free T0800 298 9555, http://www.havanaflights.com.

Cubalinda, http://www.cubalinda.com.

Cubana de Aviación, T020-7538 5933 (UK), T537-834 4446, http://www.cubana.cu.

Cuba has several airports classified as international, but only Havana is of any size. Havana now has three terminals, the third and newest one being for international flights, with exchange facilities open during normal banking hours, snack bars, shops, car rental and a 24-hour tourist information bureau (Infotur, limited information). The airport is safe at night, which is when the European flights come in, and taxi services are efficient. Immigration can be very slow with long queues. Coming into one of the other airports is a more relaxed and speedy affair with less traffic. There are a couple of casas particulares in the Altahabana district, Boyeros, quite close to Havana airport. The seating everywhere at Havana airport is uncomfortable. The restaurant upstairs, before you go through passport control, is OK for sandwiches or full meals, welcome after a long check-in and this will be your last chance to hear a live Cuban band while eating. The food on offer in the departure lounge is awful, with a choice between a microwaved hot dog or a soggy pizza. As most European flights leave late at night this can be a problem if you have a long wait for a (delayed) Air France or Iberia flight, but you can savour your last mojito in this vast, uncomfortable shed. At least the toilets are free and there is unlimited toilet paper. The selection of shops is limited but there is lots of rum, coffee, biscuits, a few books, postcards and magazines on sale. The selection of cigars is poor; if you know which brand you particularly want, get it in a specialist shop before you get to the airport. Rum costs much the same as elsewhere. The Cubita coffee, on the other hand, is marginally cheaper than in town.

A specialist travel agency, such as Journey Latin America will be able to get you better deals than anything you can find on the internet. The state airline, Cubana de Aviación, flies to Europe, Canada, Central and South America and to many islands in the Caribbean. It is cheaper than competitors on the same routes but the service is worse, seats are cramped, and some travel agents do not recommend it. Charter flights with accommodation packages can be good deals even if you ditch the hotel and tour Cuba independently. Early booking is essential as agents need at least 14 days’ notice to get confirmations from Havana. High seasons cover the Easter period, the July to August European summer and the last three weeks of December. Prices quoted below include all taxes except for Cuban departure tax, CUC$25.

There are no direct flights and you have to connect in a European, Canadian or Latin American city. Even if you fly Virgin all the way, you will have to change airports in London (Heathrow–Gatwick). Get a round-the-world ticket for the best deals and tack Cuba on to a South or Central American itinerary.

Since 1962, US citizens have only been permitted to visit Cuba providing they can prove they are travelling for journalistic, cultural, sporting or scientific purposes. However, despite the risk of hefty fines, US travellers are increasingly travelling via a gateway city, such as Nassau, Mexico City, Cancún, or Grand Cayman. For advice on ticketing, see http://www.cubalinda.com. Nassau is not particularly recommended because you have to clear US customs and immigration at Nassau airport and officials may become suspicious if a flight from Cuba has just landed. Try overnighting in the Bahamas on your return as a way of covering your tracks. Cuban Americans are now allowed to visit relatives regularly and in 2009 direct flights were available from Los Angeles to Havana and from Miami to Havana or Cienfuegos (Cuba Travel Services, http://www.ctscharters.com). A bill pending in Congress would allow all Americans to visit Cuba. Cubana offers good deals from neighbouring gateways (US$270 round trip from Cancún) including from Santo Domingo to Havana, while AeroCaribbean flies from Santo Domingo to Santiago de Cuba. Air Jamaica flies from Montego Bay or Kingston. From Canada there are direct flights from Montréal and Toronto with high, low and shoulder seasons. There are flights to Havana from lots of Mexican cities, with connections to other Cuban airports, and also from many Central American cities with local airlines (http://www.grupotaca.com).

Direct flights are available from Amsterdam, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris, Rome and Shannon depending on the season and the Cuban airport. Air Europa and Iberia fares from Madrid to Havana are from 635 € return. Martinair’s flights to Havana from Amsterdam start at 599 €. Cubana starts at 532 €. Other airlines offering scheduled flights to various Cuban cities include LTU/Air Berlin, Condor and Aeroflot. All flights from Europe arrive in Havana around 2000-2130, returning overnight.

Direct flights are about nine hours. Virgin Atlantic flies from London direct, while Air France, Iberia and Martinair operate connecting services via Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam respectively. Virgin Atlantic’s low-season prices start at about £600, including all taxes and fees, its high season prices go up to over £900 at Christmas. Indirect flights can be cheaper by £100 or so, but are more time consuming and not so comfortable. Cubana uses aircraft leased from Air Europa and flies direct from London to Havana via Holguín for £445-551 (£829 at Christmas), allowing a two-centre holiday.

Before arriving in Cuban territorial waters (12 nautical miles from the island’s platform), you should communicate with port authorities on channel HF (SSB) 2760 or VHF 68 and 16 (National Coastal Network) and 2790 or VHF 19A (Tourist Network). There are lots of rules and regulations and you must expect paperwork to take hours while the many bureaucrats board your boat and check you out. Not many ‘yachties’ visit the island because of the political difficulties between Cuba and the USA. The US administration forbids any vessel, such as a cruise ship, cargo ship or humble yacht from calling at a US port if it has stopped in Cuba. This effectively prohibits anyone sailing from the US eastern seaboard calling in at a Cuban port on their way south through the Caribbean islands, or vice versa. However, it does not seem to prevent regattas being held between Florida and Cuban marinas. It is better to rent a bareboat or crewed yacht from a Cuban marina and sail around the island, rather than include it in a Caribbean itinerary. From Cienfuegos marina you can sail west to the Archipiélago de los Canarreos, visiting Cayo Largo, Isla de la Juventud and the many cays in between, or east to the Jardines de la Reina, stopping at Trinidad (Ancón) and the many cays south of Júcaro. It would be worthwhile to invest in The Cruising Guide to Cuba, by Simon Charles (Cruising Guide Publications, 2nd edition 1997) before embarking. Havana, Cienfuegos and Santiago receive tourist cruise vessels. There are now some 20 marinas and nautical centres all around the island and the only prohibited area is the Bay of Pigs. The largest marina is the Hemingway in Havana, but there are three in Varadero and others in Cienfuegos, Cayo Largo, Santiago and several along the north coast.