Zapata Swamp Cuba: The first time most people see a zunzuncito, they don’t see a bird. They see an insect that’s behaving strangely — hanging in the air beside a flower, too fast to focus on, gone before anyone can point at it. Then…
There’s a sound in Santiago de Cuba that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and once a year the whole city is built around it. It comes from a Chinese cornet — a thin, nasal, almost painful horn that cuts over a wall of drums, brake…
The first thing you notice in Cienfuegos, Cuba is the straight lines. You come in off the road expecting the usual tangle of a Cuban town — narrow lanes, colonial walls leaning on each other, a plaza that grew where the streets happened to…
Baracoa Cuba: The road that finally connected Baracoa to the rest of Cuba is called La Farola, and it does not let you arrive gently. It climbs out of Guantánamo, hairpins up into the Sierra del Purial, and for a while there’s nothing on…
Cuban Paladares: There’s a moment a lot of first-time visitors to Cuba have on about the second night. They’ve checked into a resort or a state hotel, they’ve been to the buffet twice, and they’re standing over a tray of pale rice, boiled vegetables…
Ask someone in Havana when they last went to Camagüey, and there’s a fair chance the answer is “never.” It isn’t that they don’t know it. Camagüey is Cuba’s third-largest city, a provincial capital of more than 300,000 people sitting almost exactly in the…
Cuba reforms: On June 19, standing before the National Assembly, the Cuban government laid out a package it had been trailing for a week: 176 measures, grouped into 23 “strategic axes,” presented as the deepest reordering of the island’s economy since the Special Period…
There’s a particular sound you start to notice a few days into any trip across Cuba, and it has nothing to do with a concert ticket. It’s the scrape of a chair being dragged onto a sidewalk in the late afternoon. Somebody’s cousin shows…
The town that sugar built (and sugar abandoned) Trinidad Cuba: There is a particular hour in Trinidad, just after the sun clears the red-tiled rooftops, when the light hits the cobblestones and you understand why people keep calling this place a museum without walls….
There’s a specific moment on the road from Havana to Viñales — about 180 kilometers west, somewhere past Pinar del Río — when the flat Cuban lowlands stop and the valley opens up below you. Most people pull over without planning to. The mogotes…
