Long before the Europeans arrived, Cuba was inhabited by three great cultural complexes of Indigenous peoples, who had come in successive waves from the continent and the Antilles over thousands of years. The Guanahatabey, the oldest and most archaic, survived as hunter-gatherers and fishers at the western end of the island, in the lands that today make up Pinar del Río and the Guanahacabibes Peninsula. The Ciboney, whose economy was likewise one of foraging, occupied caves and coastal areas in the center and the west. The Taíno, the most numerous and the most advanced, farmers of cassava, maize, sweet potato and tobacco, dominated the east and much of the territory, organized into chiefdoms ruled by caciques.
From their Arawak language, dozens of words we use every day survive in universal Spanish: tabaco, huracán, canoa, hamaca, barbacoa, sabana, iguana, tiburón, cacique, batey and guajiro. The Taíno planted in mounds called 'conucos', lived in villages of bohíos beside ceremonial plazas, played ball games, carved stone and wood and travelled in dugout canoes. Their religion revolved around the cemíes, spirits and ancestors represented in small sculptures.
On October 27, 1492, on his first voyage, Christopher Columbus landed on the northeastern coast of the island —traditionally placed at the Bay of Bariay, in the present-day province of Holguín— aboard the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María, and was dazzled by its beauty: 'this is the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen', he wrote in his diary. He believed he had reached the coasts of Asia. For almost two decades the island was barely explored, until the crown decided to colonize it systematically.
The conquest proper began in 1510, when Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar led the occupation of the island setting out from Hispaniola. Indigenous resistance found its great symbol in the cacique Hatuey, who had come from Hispaniola to warn the Cuban Taíno of the Spanish danger; captured after a stubborn guerrilla war, he was burned alive at the stake around February 2, 1512, near Baracoa. Tradition holds him to be the first rebel in Cuban history, and his famous answer to the friar who offered him heaven —that he would rather not go there if Christians went too— sums up the brutal clash between the two worlds.
Between 1511 and 1515, Velázquez founded the first seven towns that gave colonial Cuba its structure: Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa (1511), the first capital and seat of the first bishopric; San Salvador de Bayamo (1513); Santísima Trinidad (1514); Sancti Spíritus (1514); San Cristóbal de La Habana (1514, later moved); Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, today Camagüey (1514, also relocated); and Santiago de Cuba (1515), which would be the capital for much of the sixteenth century. From these nuclei the Spanish parceled out the Indigenous population in encomiendas for forced labor.
The Indigenous population collapsed within a few decades because of the wars, the abuses, the labor in the mines and the conucos and, above all, the European diseases —smallpox, measles, influenza— against which they had no defenses. Very soon the colonizers began importing enslaved Africans to replace the labor that was disappearing, sowing the seed of the mestizo society that would define Cuba. From Santiago, moreover, between 1518 and 1519, sailed the expeditions of Juan de Grijalva and Hernán Cortés to Mexico, which turned the island into the springboard for the conquest of the mainland.
Cuba's geographical position, at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico and at the entrance to the Bahama Channel, made it a strategic piece of the Spanish empire. Havana, thanks to its deep, sheltered, narrow-mouthed bay, became from the sixteenth century the great gathering port of the Fleet of the Indies: there the galleons carrying the silver of Mexico and Peru to Spain came together before crossing the Atlantic in convoy, to protect themselves from pirates and privateers. In 1607, Havana displaced Santiago as the capital of the island.
The wealth that passed across its wharves made the city a target for attack. The French, the English and the Dutch besieged it, which forced the crown to fortify it with imposing castles: the Castillo de la Real Fuerza, El Morro and, later, the fortress of San Carlos de la Cabaña. The supreme test came in 1762, when a British squadron took Havana and held it for almost eleven months, opening the island's trade to new markets. In 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, England returned Havana to Spain in exchange for Florida; that brief interlude left a lasting lesson about the commercial value of the island.
Cuba also benefited, from 1837, from the first railway in all of Spanish America —laid to carry the cane—, long before Spain itself had one. Havana was growing into one of the most populous and wealthiest cities in the hemisphere, and the whole economic life of the 'ever most faithful Isle' turned on maritime trade, tobacco and, more and more, sugar.
From the end of the eighteenth century, Cuba threw itself into a spectacular sugar boom. The trigger was the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), which destroyed the plantations of Saint-Domingue —until then the world's largest sugar producer— and left an enormous gap in the market that Cuban planters hurried to fill. Sugar mills multiplied across the plains of Matanzas, the Valle de los Ingenios at Trinidad, Cienfuegos and much of the west and center of the island.
That boom rested on a brutal expansion of the slave trade: it is reckoned that over the colonial period close to a million Africans were carried to Cuba, the vast majority in the nineteenth century, when the trade was already illegal under the treaties Spain had signed. In the Valle de los Ingenios at Trinidad, around 1837, some 56 mills employed more than 11,000 slaves. The brutality of the system provoked the flight of maroons to the palenques and uprisings that were savagely put down, such as the 'Conspiración de La Escalera' of 1844 in Matanzas. Slavery was not fully abolished until 1886.
Out of that African root —Yoruba, Congo, Carabalí— came santería and other Afro-Cuban religions, son, rumba, the batá drums and much of the island's identity. Cuba became Spain's richest colony, the 'Pearl of the Antilles' and the 'sugar bowl of the world', with a Creole elite grown wealthy but politically subordinate to the metropolis, a tension that would feed the longing for independence.
While almost all of Spanish America won its independence around 1820-1825, Cuba —along with Puerto Rico— remained a Spanish colony, held on to firmly for its enormous economic value. The longing for freedom broke out on October 10, 1868, when the Bayamo planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves at the La Demajagua mill and proclaimed independence in what became known as the Grito de Yara, near Manzanillo, beginning the Ten Years' War (1868-1878).
On October 20, 1868, the patriots took Bayamo, where the Cuban national anthem, La Bayamesa, with words by Perucho Figueredo, was sung for the first time. That first great war forged the country's founding heroes: the Dominican Máximo Gómez, the mulatto Antonio Maceo —the 'Bronze Titan'— and Ignacio Agramonte of Camagüey, killed in combat in 1873. Céspedes, deposed by the revolutionary assembly itself and left isolated, fell at San Lorenzo in 1874. The war ended without independence in the Pact of Zanjón of 1878; Maceo rejected it in the famous Protest of Baraguá, but the fighting died out.
In 1879-1880 a brief new attempt broke out, the Guerra Chiquita, quickly crushed by Spain. Those two decades of struggle, however, were not in vain: they created a national consciousness, showed that whites and blacks, Creoles and freedmen could fight side by side for a single homeland, and prepared the ground for the decisive campaign that a young poet and journalist named José Martí would organize from exile.
The soul of the independence cause was José Martí (1853-1895), poet, journalist, essayist and political organizer who from exile in New York brought together the scattered Cubans and founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892. Convinced of the need for a 'necessary war' that would be short and well planned, and wary of the expansionist appetite of the United States, Martí worked tirelessly to unite the old generals and the working-class emigration of Tampa and Key West.
The decisive war began on February 24, 1895 with the Grito de Baire. Martí landed at Playitas de Cajobabo, in the east, alongside Máximo Gómez, but died in combat very soon after, on May 19, 1895, at Dos Ríos, becoming the 'Apostle' and Cuba's supreme national hero. Military command passed to Gómez and Maceo, who undertook the epic Invasion from East to West: in a little over three months, crossing the whole island, they got past the fortified Trocha from Júcaro to Morón and carried the war as far as Pinar del Río, the western tip, in December 1895 and January 1896.
The fight was going the mambises' way when, in the early hours of February 15, 1898, the explosion of the American battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana —which killed 266 men and whose causes were never established— gave the perfect pretext to the United States, whose press was crying 'Remember the Maine!', to declare war on Spain. The fall of Maceo at Punta Brava in 1896 had already deprived Cuba of its best general; now a foreign power was preparing to snatch from the Cubans the fruit of thirty years of sacrifice.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 was brief and disastrous for Spain. In a few months the Spanish squadron was destroyed in the bay of Santiago de Cuba and the North American troops —alongside the mambises, although these were deliberately left out of the spoils— defeated the Spaniards. By the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, Spain gave up Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States. The Cubans were not invited to the negotiating table.
From 1899 to 1902, the island remained under American military occupation. Before withdrawing, Washington imposed conditions: the Platt Amendment, drafted by Senator Orville H. Platt and approved by the North American Congress on March 2, 1901, was attached as an appendix to the Cuban Constitution of 1901. That text granted the United States the right to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it saw fit, limited the island's ability to sign treaties and take on debt, and authorized the establishment of naval bases, among them Guantánamo, leased under a treaty of 1903.
On May 20, 1902 the Republic of Cuba was formally born, with Tomás Estrada Palma as its first president. But it was a mutilated independence: sovereignty was conditioned by the tutelage of the neighbor to the north, the economy depended almost entirely on the American sugar market and North American investment dominated the mills, the railways and public services. The 'mediated Republic' set out with the shadow of the Maine and of Platt hanging over it.
The first decades of the Republic combined a sugar boom, heavy North American influence, corruption and frequent political crises. The United States intervened militarily several times under cover of the Platt Amendment. The 'dance of the millions' of the First World War sent the price of sugar soaring and then sank it. In 1925 Gerardo Machado came to the presidency and soon drifted into a brutal dictatorship, overthrown in 1933 by a popular and military revolt out of which emerged a sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, who would dominate Cuban politics for a quarter of a century, first behind the scenes and later as elected president.
The Constitution of 1940, advanced for its time, was not enough to stabilize the country. On March 10, 1952, Batista staged a coup d'état that cancelled the elections and installed a new dictatorship, backed by Washington and by the interests of the American mafia in the casinos and cabarets of Havana. Against it rose a young lawyer, Fidel Castro, who on July 26, 1953 attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault failed and Castro was imprisoned, but it gave its name to the 26th of July Movement and, in his own defense, he delivered the plea 'History Will Absolve Me'.
Amnestied and exiled in Mexico, Castro organized the expedition of the yacht Granma, which sailed from Tuxpan and landed on December 2, 1956 near Niquero, in the east. Decimated by the army, barely a score of survivors —among them Fidel, his brother Raúl and the Argentine Ernesto 'Che' Guevara— took refuge in the Sierra Maestra, from where they waged a guerrilla war that steadily won popular support. The decisive blow came at the end of December 1958, with the battle of Santa Clara won by Che. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled the country before dawn and the Revolution triumphed.
The new government undertook radical reforms that transformed Cuban society within a few years. The Agrarian Reform Law of May 17, 1959 expropriated the great estates; a massive Literacy Campaign sent volunteer teachers out into the countryside in 1961; and over the course of 1960 the large American companies —oil, sugar, telephone and electricity— were nationalized first, and then the banks and hundreds of other firms. These measures quickly set Havana against Washington, which broke off relations and imposed, from 1960-1962, the economic embargo that is still in force and that in Cuba is known as 'the blockade'.
In April 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion (Playa Girón) failed spectacularly, with a contingent of exiles trained by the CIA defeated in less than three days; in the wake of that victory, Fidel Castro proclaimed the socialist character of the Revolution. In October 1962, the secret installation of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island set off the Missile Crisis, thirteen days that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR and that were resolved with the withdrawal of the rockets in exchange for a North American commitment not to invade Cuba.
An ally of the Soviet Union for almost three decades and part of its economic bloc, Cuba developed a remarkable network of free public health care and education, with very high rates of literacy and life expectancy, but it also consolidated a regime of a single party, a centralized economy and political control, with mass emigration —such as the Mariel exodus of 1980— and a military presence in African conflicts, above all in Angola. The Soviet subsidy propped up an economy dependent on sugar that would soon be left out in the open.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991 deprived Cuba at a stroke of its markets, its credit and its subsidies, and plunged the island into the so-called 'Special Period in Time of Peace', declared in 1990: years of extreme shortages of food, fuel and medicine, endless blackouts, paralyzed transport and a crisis that in 1994 set off the 'Maleconazo' and the rafters' crisis. To survive, the government cautiously opened the economy to tourism, authorized the dollar and allowed small forms of self-employment. The rise to power of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, with his oil, eased the crisis at the start of the twenty-first century.
In 2006, a serious illness forced Fidel Castro to hand power to his brother Raúl, who formally took the presidency in 2008 and pushed through gradual economic reforms. The most resounding milestone came in December 2014, when Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations: embassies reopened in 2015 and Obama visited Havana in 2016, in a historic 'thaw' that the administration of Donald Trump would nonetheless largely reverse from 2017 onwards.
Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016. In 2018, Raúl handed the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first ruler born after the Revolution, closing the Castro era at the head of the state. A new Constitution was approved in 2019. In July 2021, the largest anti-government protests in decades —the so-called '11-J'— broke out over the shortages, the blackouts and the crisis of the pandemic. Today Cuba faces a harsh economic crisis, high inflation and record emigration, above all towards the United States, but it keeps an immense cultural, musical and symbolic weight, and an identity, a human warmth and a capacity for endurance that make it unmistakable in the world.
The 16 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Artemisa is one of Cuba's most recent provinces: it was born in 2011, when the old province of La Habana was split and its western territories were grouped around the city of Artemisa, the new capital. Its territory, however, has a long colonial history bound up with agriculture: cane fields, coffee estates and tobacco fields shaped its landscape from the eighteenth century onwards.
The region combines fertile plains near the capital with the foothills of the Sierra del Rosario in the north. That double condition —productive farmland to the south, wooded mountains to the north— defines a province that works at once as the farming larder of the west and as a green refuge a little over an hour from Havana.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Sierra del Rosario and its surroundings went through an intense wave of coffee settlement driven by French immigrants who arrived from Haiti after the revolution that drove the colonists out of the neighboring island. They raised dozens of coffee estates worked by enslaved labor, and their ruins —drying floors, plantation houses, slave barracks— still stand among the vegetation.
The most famous is the Angerona coffee estate, built between 1813 and 1820 by the German Cornelio Souchay near Artemisa: at its height it had 750,000 coffee bushes and some 450 slaves, and it was the largest coffee estate in western Cuba and the second largest in the country. Its imposing ruins, with the watchtower and the columns of the manor house, are today a National Monument and a witness to the brief but intense coffee boom in Cuba.
Artemisa's great natural treasure is the Sierra del Rosario, declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1985, the first in Cuba. Its humid mountain forests, its rivers, waterfalls and pools, and its rich biodiversity made it a pioneering model of conservation and sustainable development on the island.
Within it Las Terrazas was born, a project begun in 1968 with a double aim: to reforest close to 5,000 hectares of hillsides eroded by logging and coffee, and to improve the life of a scattered population by bringing it together in a model community, which took shape as such in 1971. Today Las Terrazas is one of Cuba's main ecotourism destinations, with trails, zip lines, restored historic coffee estates such as the Buenavista, a lake and lodgings set into the forest.
Very close to Las Terrazas, the enclave of Soroa —known as the 'Rainbow of Cuba' for the arc the sun draws in its waterfall— rounds out the province's offering of nature. It takes its name from Jean-Pierre Soroa, a Frenchman who in the nineteenth century owned a coffee estate in these hills.
Its jewel is the Soroa Orchid Garden, created in 1943 by Tomás Felipe Camacho, a lawyer of Canary Island origin, in homage to his wife and daughter. In time it came to hold more than 20,000 plants of some 700 species of orchid, 250 of them endemic to Cuba, and it is today the country's largest orchid garden and one of the most important in the world. Surrounded by forest, Soroa is a classic spot for hiking, birdwatching and bathing in river pools.
Together with the ruined French coffee estates and the mountain communities, Soroa and Las Terrazas make Artemisa a real gateway to Cuban ecotourism, in sharp contrast to the bustle of the capital, a little over an hour away by road.
That contrast between the protected mountains and the farming plains of the south, added to how close Havana is, defines the profile of a province still little known to mass tourism but much prized by those looking for nature, colonial history and quiet. Artemisa shows that, beyond the beaches, Cuba also holds a green heritage of the first order.
Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, today Camagüey, was one of the first seven towns founded by Diego Velázquez, established on February 2, 1514 on the north coast, near the present-day port of Nuevitas. Its site by the sea, however, left it at the mercy of Indigenous attacks and, above all, of the constant harassment of the pirates and privateers who ravaged the Caribbean.
So the town moved inland in search of safety, until it settled for good around 1528 beside a Taíno village called Camagüey, in the middle of the savanna and on the banks of the Caonao River. That Indigenous name would end up prevailing over the official Puerto Príncipe, although the change of name was not formalized until 1903.
Not even inland did the city escape the privateers: in 1668 the fearsome Welsh pirate Henry Morgan stormed and burned it, and other attacks followed one after another through the seventeenth century, leaving a deep mark on the mentality and on the very shape of the town.
The trauma of the pirate attacks shaped Camagüey's most famous urban feature: its labyrinthine layout. Unlike the regular grid of most Spanish American cities, Camagüey was rebuilt as a deliberate tangle of alleys that twist, fork and spill into squares of wildly different sizes, a maze designed to disorient attackers and make the town easier to defend. That irregular urban plan is unique in Cuba and one of the reasons for its heritage value.
The city's other great emblem is the tinajón, an enormous wide-mouthed clay jar that the people of Camagüey used to collect rainwater and keep it cool, a vital resource in a region of frequent droughts. The abundance of excellent clay soils in the surrounding area allowed them to be made in great numbers, and in time the tinajones multiplied in courtyards and squares until they became the symbol of the city.
An old tradition has it that whoever drinks the cool water from a Camagüey woman's tinajón falls in love and stays in the city forever, a romantic legend that sums up local pride in this object turned into identity.
On July 7, 2008, UNESCO declared the historic center of Camagüey a World Cultural Heritage Site, in recognition of its singular labyrinthine layout and its exceptional array of churches, squares and colonial houses. The protected area covers some 54 hectares and dozens of blocks with buildings of great architectural value, the record of more than four centuries of urban history.
Among its churches, the outstanding ones are the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria and the churches of La Soledad, El Carmen, La Merced and Santo Cristo, true jewels of Cuban baroque, along with squares as distinctive as Plaza del Carmen or San Juan de Dios, the latter one of the best-preserved colonial corners in all of Cuba. The tinajones, scattered through courtyards and public spaces, complete an unmistakable urban setting.
That international recognition confirmed Camagüey as one of the country's great historic cities, on a par with Old Havana, Trinidad or Cienfuegos.
Camagüey is the birthplace of some of the greatest figures in Cuban history and culture. Here, in 1841, was born Ignacio Agramonte, 'El Mayor', a lawyer and hero of the Ten Years' War who drafted the first Constitution of the Republic in Arms at Guáimaro (1869) and died in combat on May 11, 1873, leaving behind a legend of courage and chivalry; his equestrian statue presides over the city's central square.
The province also gave the country Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, 'Tula', born in 1814 and one of the great poets and playwrights of Romanticism in the Spanish language; Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989), Cuba's national poet and the supreme voice of mulatto and Afro-Cuban poetry; and Carlos J. Finlay (1833-1915), the doctor who discovered that the Aedes aegypti mosquito transmitted yellow fever, a finding that saved millions of lives around the world.
That string of figures —to whom can be added scientists, artists and even the legendary ballplayer Tony Pérez— makes Camagüey one of the provinces that weighs most heavily in Cuba's cultural, scientific and patriotic memory.
Camagüey is Cuba's largest province and its great cattle region. Its huge flat savannas, well suited to grazing, have sustained cattle raising for centuries, the basis of a deeply rooted ranching culture with its vaqueros on horseback, its rodeos, its corrals and its traditions, something that sets Camagüey apart from the rest of the island and gives it an almost 'gaucho-like' air, of a piece with the great plains of the Americas.
In colonial times cattle were the district's main source of wealth, when the ranches and corrals supplied meat, hides and tallow, and they remain today a mark of provincial identity, complemented by sugar cane and other crops. The port of Nuevitas, on the north coast, inherits the site of the first founding and keeps its importance as the region's outlet to the sea.
On the north coast, remote Playa Santa Lucía offers more than twenty kilometers of sand, sheltered by one of the largest coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere, which runs parallel to the coast a short way offshore. That reef makes Santa Lucía a first-rank diving destination, with coral gardens, wrecks and the chance to see bull sharks in their natural habitat.
Nearby, Playa de los Cocos and the mouth of the Bay of Nuevitas round out a quiet stretch of coast, far from the big tourist circuits, ideal for those looking for sea and nature without the crowds. Between its cattle savannas, its labyrinthine city declared a World Heritage Site and its northern beaches and reefs, Camagüey brings together some of the richest and most authentic contrasts in all of Cuba.
The name Ciego de Ávila goes back to 1538, when the conquistador Jácome de Ávila set aside a 'ciego' —a flat clearing surrounded by forest— as a resting place for travelers crossing the center of the island. For centuries that waypoint in the middle of Cuba was little more than a stop on the long road between the west and the east, in a region of savannas, woodland and cattle.
The city itself developed late: it was founded around 1840 with barely 263 inhabitants and did not obtain its own municipal government, separate from Morón, until 1877. Its history was always marked by its status as a natural frontier at the island's central narrowing, a geographic neck that would make it a key setting in the wars of independence.
For much of the 20th century this territory belonged to the vast province of Camagüey, from which it only separated in 1976, when the revolutionary government created the present-day province of Ciego de Ávila with the city as its capital.
The region's most important historical episode was the building of the Trocha from Júcaro to Morón, an imposing fortified military line that the Spanish army raised between 1869 and 1872, during the Ten Years' War. It ran some 68 kilometers from coast to coast, from the port of Júcaro in the south to Morón in the north, taking advantage of the narrowest point in central Cuba.
The Trocha was studded with more than thirty forts, towers, barbed wire, trenches and a service railway, and its purpose was to stop the eastern independence troops —the mambises— from carrying the war into the rich sugar regions of the west. It was one of the largest fortification works in colonial America and a symbol of the Spanish effort to contain the insurrection.
The Trocha did not entirely fulfill its purpose, however: during the war of 1895 General Máximo Gómez and the invading columns outwitted it and crossed westward, proving that no barrier could halt the advance of the Liberation Army. Remains of those forts still survive in Morón and its surroundings.
The economy of Ciego de Ávila was historically based on sugarcane and, above all, on growing pineapple, which gave the province a strong agricultural identity and the nickname 'the land of pineapple'. The region's soils and waters also produced oranges and some of the best irrigated cane in the area, and supplied fruit to much of the island. Pineapple is still honored every year at festivals that are part of the image of Ciego de Ávila.
In the first decades of the 20th century, after the Republic was established, the plain of Ciego de Ávila filled with large modern sugar mills and with communities founded by immigrants and by American settlers, drawn by the cheap, fertile land of central Cuba. Those 'American colonies' —with their wooden houses, their Protestant churches and their imported customs— left a singular mark on local culture.
That world of sugar mills, colonies and cane railways coexisted with a modest but thriving urban life in the provincial capital, whose Teatro Principal, promoted by the wealthy Ángela Hernández, gave the city an air of refinement in the middle of the savannas.
The province's second city, Morón, is known throughout Cuba as 'the city of the rooster'. The symbol comes from an old legend brought over from Morón de la Frontera, in Seville, about an arrogant, overbearing tax collector whom the townspeople humiliated and drove out, giving rise to the popular saying: 'you ended up like the rooster of Morón, featherless and still crowing'.
In 1982 the sculptor Rita Longa made the famous bronze statue of a rooster that today welcomes visitors at the entrance to the city, crowned by a clock tower that sounds a rooster's crow at set hours. Morón also keeps its character as a rail and farming hub and is the natural gateway to the northern cays, to which it is linked by a long causeway.
Laguna de la Leche —the largest natural body of water in Cuba, its waters milky from the calcium carbonate deposits on its bed— and Laguna de la Redonda, both rich in fish, round out the attractions of an area closely tied to hunting and sport fishing.
The province's great tourist draw is the Jardines del Rey, the stretch of the Sabana-Camagüey archipelago that lies off its northern coast and owes its name to King Ferdinand the Catholic, in whose honor Diego Velázquez christened it in the 16th century. Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, joined to the mainland by a long causeway across the sea, are today two of Cuba's most famous beach destinations, with dazzling white sands, turquoise water, coral reefs and large colonies of pink flamingos.
These cays fascinated the writer Ernest Hemingway, who sailed their waters and immortalized them in his novels 'Islands in the Stream' and 'To Have and Have Not'; Cayo Guillermo itself appears in 'The Old Man and the Sea'. Today the area, with its own international airport —Jardines del Rey, on Cayo Coco—, is one of the country's great sun-and-beach hubs.
Between the historic Trocha, the land of pineapple, the city of the rooster and its world-famous cays, Ciego de Ávila brings together in the middle of the island a unique combination of military history, farming culture and coastal paradise that sets it apart among Cuban provinces.
Long before the city existed, the magnificent bay of Jagua was already a strategic point on Cuba's southern coast and the seat of an Indigenous Ciboney chiefdom whose name —Jagua— survives to this day. Its deep waters and narrow mouth, almost an inland sea, offered a perfect refuge, and for that very reason they were used for centuries by pirates, corsairs and smugglers who preyed on Caribbean shipping.
To block their way, the Spanish crown raised there, between 1742 and 1745, the castle of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Jagua, a solid fortress that still stands at the entrance to the bay and is the oldest building in the region. With its drawbridge, its moat and its legends —such as that of the Blue Lady who, tradition says, walks its walls—, the castle is today one of the most evocative spots in southern Cuba.
That pouch-shaped bay, wide and well protected, would half a century later be the setting for one of the most unusual foundings in all of Cuba: that of a city with French roots in the middle of the Spanish Caribbean, tied from day one to maritime trade and to the farming of its fertile surroundings.
Cienfuegos has an origin unique in Cuba: it was founded on April 22, 1819, by a group of French settlers from Bordeaux and Louisiana, led by the military man Louis De Clouet, born in Bordeaux in 1766. The new colony was at first called Fernandina de Jagua, in honor of King Ferdinand VII of Spain and of the old Ciboney chiefdom of Jagua, and that year 231 settlers arrived across several voyages.
That French origin gave the city a layout and a style unlike those of the rest of the island. Its founders planned the first twenty-five blocks as a perfect grid, like a chessboard, applying the rational, orderly ideas of Enlightenment town planning. In 1829 the settlement was raised to the rank of villa and renamed Cienfuegos in honor of José Cienfuegos Jovellanos, captain general of Cuba between 1816 and 1819, and in 1880 it received the title of city.
That geometric plan, its broad avenues and its French air made Cienfuegos an oddity in colonial Cuba and laid the groundwork for the elegant urban ensemble that Unesco would recognize almost two centuries later as an exceptional testimony to the Enlightenment in the New World.
The 19th century and the early 20th brought Cienfuegos enormous prosperity thanks to sugar and maritime trade. Its deep, well-connected bay made it one of Cuba's busiest export ports, and around it flourished large mills and sugar estates that turned the district into one of the hearts of the sugar industry in the south-center of the island, sustained as everywhere by the labor of thousands of enslaved Africans.
That wealth took shape in a refined neoclassical urban ensemble around Parque José Martí, with gems such as the Teatro Tomás Terry, the cathedral of La Purísima Concepción, the Palacio de Gobierno, the Triumphal Arch dedicated to independence and, above all, the lavish Palacio de Valle, an eclectic, Moorish-inspired folly next to Punta Gorda. Cienfuegos thus earned the nickname 'the Pearl of the South'.
Prosperity continued after the birth of the Republic in 1902, when the port, the architecture and an intense cultural life consolidated the city's prestige. It was that admirably preserved heritage that would lead Unesco to single out Cienfuegos as one of the great urban-planning landmarks of Latin America.
In 2005 Unesco inscribed the urban historic center of Cienfuegos on the World Heritage List, citing it as the best preserved example of the influence of the 19th-century Spanish Enlightenment on urban planning in Latin America. The ensemble, with its perfect grid, its arcades and its neoclassical buildings, is the monumental culmination of that French project of 1819.
The city also left its mark on the revolutionary struggle of the 20th century. On September 5, 1957, an uprising broke out in Cienfuegos led by sailors from the Cayo Loco naval base, allies of the 26th of July Movement, who came to control much of the city before being crushed by Batista's army and air force in a bloody repression. That revolt was one of the boldest episodes of the insurrection against the dictatorship.
Between its Enlightenment founding, its sugar splendor and its role in the Revolution, Cienfuegos condenses much of Cuban history into an urban setting of rare beauty, laid out before the mirror of its bay.
The province of Cienfuegos is the birthplace of one of the greatest figures in Cuban music of all time: Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré, 'Benny Moré', born in 1919 in the town of Santa Isabel de las Lajas. A brilliant singer and bandleader, nicknamed 'el Bárbaro del Ritmo' and 'el Sonero Mayor de Cuba', he mastered son, mambo, bolero and guaguancó like no one else, and his voice remains an irreplaceable reference point of 20th-century Latin music.
The district's African roots, inherited from the enslaved people of the sugar estates, also come through in traditions such as the tumbas francesas and the cabildos of Lajas, and feed a powerful musical and festive culture. Cienfuegos honors its most illustrious son with statues, festivals and a pride that is part of the provincial identity.
On the outskirts of the city, the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden —one of the oldest and richest in Cuba, founded in the early 20th century by the American sugar industrialist Edwin Atkins as a sugarcane experimental station— gathers thousands of tropical species, among them one of the world's largest palm collections. It is a haven of biodiversity a few kilometers from the urban bustle.
Inland, the Escambray mountains, which the province shares with Sancti Spíritus and Villa Clara, offer rivers, waterfalls and trails in spots such as El Nicho, with its pools and cascades. On the coast, the bay and the neighboring cays round out an offering that combines sea, mountains and historic city.
Today Cienfuegos adds to its heritage the industrial and port activity of southern Cuba, yet keeps intact its charm as the Pearl of the South: a bright, orderly, elegant city, proud of its French origin, its bay and its music, which places it among the most distinctive destinations on the whole island.
The province of Granma takes its name from the yacht in which Fidel Castro and his companions returned to Cuba in 1956, but its history as the cradle of the homeland is far older. San Salvador de Bayamo, founded in 1513, was the second villa in Cuba and an early center of cattle wealth, of smuggling —which got around the crown's monopoly— and of rebellion.
A cultured, patriotic city, Bayamo was the great stage of the independence awakening. Its enlightened atmosphere and its tradition of resistance made it the heart of the first free Cuba, the 'Republic in Arms' proclaimed during the Ten Years' War.
On October 10, 1868, at the nearby La Demajagua sugar estate, the Bayamo landowner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and proclaimed independence in the Grito de Yara, starting the Ten Years' War. A few days later, on October 20, the patriots took Bayamo, and there the Cuban national anthem, La Bayamesa, whose words were written by Perucho Figueredo, was sung for the first time —that date is celebrated today as Cuban Culture Day—.
When in January 1869 the patriots could not defend the city against the advancing Spanish troops, its own inhabitants chose to burn it rather than hand it over to the enemy: on January 12, 1869, after 82 days of freedom, Bayamo burned by decision of its people, in one of the most heroic gestures in Cuban history.
The province took center stage in history again in the early hours of December 2, 1956, when the yacht Granma —coming from Tuxpan, Mexico, with 82 expedition members aboard led by Fidel Castro— made landfall in a mangrove swamp in the Los Cayuelos area, near Playa Las Coloradas, in the municipality of Niquero. The landing was a rough one and the group, betrayed and hunted by the army, was almost wiped out at Alegría de Pío a few days later.
The site is protected today by Desembarco del Granma National Park, declared a Natural World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1999, not only for its historical value but for its spectacular limestone marine terraces, stepped above the sea and unique in the world. Every December 2 the Day of the Revolutionary Armed Forces is commemorated there.
From the landing, the surviving revolutionaries pushed into the Sierra Maestra, Cuba's highest range, crowned by Pico Turquino at 1,974 meters, which runs along the south of Granma and Santiago de Cuba. Among its forested mountains they set up the Comandancia de La Plata, Fidel Castro's headquarters, and for two years waged the guerrilla war that ended in the triumph of January 1, 1959.
Those peaks, where Fidel, Raúl, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos and Celia Sánchez fought, became the great symbol of the Revolution. Today the Sierra Maestra combines that enormous historical value with mountain landscapes, trails up to the Turquino and lush nature, and remains one of the places most laden with memory in all of Cuba.
The territory of Guantánamo, at the eastern tip of the island, is home to the country's oldest town: Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa, founded in 1511 by Diego Velázquez as the first capital of Cuba and the seat of the island's first bishopric. Isolated for centuries by the mountains of the Sierra del Purial, reachable only by sea until the La Farola viaduct was opened in the 20th century, Baracoa preserved a singular identity and an exuberant natural setting.
According to tradition, its parish church holds the Cruz de la Parra, one of the crosses Columbus is said to have planted on his arrival, considered one of the oldest Christian relics in the Americas. Surrounded by rainforest, washed by the Miel, Duaba and Toa rivers and crowned by the flat table-top of El Yunque, Baracoa has an unmistakable end-of-the-tropical-world air.
Baracoa is Cuba's capital of cacao and chocolate: along its riverbanks, in the shade of the royal palms, grow the cacao groves that supply the country's main chocolate industry. The fruit is an essential part of the region's life and economy.
Its cooking, unique in Cuba, revolves around coconut and cacao: dishes such as 'bacán' (a plantain tamale with coconut and crab), fish in coconut milk and coconut sweets, or the 'cucurucho' —a treat of coconut, fruit and honey wrapped in a palm leaf— make Baracoa a food destination unlike any other on the island, the fruit of its long isolation.
The city of Guantánamo, the provincial capital, is known the world over for the song 'Guantanamera', the son montuno whose most famous verses are based on José Martí's 'Versos sencillos' and which has become a universal Cuban anthem, sung in dozens of languages.
Its name is also tied to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, an enclave the United States has occupied since 1903 under the Platt Amendment and a lease treaty that Cuba considers imposed and illegitimate. The base, famous for the military prison opened there in 2002, remains a permanent grievance for the Cuban government, which demands the return of that territory.
Beyond that international fame, the province holds a strong campesino and Afro-Caribbean culture, with marked Franco-Haitian influences inherited from the immigration of the 18th and 19th centuries. Dances such as the tumba francesa and the changüí —a country rhythm considered the forerunner of the son, born in the hills of Guantánamo— are part of its rich musical heritage.
The changüí, with its tres, its bongó and its marímbula, is one of the deepest roots of Cuban music and is celebrated every year at festivals that bring together the soneros of the east. That inheritance makes Guantánamo one of the provinces with the oldest and most singular musical identity on the whole island.
Guantánamo is one of the most biodiverse provinces in Cuba. Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, shared with Holguín, stretches across its territory; declared a Unesco World Natural Heritage Site in 2001, it is one of the richest and best preserved island ecosystems in the Caribbean, with an extremely high degree of endemism in its flora and fauna, including the smallest bird in the world, the zunzuncito or bee hummingbird.
The Toa River, the country's largest by flow, and the exuberant rainforest that surrounds Baracoa complete a unique landscape, where Cuba's tropical nature reaches its fullest expression. Between the first town, the chocolate, the changüí and the rainforest, Guantánamo offers one of the most authentic and wildest experiences on the island.
San Cristóbal de La Habana was one of the first seven villas of Cuba; after several moves, it settled on its definitive site, beside the magnificent pouch-shaped bay, in 1519, under a ceiba tree on the spot of today's El Templete. Its deep, sheltered, narrow-mouthed harbor very soon made it the key port of call of the Spanish empire: there the fleets loaded with silver from Mexico and Peru gathered before crossing the Atlantic together toward Seville.
That wealth drew pirates and privateers, which forced the crown to fortify the city with imposing castles such as the Real Fuerza, El Morro and, later, La Cabaña. In 1607 Havana became the capital of the island, displacing Santiago de Cuba, and grew into one of the most important and populous cities of the New World.
In 1762, in the framework of the Seven Years' War, a powerful British squadron besieged and took Havana, which remained almost eleven months under English rule. That occupation opened the city's trade to new markets for the first time and accelerated the arrival of slaves and goods. In 1763 England returned Havana to Spain in exchange for Florida.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, the sugar and tobacco boom made Havana an opulent city, with palaces, churches, theaters and promenades such as El Prado. In 1837 the first railway in all of Spanish America was inaugurated, laid to carry sugarcane, long before Spain's own. The city filled with an enriched creole bourgeoisie and with an intense cultural life that placed it among the most brilliant capitals of the continent.
In the early hours of February 15, 1898, the explosion of the American battleship Maine in Havana Bay, with 266 dead, precipitated the war that put an end to Spanish rule over Cuba. Four years later, on May 20, 1902, the city saw the birth of the Republic in the Palace of the Captains General.
The first republican decades were for Havana a golden age of eclectic, art deco and later modern architecture, with the Capitolio inaugurated in 1929 —inspired by the one in Washington—, grand hotels, cabarets such as Tropicana, casinos linked to the American mafia and music playing on every corner. The capital was also the central stage of Cuban politics, of pre-revolutionary glamour and, after January 1, 1959, of the new revolutionary power that transformed it completely.
The city's historic core, Old Havana, was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982, together with its system of colonial fortifications. Its squares —the Plaza Vieja, the Plaza de la Catedral, the Plaza de Armas, the Plaza de San Francisco—, its cobbled streets and its centuries-old buildings have been restored by the Office of the City Historian in one of the largest and most admired urban rehabilitation projects in Latin America.
Beyond the old town stretch neighborhoods of enormous character: Centro Habana, with its bustle; Vedado, with its mansions and its nightlife; and residential Miramar. The Malecón, the seafront avenue almost eight kilometers long, is the great open-air living room of the people of Havana, lashed by the waves on days of northerly winds.
Havana is one of the great musical capitals of the planet. In its streets, cafés and academies, son, danzón —Cuba's national dance—, bolero, mambo, cha-cha-chá and, later, salsa, filin, timba and a good part of modern Latin music were developed or popularized. It was also the cradle of Cuban cinema, of the literature of Alejo Carpentier and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and of a cultural life that still beats strongly.
The classic American cars of the 1950s, turned into almendrones and taxis, still roll along its avenues like time capsules. Between the music pouring out of every corner, the smell of tobacco and rum, the sea of the Malecón and five centuries of architecture, Havana has become a worldwide symbol and Cuba's great political, cultural and tourist center.
The north coast of Holguín holds a place of honor in the history of the Americas: it was there, in the bay of Bariay, that according to tradition Christopher Columbus landed on October 27, 1492, aboard the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María, and delivered his famous praise of the island as the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen. Today a monument park at Bariay recalls that first encounter between the Old World and the New.
Facing the landing site rises the Silla de Gibara, the flat-topped mountain that Columbus is said to have described in his diary. The bay of Bariay and its surroundings thus preserve an enormous symbolic value as Europe's gateway to the American continent.
The region was densely populated by Taínos, whose archaeological legacy is one of the richest in the whole Caribbean. The Chorro de Maíta site, in the municipality of Banes, holds the largest aboriginal cemetery discovered in Cuba, with more than a hundred burials from a village that existed over a thousand years ago, and was declared a National Monument in 1991.
The finds —pottery, gold and shell ornaments, human remains— make it possible to reconstruct the life of the original inhabitants before the arrival of the Spanish. Together with a reconstructed Taíno village, Chorro de Maíta makes Holguín one of the great places to learn about Cuba's Indigenous past.
The city of Holguín has its origin in an estate of grazing land that, according to tradition, was acquired by Captain Francisco García Holguín; the territory took the name San Isidoro de Holguín in 1720 and was made a municipality in 1752. It is known as 'the city of parks' for its many landscaped squares, such as Parque Calixto García.
From the Loma de la Cruz, a lookout reached by a long stairway of more than 450 steps crowned by a cross, the whole city comes into view along with its setting of savannas and hills. Holguín is a quiet, cultured university city, the administrative heart of one of the most populous provinces in the east.
The north coast of Holguín concentrates some of the best beaches in eastern Cuba. Guardalavaca, Playa Esmeralda and Playa Pesquero form one of the island's main tourist hubs, with white sand, crystal-clear water and coral reefs close to shore, served by a chain of all-inclusive hotels in a setting of bays and green hills.
This coastal strip, sheltered by cays and inlets and rich in marine biodiversity, turned Holguín into an internationally famous sun-and-beach destination, complemented by the mountainous nature of the interior and by natural parks such as Bariay or the untouched cays of Saetía.
On the coast sits Gibara, a beautiful 19th-century seafaring town nicknamed 'la Villa Blanca', which preserves its colonial architecture, its seafront and the remains of its fortifications, and which hosts every year a well-known international film festival, heir to the old Festival de Cine Pobre founded by Humberto Solás.
Holguín is also a land of strong campesino traditions —the cradle of the Romerías de Mayo festival— and of Cuba's greatest mineral wealth: in the municipality of Moa, at the eastern end of the province, enormous deposits of nickel and cobalt are mined, the basis of one of the country's most important mining industries. Nature, history, archaeology, culture and industry live side by side in one of the most complete provinces of eastern Cuba.
Lying south of the main island, in the Gulf of Batabanó, the Isla de la Juventud is the second largest island in Cuba and has a singular administrative status: it is a special municipality answering directly to the national government, not a province. It was sighted by Christopher Columbus in June 1494, during his second voyage, and he named it La Evangelista.
Known for centuries as Isla de Pinos for its pine forests, it remained on the margins of colonization and, thanks to its coves, rivers and caves, became a refuge for the pirates and corsairs who preyed on the Spanish fleets. Those stories of buccaneers, hidden treasure and secret maps also earned it the names Isla de Cotorras and Isla del Tesoro.
The island's pirate fame left its mark on world literature. It is often said that its landscapes and its buccaneer legends inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel 'Treasure Island' (1883), and it is also linked to the imagery of J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan', set on an island of pirates.
Whatever the historical certainty of those influences, what is clear is that for centuries the Isla de Pinos embodied the archetype of the Caribbean island of pirates and buried treasure, a remote and mysterious place in the shadow of the great island of Cuba, one that fed the imagination of travelers and writers.
In the 20th century the Isla de Pinos housed the Presidio Modelo, an enormous prison built between 1926 and 1931 with four circular panopticon-type buildings inspired by a penitentiary in Illinois, able to hold thousands of inmates watched from a central tower. It was one of the harshest prisons in Cuba.
Fidel Castro was held there between 1953 and 1955, after the assault on the Moncada barracks, along with his brother Raúl and other moncadistas. During his confinement he reconstructed his defense plea, 'History Will Absolve Me', and smuggled it out; it would become the program of the Revolution. Today the Presidio Modelo, closed in 1967, is a museum that recalls that decisive chapter.
After the triumph of the Revolution, the island became a vast educational project. From the 1960s and 1970s on it took in thousands of young students from Cuba and from dozens of countries of what was then called the Third World —from Africa, Asia and Latin America— who combined study with farm work in its many secondary schools in the countryside, surrounded by citrus plantations.
In tribute to that multitude of young people, Fidel Castro presided on August 3, 1978 over the ceremony in which the Isla de Pinos was officially renamed Isla de la Juventud, the name it still carries today. That international educational experiment marked a singular era in the history of the place.
The special municipality includes numerous cays of the Canarreos archipelago, foremost among them Cayo Largo del Sur, a paradise of brilliant white sand and turquoise water given over almost entirely to tourism, with beaches such as Sirena and Paraíso considered among the best in the country, and colonies of sea turtles and iguanas.
The Isla de la Juventud itself, by contrast, keeps a quiet, little-visited character, with excellent seabeds for diving —such as those of the Punta Francés reserve, in the south— and with pre-Columbian cave paintings in the caves of Punta del Este, a group of more than two hundred drawings left by the first Guanahatabey inhabitants, considered one of the most important in the Caribbean and dubbed the 'Sistine Chapel' of Antillean rock art.
The city of Las Tunas, founded as Victoria de Las Tunas around the parish of San Jerónimo toward the end of the 18th century, took its name from the tuna, a cactus abundant in the district. Raised to villa in 1848 and to city in 1853, it earned the nickname 'Balcony of the Cuban East' for its strategic position at the entrance to the island's eastern region, as a threshold and gateway between the center and the east of Cuba.
That condition as a geographic frontier shaped its historical destiny. Set at the point where the island begins to narrow toward the mountainous east, Las Tunas was for centuries an obligatory crossroads of cattle trails and, later, of railways and highways, a natural lookout over the region that cradled Cuba's independence struggles.
With broad plains and a traditionally pastoral economy, the district kept a rural, country character that still defines its identity and its unhurried pace.
During the wars of independence, Las Tunas was the setting for some of the most dramatic and heroic episodes of the mambí struggle, led by its most illustrious son, General Vicente García González (1833-1886), one of the great military chiefs of the Ten Years' War. On September 26, 1876, to keep the city from falling back into Spanish hands, García ordered it burned, uttering the phrase that today appears on the city's coat of arms: 'Tunas, with sorrow in my soul I set you on fire, but I would rather see you reduced to ashes than enslaved'.
That scorched-earth tactic destroyed much of the colonial architecture, but it became a symbol of the sacrifice and determination of the people of Las Tunas. Years later, in the war of 1895, the mambí troops —this time under General Calixto García— took the city again in a celebrated assault in August 1897, in which the first cannons manufactured by the insurgents themselves were used.
That history of fire and rebellion left Las Tunas with a historical heritage less monumental than that of other colonial towns, but with an intensely patriotic memory, embodied in the figure of Vicente García, whose birthplace is now a museum.
Las Tunas is known today as Cuba's 'Capital of Sculpture', for the extraordinary number of works that adorn its streets, squares, parks and public spaces and for the national and international sculpture events it hosts regularly. From large monumental pieces to small-format sculptures, the city has become a kind of open-air museum unique in the country.
This artistic identity, relatively recent, gave the city —whose old center had been razed by fire in 1876— a new face and a singularity that sets it apart on the Cuban cultural map. Fairs, biennials and gatherings of sculptors have filled the city with figures of stone, wood and metal, many of them inspired by nature, history and local traditions.
So from the ashes of the city burned by Vicente García there arose, in time, a capital of sculptural art that proudly claims its new creative calling.
Las Tunas is also Cuba's capital of peasant culture and of improvised song. The province pays homage to the popular poet Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo, 'El Cucalambé', born in the district in the 19th century and considered the greatest cultivator of the décima —the ten-line stanza— and of the guajiro ballad tradition. In his verses El Cucalambé drew the rural life and landscape of the El Cornito farm, on the outskirts of the city, where part of his life was spent.
In his honor, every year at the end of June and the beginning of July, the Jornada Cucalambeana is held, Cuba's greatest festival of the décima and the punto guajiro, which gathers at El Cornito improvising poets, country people and artists from all over the country. The punto guajiro, the improvised song of peasant roots, was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2017, and Las Tunas is one of its great sanctuaries.
That tradition of improvised verse, of the guitar, the tres and the laúd, makes the province a living heart of Cuban peasant identity, that of the guajiro and his décima.
With an economy historically based on cattle ranching, sugarcane and agriculture, Las Tunas keeps the character of a rural, authentic province, of broad plains and unhurried pace, faithful to its role as the threshold between the center and the east of the island. Its savannas sustain a significant livestock industry, and its countryside holds the canefields and sugar mills that marked the development of the 20th century.
On the northern coast, the municipality of Puerto Padre —known as the 'Blue Town' for its bay— was one of the great sugar ports of eastern Cuba, with mills such as Chaparra and Delicias, among the largest in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century, built with American capital. Puerto Padre preserves its colonial fortress, the Fuerte de la Loma, and a strong seafaring and sugar-making identity.
On its northern shoreline, Las Tunas keeps little-exploited beaches of great beauty, such as Covarrubias Beach, with white sand, crystal-clear water and coral reefs close by, one of the cleanest and quietest stretches of coast in eastern Cuba and the site of a few all-inclusive hotels far from the big crowds. The absence of overcrowding is precisely one of its greatest charms.
This combination of patriotic history, peasant culture, sculptural art and coastal nature defines a province still little known to mass international tourism but deeply Cuban in its essence. Las Tunas, the gateway to the east, invites you to discover a rural, authentic Cuba, that of the guajiro, the décima, the cattle and the lonely beaches, very different from that of the big mass destinations.
The city of Matanzas was founded on October 12, 1693 as San Carlos y San Severino de Matanzas, on a deep bay and between the San Juan, Yumurí and Canímar rivers, which earned it the nickname 'the city of bridges', since seventeen of them cross its waters. Its name —'matanzas', killings— alludes to an old tradition about the death of a group of Spanish soldiers at the hands of the indigenous people in the 16th century.
In the 19th century, Matanzas lived an intense cultural life that consecrated it as 'the Athens of Cuba', a title proclaimed in 1860 by the director of its Artistic and Literary Lyceum. Poets, newspapers, theaters such as the Sauto and a vibrant intellectual activity made it a literary and musical center of the first order across the whole island.
Matanzas is one of the great cradles of Afro-Cuban culture. Here rumba —proclaimed Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2016— and danzón, Cuba's national dance, were born or took shape, and here the religious traditions of African origin that arrived with the slaves of the sugar mills, such as santería and the arará cult, survive with enormous strength.
Neighborhoods such as Marina and Pueblo Nuevo are living sanctuaries of rumba, with their drums, songs and dances handed down from generation to generation. That African heritage, a direct fruit of plantation slavery, made the province one of the spiritual and musical hearts of Cuban identity.
During the 19th century, the plains of Matanzas became the epicenter of the Cuban sugar boom. Hundreds of mills covered the province and with them came the island's largest concentration of enslaved Africans, whose labor sustained a colossal sugar fortune. That history left a deep mark on the demography, the culture and the landscape of Matanzas.
Out of those tensions an intense resistance was also born: the province was the scene of slave conspiracies and revolts, such as the suppressed 'Conspiración de La Escalera' of 1843-1844, which unleashed ferocious repression against free blacks and slaves. The legacy of that plantation world lives on today in the music, the religion and the memory of the region.
The greatest tourist magnet of the province —and of the whole country— is Varadero, on the Hicacos peninsula: more than twenty kilometers of fine white sand and turquoise water that form Cuba's main sun-and-beach destination, with dozens of all-inclusive hotels. At the beginning of the 20th century, Varadero was a summer resort for the elite, including the Dupont family, whose Xanadú mansion is still preserved.
Today Varadero receives each year a large share of the island's international visitors, turned into a worldwide byword for the Caribbean beach. Its development transformed the provincial economy and projected Matanzas into the front line of international tourism.
To the south stretches the Zapata Swamp, the largest wetland in the insular Caribbean and a Biosphere Reserve, refuge of crocodiles, manatees, flamingos and dozens of endemic birds, and a paradise for ecotourism and birdwatching. It was also the historic setting of the Bay of Pigs invasion (Playa Girón) in April 1961, remembered today in a museum right on the beach.
The province also holds underground wonders such as the Bellamar caves —among the oldest opened to tourism in Cuba— and the Saturno cave, with its natural pools, and picturesque valleys such as the Yumurí. Between beaches, wetlands, caves and a deep Afro-Cuban culture, Matanzas brings together some of the island's greatest natural and cultural attractions.
Long before the Spanish arrived, the fertile plains that today make up Mayabeque were inhabited by Taíno and Siboney communities that used the waters of the Mayabeque River —which they called Onicajinal or Güinicajinal— to grow cassava, maize and tobacco. The Güines region formed part of the extensive chiefdom ruled by the cacique Habaguanex, one of the Indigenous lords of the western end of the island whose name has remained tied forever to the pre-Hispanic memory of this territory.
The place name Mayabeque itself is of Arawak root and originally referred to the river that waters the valley, a modest but decisive watercourse, because centuries later its flow would turn these lands into one of the most productive farming districts in Cuba. As in the rest of the island, the native population collapsed within a few decades from European diseases, forced labor in the encomiendas and the violence of the conquest, and the colonists very soon began importing enslaved Africans to work the land.
Through the first two colonial centuries the region remained a mosaic of hatos and corrales given over to extensive cattle raising, barely populated, in the shadow of nearby Havana. Only with the sugar boom of the 18th century would these plains begin to turn into the landscape of sugar mills, cane fields and hamlets that would define their history.
The permanent settlement of the district took shape in a series of towns that appeared between the 17th and 18th centuries. Batabanó, on the south coast, was granted as a hato in 1559 and formally founded as a settlement in 1688; Bejucal was established as a town around 1714 and went on to become a county; Güines went from parish in 1690 to town in 1769; and San José de las Lajas was born in 1778 around a warehouse built at the crossing of the old royal road from Havana to Güines, with a parish church opened shortly afterwards.
San José de las Lajas, today the provincial capital, grew precisely because it was a road junction between the capital and the farming interior. Its strategic position turned it over time into a center of communications, trade and industry, while Bejucal keeps the historic honor of having been the scene of early innovations and of a notable urban life on the outskirts of Havana.
That network of towns gave the district a population density and an institutional life far above those of other rural regions of Cuba, logical enough given its closeness to the island's largest consumer market. Each of these settlements developed its own identity, its festivals and its traditions, which live on today in the culture of the young province.
The region's great economic protagonist was Güines, whose fertile valley went through a spectacular sugar boom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The number of mills multiplied from barely six in 1784 to twenty-six in 1804, at the height of the surge in world demand that followed the destruction of Haiti's plantations. That wealth was built, as everywhere in Cuba, on the labor of thousands of enslaved Africans brought to the cane fields.
Güines was also a pioneer in a decisive technical advance: in 1798 the Real Consulado of Havana granted it the power to distribute the waters of the Mayabeque River, and so the Comunidad de Regantes de Güines was born, one of the first large organized irrigation systems in Cuba. Channeled water multiplied the productivity of the land and turned the valley into a farming model admired across the island, able to sustain not only cane but vegetables, fruit and root crops.
That dynamism also had an early industrial counterpart: works such as the Alejandría mill —the first water-powered cane press in the area, today a National Monument in ruins—, a chocolate and guava paste factory set up by José Manuel Iturbe in 1840 and several cassava starch factories in the 1860s give an idea of the economic vitality of a district that supplied the nearby capital.
The sugar boom needed to move the cane quickly to the port of Havana, and that need made the district the cradle of a historic milestone: the first railway in Cuba and in all of Spanish America. The line, opened in 1837 between Havana and Bejucal and extended to Güines in 1839, was laid long before Spain's own, and placed Cuba among the first countries in the world to have rail transport.
That train, conceived to carry the sugar of the Güines valley, transformed the economy and the geography of the region and foreshadowed the rail network that would end up crossing the whole island. That such a technological first should have happened precisely on these plains east of Havana is a measure of their economic importance in colonial Cuba.
The territory also paid its share in the patriotic struggles: the columns of Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo passed through it during the invasion of 1895-1896, and Güines was the home town of Raúl Gómez García (1928-1953), a revolutionary poet and one of the victims who fell after the assault on the Moncada barracks. Farming history and political commitment are thus interwoven in the memory of Mayabeque.
On the south coast, on the Gulf of Batabanó, lies Surgidero de Batabanó, a port that for decades was Cuba's great center of sponge fishing, an activity that brought the town fame and prosperity and drew fishermen and traders from all over the island. That sponge trade shaped the seafaring identity of a region traditionally turned towards farming.
Batabanó is still today the main sea link with the Isla de la Juventud: the ferries and catamarans that cross the gulf to Nueva Gerona leave from its pier, which makes Mayabeque an obligatory transit point for anyone travelling to that special municipality of southern Cuba. The province also has dark sand beaches along its southern shore, such as Playa Mayabeque, while its short northern coast looks out on the Straits of Florida.
Mayabeque was created administratively on August 1, 2010 —taking full effect in 2011—, when the old and extensive province of Havana was split in two: Artemisa to the west and Mayabeque to the east, with its capital at San José de las Lajas. It is the smallest province in Cuba by area, but one of the most productive in farming terms, thanks to the fertility of its plains and its closeness to the great market of the capital.
Because of that combination of rich soils and proximity to the city, Mayabeque works as one of the country's main larders: vegetables, fruit, cane, tobacco and cattle supply a good part of Havana's demand. That farming vocation coexists with industrial plants and major research centers in San José de las Lajas, which gives the province a profile that is at once rural and modern.
Though little visited compared with its neighbors, Mayabeque brings together a remarkable historical heritage —the first railway, the pioneering sugar mills, the irrigation of Güines, the sponge port of Batabanó— that makes it a key piece for understanding the agricultural and technological development of western Cuba. Its closeness to Havana and its character as a territory of transit and supply define this young province with very deep colonial roots.
Western Cuba was the last refuge of the Guanahatabey, the oldest and most archaic of the island's Indigenous peoples, hunter-gatherers and fishers who lived in the lands that today make up Pinar del Río and the remote Guanahacabibes peninsula. Without farming or pottery, they lived in caves and coastal camps and had practically disappeared by the time the Spanish arrived.
Under colonial rule the region —known as Nueva Filipina and organized administratively in 1774 by order of the captain general Felipe de Fondesviela, marquis of La Torre— remained remote, forested and thinly populated, living off tobacco, cattle and the cutting of precious timber. Its distance from Havana kept it a rugged frontier for much of the colonial period.
Tobacco defines the identity of Pinar del Río. The Vuelta Abajo region, settled at the beginning of the 19th century above all by Canary Islander immigrants, was officially designated by the colonial government as the area that produced the best leaf on the island, and in time it earned worldwide fame: from its vegas comes the tobacco used to make the legendary habanos, considered the finest cigars on the planet.
In the vegas, the vegueros grow and cure the leaf by almost artisanal methods handed down from generation to generation: planting in the dry months, picking leaf by leaf, stringing and curing in the palm-thatched tobacco barns that dot the landscape. That tobacco culture turned the province into a symbol of one of Cuba's most famous products and into an obligatory stop for understanding where the habano comes from.
The province's tourist heart is the Viñales Valley, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1999 as a cultural landscape, for the harmony between its natural setting and the traditional techniques of tobacco growing. Its mogotes —limestone hills with vertical sides that rise out of the valley like enormous green backs, the remains of an ancient collapsed cave system— create one of the most photographed landscapes in Cuba, dotted with vegas, palm groves and bohíos.
The village of Viñales, which grew up around 1878, keeps its rural air of porched houses and quiet streets. The karst underground hides great caverns, such as the Cueva del Indio and the Gran Caverna de Santo Tomás, the largest in Cuba. During the colonial period these hills also served as a refuge for runaway slaves who had fled the tobacco farms.
Two ranges run across the province: the Sierra de los Órganos, with its mogotes, and the Sierra del Rosario, further east, covered in rainforest. These mountains, together with the valleys and the caves, give Pinar del Río enormous natural value and make it one of the greenest regions on the island.
The west also had its part in the wars of independence. The epic Invasion from East to West of 1895-1896, led by Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez, came to its end precisely on Pinar del Río soil: after crossing the whole of Cuba, Maceo carried the war as far as Mantua, at the western tip, proving that no part of the island was safe from the liberation army. That feat made Pinar del Río the setting for the symbolic close of the mambí campaign.
Towards the far west, the Guanahacabibes peninsula is a Biosphere Reserve of semi-deciduous forest and almost untouched coastline that ends at Cabo de San Antonio, the westernmost point of Cuba. Its seabed, in the María la Gorda area, is among the best in the country for diving, with coral reefs and abundant marine life in clear water.
On the north coast, Cayo Jutías and Cayo Levisa offer solitary white sand beaches linked to the mainland by causeways and jetties, ideal for anyone after sea and quiet far from the big hotel complexes. Between mountains, caves, tobacco vegas and cays, Pinar del Río combines like few other provinces Cuban nature and country culture in their purest state.
The province of Sancti Spíritus holds two of the seven original towns founded by Diego Velázquez, both in 1514: Sancti Spíritus and Santísima Trinidad. They are among the oldest settlements in Cuba and on the American continent, and they preserve an exceptional colonial heritage.
The city of Sancti Spíritus, crossed by the Yayabo River and its historic Romanesque-style stone bridge —the only one of its kind in Cuba—, keeps an old quarter of cobbled streets, squares and churches, such as the Parroquial Mayor del Espíritu Santo, that bear witness to five centuries of history in the middle of the island.
Trinidad, the third town of Cuba, is one of the best preserved colonial cities in all of the Americas. Founded in early 1514, it grew enormously rich on sugar and trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. When the sugar economy declined, the city was left 'frozen in time', which kept its palaces, its cobbled squares, its churches and its tile-roofed houses intact.
It was from Trinidad that Hernán Cortés set out in 1518 to recruit men for the conquest of Mexico. Walking today along its cobbled streets, climbing up to the Plaza Mayor or looking into the courtyards of its mansions is to travel straight back to the colonial Cuba of two centuries ago.
In 1988 Unesco declared Trinidad and the neighboring Valle de los Ingenios a World Heritage Site, an area of more than 275 km² with the ruins of dozens of colonial sugar estates —towers, plantation houses, mills and slave quarters— that bear witness to the splendor and also to the tragedy of a sugar industry built on slavery.
By around 1837 the valley held some 56 mills with close to 11,600 slaves, many of them belonging to the Iznaga, Borrell and Brunet families. Its most famous symbol is the Manaca Iznaga tower, 45 meters high, built by Alejo María Iznaga around 1816: from it the slaves working the cane fields were watched over, and its bell marked out the working day.
West of Trinidad rises the Sierra del Escambray, Cuba's second mountain range, where the Topes de Collantes nature park offers forests, rivers, waterfalls such as the Salto del Caburní and some of the best trails in the country, in a cool, damp mountain setting.
These mountains were also the scene of guerrilla warfare: first that of the Revolution, and later the so-called 'fight against bandits' of the 1960s, when groups that had risen up against the new government took refuge in the range. Today the Escambray is a nature destination that complements a visit to the colonial city perfectly.
On the south coast, a few kilometers from Trinidad, Playa Ancón, on the peninsula of the same name, is one of the best beaches on Cuba's Caribbean shore: white sand, warm clear water and nearby coral reefs ideal for diving and snorkeling.
So, in barely a few kilometers, the province of Sancti Spíritus brings together a colonial city, a heritage sugar valley, mountains and sea, which makes it one of the most complete and most visited regions in the center of the island, and an essential stop for understanding the past and the beauty of Cuba.
Santiago de Cuba, founded on July 25, 1515 by Diego Velázquez, was the seventh town established on the island and its first capital, a status it held from 1522 until the government moved definitively to Havana in 1607. For almost a century it was the most important city in Cuba and the base for Spanish expansion across the mainland.
Decisive expeditions of the conquest set out from Santiago: that of Hernán Cortés to Mexico in 1518 —Cortés was in fact the town's first mayor—, that of Juan de Grijalva and that of Hernando de Soto to Florida in 1538. Its wide, sheltered bay made it a strategic port, defended from the 17th century by the imposing castle of San Pedro de la Roca, the Morro of Santiago, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1997.
Its position at the eastern end of the island, facing the Caribbean Sea and close to the French and English Antilles, gave Santiago an intensely Caribbean stamp and a deep racial and cultural mixing. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the arrival of thousands of Franco-Haitian colonists and slaves fleeing the Haitian Revolution reinforced that character and brought coffee, new dances and the culture of the tumba francesa, which survives to this day.
That melting pot of Spanish, African and Franco-Caribbean influences made Santiago one of the culturally richest cities in all of Cuba, with an identity of its own, proud and cheerful, very different from that of the capital and of the west of the island.
Santiago holds a central place in Cuba's revolutionary history. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro and a group of young men stormed the city's Moncada barracks; the attack failed, but it gave its name to the 26th of July Movement and marked the beginning of the armed struggle against Batista. The city was also the focus of intense clandestine urban resistance, led by the young teacher Frank País, killed by the police in 1957.
For its role in the wars of independence and in the Revolution, Santiago was granted the title of 'Hero City of the Republic of Cuba'. It is no accident that it was there, on the night of January 1, 1959, that Fidel Castro proclaimed the triumph of the Revolution from the balcony of the city hall. In its historic Santa Ifigenia cemetery lie José Martí, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Frank País and Fidel Castro himself.
Santiago is one of Cuba's great musical capitals: the cradle of son —from which salsa and much of Caribbean music derive—, of the bolero, of traditional trova and of choral singing. Santiago's Casa de la Trova is a temple of Cuban music, and the city has given the island's culture some legendary figures.
It is also home to the country's most famous, oldest and most boisterous carnival, which fills the streets with congas, comparsas and drums in the full heat of July, coinciding with the patron saint festivities. And it is the city of rum: there, in 1862, Facundo Bacardí Massó founded the distillery that gave rise to one of the most famous rum brands in the world, made in Cuba today as Ron Caney.
A few kilometers from the city, in the old mining town of El Cobre, stands the Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, patron saint of Cuba. Devotion to 'Cachita' unites Catholics and followers of the Afro-Cuban religions, who identify her with the orisha Ochún, and every September 8 it draws thousands of pilgrims from all over the island.
Legend has it that, at the beginning of the 17th century, three fishermen found a small image of the Virgin floating in the Bay of Nipe bearing the inscription 'Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad' ('I am the Virgin of Charity'). Between son, rum, revolutionary history and faith, Santiago de Cuba distills like few other cities the Caribbean, mixed-race and rebellious soul of the island.
The territory of Villa Clara holds one of the oldest towns in Cuba: San Juan de los Remedios, founded in the first decades of the 16th century and traditionally considered the island's eighth town, after the original seven of Diego Velázquez. Set close to the north coast, it was for generations a prosperous smuggling port, so exposed to attacks by pirates and corsairs that its history was marked by fear of the sea.
That constant harassment led, at the end of the 17th century, to an extraordinary episode: a group of families from Remedios, weary of the raids, decided to abandon the town and found a safer new settlement inland. Santa Clara was born of that exodus. Remedios, however, survived and preserved its magnificent historic center, with its two churches facing the same square —a unique case in Cuba— and its colonial atmosphere intact.
Today Remedios is famous above all for its Parrandas, one of the most spectacular popular festivals in the country, and for being the oldest settlement in the province, a colonial treasure whose beauty rivals that of Trinidad or Camagüey.
Santa Clara was founded on July 15, 1689 by a group of families from Remedios who, fleeing the pirate attacks on the coast, settled inland and celebrated their first mass under a leafy tamarind tree, on the spot where Vidal Park, the heart of the city, stands today. The town was named Santa Clara de Asís and grew quickly thanks to its central position on the island.
In time, Santa Clara became the most important city in central Cuba and a crossroads of highways and railways linking west and east. In 1867 it was connected by rail, and its strategic location —at the very geographic center of the island— would determine its fate at the decisive moments of Cuban history. In 1878 it became the capital of the former province of Las Villas, and since 1976 it has been the capital of present-day Villa Clara.
Santa Clara is known as 'the city of Marta Abreu and of Che'. Marta Abreu de Estévez (1845-1909), a wealthy benefactor and patriot, used her fortune to finance the independence cause from exile and gave the city schools, public washhouses, almshouses, a power plant and the beautiful Teatro La Caridad, inaugurated in 1885 and considered one of Cuba's great colonial theaters.
In her honor, the local anthem, 'La Villaclareña', premiered on February 28, 1895, celebrates the electric lighting with which Marta Abreu lit up the city, an extraordinary luxury for the time. Generous and committed, she made Santa Clara an example of civic patronage and bound it forever to the ideals of progress and independence.
That enlightened tradition of social commitment is part of the character of a city that was also the birthplace of a prestigious university, the Universidad Central 'Marta Abreu' de Las Villas, founded in 1952.
Santa Clara holds a central place in the history of the Cuban Revolution. In late December 1958, a guerrilla column commanded by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara reached the center of the island and fought there the battle of Santa Clara, the last great action of the war. With a handful of fighters, Che managed to derail an armored train loaded with weapons and ammunition carrying more than 350 soldiers of Batista's army, a devastating military and psychological blow.
The taking of the city, completed on December 31, 1958, cut the island in two and precipitated the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista in the early hours of January 1, 1959. The victory at Santa Clara is, for that reason, one of the founding moments of revolutionary Cuba, and the derailed carriage of the armored train is preserved today as a monument in the middle of the city.
In 1997, the remains of Ernesto Guevara, found in Bolivia thirty years after his death, were brought to Santa Clara and laid in an imposing mausoleum crowned by his statue, which has become a place of pilgrimage and the city's symbol par excellence.
The province is famous throughout Cuba for the Parrandas of Remedios, one of the oldest and most spectacular popular festivals in the country, born in Remedios at the beginning of the 19th century. Every December, the town's two historic neighborhoods —El Carmen, represented by a hawk, and San Salvador, by a rooster— compete in a lavish festive rivalry of monumental floats, illuminated plaza displays, deafening music and a fireworks battle that lights up the sky until dawn.
On November 28, 2018, Unesco recognized the parrandas of central Cuba as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, enshrining a tradition that extends to other towns in the region and that mobilizes entire communities for months. Noise, gunpowder, popular ingenuity and neighborhood pride come together in one of the most genuine festive expressions of the Cuban soul.
To the south, the Escambray mountains, which Villa Clara shares with Cienfuegos and Sancti Spíritus, were in the 1960s the setting for the 'Lucha Contra Bandidos', a long campaign by the new revolutionary government against armed groups holding out in the sierra. Today those heights offer nature, reservoirs such as Hanabanilla and mountain trails that contrast with the sugarcane plains of the interior.
On the north coast, the Sabana-Camagüey archipelago holds some of the most exclusive beach destinations in Cuba. Cayo Santa María, linked to the mainland by a long causeway of almost fifty kilometers laid across the sea, concentrates large all-inclusive hotels facing white sands and turquoise waters, alongside the neighboring Cayo Ensenachos and Cayo Las Brujas.
These cays, sparsely populated and of great natural beauty, have turned Villa Clara into a major sun-and-beach destination that complements its enormous historical and cultural wealth. Between Che's mausoleum, the Parrandas of Remedios, the Escambray and the cays, the province distills like few others the diversity of the island.