Cuba is a fabulous live museum, a place where history was forced to halt for a moment and take a long and refreshing breath. The old American and Soviet cars, the architecture, the people’s attitude, and its out-of-time political system are all creeping out from an anachronistic time, a period described only in the yellowed pages of old newspapers. 

The undulating Havana is a vibrant city that lives each moment with fervor and passion. You get the feeling that from every dilapidated building, music spills onto the streets in an aerial sentiment that pervades and transcends time and space. Outside Havana, life’s rhythm is way slower, but the music’s rhythm stays the same as in Trinidad de Cuba, a town somehow tucked away by history. The carriages and horses’ hooves that you may hear in the morning are reminiscent of the Spaniards and the Conquista, but at night the center of the town is getting flooded by music that oozes from each person’s soul.

The tobacco plantations of Pinar Del Rio and Vinales, Vale de Ingenios with its old plantations, Sancti Spiritus with its blue church, French-touched-Cienfuegos, and Camaguey with its colonial squares full of local artists shops are major stops while crossing the island. Santa Clara is dedicated to Che, the most cherished killer on the planet who still benefits from the most effective marketing campaign staged ever for a person, dead or alive, in the entire world. If Varadero collection of resorts is so distant from the spirit of Cuba, the beautiful beaches of Playa Larga and Cayo Guillermo infused with “papa” Hemingway spirit is the real treasures of sunshine on the way to “Oriente”. On the eastern side of the island, Santiago and Baracoa vibrate in African and salsa rhythms entwined in the waves of their sea battered Malecon.