Cuba - Lonely Planet [0]
Destination Cuba
Getting Started
Events Calendar
Itineraries
History
The Culture
Music
Food & Drink
Environment
Cuba Outdoors
Havana
Havana Province
Isla de la Juventud (Special Municipality)
Pinar del Río Province
Matanzas Province
Cienfuegos Province
Villa Clara Province
Sancti Spíritus Province
Ciego de Ávila Province
Camagüey Province
Las Tunas Province
Holguín Province
Granma Province
Santiago de Cuba Province
Guantánamo Province
Directory
Transport
Health
Language
Glossary
Behind the Scenes
Map Legend
Return to beginning of chapter
Destination Cuba
Caressed by the warm currents of the Caribbean and lashed by regular destructive hurricanes, Cuba is the ultimate travel contradiction; a dynamic mix of music, history and revolutionary politics that, at times, seems to have had the life sucked out of it by 50 years of austere, unbending socialism. As much as you’ll love it (and it’s hard not to), there will be occasions when it baffles and frustrates you, raising both your passion and your ire.
To the outside world, life in Cuba has changed little since the 1960s. Castro’s isolated island nation remains one of the world’s last great Cold War anachronisms, a stubborn contrarian caught in an ideological no-man’s-land between an ever-powerful USA on one hand and a long defunct USSR on the other.
But, while gasping ‘yank tanks’ still splutter unhealthily around the streets of Santiago and Havana, Cuba has been quietly dusting off its communist cobwebs for more than a decade. Aided by a growing medical and pharmaceutical sector and bolstered by a ‘new left tide’ in Latin American politics, Cuba is no longer the international basket case that it once was.
* * *
FAST FACTS
Population: 11.3 million
Area: 110,860 sq km
GNP per capita: US$12,700
Life expectancy: 76 (men); 80 (women)
Adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rate: 0.01%
Ethnicity: 65% white, 24% mixed, 10% black, 1% Chinese
Number of cell phones: 198,000
Total railways: 4226km
First Cuban heart transplant performed: 1985
Ranking on World Press Freedom Index: 169th
* * *
The first signs of a thaw came in the early 1990s when the post–Cold War economic meltdown forced the Castro administration into making some important free-market concessions. Allowing limited private enterprise and opening up the floodgates to tourism, the Cubans were able to let out their homes to foreigners and mingle freely with visitors from the capitalist West.
Progress was slow at first, but by the mid-2000s subtle signs of the new economic buoyancy were beginning to appear. A veteran of the Special Period returning home today after a 10-year exile would detect a plethora of subtle but important changes. There’s a greater choice of consumer goods in the city’s shops, the expanding waistlines of the better-off Habaneros and – most noticeably – the traffic: in the late ’90s you could have quite conceivably sat down and had your lunch in the middle of Havana’s Malecón sea drive; today, it takes a good five minutes to even cross it.
On inheriting the presidency from his brother in February 2008, Raúl Castro initiated a handful of progressive but largely symbolic reforms. In May, the Cuban government passed a law that allowed its citizens access to all tourist hotels (they had previously been barred from all but the cheapest). The same month the Cubans were also legally permitted to own cell phones, buy various electronic goods and own larger tracts of land in private farms.
The Cubans greeted the inauguration of Barack Obama to the White House in January 2009 with guarded optimism. Cautiously they envisaged, if not an immediate end to the embargo, then at least the start of some long-overdue dialogue. But with the country battered by three hurricanes inside two months and bloodied by the global economic downturn, the long-awaited celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the Revolution in January 2009 turned out to be muted and low-key.
After half a century of on-off austerity, the Cubans have grown wearily