Kuba

Vagabonds guide till Santiago. Tips på sevärdheter, restauranger, boenden, bästa musikställena och mycket mer.

Diminutive Ciego de Ávila's finger-in-the-dyke moment came during the late-19th-century Cuban Wars of Independence: it became the site of an impressive fortified wall, the Trocha, built to keep out rebellious eastern armies from the prosperous west. Today, the province continues to be the cultural divide between Cuba's Oriente and Occidente. Most tourists come here for the ambitious post–Special Period resort development of Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo. The brilliant tropical pearls that once seduced Ernest Hemingway have had their glorious beaches spruced up and daubed with over a dozen exclusive resorts.

Elegant and old, this relatively hush city spells oasis to the traveler weary of confrontation. Predating both Havana and Santiago, it has been cast for time immemorial as the city that kick-started Cuban independence. Yet self-important it isn't. The ciudad de los coches (city of horsecarts) is an easygoing, slow-paced, trapped-in-time place, where you're more likely to be quoted literature than sold trinkets. Cuba's balmiest provincial capital, it resounds to the clip-clop of hooves; nearly half the population use horses for daily travel.

Habana del Este is home to Playas del Este, a multiflavored if slightly unkempt beach strip situated 18km east of Habana Vieja. While the beaches here are sublime, the accompanying resorts aren't exactly luxurious. Rather, Playas del Este has a timeworn and slightly abandoned air, and aspiring beach loungers might find the ugly Soviet-style hotel piles more than a little incongruous. But for those who dislike modern tourist development or are keen to see how Cubans get out and enjoy themselves, Playas del Este is a breath of fresh air.

Spread out like a fan on three sides of downtown, Havana's little-visited suburban municipalities hide a handful of disparate sights that can make interesting half-day and day trips from the city center. Santiago de las Vegas and Santa María del Rosario are former rural settlements that have been incorporated into the larger metropolis without losing their soporific airs; San Francisco de Paula trades off its association with famous former resident, Ernest Hemingway; Arroyo Naranjo encircles the city's largest green space, Parque Lenin, and hosts Havana's expansive botanical gardens.

La Victória de Las Tunas (as it's officially known) is a sleepy agricultural town anointed provincial capital. It has long held a sleazy reputation for being the Oriente's capital of sex tourism. But thanks to good private lodgings, welcoming locals and a handy location on Cuba's arterial Carretera Central, handfuls of road-weary travelers drop by and are pleasantly surprised. Missing here are the touts that exasperate tourists in other destinations. It's a window into real provincial life.

Leap-frogged by almost all international visitors, Cuba’s two smallest provinces, created by dividing Havana Province in half in 2010, are the preserve of more everyday concerns – like growing half of the crops that feed the nation, for example. But in among the patchwork of citrus and pineapple fields lie a smattering of small towns that will satisfy the curious and the brave.

When Pinar del Río's greenery starts to erupt into craggy mogotes (limestone monoliths) and you spy a cigar-chewing guajiro driving his oxen and plough through a rust-colored tobacco field, you know you've arrived in Viñales. Despite its longstanding love affair with tourism, this slow, relaxed, wonderfully traditional settlement is a place that steadfastly refuses to put on a show. What you see here is what you get – an agricultural town where front doors are left wide open, everyone knows everyone else, and a night out on the tiles involves sitting on a sillón (rocking chair) on a rustic porch analyzing the Milky Way.

Large, very detached and set to a slow metronome, La Isla is both historically and culturally different to the rest of the Cuban archipelago. Mass sugar and tobacco production never existed here, and until the Castro revolution, the island yielded to a greater American influence. Eclectic expat communities, which call on Cayman Island, American and Japanese ancestry, have even thrown up their own musical style, a sub-genre of Cuban son known as sucu sucu. Today the island, bereft of the foreign students that once populated its famous schools, is sleepy but extravagantly esoteric: with a prison masquerading as a museum and scuppered ships just waiting for you to dive down to – or to party in! The opportunities for getting (way) off the beaten track will appeal to divers, escape artists, adventurers and committed contrarians.

With a name translating as 'massacres,' Matanzas Province conceals an appropriately tumultuous past beneath its modern-day reputation for glam all-inclusive holidays. In the 17th century pillaging pirates ravaged the region's prized north coast, while three centuries later, more invaders grappled ashore in the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) under the dreamy notion that they were about to liberate the nation.