![]() The Cuban capital grew rich on the sugar boom of the 1820s when wealthy landowners built their glittering abodes in the salubrious streets and squares of the Old Town -– but the prosperity didn’t last.įrom 1850 onwards the city’s hub and money migrated west to the former forest reserve of Vedado, and Habana Vieja fell into a spiralling decline that continued unchecked for more than a century. ![]() In response, the Spanish built an extensive network of forts such as ‘La Cabana’ (left) around the harbour, making Havana the best-protected city in the Caribbean. Stealing the mantle of Cuban capital from Santiago in 1607 due to its strategic position on the lucrative Atlantic trade routes, the city quickly became a haven for sabre-brandishing pirates such as Jacques de Sores, who sacked the burgeoning settlement in 1555. Inaugurated in 1514 as the most westerly of Cuba’s seven pioneer settlements, Havana was moved to its present site in 1519 when the saintly Friar Bartomolé de las Casas conducted a solemn mass under a ceiba tree in present day Plaza de Armas. It’s a small yet wonderfully seductive urban quarter that juxtaposes the gritty reality of daily city life with one of the best-preserved Unesco World Heritage sites in the Americas.īut beyond the resplendent architecture and small, quirky museums lies a neighbourhood of rare complexity that embraces life with a dynamic joie de vivre and is endowed with an ebullient Caribbean culture that can be peeled off serendipitously, layer by layer. Cuba remains suspended in a dusty pre-revolutionary time warp, an intoxicating mélange of Jurassic American cars and infectious Caribbean rhythms that grab you by the heartstrings and lure you sensuously into their fold.Ĭoloured by 500 years of rollercoaster history, Habana Vieja lies at the centre of the modern day Cuban conundrum. Ten years later and not much has changed, bar a shift in power between the Castro brothers and a greater number of inquisitive tourists wandering around in Che Guevara T-shirts. If the Cubans were feeling despondent after three decades of shortages and rationing, they certainly weren’t showing it. ![]() Household washing fluttered from mildewed colonial buildings, craggy-faced men slapped down dominoes amid the omnipresent fug of cigar smoke, and snippets of soulful son music drifted out from cavernous houses to fill the streets and squares of the animated colonial core. Frozen in time, the city was like nowhere else I had ever visited. I first plied the haunting streets of Habana Vieja in November 1997 during the post-Soviet economic meltdown that the Cubans euphemistically call the ‘Special Period’.
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