I stood on the edge of the road, the neon glow of a gas station behind me. It was three in the morning and I was somewhere in Camaguey province. Beyond the small spotlight in which I stood, the night was black. The rain was falling fast and hard, and...

"I've only got two weeks in Cuba; what should I see?" This is a question I get asked from a lot of holidaymakers wanting a taste of the country on a limited time schedule. So I thought I would share a recent itinerary I devised for one such traveler, which...

Drinking in Havana generally seems to been done out of a bottle of rum sat on the doorstep on a balmy evening watching the cinema of street life pass by. Or, if you're feeling more sociable, taking to the Malecon, dancing on the wall as the sea crashes behind you...

Trinidad is almost too pretty. If such a thing is possible. Pink, yellow, green colonial houses line the cobbled streets where children play baseball, and old weathered men sit on doorsteps plucking melancholically on a guitar. No car ever drives faster than a horse and cart could carry you, and...

Eating a freshly made breakfast from antique porcelain plates beneath a teardrop chandelier in an old colonial house while being treated like an old family friend would be considered an experience possible in only hotels of the rarest kind. In Cuba, however, it's practically normal.

Similar to a bed and...

It takes a few days to notice. At first the barrage of colour and noise and sheer sensation is enough, but it will hit you eventually, an absence on your visual landscape of something that you have been bombarded with for your entire life: Advertising.

Here, there are no billboards...

It was my third day of attempting to send an email. I had scrapped my original plans of keeping a daily blog, realizing that I would spend so long trying to get online that I would probably have nothing to write about anyway. All I wanted now was to tell...

You don't come to Cuba for the food. Well, you never used to come to Cuba for the food.

Strict rationing, food shortages and far more serious issues on the collective plate for the last fifty years than fine dining led to the slow demise of culinary culture, and...

"You're American?" a German woman asks my two companions, eyebrows raised in surprise. "How did you get in?"

We're in a lift on our way down from the top floor bar of Parque Central Hotel in Havana where we had accidentally gate-crashed a well-to-do drinks reception. Yes, well-to-do drinks receptions...

In a country as complex as this, in which tourists have for so long existed in a separate strata to locals, the only way to learn anything about the "real Cuba" is to talk.

Luckily, this is a also a country in which everyone is happy to chat.

I arrive to the soundtrack of Charlie Parker's jazz crackling out of a rigged up car stereo. The music is punctuated by the syncopated shake, rattle and roll of a beat up old Chevrolet hurtling along beside my taxi. All I needed was to be handed a cigar and a...