Havana

Visit the Cuban capital and be transported by its intoxicating mixture of sights and sounds

- Reif Larsen

JUST BEFORE NEW YEAR’S EVE, my wife and I left our two children at home in New York with my parents and sneaked down to Havana for a brief getaway. More than once, I felt as if we had opened a portal into a parallel universe.

Cuba, which unfurls across the Caribbean like a tangled flag, sits barely 100 miles south of Key West, Florida. In some respects, it might as well be 10,000 miles. The country languishes in a period of post-Fidel, post-Obama uncertainty. Many Cubans we talked to cited President Obama’s 2016 visit as a critical first step in normalising relations between the two countries.

But such optimism has given way to a kind of stagnant waiting game, filled with more questions than answers: Is the sudden explosion of private businesses (like Airbnb) on the island a sign of things to come or merely window dressing on what remains a totalitarian regime? What will happen now that a Castro is no longer in charge? And if I did visit Cuba, would my capitalist mind be turned into mush?

Like many, I had been particularly taken by reports that US diplomats in Cuba had suffered from a range of mysterious symptoms, including nausea, hearing loss, dizziness, memory loss, and even brain damage. Both the media and the US State Department bandied about the idea of an attack by a sonic or microwave weapon as a possible explanation.

Why go to Cuba and dive into the cross hairs of both diplomatic and acoustic uncertainty then? Because this is why we travel. As José Martí, Cuba’s national poet and philosopher, once wrote, “In a time of crisis, the peoples of the world must rush to get to know each other.” No one can predict what will happen to Cuba in the coming years, which is why you must rush there now. To visit is to witness a rare bird about to fly the coop.