POST 28 – ABANDONED GLORY: DAYS 39-40 (25-26 January 2026): CUBA: Havana.

Welcome to Cuba, my 147^th Visit and 142^nd Run UN Country out of a UN total of 193. After my blog photos below are the key statistics, brief history and interesting facts about this destination.

Havana, the Capital of Cuba appears to be a former classic European cultural and architectural powerhouse that has been systematically abandoned by the people who originally built and lived in it and now occupied by squatters living from day-to-day on average unskilled wages of $12USD per month in its unkept, garage-filled ruins !!! What a colossal tragedy…

 

Bundy, Yiannis, Pats and Niko (brother of Yiannis) flew the 43min in-the-air from Miami to Havana shortly after noon on 25 January. It is from the air that you realise just how close Cuba is from the Florida mainland (367km in a straight line). We flew over Key West and were soon met with Cuban fertile green farmland sporting thousands of palm trees and small villages.

 

Our designated drivers were not there to greet us but thanks to nice young lady at the airport, we spoke to the person at our hostel who promptly redirected our lost drivers to collect us. Our hostel was in the centre of the Old Town, 22km from the airport. The emerging city looked old, run-down and abandoned. Poverty was obvious in the streets and each corner was a garbage dump. Despite all of this, the buildings are seriously grand. Spanish Colonial architecture featuring serious sandstone, albeit darkened and chipped through neglect. The streets of the old town are narrow and most apartments are abandoned. Many apartments look like they have never been repaired or painted since they were built but you can see clothes drying on the decrepit balconies making it seem that squatters are living there. Most of the older classic buildings including churches are made from huge blocks of limestone sourced from the major river bed flowing through Havana. As a result, the blocks have made divots or holes through them and some even contain traces of shells.

 

We saw most of the old town in the afternoon of our arrival. The following morning (26JAN) we walked the new town. At the Capital Building we hired a green 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air with its original straight six-cylinder engine and a column-shift manual. We drove for one hour to the furthest attractions in the city dedicated to the revolution and old communism. In all, the 26JAN proved a full day and gave us a reasonable appreciation of the former glory of Havana and its seemingly impossible state now. That afternoon we met two of the seven other fellow travellers on our 15-day Ciba Adventures Tour – one American and one German. The following morning, we packed up and put our gear in a 20-seat mini-van and met the other five travellers, all from Portugal. That morning our Guide Benny walked us to the four most important plazas in the old town which we had seen on the day of our arrival. Lucky we did because we had plenty of sun versus the cloudy cool day of today.

 

We saw the following attractions during our 48hrs in Havana:

 

OLD TOWN: Plaza Vieja, Plaza de Armas, Plaza de la Catedral (Catedral de San Cristóbal), Plaza de la Francis of Assisi, Parque Cervantes, Castle of the Royal Force, Columna Cagigal, Palacio del Segundo Cabo, Archaeology Museum, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Biblioteca Provincial de La Habana, Obispo (Pedestrian Street).

 

NEW TOWN: Fraternity Park, Parque de la India, National Capitol, Central Park, Castillo de San Salvador de La Punta, Independence Square, Malecon (Waterfront Drive), Paseo Boulevard (Mansions), Fountain of Hotel Nacional, Gran Teatro de Habana.

 

Havana is a relic of the past. It is hard to ignore the decay and poverty amongst buildings of incredible architecture and former glory. Hopefully the images below do justice to that former glory…

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