Visitors flocking to Cuba’s largest city, Havana, are discovering a place mapping out its own destiny. Already in the throes of a dynamic renaissance, life in Havana has changed significantly over the last decade, for both visitors and Cubans. New transport networks, an ever-expanding hotel and restaurant portfolio, countless new visitor attractions and a scramble amongst habaneros to cash in on the increasing number of foreign tourists in the city have made the Cuban capital more exciting and accessible than ever. Thankfully, despite this surge forwards, Havana has lost none of what makes it so unique; the symbols and sense of the past, both recent and distant, embedded in the city's fabric, from colonial buildings and squares to 1950s shop fronts and street signs. 

This picture of the past merging with a vision of the future is at its most vivid in Habana Vieja. This is Havana’s oldest district, where Spanish colonists first established a settlement five-hundred years ago, and where the pace of change is most rampant. Since the loss of trade with the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy has depended on money earned from tourism to fund social projects and it’s in Habana Vieja where this is most apparent. Near the heart of this historic neighbourhood is the Plaza Vieja where some of the most recently established highlights and an eclectic set of attractions can be found. Finally nearing the end of a two-decade-long transformation, Plaza Vieja  represents the reconstruction of Habana Vieja in microcosm.

Just off the south-western and north-eastern corners of the square are two excellent examples of the new breed of artist studios cropping up all over Habana Vieja, the Estudio de Ronaldo Encarnación and the Estudio Taller de Pintura de Reinaldo Juan Martínez. Amongst the limited forms of private enterprise permitted by Cuba, these commercial workshop-cum-galleries have provided some of Havana’s most innovative artists a space to exhibit and sell their work and are where to head to witness some of the most original and memorable contemporary artwork in Havana.

There are also three excellent restaurants on the square, between them offering two of the best venues in the old town for live music, Santo Angel and Café Taberna, and the only venue for draught beer, the Taberna de la Muralla.  Still in construction is the Hotel Palacio Cueto, sure to be one of the most  stunning hotels in Havana, an Art Nouveau masterpiece now being returned to its early twentieth-century heyday. In the meantime, accommodation in this part of the old town is found just off the square, either at the Hotel Beltrán de Santa Cruz, a converted aristocratic colonial mansion and one of  Habana Vieja’s trademark hotels, or at two of the finest casas particulares in Havana, Chez Nous and Los Balcones. These homestays are another of the private enterprises permitted by Cuba and the city is teeming with them.

The communist roots of Cuba are evident throughout Havana, and many of its nineteenth-century buildings have been renovated in joint ventures between the Cuban government and foreign entities, to provide the city’s attractions. The Museo de Naipes, a playing cards museum, was part funded by a Spanish culture foundation; the soon-to-be-completed planetarium will use equipment donated by the Japanese government; and an arts centre in the north-western corner is sponsored by the regional Belgian government of Wallonia.

The US recently took its first tentative steps towards what many hope will be a steady thawing of relations between the two countries by lifting travel restrictions on  Cuban-Americans visiting their families on the island. Many Americans look forward to an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba and the lifting of the travel ban, allowing US citizens to visit their communist neighbours freely for the first time in fifty years. At just ninety miles from Florida, Cuba has been a forbidden fruit for so long and is sure to become a wildly popular city-break destination for Americans if/when the blockade is removed. But regardless of whether this happens, Havana is ploughing ahead on its own path, waiting for no one.