17 Best Sights in Cuba

Even those convinced that they've outgrown their thirst for Hemingway will feel a flutter of youthful romanticism on a visit to Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm), the American Nobel Prize–winner's home from 1939 to 1961. The excellent guides will show you his weight charts—faithfully kept on the bathroom wall and never varying much from 242.5 pounds—a first edition of Kenneth Tynan's Bull Fever by the toilet; the lizard preserved in formaldehyde and honored for having "died well" in a battle with one of Hemingway's five-dozen cats; the pool where Ava Gardner swam naked; Hemingway's favorite chair (ask about what happened to people who dared sit in it); his sleek powerboat, El Pilar; and much, much more.

Installed in a fantastical Moorish palace, dripping with carved stone griffins, this museum is even more fascinating for its outlandish architecture and quaint, old-fashioned displays than for its hodgepodge, natural history collection. Built by a wealthy doctor in 1909, this private residence was known as the Guasch Palace. After the Revolution, the doctor's son "gifted" the building to the state and it was officially renamed after a self-taught, 19th-century Cuban scientist named Tranquilino Sandalio de Noda. The exhibits include dusty dioramas of desiccated stuffed specimens, from antelope to zebra, plus an array of mounted animal heads on the walls. There's a room dedicated to butterfly and moth collections, and a shell collection is displayed in showcases held up by carved seahorses. The delightful surprise here is the interior garden where, amid Art Nouveau painted floor tiles, intricately carved wooden doors and tropical plants, a giant concrete model of a demonically grinning tyrannosaurus Rex reigns.

Pay the extra to bring in your camera; there are photo ops everywhere you look.

Across the street from the museum there are two side-by-side, brightly colored restaurants competing for lunch business.

The most impressive of Punta Gorda's mansions is the Palacio de Valle, which was built in 1917 by the sugar baron Asisclo del Valle. It's a stunning, sumptuous structure full of ornate relief work, crystal chandeliers, hand-painted tiles, Italian-marble columns, French windows, and carved Cuban hardwoods. Though the mansion's design is eclectic, its foremost inspiration was the Alhambra—the Moorish palace in southern Spain. It now houses the city's best restaurant on the ground floor and a rooftop bar that's the perfect spot from which to watch the sun set.

At Parque José Martí's southwest corner stands the Palacio Ferrer, an elaborate mansion built in 1917 by Spanish businessman José Ferrer and now the Casa de Cultura. The corner room on the second floor was once used by Enrico Caruso, and a spiral staircase leads from here up to a tower that offers a nice view of the plaza. Local musicians and dancers often rehearse here.

Constructed in 1516, this structure is reputed to be Cuba's oldest house, although many historians now doubt that claim. First or not, it is one of Santiago's top attractions. Diego Velázquez, the Spanish conquistador who founded the city and was the island's first governor, lived upstairs. Inside you'll find period beds, desks, chests, and other furniture. On the first floor is a gold foundry. Memorable are the star-shape Moorish carvings on the wooden windows and balconies, and the original interior patio with its well and rain-collecting tinajón vessel. An adjacent house is filled with antiques intended to convey the French and English decorative and architectural influences—such as the radial stained glass above the courtyard doors—in the late 19th-century.

This house is named for the obra pía (pious work) with orphans that was carried out here in colonial times. Its elaborately wrought Baroque doorway is thought to have been carved in Cádiz around 1686. The architecture of the interior patio is based on North African fondouks (inns) and, later, of Spanish corralas (patios). There's much to see here: arches of different sizes and shapes, vases decorated with paintings by Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga, as well as a collection of old sewing machines and needlecraft paraphernalia.

The Alejo Carpentier artifacts (including the car he used in Paris) are still there, but locked up in a special room that you must get permission ahead of time to see.

This yellow colonial building with a high wooden balcony was probably one of the tallest structures in town when Ignacio Agramonte was born to a wealthy ranching family here in 1841. Agramonte grew to become a general in the Ten Years War. When he was killed in battle in 1873, popular acclamation elevated him to the rank of hero. Though only half of the original house remains, it has been restored and converted into a museum. Its courtyard has a tinajón in every corner, and upstairs rooms are furnished with period pieces or filled with displays about the wars for independence.

This Spanish-colonial mansion was the birthplace of poet José María Heredia, who, because of his pro-independence writings, is considered Cuba's first national poet. Heredia died in 1839 at age 36 while exiled in Mexico. The house, now just a fraction of its original size, displays period furniture and some of the poet's works and belongings. The home's traditional interior patio is planted with trees and plants—including orange, myrtle, palm, and jasmine—associated with Heredia's verse. A marble plaque on the house's Calle Heredia facade excerpts one of the poet's most famous works, "Niágara" ("Ode to Niagara Falls").

If you really wish to delve into Trinidad's amazing architecture, this museum documents the city's development. (Of course, nothing replaces actually wandering around the city's fabulous streets themselves and soaking it all in.) Exhibits on its most important 18th- and 19th-century buildings fill the rooms of a sky-blue 18th-century house, once the home of the Sánchez Iznaga family. Don't miss the lovely garden patio.

The meticulously restored mansion that now houses the Museum of Colonial Art was long the property of the Valle Iznaga family, who owned sugar plantations, processing plants, a railroad, and a port, among other things. Dating from 1744, it's furnished with antiques from several centuries, most of which belonged to the Valle Iznagas, so the house appears much as it might have for a party a century ago—the music room is full of instruments, the dining room is set for a banquet, and the kitchen is ready for the cooking to begin.

The oldest building on Parque Vidal is a former home built in 1810 that's now open to the public as a museum. The house itself is half the attraction, with its marble floors, fluted columns, and hand-painted tiles. Its rooms hold an array of antiques—including crystal, china, statues, and furniture—that date from several centuries.

On the northern side of Plaza Martí you'll find one of the city's best-preserved colonial buildings. The former home of composer Alejandro García Caturla is now a museum dedicated to his life with many of his musical instruments on display. Built in 1875, the house has a small central patio planted with palms and surrounded by rooms that contain antique furnishings or exhibits on the composer's works.

Set in the impressive Palacio Cantero, which was built by a sugar baron in 1830, the History Museum's displays trace the development of Trinidad from its founding by Diego Velázquez to the early years of the Revolutionary government. Two rooms are furnished with antiques, and elaborate murals cover some of the walls. A lookout platform atop the building's large tower affords a wonderful view. (The stairs look rickety, but are safe, although you probably won't want to negotiate their narrowness if you are claustrophobic.)

Cuba's oldest museum was founded in 1899 by Emilio Bacardí Moreau, the former Santiago mayor whose rum-making family fled to Puerto Rico after the Revolution. Although the Neoclassical structure's interior was horrendously remodeled in 1968—destroying many elegant details and cutting off air circulation—the collection it contains is fantastic. The basement, which you enter from the side of the building, has artifacts—including mummies and a shrunken head—from indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. In the first-floor displays of colonial objects, the antique weapons and brutal relics of the slave trade are especially thought-provoking. Step outside a door to a cobblestone alley, along which are houses from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Around the corner is a traditional colonial patio. The second-floor art gallery has works from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although the museum bears the Bacardí name, this is not Santiago's rum museum. That's the Museo del Ron, two blocks away.

Rather than the stuff of Cupid's arrows, the romance in this museum's name refers to the one that Trinidad's prominent families had with their precious things. A great variety of antiques—most imported from Europe—fill the 14 rooms of this imposing mansion. Built in 1704, the house belonged to Count Burnet, though nearly all the antiques in it came from the homes of other families. Don't miss the view from the second-floor balcony.

Just past the Parque de la Fraternidad Americana's southwest corner is this Italianate mansion built in 1840 by the Spanish merchant Domingo de Aldama. His son, Miguel de Aldama, worked for Cuban autonomy from Spain until his palace was sacked by the Spanish authorities in 1869. Don Miguel fled to the United States, where he continued his work as an activist for Cuban independence until his death in 1888. The building isn't open to visitors, but the massive columns and monumental size of the place are striking proof of the economic power of the 19th-century Cuban sugar barons, dubbed the zacarocracia by Cuban journalists and historians.