The first ornaments that one sees upon entering some Cuban homes are a tongue pierced by a sword and an eye that looks straight at you. These amulets are intended to frustrate the ill will of visitors, although they also serve as a warning for gossips and for those who want to see or know too much.

Without Fidel: Ann Louise Bardach: Reporter and Cuba expert examines the fallout of Fidel Castro's semi-retirement in Havana, Washington, D.C. and Miami, which she calls ``the Cuban triangle of capitals.'' “In her clear-eyed and well-researched new book, Bardach charts the political ripples radiating from the shock wave of the maximum leader's semi-retirement, not only in Havana but also in Miami and Washington…An intrepid reporter.”

We are on a main city block early Saturday morning. People gathering are high spirited, almost giddy. As people begin to form a line I exhale deeply, imagining it is just one of many lines that are the Cuban reality. This line, however, is different. This line begins to shift, snake, jump and dance. This is a conga line. There are hundreds of us, perhaps even a thousand, and we are dancing in a conga line down one of the most central streets in Havana.

The lights go down... as a troupe of near-naked showgirls in silver thigh-high boots and glowing chandeliers atop their heads appears at the back of the auditorium. Their see-through fishnet body suits drip with silver baubles that dangle like still-wet tiny fishes, and they strut down the aisle like sex washing up from the sea.

In Havana, the local “Industriales” team are gods. They are the New York Yankees of Cuban baseball. Whether celebrated or loathed, there’s no getting around the fact that team Industriales is the island’s most successful franchise. Point proven by the fact that in the post-revolutionary Castro era of baseball, the Industriales have reigned supreme and have practically had a monopoly as the winners of the most of the Cuban World Series classics.

A young girl walking down the street dressed in her school uniform—short mustard or burgundy skirt, and white blouse—braided hair, trainers, backpack and licking a popsicle or an ice-cream cone is an everyday scene in Havana. The same as for a distinguished-looking gentleman, one elbow on a window sill or a small stand sipping his coffee from a thimble-sized cup. Or the mulata who walks slowly swaying her hips and biting a pizza pie enclosed in a piece of manila paper.

Habaneros hate rain and can be cast into depression by what any British person, accustomed as one is to endless meteorological variations on the theme of wetness, would consider a mere caprice. The slightest hint of impending rainfall can keep the city’s entire workforce at home and no demur whatsoever is made by their bosses if workers fail to appear on a wet day.

There has never been in Cuba in the last decades a more controversial project than the National Art School (ENA), begun in 1961 and never completed due to a lack of ideological and aesthetic understanding, as well as a shortage of materials. Considered by its most enthusiastic advocates a symbol of the audacity and the will to experiment that should characterize contemporary architecture, its harshest critics ...

Construction of the first stretch of the Malecón began on 6 May 1901, with beautiful lampposts placed along the sea wall. However, the battering of huge waves during the following Cuban winter caused the original design to be replaced by another, this time with no attachments to the wall. The works were finally completed in 1959.

For an introduction to Cuban cigars where better to start than the Partagás cigar factory (520 Industria St., behind the Capitolio) in Havana? Cigars have been produced here since 1845 and the tour will create an appreciation for the art of cigar making that will last long after your return home. Even non-smokers are bound to exit impressed and with a greater understanding of the lure of the cigar. This is also the place to sample the goods; just before you exit to the street veer left through the wooden door into the store aptly named La Casa del Habano, probably the most famous cigar store in the world.

“Two days ride and you are still on my property,” is a boast you might hear quite frequently from South American landowners. But not in Cuba. Although this island was once famous for its huge ranches, many of which were in American hands before the revolution, those days are long gone.

There has never been in Cuba in the last decades a more controversial project than the National Art School (ENA), begun in 1961 and never completed due to a lack of ideological and aesthetic understanding, as well as a shortage of materials. Considered by its most enthusiastic advocates a symbol of the audacity and the will to experiment that should characterize contemporary architecture, its harshest critics tend to consider it as an aesthetic boom, not without elitism and devoid of any subsequent significance.

Driving through Holguín province recently I passed an antediluvian automotive abuelo, dead as a dinosaur, stopped in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere. Time itself seemed to have stopped on the carretera midway between Bayamo and Vequitas. The curvaceous Chevy Bel-Air stared me down with its acres of bechromed grinning grillwork. Its hood was propped open while two men peered into the engine.

In Cuba—and Havana in particular— Eduardo Pimentel Vázquez is yoga personified. Known throughout the island for his national yoga television program, Eduardo has managed to convince many Cubans that the practice of this age-old discipline, which dates back to second century BC India, may be a channel for the self-knowledge and mind-body harmony that humans have long pursued in the name of faith, philosophy or science.

Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” And the same goes for Cubans whose unrestrained, rich colloquial language flourishes side by side with Spanish.

Loquacious—as are all good barbers—Gilberto Valladares (Papito) speaks at the same speed and enthusiasm as his hands handle the scissors. However, his conversation doesn’t involve homeruns made by his favourite baseball team or inappropriate comments about the beautiful woman who lives just across the street. Neither does he attempt to captivate his clientele by talking of the merits of a new hair dye that will soon hit the market or how many litres of silicone a certain movie star has in her body.

One very sunny day last year, in March (2007), a small party from Ireland descended on Havana laden with radio mics, cameras, sound people, leather, felt and wire. Cameras, leather, felt and wire, I can hear you asking, brows, naturally, a little furrowed? Well…could be a country crafts series, or...what about a late night, one-off, tropical bondage short? Actually, no. Rest easy.

Our story begins with a young man, Ramón Silverio, born into extreme poverty in the Cuban province of Santa Clara and whose first passion was seeing the rather poor, but magical, travelling circus that visited the rural communities where he lived. His fascination and nostalgia for the idea of the circus show with its magician, its rumba dancer and its fire-eater never left him. El Mejunje is nothing less than a revelation for many visitors to Cuba.

It very much depends on who you talk to as to what impression you get about being LGBTQ in Cuba today… Watch Christian Liffers’s provocative new documentary, Dos Patrias, Cuba y La Noche [Two Homelands, Cuba and the Night]—out this week in the US—and you’ll be ready to cut your wrists. But sit listening to Mariela Castro Espín—daughter of Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and Cuba’s next leader—speak impassionedly at Havana’s International Culture and Development conference last June (2007), and you’d have been moved to tears.

When in 2003, at the Casa de la Obra Pía in Old Havana, the Arte y Moda fashion show took place, one of the most stunning designs was Peacock Woman, a creation by Ismael de la Caridad based on one of Zayda del Río’s paintings. Still today, this spectacular gown by the renowned Cuban fashion designer is a referent when it comes to translating contemporary Cuban visual art into the codes of the catwalk.

Visitors to the Cuban capital frequently remark on how busy the city seems to be, how the life of the city is inescapable and either delightful or irritating, depending on their disposition and expectations as a tourist in a socialist Caribbean island. The fabric of the city is often crumbling, yet Cuban life goes on with a kind of cheerful self-absorption and confidence despite (or because of?) the lack of material trappings and 'advances' that we are used to in western cities

The restoration of Old Havana is internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most innovative and exciting projects of urban renaissance. It is all more the remarkable for the context in which it is taking place: Cuba’s ongoing struggle to establish itself as a political and economic force to be reckoned with.

Beneath the centuries of multi-coloured limewash in Old Havana’s eighteenth century mansions, archaeologists often discover elaborate and beautiful mural paintings in which an exquisite powdery blue predominates. This has come to be known as ‘Havana Blue’ and the colour is still used all over the city, gently echoing the triumphant azure of the Cuban sky.

When Spaniards first arrived in Cuba in 1492 they encountered indigenous people who lived by hunting, fishing, gathering and the cultivation of cassava, yams, maize and black beans. As a result of the new illnesses and living conditions brought in by the colonisers, the original Cuban Indians eventually became all but extinct and crops that had been previously grown gave way to new ones brought from Spain.

Cubans are world champion flirts and it’s usually done with such style that one struggles not to become putty in their hands. Calling out piropos to passing women is a time-honoured Havana tradition. Piropos are nothing like the tacky remarks that northern women have to put up with. OK, they’re macho, but it’s hard to resist smiling at the most of them and men know that the wittier the piropo, the more satisfactory the result is likely to be.

A hot Havana afternoon… the surface of the bay is like a gleaming sheet of glass and castles of cumulonimbus inch imperceptibly across the sky. The wall of the Malecón is draped with sleepy figures. Dogs drowse in the shade of the crumbling porticoes. Nothing stirs; the sweltering air is utterly still. But as you lie on the sun-baked wall, frying in the blue and gold afternoon, sinking voluptuously down through the layers of silence towards sleep

In the western suburbs of Havana stands a series of extraordinary buildings in a bizarre collection of styles from Modernist to Neobaroque to Hollywood Hacienda. These were the grand old pre-Revolutionary social clubs where exclusive sailing and rowing races were held and where rich, glamorous women in Channel sailor suits posed with their borzois for photographs which were later published in Havana’s society journals.

Whether in his favourite bars, at his secluded country house or among the fishermen and boat builders of Cojímar, Hemingway’s presence in Havana is still almost tangible. In April 1932, Ernest Hemingway and his friend Joe Russell sailed from Key West to Havana for a two-day trip which ended up lasting for four months. Amongst Cuba’s principal attractions were excellent marlin fishing and the company of beautiful women.

The unique contemplative pleasure of smoking a Havana cigar should never be taken lightly. Whilst the lucky few indulge in this luxury on an enviably regular basis, they never allow familiarity to breed contempt. However many cigars one smokes, one never tires of the gentlemanly—or ladylike—anticipation of extracting one’s chosen cigar from the humidor. Gently, one tests it between one’s fingers and catches the first whiff of that splendid scent

It takes a lot for the streets of Old Havana to go silent, for the normal hum of activity to diminish to a barely audible whisper. The World Classic Baseball Final played on March 20, 2006 in front of a crowd of 42,696 in San Diego was one such event. It was viewed in virtually every home in Cuba and transfixed the nation. On Obispo (the main thoroughfare of Old Havana) security guards discreetly listened to the match through their ear-pieces as the few people that were still out and about hurried to get somewhere they could see the game.

In the early 1950s Detroit dominated the world as the unchallenged leader of the world car industry. Long before the notion of French and Japanese white knights riding to the rescue, Detroit designers were producing innovative and beautiful cars. Cuba was often used as a testing ground for new designs, models and styles and many of the cars and trucks first brought to the island in the early 1950’s are not only still here but still in working use.

Sergio Morales says his wife, Miriam, isn't the jealous type. And that's a good thing because there's another “woman” in his life: His beloved 1946 Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He has kept the battered red machine running for more than three decades with little more than sweat, ingenuity and homemade spare parts.

Ted Oswick has heard the tales of woe. Older men venture into Cuba and marry young, beautiful women, only to be dumped once they get back home. But he said he's sure his romance with a Havana maid is for real.

Ted Oswick has heard the tales of woe. Older men venture into Cuba and marry young, beautiful women, only to be dumped once they get back home. But he said he's sure his romance with a Havana maid is for real.

Armando Gómez is suddenly a subversive. And only an act of God, or George Tracey Eaten Bush, will allow him to attend the piano tuners convention in Dallas this week. Gómez laughed at first when U.S. authorities refused his travel visa. “What am I? A Taliban?” the Havana piano technician said.