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Havana
Cuba's capital, a faded baroque port on the Caribbean
Havana faces the Straits of Florida from behind a long sea wall, a capital where Spanish colonial grandeur, mid-century American cars, and decades of revolutionary austerity sit side by side along the salt-sprayed Malecón. More than two million people live in the metropolitan area of Cuba's capital, the largest city in the Caribbean, built around one of the finest natural harbors in the Americas. For centuries it was the great staging point of the Spanish treasure fleets, and its weathered streets still carry that layered history.
The city wraps around a deep, bottle-necked bay on Cuba's northwestern coast, the entrance once guarded by the massive stone fortresses of El Morro and La Cabaña. The land is low and gently rolling, fringed by coral coastline, and the Malecón seawall absorbs the waves that crash over it during winter storms and hurricanes. The compact colonial core of Old Havana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a dense grid of plazas, arcades, and baroque churches, much of it crumbling from decades of deferred maintenance. The harbor that made the city remains its defining geographic feature.
The Spanish founded Havana in 1519 and soon moved the colonial capital here, drawn by the harbor that sheltered the convoys carrying silver from the Americas back to Spain. Pirates and the English besieged it, and the wealth of the sugar economy and the slave trade built its mansions. After independence it became a playground of casinos and nightlife under American influence until the 1959 revolution. The long decades of socialist rule and the U.S. embargo froze much of the city in time, preserving its architecture even as it decayed. Today Havana remains the political and cultural heart of Cuba.