Cuba

Cuba (Country Guide)

Nobody knows Cuba like Lonely Planet. Whether you're looking to explore Havana's colorful architectural relics, laze languidly on an isolated beach or discover your inner Hemingway deep-sea fishing off the coast of Cayo Guillermo, this 5th edition gives you all the information you need to enjoy the best of Cuba.

Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.

In This Guide:

Full color section on Cuba's music, festivals, natural beauty and architecture
Unique Green Index makes ecofriendly travel easy

Cuba Information Manual: The Definitive Guide to Legal and Illegal Travel to Cuba

For forty-six years and counting, the U.S. government has forbidden its citizens from traveling to Cuba. The threat of stiff fines and jail time cause even the most adventurous American traveler to break out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of visiting Cuba without the proper permits from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
But now, in a trailblazing first for travel guides published in the U.S., this daring and unconventional new guidebook openly challenges the U.S. embargo laws by offering inside secrets, tips, loopholes, and advice in order to help U.S. citizens travel legally or illegally to a country that has become known as the forbidden fruit in a Caribbean paradise.
Written in a style that is easy to read and seductively informative, this handbook decodes the intimidating and often misinterpreted embargo laws and offers tried-and-true information about how to get there, where to stay, how to get around, changing money, staying out of trouble with the Revolutionary police, dangers and annoyances, and navigating the very different laws and social customs that govern the communist country. Included in the manual are maps, an extensive reference section, and engaging color photographs that capture the flavor and character of an enigmatic tropical nation and her people who are the friendliest and most sociable on the planet.

Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground

Featuring hundreds of vintage photographs, postcards, brochures, and other materials evocative of time and place, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground documents how the city of Havana evolved from Prohibition haven and rich man's playground to a heady blend of glittering nightclubs, outrageous cabarets, all-night bars, and backstreet brothels. Here, captured in one amazing book, is the drama, passion, intrigue, and opulence of a legendary city during its heyday-before the Castro dictatorship re-imagined the country and Americans were banned from travel to this tropical paradise.
An architectural historian by profession, Peter Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on mid-century Modern architecture and design. He is the founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, an internationally recognized historic preservation organization, and the writer/director of Desert Holiday, a documentary film chronicling the history of Palm Springs as seen through vintage postcards. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs.
(20080515)

Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows

Matanzas - the name means literally 'slaughters' - is the Cuban city nearest the United States. Known at the heyday of the nineteenth-century sugar boom as the 'Athens of Cuba', it is renowned for its art, its music, and its rich African heritage. It is also the place where Latin American baseball began. Yet most Americans have never heard of it. Miguel Bretos' fascinating history of his hometown remedies this oversight. Though he came to the United States as a Pedro Pan child and has lived all over the world, his family is still closely tied to the city where they lived for generations. After forty years he returned to his homeland 'with the longing of an exile, the anticipation of a child, the curiosity of a visitor, the resentment of a victim, and - hopefully - the objectivity of a scholar'. Bretos unfolds the Matanzas story from the aboriginal Tainos to the coming of revolution with solid research, wit, clarity, and the kind of vivid detail that can come only from an insider. But he also deftly inserts Matanzas into a larger picture. More than local history, this original work is Cuban history from a local perspective.

Cuban Elegance

At a time when more and more travelers are discovering Cuba, which has been locked away from the outside world for more than 40 years, this lavishly illustrated, absorbing volume offers a completely different view of the island from the one seen by most visitors. This book presents not the picturesque Cuba of Castro's era with its derelict buildings and peeling paint, but the opulent world of the Spanish Creole aristocracy of the colonial period, which has continued to influence Cuban taste and cultural life on a more modest scale even to this day.

Emphasizing the palatial homes and elegant furnishings of the island's enormously rich sugar, cotton, and tobacco barons, Cuban Elegance relates the social, cultural, architectural, and interior design history of Cuba, and of the Caribbean region in general. With an engaging text and gorgeous photographs taken especially for this sumptuous volume, Cuban Elegance offers a fresh, surprising perspective on an intriguing country.

Cuba (EYEWITNESS TRAVEL GUIDE)

DK Eyewitness Travel's full-color guidebooks to hundreds of destinations around the world truly show you what others only tell you. They have become renowned for their visual excellence, which includes unparalleled photography, 3-D mapping, and specially commissioned cutaway illustrations.

DK Eyewitness Travel Guides are the only guides that work equally well for inspiration, as a planning tool, a practical resource while traveling, and a keepsake following any trip.

Each guide is packed with the up-to-date, reliable destination information every traveler needs, including extensive hotel and restaurant listings, themed itineraries, lush photography, and numerous maps.

I Was Cuba: Treasures from the Ramiro Fernandez Collection

While most think of Cuba as a mythical island of rum, rumba, and revolution, period photographs reveal a more complex place. I Was Cuba is an original look at Cuban history as seen through the Ramiro Fernandez Collection arguably the world's leading archive of Cuban photos and ephemera. I Was Cuba showcases rare, vernacular images from the nineteenth century through the revolutionary period, exploring the everyday and the eccentric. With texts from famed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls), this captivating volume is an intimate view into a bygone era of glamour, political upheaval, and astounding visual culture.

Havana Then and Now (Then & Now)

Established in 1519 as a harbor city to service the fleets bound for Spain from Mexico and Peru, Havana became the busy portal to the vast Spanish colonial empire. Largely unharmed by war or weather, many great examples of Spanish colonial architecture survive today. Dozens of archival photographs from HavanaÂ’s mid-20th-century heyday as a posh vacation spot are featured here opposite contemporary photographs, portraying a beautiful city undergoing restoration and struggling to regain its glory days.

Moon Cuba (Moon Handbooks)

Streetwise Cuba Map - Laminated Country Road Map of Cuba

Streetwise Cuba Map - Laminated Country Road Map of Cuba - Folding pocket size travel map

This map covers the following areas:
Main Cuba Map 1:650,000
Habana Map 1:18,000
Varadero Map 1:22,000
Playas Del Este Map 1:28,000

Cuba, the forbidden fruit of countries, is famous for cigars, colonial architecture, Communism, and 1950’s cars still careening thru the streets.

We hear it’s a great place to visit with its lush unspoiled terrain and friendly towns but for most Americans, it’s off limits. Unless you have a general or specific license, you may be in violation of the US Travel Ban to Cuba. To get a license, you need to prove you're a govenment official traveling on official business, a journalist, on a religious or humanitarian mission, a realtive of a Cuban citizen, an athlete or doing research (map research doesn't apply, we checked). Even these requirements have strict guidlines. It's not the traveling that's the problem, it's spending US dolIars that will get you in trouble. The Department of Treasury can impose fines up to $55,000 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Americans may not be able to legally travel to Cuba, but it’s so lovely and relatively undeveloped that it’s the number one warm weather destination for Canadians. Europeans also arrive by the planeful to take advantage of the relaxed atmosphere, inexpensive prices and, frankly, the lack of Americans.

So how did the STREETWISE® Cuba Map come about? This is the only map that was not physically researched by our in-house team. In fact, we out-sourced the work to a British cartographic firm that, assured by separate fact checkers from Canada, did an accurate job of drawing the road network of Cuba found on the map front and preparing the detailed expanded inset maps of Havana, Varadero, and Playas del Este, which are located on the map backside. The Cuba map is complete with index for hotels, sites, parks and streets.

We hope to one day visit Cuba when the travel ban is lifted. Until then we study the Cuba map and plan our itinerary.

Our pocket size map of Cuba is also laminated for durability and accordion folding for effortless use. The STREETWISE® Cuba map is one of several detailed and easy-to-read country road maps published by STREETWISE®. Buy your STREETWISE® Cuba map today and you too can navigate Cuba like a native. For a larger selection of our detailed travel maps simply type STREETWISE MAPS into the Amazon search bar.