Havana

Havana Right Now: What You Need to Know Before You Book

As of June 2026, Visa and Mastercard payments have been suspended in Cuba after U.S. sanctions severed connections with the state payment processor FINCIMEX. All Canadian airlines have suspended service to Cuba until further notice. Power blackouts in some parts of the country are running 20 hours a day. Tourist arrivals in early 2026 were down 48 percent compared to the same period the year before. These are facts, not warnings designed to discourage – they are the current operating conditions of a city that has never been straightforward to visit and has always rewarded the visitors who came anyway.

Havana is unlike anywhere else in the Americas: Spanish colonial palaces, pastel Art Deco cinemas, crumbling tenements, and the 1950s American cars maintained with ingenuity and ingenuity alone, because the parts haven’t been officially available for 65 years. The city operates on improvisation as both a cultural style and a daily necessity. If you come expecting convenience, the energy crisis will frustrate you. If you come expecting one of the most atmospheric and historically layered cities in the Western Hemisphere, that is exactly what you will find.

Old Havana

Habana Vieja clusters around four main plazas, each with a distinct character. Plaza de la Catedral is the most atmospheric, fronted by the 18th-century Baroque Cathedral de San Cristobal. Plaza de Armas is the oldest, with secondhand book stalls arranged around its perimeter and the Museo de la Ciudad in the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales – the finest colonial palace in Havana, built between 1776 and 1792. Plaza Vieja has been restored to its original colonial colours and has microbreweries and a camera obscura rooftop that most visitors walk past without noticing. Calle Obispo is the pedestrianised spine of the old town – musicians, pastel facades, and the Hotel Ambos Mundos where Hemingway kept room 511 for several years in the 1930s.

El Capitolio, the domed former parliament modelled closely on the US Capitol building in Washington, was fully restored after decades of deterioration and now houses the Cuban Academy of Sciences. The main dome is the third-largest in the world.

Vedado

Plaza de la Revolucion is the vast civic square dominated by the Jose Marti memorial and the steel portrait of Che Guevara on the facade of the Interior Ministry – a 60-metre silhouette that has been reproduced on every t-shirt in the tourist trade. The Museo de la Revolucion in the former Presidential Palace contains the Granma, the yacht that carried Castro and 81 others from Mexico in December 1956. They were meant to time the crossing with a supporting uprising; the uprising was suppressed four days before they arrived. The improvisation required to survive that miscalculation says something about how the revolution – and the country – operates.

The Fabrica de Arte Cubano (FAC) in Vedado, a converted cooking-oil factory, runs Thursday through Sunday as gallery, concert hall, and bar. It represents the most alive current cultural space in Havana and is worth building an evening around.

Eating and Music

La Guarida, reached via the fourth-floor staircase of a crumbling Centro Habana tenement, is Havana’s most famous paladar (private restaurant). It was used as a filming location for the Cuban film Fresa y Chocolate in 1994 and still has a rooftop bar with views of the Capitolio. Book ahead. El Del Frente and O’Reilly 304 are two blocks away and do imaginative seafood and excellent cocktails without the waiting list.

For music: Casa de la Musica in Centro Habana, Casa de la Trova in Old Havana, FAC on Thursday nights, and Callejon de Hamel on Sunday afternoons for live Afro-Cuban rumba in a narrow mural-painted back street that dates its artistic life to the early 1990s.

La Bodeguita del Medio and El Floridita are touristy. Both are worth visiting once, deliberately. The mojito at La Bodeguita and the daiquiri at El Floridita are the historical reference points for both drinks – Hemingway’s name is on both menus for a reason.

Practical Notes

Bring euros, British pounds, or Canadian dollars in cash – not US dollars, which face penalties at official exchanges, and not bank cards from US-affiliated networks, which as of June 2026 simply do not work. Carry what you need for the duration. ATMs are unreliable even in normal conditions. The Cuban peso (CUP) is the everyday currency for goods and services.

Check current flight availability from your departure city before booking – routes to Havana from several major markets have been disrupted during 2025 and 2026, and the situation is not stable. Casas particulares remain the most rewarding accommodation choice for the cooking, the conversation, and the daily life they put you inside. November through April is the dry season. The Hotel Saratoga, destroyed by a gas explosion in May 2022, remains under restoration – one reminder among many that Havana has always operated on its own timeline, and that timeline is not yours to control.