Trending now
INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA
There is perhaps no more recognisable city on earth than Havana, writes photographer Sam Parkes, who has dreamt of visited the Cuban capital since childhood. Resisting the urge to romanticise the city with tired cliches of 'beautiful decay' and 'crumbling beauty', Sam allows his camera, and words, to tell their own story.
BY SAM PARKES | CABANA TRAVEL | 27 OCTOBER 2025
I’d always wanted to visit Cuba. Growing up, it seemed the epitome of everything my childhood wasn’t. I longed for the time-capsule aesthetic, the romance of revolution, the deep lush green of tropical forests and question-mark-silhouettes of pink flamingos.
While people queued in grim procession at the Post Office in England, it seemed like Cubans cha-cha-chá’d their way to the beach. In later years, I would learn of a different story, but I needed to see for myself. There is perhaps no more recognisable city on earth than Havana. We’ve seen it from every angle; the same old clichés reinforcing a postcard of “romantic decay”. I’m guilty too. Every fibre of my being wants to romanticise it.
Havana comes pre-loaded with its own visual mythology: old Cadillacs, cigars, paint-flecked facades, shuttered balconies, communism and colour, Che Guevara and Ernest Hemingway; the whole collage of faded grandeur. Any attempt to photograph and write about it without slipping into cliché is like casting a net into a stream teeming with fish and hoping not to catch anything. Repeat after me: it isn’t 'frozen in time', the food isn’t terrible, there is private enterprise and not everybody is a revolutionary.
Even describing the clichés has become cliché. And for God’s sake don’t mention that you “want to see Cuba before it changes”. Yawn. From a distance, the city still looks ravishingly imperial. Up close, it is crumbling, patched, spliced and improvised, reassembled from the debris of empire and ideology.
It looks crotchety and bent-backed, with the layered aesthetic and 'old-world charm' of a cash-strapped aristocrat; lights blinker, taps splutter, pipes groan; antique fans wheeze. Baroque façades crumble beside art deco towers, like Miami without the botox, their looped and curled iron balconies drooping with potted plants and drying laundry. And, every so often, an impetus of wind will animate an old billboard poster of Fidel Castro, as though his ghost lingers still.
But the city has an irresistible allure. We visit Havana for the diametrically opposed reasons we visit Dubai - it’s old, gritty, run-down and poor - desirable precisely because it has bags of one of the few things money cannot buy: character. It is a wonderful city to sit and observe from a shaded cafe because the whole of life seems to unfold on the streets, all is so explicit and overt and ripe with story, it’s like watching a music box with the lid blown off. And yet, this is the paradox. The Havana that outsiders seek is the version many residents would prefer to replace or escape from, particularly the young.
From the 20s to 50s, Cuba’s ‘golden period’, Havana became a glamorous hub for the elite. The city’s architecture mixed neoclassicism with whimsical art nouveau: grand hotels, art deco and colonial mansions. Symmetry, grand spiral staircases and marble columns met wide verandas, geometric shapes and vibrant pastel colours.
But then everything changed. As a result of the 1959 revolution, construction halted, buildings fell into disrepair, and the economy entered decades of hardship and stagnation. The revolution brought social progress in some areas- high rates of literacy and universal healthcare- but many of that generation now feel abandoned by the society they created. In recent years, Cuba has been in the grip of an emigration crisis.
However, those who remain are forging hopeful projects. It wasn’t long ago that tourists were offered just two lodging options: the standardized government hotel or the cozy, family-run room in a local home. But a recent hotel revival reflects the city’s shift from strict communism toward a controlled form of capitalism. Since 2021, the state has allowed private businesses to import and export. Private restaurants and bars, once dependent on the black market, now receive foreign investment.
Every evening along the Malecón (the seawall that curves around the bay), just before the sun sinks into the Atlantic, half the buildings along the seafront will unsheathe to brass, while the other half shadows to darkness. The plaintive tune of a street musician’s clarinet will compete with the pizazz of a rumba in a nearby bar. Upstairs, in the same building, an old lady will be leaning through shuttered windows, watching life pass below her, and strung out to dry on the balcony, a motley assemblage of laundry will billow and contract with the puffed cheeks and drawn-in lips of melancholy repose.
Read Latest Articles
Cabana Magazine N24
Covers by Morris & Co.
This issue will transport you across countries and continents where craft and culture converge. Evocative travel portfolios reveal Japan's elegant restraint, Peru's sacred churches ablaze with color, and striking architecture in a fading Addis Ababa. Inspiring minds from the late Giorgio Armani to Nikolai von Bismarck spark curiosity, while exclusive homes—from the dazzling Burghley House in England and an Anglo-Italian dream in Milan, to a Dionysian retreat in Patmos and a historic Pennsylvania farmhouse—become portals that recall, evoke and transport.
