Nothing in Cuba is easy. Getting a bottle of water in a shop is so painstaking that many Cubans resort to collecting rainwater from the roof and get ill doing so. Filling up with petrol is so complicated that you have to be either waiting in a queue on an app or lining up for sometimes hours at a service station only to be told the fuel has run out – if that service station accepts normal citizens rather than just government employees, of course. Relaxing of an evening with a cold beer is hard because 1) the almost daily power cuts mean there could well be no light and 2) the same power cuts will quite possibly have spoiled what was in your fridge and made that beer, well, distinctly less cold. Things are tough in this most fascinating of Caribbean countries right now and I’ve written an article on just how tough. Imagine, then, how challenging it can be to go to the country and research it to write a book on how travel is there right now. Not easy (though significantly easier, of course, than being a Cuban trying to simply live everyday life in Cuba). 

All things considered, therefore, the latest Lonely Planet Guide to Cuba, written by myself and the talented Claire Boobyer, Brendan Sainsbury and Katya Bleszynska, is therefore a colossal achievement. We all took on the power cuts, internet outages, problems obtaining fuel to even travel anywhere and much more – and researched a fantastic book. I went off to the wild west – the provinces of Pinar del Río, Artemisa, Mayabeque and La Habana – in search of the tobacco plantations, lush nature reserves, surreally spectacular mogotes (bizarre foliage-clad limestone crags) and hidden sandy beaches that make up the region, and here, at last, this travel guide is the result!

A beautiful, brilliant and culturally insightful effort – and a country that still, despite everything, is so worth going to. In fact, because it needs your help right now to sustain the tourism which is its economic driving force, perhaps it is more worth going to than ever…

Lonely Planet Cuba – 2026 edition

Categories: Adventure Travel, Caribbean Travel, Cultural Travel, Travel/Reference BooksTags: Artermisa, Caribbean, Caribbean Travel, cuba, havana, Islands, La Habana, lonely planet, Mayabeque, travel guides, vinales, western cuba