Cuba

Accounting for Cuba's singular appeal is not as simple a task as invoking its beaches or sunny tropical climate (of which, admittedly, there is no shortage on the island). Even the visual clichés which are inseparable from any first approach to or conception of Cuba hint at this in their unlikely combinations of geography, culture and the country's political history (think of Che Guevara puffing on an habano or the 1950s American car parked on a cobbled, colonial thoroughfare). Indeed, a whole other landscape, marked or defined by these traces of lived experience, where the colonial mansions of yesteryear co-exist with makeshift present-day dwellings or have been partitioned and transformed into the latter, where austere political slogans look down from billboards or building facades on carefree and jovial street scenes, must be explored to begin to grasp why Cuba is truly worth visiting - and how it can become a rewarding and eye-opening experience.