By Vivienne Stanton 

(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, December 2008) 

When I was 25, I drove across Cuba with two friends, from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, via Trinidad and the  Bay of Pigs. I remember crumbling buildings and creaking cars, un-marked roads and sugar cane fields, and kids in school uniforms playing baseball in empty lots where mansions once stood, using sticks for bats and bottle caps for… Read more

By Vivienne Stanton 

(Published in The West Magazine, December 2008) 

As a bearded, 27-year-old law student from Santiago de Cuba in the country’s East, Roberto Gonzalez hid in the hills of the Sierra Maestra with his wife Maria and their baby daughter for ten months. They camped in shelters dug into the hillside, and learned how to shoot rifles. Without food or water, campesinos, local farm workers sympathetic to… Read more

By Vivienne Stanton

(Published in National Geographic Traveler Latin America, June 2009)

In La Habana Vieja, a blind man sings songs in a beautiful voice outside the Bodegita del Medio, Hemingway’s old haunt, while tourists pose with Che Gueverra berets and fat cigars, and street hustlers shout offers of everything from cheap Cohibas to cheap women. Growth in tourism – now Cuba’s second-biggest foreign dollar earner – has had… Read more