Grand tours: Did someone leave the cake out in the rain?

Born in 1961, the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the writer and Channel 4 news correspondent Stephen Smith made it his mission to visit every communist spot on the globe. Smith was enraptured by this "land of miracles" ­ the Cubans' ironic name for their island and the title of his first book, from which this extract is taken ­ tracing the route taken by its revolutionary leader. Here, he visits Havana.

Born in 1961, the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the writer and Channel 4 news correspondent Stephen Smith made it his mission to visit every communist spot on the globe. Smith was enraptured by this "land of miracles" ­ the Cubans' ironic name for their island and the title of his first book, from which this extract is taken ­ tracing the route taken by its revolutionary leader. Here, he visits Havana.

* * *

I walked down the Prado to El Malecon. There were oil streaks on the tarmac. Above the teeteringly stacked rubbish bins at the kerbside, the air trembled with rankness. There was gratuitous-looking wooden scaffolding. It seemed so insubstantial you thought it had hardly been worthwhile putting it up. A sign claimed that constructors were erecting a new hotel in the ruins of an old Spanish building. Only its beautiful columns were standing: they were pitted and engrimed with decay. Reminded by the architecture of wedding cakes, I spotted one, on a pushbike being wheeled down Prado early enough to thwart the sun's effect on icing sugar. I had once attended a wedding reception for habanero teenagers at a pigeon-fanciers' club, where guests' glasses, abandoned for some reason on the bottom tier of the wedding cake, sank through the icing up to their stems.

People hissed as I passed. It was the favourite way of attracting attention: as Norman Lewis has written, it was normal to be stopped on the street in Havana by strangers wishing to share their thoughts about anything that had caught their attention. In front of the Sevilla, a tout from a local nightclub pushed a flyer on me. "Best disco, I like it," he said in English. He asked me where I was from ­ why do people do that? We all need to know, for some reason. I said, "London".

"Ireland?"

"No. Inglaterra."

"Ah. What you name?"

"Stephen," I told him.

"Francis!" he exclaimed delightedly.

On the Malecon, there were a couple of new fast-food cafés and what looked as though it was going to be a car showroom when it was finished. Another cake was being nursed in the sidecar of a motorcycle-combination by a little boy. It was more lurid, with piping of a nosebleed-in-the-snow hue. The boy's father, astride the puttering motorbike, looked Asian. But when I flagged the pair of them down, to take their picture, he told me he was a cubano, a resident of Havana's modest Chinatown. The cake was for his son's classmates, he said.

A young man fell in with me and told me a story about being a soccer player. He agreed with me that some of the hamburguesa joints, and the car showroom ­ "la casa para los coches", as I put it ­ were new. He wanted money, but a policeman foiled him by calling him across to check his papers. A line of cyclists went past me with a susurrus of slack chains. Among the girls, the fashion appeared to be for gynaecological Lycra. Julietta told me that she wouldn't wear it, she was too skinny. She thought that Lycra was only worn by women trying to hold in excess pounds. A beautiful girl with Nefertiti plaits was wheeled past by her boyfriend, astride the handlebars of his bike.

I was going to the Centro Internacional de Prensa on La Rampa, the "Press Censure" to which I had been so unguardedly referred by the visa clerk at the London Embassy. The clean, airless vestibule was hung with self-consciously artistic photography ­ nudes with dock leaves ­ and rather intense works of modern art, in which, for instance, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix might be looking at a Daliesque clock-face. There was an air-conditioned café in the basement where you could drink coffee and watch Mexican soap operas on the barman's television set.

My attempts to get journalistic endeavours off the ground had always foundered at the Press Centre. I had never quite managed to get accredited as a visiting reporter on previous visits. The centre's representatives and I had danced a minuet of futility every day ­ all told, I calculated, we had completed a masked ball of pointlessness. Each morning I would go in, ask where my accreditation had got to and be advised that it was pending. I would ask about interviews, facilities, access, and get stalled or brushed off.

This time I approached the front desk and asked for Igor. Senor de Armas had said I would be looked after by Igor, not the sort of name you forgot. A wiry man appeared wearing a guayabera, a short-sleeved shirt with breast and hip pockets much favoured by Cuban officialdom. Was this Igor? No, this was Senor Almeida. He said that nothing could be done until I had filled in accreditation forms. I had to provide photographs. Foolishly, I'd not thought to bring any: I would have to go to an official photographic studio and sit for the state portraitist.

I had pulled on whatever came to hand that morning and was dressed in full Englishman-abroad fig. A man on the street cried out "Sherlock!", presumably a generic term for my countrymen: I'm not sure that the sleuth of Baker Street ever ventured abroad in floor-length green cotton trousers, long-sleeved shirt, and a sun-hat bearing the legend "Australia" ­ it was a present and was mirthfully set off by corks on yellow strings. I was perspiring, but I found a handkerchief, and then a smile for the photographer ­ unlike my fellow subjects, Cuban men, who were done up in duly gleaming suits and shirts with abstract designs where the buttons would ordinarily have been. They returned the camera's fixed look.

'The Land Of Miracles' by Stephen Smith (Time Warner Books, £8.99) is available to readers of the 'Independent on Sunday' for £7 .99 (incl p&p within the UK). Call 01832 737525 and quote 'Cuba Offer'

Follow in the footsteps

On the waterfront

El Malecon is a gracious seafront boulevard on the edge of Cuba's old colonial capital, Havana. It was designed as a jetty wall in 1857 by the Cuban engineer General Francisco de Albear, but was not constructed until 1902, the year Cuba achieved its independence. Nicknamed the "Silver Lamé" by the composer Orlando de la Rosa, this six-lane road stretches 5km from east to west around the Bay of Havana. Beaten by sea spray the grand old houses that line the seafront are sadly neglected, but still, like much of Havana, contain a crumbling elegance. Similarly, the remains of the public baths, the Baños de Mar, cut from the bare rock at the start of the 20th century, have fallen into disrepair, too.

Getting there

Journey Latin America (020 8747 3108; www.journey latinamerica.co.uk) arranges tailor-made holidays to Cuba, including seven nights at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in old Havana, where Ernest Hemingway lived and worked for a time. In May, this will cost from £860 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights via Madrid and b&b.

Further information

Cuban Tourist Board
(020 7240 6655; www.cubatravel.cu).

Compare Travel Insurance - 5 day Euro cover from £4.33 and Annual worldwide policies from just £43.08