Cuba

• The Spice Island girl - Grenada
• Slow Time! - Grenada
• Star Grazing - Necker Island, Antigua
• Where Nelson won his spurs - Nevis
• Chill Out Caribbean - Spas
• Chicville-sur-mer - St Barts
• The Most Exclusive Island of All? - St Barts
• Spring into the Caribbean - St Barts
• Frightfully Fabulous - St Kitts
• I Love Lucia! - St Lucia
• So you want to live like a millionaire? - St Vincent & the Grenadines
• My perfect Martini - Turks and Caicos
• The Spice Island girl - Grenada
• Slow Time! - Grenada
• Star Grazing - Necker Island, Antigua
• Where Nelson won his spurs - Nevis
• Chill Out Caribbean - Spas
• Chicville-sur-mer - St Barts
• The Most Exclusive Island of All? - St Barts
• Spring into the Caribbean - St Barts
• Frightfully Fabulous - St Kitts
• I Love Lucia! - St Lucia
• So you want to live like a millionaire? - St Vincent & the Grenadines
• My perfect Martini - Turks and Caicos

STANDING AT THE GATES of the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Gina is paid to be passionate. This was the scene of Fidel Castro’s first, failed bid to seize power from the American-backed administration that ruled the island.

Elegant palms provide welcome shade as our state guide describes the heroics of the world’s longest-serving leader.

I ask Gina: ‘Is it true that Castro fell out with Che Guevara?’ Her skin is the same burnished colour as the mahogany tree, whose fruit is scattered like backgammon pieces outside the Moncada, where Castro’s ceremonial soldiers stand rigid in their dull khaki.

Gina’s eyes narrow and she smiles thinly at this dopey tourist. She replies: ‘No, you are wrong. That is propaganda put about by the Yankees.’

This second largest city is the place where the propaganda arm of a dying revolution still flickers. Che’s portrait is everywhere. I reflect that his handsome looks and early death made him a natural icon for a generation.

And the magic still works on the females of Gina’s age in our own tour party, who relapse into memories of life before they threw out the bedsit poster of the chubby-faced guerrilla fighter.

His image is still powerful in Cuba. Visit a school and you will hear his name intoned as morning ‘prayers’. The government has shrewdly packaged him as a consumer-friendly revolutionary, a publicity tool for an ageing administration struggling to grab tourist dollars to prop up an ailing economy.

Today, despite what they still call ‘Yankee imperialism’, Cuba is a revolutionary relic. After the demise of the Soviet Union and crippling trade measures by America, it was forced to accept the dollar as a parallel currency. And to have dollars is to be able to buy what we would consider the most essential of consumer goods.

Not to have access to the buck is to rely on a state wage paid in pesos, enough to exist on, but useless if trying to buy meagre luxuries sold in shops where only the dollar is accepted.

Salsa in the square

This is economic apartheid which is fast eroding what is left of Castro’s communist dictatorship. It fuels massive resentment among most of the 11million population, who endure food-rationing, a virtually non-existent public transport system and who are denied political expression.

Yet as you travel the length of Cuba, there’s an irresistible feeling that, even if life is not everything it should be, it could be a lot worse. There’s no litter, children walk to school in crisp uniforms and literacy and numeracy are high.

Rice, beans and the occasional piece of chicken or pork form the staple diet. But there’s no sign of malnutrition - indeed the paucity of transport has produced a degree of slenderness that accentuates a nation of catwalk models who move to the beat of some of the most exciting sounds in the world.

Only someone with deeply chilled blood could not be electrified by the constant party that is Cuba.

Camaguay is a town at the end of miles of sugar plantation, a place to dawdle, but at night it dances. My wife and I joined couples who learned their steps before Castro cast the die of communist rule, as well as stunning girls who turned to the samba, mambo and salsa in the town square.

Our efforts were greeted with good-natured laughter from local lads who stood ogling the nymphets while the old-timers, in vintage sharp suits and black and white patent dancing shoes, led their ladies with heartbreaking elegance of step on a warm evening.

In the bars, the single men in our party suddenly found themselves having acquired beautiful ‘girlfriends’, who seemed content to chatter away in incomprehensible Spanish, sucking on two-dollar Mohito cocktails.

Living motor museum

There is little crime in Cuba - and few problems for tourists. Cuba has its own costas - resorts catering for sun, sand and scuba. I’m sure they’re fine but for me the attraction was the small and empty beaches where the locals go.

The fascination of the place lies in the forces struggling to shape its future. The capital, Havana, throbs with an emerging affluence accompanying the growing tourist industry. It’s a city where the finest colonial architecture in the Caribbean is being restored. And while the influx of the dollar brings swish shops, it retains, and is proud of, a passion for another time.

Necessity has preserved a living motoring museum, with the roar of stylish ‘Yank tanks’ - Chevrolets, Buicks and Oldsmobiles - gunning down thoroughfares and illegally offering themselves as taxis.

Havana is moving quickly towards the inevitable. But high in the remote Sierra Maestra Mountains, we visited La Comandancia de la Plata, where 40-odd years ago Fidel and Che hid out and plotted their way to power.

You ride in an old Soviet truck up the steepest road in Cuba and then hike upwards. This two-room wooden hut lies hidden beneath a canopy of lush foliage.

‘No photographs, I’m sorry,’ we were told by the guide. It was explained that it is felt images of the leader’s lair would cheapen its place as a national shrine in Cuba.

Cuba is changing fast. The day we left, I stumbled on a political rally. A sea of a thousand national flags, it was an intoxicating mix of Cuba libre, the rummy national cocktail, stunning dancers and political tirades, which still told of the sins of the dreadful Yankees.

It was, it must be said, great fun but seemed to epitomise a nation’s closing-down sale. No one, it seems, now knows exactly where Fidel lives. Some whisper he never sleeps and nightly rants against those he believes plot against his now stagnant revolution.

Cuba is an ideological theme park in the grip of a dictator past his sell by date. Everything will soon change. The pictures of Che will be replaced by Chanel. Go now and breathe the air before that happens.