Havana, Cuba

With five times as many inhabitants as the country's next biggest city, Santiago de Cuba, Havana is in a class by itself. Nowhere else are the contradictions which have come to characterize Cuba – particularly since the advent of mass tourism and the introduction of a dual currency system – as pronounced as they are in the capital. The emerging middle class, most of whom have made their money through the latest wave of tourism, drift around the brand-new shopping malls, while just down the road long queues of people clutching ration books form outside the local bodega. Restoration projects have returned some of the finest colonial architecture in the Caribbean to its original splendour, even as overcrowded and dirty neighbourhoods wait for their first coat of paint since the early 1990s. There is a sense that Havana is on the move, with tourist money pouring in, new nightspots appearing regularly and an increasing variety of products in shops that not long ago either didn't exist or stood empty. Yet on the other hand, time stands still, or even goes backwards, in a city where 1950s Chevrolets, Buicks and Oldsmobiles ply the roads, locals fish from tyres floating near the ageing seawall and many people seem to spend most of the day in the street or on their crumbling nineteenth-century doorsteps.