A Cuban woman enjoys a cigar in Santiago de Cuba.

Photo: Steve Woodhall

The tension between laid-back tropical paradise and dedicated socialism is at the heart of the Cuban experience.

Kids jump into the sea off Havana's grand Malecon sea wall, flame trees and bougainvillea paint brilliant colours against crumbling walls and families and friends laze for hours on their doorsteps. At the same time, billboards celebrate the AK47 and warn US President George W Bush that the Cuban people will never yield, and the population is regularly mobilised into mass rallies for collective raisings of the fist.

Cuba lavishes free health care and education upon its citizens, infant mortality rates are as good as the United States and no-one goes hungry. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country's great benefactor for 30 years, it has been hard for ordinary Cubans to get hold of pens or paper or soap for their frequent showers. Many are turning from low-paid careers in teaching, medicine or law to the far more lucrative tourism industry.

Love Pirates of the Caribbean? This is where the originals hung out. See the magnificent UNESCO World Heritage-listed fort at Santiago de Cuba complete with fierce cannons pointing out to the ghosts of the black ships on the horizon.

Spanish sugar-barons, with their armies of slaves, erected grand homes with tall doors and tiled floors. Admire them as you walk the streets of old Havana, drinking in the scenes made famous by Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club.

If you'd like to meet the real man behind The Motorcycle Diaries and a million T-shirts, visit the remains of his flesh and blood at his grave at Santa Clara.

While Che Guevara is forever young, his comrade Fidel Castro is now 80 and very frail. Will this socialist experiment survive his passing, or will Cuba revert to the US-dominated playground it was in the 1950s? Something to ponder before you throw yourself into a night of music and mojitos.

At the moment you won't find homogenous fast-food chains anywhere in Cuba. If you want fast food, you grab a sizzling Cuban-style pizza from a hole in the wall. If you want a coffee, you go into a cafe and order one, and the experience is deliciously different every time. But the golden arches could well set up shop here if Bush is successful in his drive for "regime change". Will it happen? We are raising our fists and whispering fiercely: No pasaran! (They shall not pass!)

Whatever the future, Cubans know how to have a good time - and how to share it around.

Cuba survival guide