Santa Clara
"I am wary of revolutionary shrines, but standing where the train came off the rails, I understood why this city believes in itself."
Santa Clara sits in the middle of Cuba, in Villa Clara province, on the road between Havana and the colonial set-piece of Trinidad, and most travellers blow through it without stopping. That is a mistake. This is the city where, in the final days of December 1958, Che Guevara and a few hundred fighters took the last government stronghold between the rebels and Havana, and Batista fled the country days later. Santa Clara is where the Cuban Revolution was effectively won, and the city has never let anyone forget it — but it is also a real university town, full of students, with a plaza that does not perform for tourists because tourists mostly are not here.
The armored train
The decisive moment was almost cinematically simple. Batista sent an armored train full of soldiers and weapons to reinforce the city; Che’s men used a bulldozer to tear up the tracks, and the train derailed, and the soldiers surrendered. The site is preserved as the Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado — several of the actual carriages sit where they came off the rails, the bulldozer mounted on a plinth nearby, the whole thing strewn with sculptures of twisted metal. I stood there on a hot afternoon, no one else around but a caretaker and a dog asleep in the shade, and found it more affecting than I expected — not the politics, which I hold at arm’s length, but the sheer improbability of a few hundred people with a bulldozer changing the course of a country.
The mausoleum, and the city around it
On the edge of town stands the Che Guevara Mausoleum, a vast plaza dominated by a bronze statue of Che in fatigues, rifle in hand, and beneath it the memorial where his remains were laid to rest in 1997 after they were finally found in Bolivia, thirty years after his death there. There is an eternal flame lit by Fidel and a quiet museum below. It is solemn and a little overwhelming and, photography forbidden inside, oddly intimate. But the thing I liked most about Santa Clara was not the monuments. It was Parque Vidal, the central square, in the early evening — students sprawled on benches, an old man playing a battered guitar, kids chasing each other around the bandstand, the whole town out walking in the cooling air. Lia and I sat with ice creams from the Coppelia and watched it happen, and it felt like the most ordinary, durable kind of Cuban life.
Why stop here
Santa Clara rewards the traveller who treats Cuba as more than a beach and a vintage-car photo. The revolutionary sites are genuinely significant, the casas particulares are warm and cheap, and the student energy gives the place a forward-looking feel that the more museum-like colonial towns lack. It is also a natural overnight between Havana and the centre of the island, which is how we came to it — and we stayed a day longer than planned.
When to go: December to April for the dry season and cooler evenings. The anniversary of the battle around 28 December brings ceremonies to the train monument if you want the city at its most charged.