Destinations
Varadero or the cayos: choosing your Cuban beach
Twenty kilometres of sand an hour from Havana, or an island reached by causeway. They are not the same holiday.
Cuba has more good beach than it has time to show you, and most trips end up choosing between two options: Varadero, on the peninsula east of Havana, or the cayos of the Jardines del Rey, further along the north coast. The water is superb in both. Everything else is different.
Varadero: the beach with a town attached
Varadero is a twenty-kilometre spit of sand with a working town in the middle of it. That town is the deciding factor. You can walk to a restaurant that is not your hotel, buy something in a shop, watch a band that nobody booked for you. For travellers who find all-inclusive resorts claustrophobic, that matters more than the quality of the buffet.
It is also the easy option logistically: roughly two hours from Havana by road, which makes a city-and-beach trip straightforward. The hotels run from two-star bed and breakfast in the middle of town to four-star all inclusive out along Las Morlas, where the sand is at its widest and the properties at their quietest.
The cayos: further, quieter, more committed
Cayo Guillermo and its neighbours sit off the north coast, reached by a causeway from Morón. The water on the flats is a colour that photographs badly because nobody believes it. There is almost nothing there except the hotels, which is precisely the point and precisely the risk.
Getting there takes most of a day from Havana by road, so the cayos work best as a flight or as a stop on a longer eastward route rather than as a weekend addition. Once you are there, you are on the island: there is no town to walk into and no alternative to the hotel you chose. Choose it carefully.
How to pick
Take Varadero if this is your first trip to Cuba, if you are travelling with children, if you want the beach section to sit neatly after Havana, or if the idea of one property for a week makes you uneasy.
Take the cayos if the beach is the reason for the trip rather than the reward at the end of it, if you want water sports and flats fishing, and if you would rather see nobody at all for four days.
If you cannot choose, the honest answer is Varadero. It is harder to be disappointed by, and the ability to walk out of your hotel is worth more than most people expect.
