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If you are planning a vacation to Cuba or if you have been there and fell in love with it, here are some of the most beautiful films to watch to be moved by splendid images of Cuba and Havana:

OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1958)
Actually filmed in Cuba shortly after the revolution, this brilliant dark comedy tells the fictionalized events leading up to the revolution. Alec Guinness, long before becoming a Jedi master, plays a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who agrees to create a spy network for MI6. He becomes caught up in his own deception and the results are not always comical. There is a wicked police captain, mysterious deaths, secret codes, Havana nightlife, many images and spectacular scenes of Old Havana and even the foreshadowing of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The screenplay was written by Graham Greene, based on his novel of the same name. According to some reports, Fidel liked the film but thought it was too soft on the Batista regime.

STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE (1992)
Awarded at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994.
Filmed in Havana, it tells the story of Cuban society in the 1970s, its contradictions and its difficulties, including those, albeit in a tangential way, of a political nature.
Set in 1979, it tells the story of a friendship between David, a Cuban student and Castro supporter, who identifies homosexuals as “spies of capitalism,” recovering from a recent romantic disappointment with the uninhibited Vivian – solely in pursuit of sex and money – who is approached, while upset and embittered in a bar, by Diego, an intellectual about to set up an art exhibition, who tries to seduce him with blatant homosexual attitudes. David refuses, annoyed. Then, attracted by the possibility of reading works by authors banned by the regime and listening to music equally hard to find, he begins to spend time with Diego and becomes fascinated, not by his gay reality, but by his culture as a “free thinker” regarding Castroism.

BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999)
This documentary helped remind the world of the wonders of Cuban music. In 1996 in Havana, American guitarist/archivist Ry Cooder and Cuban leader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez gathered and recorded some of the island’s finest musicians. Many of them had fallen on hard times since the revolution. The album takes its name from a Havana social club where the older musicians used to perform. The film shows the musicians in concert and traveling beyond their native island. The music is phenomenal and the interviews with the veterans are great. The film, directed by Wim Wenders, also gives us a rare glimpse of life in Cuba. Ry Cooder was later indicted and fined by the United States government under the Doing Business with the Enemy Act.

FAST AND FURIOUS 8 (2017)
Filming began in Havana, disrupting traffic in the capital and offering Cubans new proof of the island’s cultural openness.
The old American cars that still circulate on the island (in Cuba they call them “Almendrones”), since imports from the USA were interrupted after the revolution in 1959 – play a prominent role in the film.
Aboard one of these cars, the protagonist Vin Diesel paraded among the cheering crowd, emphasizing “this is a beautiful place with beautiful people.”

We look forward to helping you organize your vacation to Cuba and revisit these legendary places.