Our Destinations

Cienfuegos,The City I Most Like

Cienfuegos is simply gorgeous. The only villa founded by the French under the Spanish colonial rule in Latin America is flanked by two splurges of Mother Nature, the Escambray Mountain Range and a wide, beautiful bay giving onto the Caribbean Sea. Its iconic architecture and modern urban layout were a true revolution at the turn of the 19th century.

Unsurprisingly, the beauty and functionality of the city ushered in an economic boom, which did not take long, bringing in a thriving arts and cultural scene. Enrico Caruso, the famed tenor, is one of the great who honored the city with a historical performance at the Terry Theatre.

However, the most important contributions of Cienfuegos to the arts legacy in Cuba, did not necessarily result from this sort of virtuous cycle. In fact, the career and path to celebrity of the greatest of all Cuban musicians, Benny Moré, a cienfueguero himself, had little to do with the glamour of his beloved birthplace city. Rather the opposite.

He was not able to complete elementary education, let alone formal musical instruction. Eldest of 18 siblings, he had to become a breadwinner at an early age and left Cienfuegos with his mother in a quest for jobs. Still, one of Moré’s most important songs goes “Cienfuegos es la ciudad que más me gusta a mí” (Cienfuegos is the city I most like). The “Pearl of the South” is just that charming.

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