Chocolate House and Museum

This guide to the Chocolate House and Museum in Havana opens with a smell rather than an exhibit: cinnamon and black pepper stirred into hot chocolate at a colonial mansion on Mercaderes Street. It traces how the self-styled museum opened in November 2003, its idea borrowed from a chocolate museum on Brussels' Royal Square, and how its cases of porcelain cups from Germany, France, Britain and Italy have quietly been upstaged by the crowd queued at the counter instead. The drink itself comes thick and dark, spiked with cinnamon and a pinch of black pepper, or cold and sweetened with honey.