Plaza de Armas

This guide to Plaza de Armas in Havana starts underfoot, with the dark wooden paving blocks on the street bordering the square, laid, tradition says, to muffle carriage wheels outside the eighteenth-century governor's residence that still stands on its western side. It follows the cost of that comfort, from imported hardwood cut into street blocks to a colonial economy built around one man's undisturbed sleep. Then it turns to what fills the plaza today, where secondhand booksellers have set up permanent stalls since Cuba allowed small private trade again in the nineteen nineties. Reach down and run a hand over one of those old wooden blocks before you move on.