3 Best Sights in Eastern Cuba, Cuba

Constructed in 1516, this structure is reputed to be Cuba's oldest house, although many historians now doubt that claim. First or not, it is one of Santiago's top attractions. Diego Velázquez, the Spanish conquistador who founded the city and was the island's first governor, lived upstairs. Inside you'll find period beds, desks, chests, and other furniture. On the first floor is a gold foundry. Memorable are the star-shape Moorish carvings on the wooden windows and balconies, and the original interior patio with its well and rain-collecting tinajón vessel. An adjacent house is filled with antiques intended to convey the French and English decorative and architectural influences—such as the radial stained glass above the courtyard doors—in the late 19th-century.

This Spanish-colonial mansion was the birthplace of poet José María Heredia, who, because of his pro-independence writings, is considered Cuba's first national poet. Heredia died in 1839 at age 36 while exiled in Mexico. The house, now just a fraction of its original size, displays period furniture and some of the poet's works and belongings. The home's traditional interior patio is planted with trees and plants—including orange, myrtle, palm, and jasmine—associated with Heredia's verse. A marble plaque on the house's Calle Heredia facade excerpts one of the poet's most famous works, "Niágara" ("Ode to Niagara Falls").

Cuba's oldest museum was founded in 1899 by Emilio Bacardí Moreau, the former Santiago mayor whose rum-making family fled to Puerto Rico after the Revolution. Although the Neoclassical structure's interior was horrendously remodeled in 1968—destroying many elegant details and cutting off air circulation—the collection it contains is fantastic. The basement, which you enter from the side of the building, has artifacts—including mummies and a shrunken head—from indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. In the first-floor displays of colonial objects, the antique weapons and brutal relics of the slave trade are especially thought-provoking. Step outside a door to a cobblestone alley, along which are houses from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Around the corner is a traditional colonial patio. The second-floor art gallery has works from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although the museum bears the Bacardí name, this is not Santiago's rum museum. That's the Museo del Ron, two blocks away.