Brin-Jonathan Butler

Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.

'What comes next?' is the constant question I'm asked by outsiders eager to travel to the island. During the eleven years I traveled to Havana, very few Cubans I met on the island ever bothered to verbalize this question.

With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.

In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.

Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still can__ flush.

Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.