La Havana province stretches 65 kilometers east and west of the city of Habana and 40 kilometers south. It is Cuba's largest metropolitan area with more than two million inhabitants. The province of La Habana is the only one that many tourists to Cuba visit--and that's unfortunate, as every province has its own special charm.

The province's captial city, Habana, is a center of education, commerce, and the arts. Hemingway lived there. Graham Greene wrote about it ("Our Man in Havana"), and the US mafia once owned much of its real estate. But that was all prior to 1959, when everything changed.

You'll see no commercial advertisements here, only political slogans. One that many Cubans are particularly proud of is found on the highway between Habana and Matanzas. It reads: "Every night, 200 million children in the world sleep in the streets. Not one of them is Cuban."