Havana's culture runs on improvisation: a 1962 lithography workshop still pulling prints by hand, ballet in a Belle Époque palace, whole city blocks tiled by one ceramicist. Three days through the studios, stages and barrios where Cuban art is actually made.
Five floors of Cuban art from colonial portraiture to Wifredo Lam's Afro-Cuban modernism and the 1980s Volumen Uno rebels, inside a 1954 modernist block. Open Tue–Sat 09:30–17:00, Sun 10:00–14:00.
Cuba's finest Art Deco tower, finished in 1930 in pink granite and Bavarian terracotta with a bronze bat crowning the ziggurat. The lobby keeps its original mahogany bar, and the bell-tower stair opens for a tip.
A working lithography workshop since 1962, where some thirty printmakers pull editions on nineteenth-century presses in a vaulted room off Callejón del Chorro. Signed prints sell straight from the wall racks.
Salvador González Escalona has been painting this Centro Habana alley in Santería symbolism since 1990 — orisha murals, bathtub sculptures, poetry lettered across the walls. Sunday rumba kicks off around noon.
The 1915 Centro Gallego palace, all Carrara marble and sculpted corner turrets, is home to the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Guided tours run every half hour 09:30–17:00 through the Sala García Lorca and salons.
Cuba's instrument archive in a 1905 mansion behind the Malecón: Esteban Salas manuscripts, consecrated batá drums used in Santería ceremony, and a piano Ernesto Lecuona composed on. Descargas in the courtyard.
Seven thousand Napoleonic objects — the death mask cast by Antommarchi, Bonaparte's molar, Empire furniture — inside a Florentine Renaissance villa built in 1928 for sugar baron Orestes Ferrara, with a rooftop loggia.
The 1884 'Teatro Chino', where delegates drafted the Cuban constitution, reopened in 2014 after four decades as a ruin, its horseshoe of gilded boxes rebuilt. Zarzuela and Cuban musical theatre most Friday to Sunday.
A drained water tank in working-class Lawton became a community art project in 2001: thirty neighbourhood artists turned bathtubs, engine parts and walls into mosaics and murals, with a studio and rum bar inside.
Fifty-six hectares of marble sculpture on a Roman grid laid out in 1876 — the Milagrosa tomb where mothers still knock on the stone, monuments to chess players and firefighters, and Art Deco family vaults.
José Fuster has been tiling his Jaimanitas fishing village in Gaudí-esque mosaic since 1975 — his roofs, benches, bus stops and eighty neighbours' façades. The studio sells ceramics and signed graphic work.
A 1940s cooking-oil factory that musician X Alfonso converted in 2014 into galleries, concert halls, a cinema and bars across three floors, with exhibitions rotating every few months. Open Thursday to Sunday from 20:00.