Your first time visiting New Orleans might give you just a hint but doesn't come close. You realize the United States you have built in your mind - the State of whatever region you're in -is an overlay of a more recent past. For most it seems the turn of the century is as "old timey" as it gets. New Orleans can't or more accurately won't- reconstruct the influence of indigenous, African, Spanish and French culture to a homogenized, easy narrative despite white supremacy's best efforts.
Where New Orleans gives you a hint of where the past and future seems to live simultaneously, Cuba seems to exist in these extremes and it's stunning. Walking through Havana, or even by way of a "yank tank", it’s time travel of the order that the best science fiction aspires to. French colonial architecture juxtaposed against 57 Chevys, the skeletons of new hotels in foreground of century old embattlements, brand new Chinese-made buses rolling through tobacco fields passing horse drawn carriages. It's easy to call it a time capsule, some living breathing anomaly, but that dismisses an entire island in the midst of profound decisions about it's future and misses the struggle that is ahead.
In the weeks prior to my trip a lot of people suddenly seemed to have expert level opinions of the island and grave concerns of Cuba "changing". Anyone who travels there, myself included, are why new hotels are being built and why a Starbucks could end up there. I don't have answers for that. But as I have witnessed how unbelievably repulsive Americans behave in Mexico I know no one wants that. Cuba needs to do the best thing for Cuba.
As an extremely drunk American who cornered me at a bar famous for Hemingway being a humorless drunk at detailed partying through Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba, stock piling rum and cigars for upper management at his company. I can imagine most Cubans don’t want their country to be a drunken pit stop on some boring dudes mission to impress his boss.