Background: Old Havana and its Fortification System, the World Heritage core of Cuba's capital

Background

Cuba spoke at the general debate of the United Nations General Assembly as a government seated in Havana, and the oldest part of that city carries a place on the World Heritage List. The property is entered as Old Havana and its Fortification System, in Cuba, under criteria four and five. The Spanish founded Havana in 1519, and within the same century it had become the largest port in the Spanish Caribbean. By the eighteenth century it held the most complete dockyard in the New World, because its bay was a compulsory halt on the sea route to the Americas. That traffic is why the Spanish ringed it with stone defences built between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Morro Castle, La Punta, La Cabana and the Castillo de la Real Fuerza. The old city inside the former walls keeps five large plazas along with Baroque and neoclassical buildings and houses with arcades, balconies and inner courtyards. These are among the oldest and largest stone fortifications anywhere in the Americas.