When I first moved to Cuba, an ex-girlfriend said: ‘That sounds lovely, Ruaridh. What next, Thailand?’ The Caribbean island has always come with a certain reputation – the writer A.A. Gill noted that the Cubans are the ‘most libidinously choreographed people in the world.’

David Miliband would be a disastrous foreign secretary

Why the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism has been disowned

It wasn’t the revolution that made Cuba known for sex. The sleaze goes way back, probably to 1492 and beyond (naughty Tainos), but by the 1950s, Havana’s infamous Shanghai Theater was putting on live sex shows, performed by a gentleman called ‘Superman’ – and not because he could fly.

Such libertine ways – and the mob that controlled them – were part of the reason Fidel Castro gave for tumbling the then dictatorship. But while he swiftly put paid to the Shanghai, communism couldn’t kill the latitude Cubans give to love.

Do you know Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy? God knows........

© The Spectator