Finca las Manacas opened as a museum in 2002 under this unassuming name, supposedly to downplay any Castro 'personality cult.' This gaggle of attractive wooden buildings on an expanse of lush grounds constitutes a pueblito (small town) and makes a fascinating excursion. The complex includes Castro's schoolhouse, family home and everything from a post office to a butcher's. It appears as a backwater today, but once sat on the camino real , Cuba's main east–west road in colonial times.
Around the various houses, you can see more than a hundred photos, assorted clothes, Fidel's childhood bed and his father's 1918 Ford motorcar. Perhaps most interesting is the schoolhouse (Fidel sat in the middle of the front row, apparently), with pictures of young Fidel and Raúl and Fidel's birth certificate, made out in the name of Fidel Casano Castro Ruz. A cemetery contains the grave of Fidel and Raúl's father, Ángel. The site illustrates, if nothing else, the extent of the inheritance that this hot-headed ex-lawyer gave up when he lived in the Sierra Maestra for two years, surviving on a diet of crushed crabs and raw horse meat.
