Welcome to Cuban Studies

Bohío lost in time

One of the last places in the Caribbean where we can still see hand-built stucco and palm-thatched homes known as bohíos—in the lived environment and not in a museum—is Cuba. Because most of the construction materials and knowledge for how to build a bohío are locally available, both their creation and their repair do not […]

I, Spy

In the 1970s and 1980s, the newly East German-trained Ministry of the Interior designated certain hotels and special hotel rooms for the exclusive use of American visitors. Cuba’s state security outfitted them with the latest surveillance equipment, particularly recording devices, not only to guard against any conspiratorial activity, but more importantly, to gather unique, unfiltered […]

The Façade of Change

In the 1990s, the Cuban government used billboards like this one to announce the future appearance of hotels and other tourist facilities in a failed attempt to secure the public’s support for its partnerships with foreign investors. In this case, most Cubans found the officials’ choice to build an extremely expensive hotel available only to […]

Cuban Surrealism

Strolling down El Prado, once Havana’s most beautiful and iconic street, almost exactly thirty years after he, his wife Nancy, and their son Carlitos had left Cuba, UF professor and historian Neill Macaulay must have thought he was walking through a surreal painting. Most older Cubans I met four years later on my first month-long […]

Ex-Libris

In this edition of Ex-Libris, author Elena Sheppard reads from her first book, The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora, a memoir detailing the exodus of her family from Cuba and the wrangling of identity, belonging, and Cubanness outside the beloved island.

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Conversatorio Cubano

In this Conversatorio Cubano, Dr. Lillian Guerra interviews author Elena Sheppard, discussing Sheppard’s new memoir, The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora.

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Gems of the Archive

By far the million-person rally, held from January 1959 forward, proved the most powerful weapon in Fidel Castro’s arsenal of strategies for consolidating his monopoly on defining the policies and direction of the Cuban Revolution. Documented here in the pages of Diario de la Marina, often described as Cuba’s Wall Street Journal, was the very first million-plus rally after the flight of Batista. Its purpose was to demonstrate to the United States that the majority of Cubans backed the trials and summary executions of Batista’s henchmen and collaborators as “war criminals”.

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