Welcome to Cuban Studies

Strolling El Bulevar San Rafael

In Cuba, a “boulevard” is a wide street of shops open only to foot traffic, no cars. In 2016, when I took this picture, the bustling, relatively clean Bulevar San Rafael that stretches from Galeano Street to El Prado and Havana’s Central Park stood out in sharp contrast to earlier times. From the 1990s to […]

Pizza…Cuba’s Post-Soviet National Dish?

As anyone who spent time in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union can attest, pizza—made from a modicum of ingredients and (euphemistically speaking) a unique variety of “cheese”—became nearly ubiquitous in the 1990s. Originally costing only ten pesos (or fifty US cents) for a folded-over, newspaper-wrapped slice, the hot, gooey meal could taste […]

Freshly Roasted Peanuts

With the legal return of small-time businesses to the economy in the 1990s, freshly roasted peanuts became a standard staple of snack vendors on Cuba’s urban streets. Although many foreigners failed to divine what they are, historians (and often older visitors returning to the island from exile) easily identified these paper rolls as the artisanal […]

Ex-Libris

Dr. Anasa Hicks, Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Caribbean History at Florida State University, reads “Conjuring Ghosts: Domestic Service’s Remains After 1959,” the sixth chapter of her latest book, Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution, which “explores questions of race, gender, and ethnicity in a field of work with deep ties to Cuba’s slave society past.”

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Conversatorio Cubano

Dr. Anasa Hicks, Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Caribbean History at Florida State University, discusses her book Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution, exploring racial harmony and the experience of Afro-Cubans working in domestic service.

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Gems of the Archive

When my dad fled Cuba for Spain in 1964, he left behind parents whom he never saw again: Agustín Guerra, an orphaned peasant who beat the odds to become a small tobacco farmer, and Aurora Almirall, a graduate of one of Cuba’s rigorous escuelas normalistas and a rural teacher who founded a one-room school in 1926.

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