Cuban Studies

Parked in front of Cuba’s historic (and still not entirely renovated) Presidential Palace, these cars reflect the grindingly slow pace of change that has characterized Cuba’s one-party state since Fidel Castro’s movement took power in 1959. Unable to import new ...

Cuba’s Presidential Palace was built during the presidency of Mario García Menocal (1913-1921) and enabled by a massive surge in sugar prices caused by the collapse of beet sugar production in Europe and armies’ reliance on sugar for soldier rations ...

The interior patio of the Presidential Palace remains marked by one indelible historical moment, more than possibly any other: a nearly successful commando assault and an assassination attempt on the life of dictator Fulgencio Batista by the University of Havana, ...

During his many years at the command of Cuba’s government (1934-1944, 1952-1958), General Fulgencio Batista regularly expressed that his greatest admiration for the United States was embodied in its paramount liberator, President Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, for anyone familiar with Lincoln’s ...

Going to Cuba’s Presidential Palace since it re-opened after partial restoration and the curatorial revision of many of its exhibits offered the chance to view the office of Cuba’s former presidents. For Cuban history buffs, this was particularly exciting because ...

With Martí at his back, a seated Cuban president would have gazed upon two portraits of Cuba’s early national figures. To the left hangs the image of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a sugar planter who defied all expectations when he ...

A day after surviving a student-led commando team’s assassination attempt, the dictator Fulgencio Batista famously received a congratulatory visit from US Ambassador Arthur Gardner. The latter brought a solid-gold telephone as a personal gift from the American-owned Cuban Telephone Company, ...

 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Conspicuously hidden by a natural cave entrance in a lush valley north of Viñales, Pinar del Río, this ambitious state-run restaurant is called Palenque de los Cimarrones. True to its name, the eatery serves as a faux fortification inhabited by ...

Central to the government-owned Palenque de Cimarrones restaurant is the replica of a nineteenth-century camp of runaway slaves. With bronze statues, one scene depicts a violent confrontation between an enslaver with his arm cocked, ready to crack his whip, and ...

La Botija, a privately owned restaurant in Trinidad, features a cast-iron roller once used to squeeze the sweet juice out of sugar cane. This machine, known for sometimes ripping arms off overworked slaves, was the centerpiece of the outdoor patio. ...

La Botija, a privately owned restaurant in Trinidad, features a cast-iron roller once used to squeeze the sweet juice out of sugar cane. This machine, known for sometimes ripping arms off overworked slaves, was the centerpiece of the outdoor patio. ...

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of the tour in La Botija lay in the main dining room. There, the manager stopped proudly before a locked display case on the wall: inside was the original bill of sale for an African ...

Tucked away in the still tiny hamlet of El Cobre in far-eastern Cuba stands one of the first Catholic pilgrimage sites of America, the shrine to the Virgin Mary of Charity. According to Juan Manzano, an eighty-five-year-old Black slave who ...

El Cobre, meaning copper, at the time of the Virgin’s first apparition in 1612, was inhabited by only a hermit, a priest, a handful of free people of mixed race, and 328 slaves. The latter worked at the mine and ...

Over the centuries since 1612, the image of the Virgin of Charity also became a principal symbol of cubanidad and a source of miraculous healing for tens of thousands of believers. Her shrine holds hundreds of thousands of objects, called ...

In the “Soviet era” of the Cuban Revolution, roughly 1961-1991, the US embargo prevented virtually all cars from being imported to Cuba except for those manufactured in the massive car factory of Togliatti (named after an Italian Communist), a Western ...

Eastern Cuba features some of the most beautiful, safe, and walkable cities in the Caribbean. Taken from a colonial fortress facing the sea, this picture shows the many layers of history reflected in the contrasts between homes topped by ancient ...

The legendary reserve of multinational piracy in the colonial era, the city of Baracoa remained unconnected to the rest of the island except by boat for most of the last century. This small island’s proximity to multiple shores in the ...

Few places on the island are more popularly seared into local memory than this one. Here Columbus not only landed for the first time in Cuba on 28 October 1492, but his men also attacked the local indigenous people who ...

The extraordinary, brightly colored Cuban Painted Snail is considered the rarest snail in the world. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United ...

Across Cuba, the legacy of the Cuban Communist Party’s behind-the-scenes organizing in favor of political radicalization in the 1960s is still visible. In Santiago de Cuba, I was surprised to find something right out of a historical memoir of the ...

Shot from the rooftop garden of a famous, once privately owned restaurant on the plaza of Santiago, this picture captures the beautiful stillness of the city’s majestic Cathedral overlooking the bay at sunset. Santiago de Cuba, July 2016.

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While most foreign observers might have found a mule train in the Sierra Maestra quaint, I saw it as evidence of local peasants’ economic autonomy. The boldness of its display was startling. Unlike central and western Cuba, where the cultivation ...

Once again, the horse-drawn carriage formed a significant part of travelers’ landscape in Cuba as far east as Santiago in 2016. Unlike the taxi-style routes of western cities or the tourist traps of Old Havana, however, Santiago’s horse-drawn carriages had ...

Soviet funding of public memory projects in the 1980s reached a crescendo in eastern Cuba, where designers focused on the history of Fidel Castro’s wing of the revolution against the 1950s dictator Fulgencio Batista. Obliterating the role of individual choice ...

After a two-year absence from Cuba, my six-year-old son returned triumphant with the knowledge that a camera is always the best witness to the ebbs and flows of the “change without change” that defines Cuba. He also knew that there ...

Two years after President Barack Obama announced the opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, the evident abundance of information, food for sale, and entrepreneurial prosperity hit a high-water mark. Until this trip in the summer of 2016, Marco Polo, a ...