Cuban Studies

The Cathedral of Santiago de Cuba stands in the city’s center, a watchful and still grand witness to the struggles, dreams, and prayers of Cubans. Santiago de Cuba, 2016.

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Like most first-time visitors to eastern Cuba, I was surprised at how mountainous and hilly the ancient colonial city of Santiago is. These stairs, built and restored many times since the city’s founding, ease the burden and prevent erosion and ...

The sight of Havana from an approaching plane reveals the grids and patterns of historic urban planners. While the colonial quarter and iconic tourist hotels hug the coast, much of the interior combines the visions of 1940s and 1950s developers ...

Raúl Castro’s legalization of hundreds of entrepreneurial jobs and services after 2009 gave their owners an unexpected canvas on which to display their personal slogans, rather than the Communist Party’s mantras, which pervade urban and rural landscapes. This bicitaxi [bicycle ...

Cubans’ national pastime is storytelling and talking—not baseball, in my view! Here, my son and his island cousins listen intently to UF Gator and now UC-Irvine professor of Caribbean History, Genesis Lara, as she prepares to read them a story ...

At the left of Santiago’s historic plaza stands the oldest building constructed by the Spanish in Latin America: the home of Cuba’s first Governor, Diego Velázquez. The house dates from 1515. Four years earlier, he had returned to the island, ...

For decades now, Communist Party slogans like this one have been plastered on city walls and maintained by a local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Since 2019, when Raúl Castro yielded the top civilian posts of rule to ...

Built to block the façade of the US Interests Section (now recast as the US Embassy), the “forest of flags” Fidel Castro had erected in 2006 had become a forest of empty flag poles ten years later. Black in color ...

Taken from a bike, this Sunday afternoon scene on Havana’s main thoroughfare captures the traffic-free, slower pace of life and breeze-cooled beauty of El Malecón, the long sea wall that defines this city. Havana, 2016.

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Ready to take the stage by storm, sisters Alicia and Isabela pose in their formal costumes for a recital at the Sociedad Cultural Rosalía de Castro, which operates a restaurant but also offers Spanish dance classes to Cubans of all ...

Whenever I visited my goddaughters Isabela and Alicia at the height of summer, playing dress-up and putting on makeup always required cranking up the “manual AC”, that is, a locally crafted and painted Cuban fan. Made to be used and ...

This intimate nightclub, a place where local Cubans always outnumbered tourists in the pre-1959 era, is located directly across from Havana’s famed Hotel Nacional. While researching my book on the 1940s and 1950s, I could not resist witnessing its late-night ...

The waters of Playa Girón, in south-central Cuba, remain crystal clear and free of government-led capitalist development, thanks in large part to their historic importance to the early Cuban Revolution’s quest for sovereignty from the United States: here, in mid-April ...

This extraordinary painting remains ensconced in the former residential quarters of the Troilet Pharmacy, now a government-owned museum in the city of Matanzas. For more than a century, the Troilets operated a world-class dispensary on the main plaza of the ...

In 1912, Emilio Bacardí Moreau, a son of the founder of the Bacardí Rum Company, launched a personal expedition to Europe and the Middle East for the purchase of numerous antiquities, in particular an authentic Egyptian mummy (and original sarcophagus) ...

Conceived a full decade before the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, the display of a real Egyptian mumy and related funerary artifacts surely bolstered the prestige and financial security of the historical museum as its founder Emilio Bacardí Moreau (1844-1922) intended. ...

Could the notable absence of a booth in telephones that Cuban engineers designed during the 1970s and 1980s say something about the general absence of privacy in a socialist society under Communist rule? I might never have considered that question ...

Amidst the collapse of the Soviet bloc between 1989-1993, the Cuban state shocked the world (and perhaps its own citizens the most) by announcing the legalization of neoliberal-style investment between agencies of the Cuban government and foreign companies. ETECSA, a ...

Unlike most tourists to El Morro fortress overlooking Havana harbor, our class did not confine our exploration of its history to the Spanish colonial era when it was a built. Instead, we discussed how its walls had been witnesses to ...

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 ...