Cuban Studies

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 ...

Like most of the decisions made by the Communist government, the logic behind why an array of life-size bronze statues suddenly started to appear across Old Havana in the 2010s was never made clear. At the eighteenth-century Plaza San Francisco, ...

Until they were reportedly banned from doing so, a handful of young performance artists began to comment on the irony and arbitrariness local Cubans associated with the sudden installation of a number of life-size bronze figures across tourist hotspots in ...

Built in a baroque style in the early twentieth century, this spectacular hotel had once provided Kosher meals and friendly refuge for the many Jewish immigrants, tourists, and merchants who visited or lived in Havana. Empty and closed for decades, ...

Like most Cuban peasants, my uncle Tiki had little or no experience visiting Havana, let alone taking a vacation. For him, who grew up on an isolated farm and lived in a very small town, the capital still seemed imposing, ...

Unlike the 1990s, when Cuban citizens were legally banned from entering state-owned retail establishments that sold goods and services in foreign currency, the government under Raúl Castro’s leadership (2006-2018) officially opened their doors to all. So long as Cuban nationals ...

Most foreigners would be surprised to see how little merchandise Cuban government stores selling in moneda nacional have available, despite leaders’ false claims to prioritize the needs of citizens. This is as much the case today ...

Given the general absence of air conditioning (and sometimes electricity), one of the most precious objects you can have in a sweltering Cuban summer is a well-made, old-fashioned lady’s fan. This store, located near the old port of Havana, houses ...

In the first years after Raúl Castro assumed power permanently from his brother Fidel (2009), entrepreneurialism in Cuba blossomed as never before and in ways unrestrained by the state. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: ...

Until the 1990s, the Cuban government provided a generous ration of nationally made cigarettes to all adults. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with ...

Recently remodeled, the Hotel Lincoln was in its heyday a pinnacle of the apparent prosperity Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship had brought to Cuba. As part of his government’s campaign to convince the international public that this was true, Batista hosted ...