Cuban Studies

For decades, elderly island Cubans have joked that they want to live long enough “to see the end of this endless movie”, referring to the dictatorship Fidel Castro built. This political cartoon, published by independent journalists whom the Cuban regime ...

In March 2024, Yasmary González Martínez covered the front of her house with graffiti protesting the Cuban government and calling for its downfall. She also posted this picture of it on her Facebook page and resisted the demands of Cuban ...

To my shock, the Cuban state recently revived the slogan that it launched in 1980 to discredit the political reasons that nearly 125,000 mostly young, working-class Cubans cited for fleeing Communism in the Mariel Boatlift. While occasionally this slogan peppered ...

In 2008, the Cuban state finally ended the ban on the ability of Cuban nationals to stay in their own country’s hotels. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … and then away ...

I took this picture while watching a live televised broadcast of Nelson Mandela’s funeral on December 15, 2013. US President Barack Obama walked up to Raúl Castro and, shockingly, shook his hand! Almost exactly one year later, both would announce ...

Two years after visiting Cuba with a dozen fellow students as part of Prof. Guerra’s history class, Emily Snyder had joined Yale’s graduate program in Latin American history and was rapidly fusing scholarship with witnessing contemporary events. This picture commemorates ...

Fidel Castro once ordered the erection of this stand of flag poles in the early 2000s to protest US foreign policy and block Cubans’ view of the US Embassy in Havana, known as the US Interests Section prior to President ...

Dr. Araceli García Carranza, a beloved friend and legendary librarian, died in Havana in the first days of February 2026. Although she and her husband, fellow librarian Julito, left behind no children of their own, Araceli’s legacy lies in the ...

For anyone familiar with the life and mission of Cuba’s nineteenth-century liberator and democrat José Martí, the idea that a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution would be named after him is as shocking as it is disturbing. ...

On display at an Old Havana pharmacy is this nineteenth-century skeleton, standing upright in a box, next to a beautiful porcelain water distiller. Although visited by many tourists who find such displays quaint, this pharmacy is rarely stocked with the ...

The vistas offered from this famous bridge at Bacunayagua are hard to beat. However, it is difficult to ignore the stark reality behind the cheerful landscape of green: fertile fields lie fallow and stands of sugar cane, long abandoned by ...

On October 10, 1868, sugar planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes assembled his slaves before him and declaring them “citizens”, invited them to fight alongside him in a revolution for independence from Spain. In fact, de Cespedes never anticipated freeing all ...

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 ...