- CUBA’S SAINT JUDE, PATRON OF IMPOSSIBLE CAUSESRead more
October 28th is the official feast day of one of Catholicism’s most revered saints, Jude Thaddeus, believed to have been a first cousin or even brother of Jesus Christ. Perhaps because Cubans have suffered great traumas in the last five ...
- EL YUNQUE OF BARACOARead more
Most travelers of the Caribbean will be familiar with El Yunque National Forest in the US colonial territory of Puerto Rico. Cuba’s El Yunque is massive by comparison. Part of a protected biosphere only ten ...
- SITE OF GENERAL ANTONIO MACEO’S 1895 LANDINGRead more
This national monument is located in an obliquely mapped spot on the eastern shore near Baracoa. It marks the spot where three of Cuba’s greatest national leaders and military officers landed in April 1895 to launch Cuba’s final war for ...
- Agua y masa de coco, roadsideRead more
Perhaps no other part of Cuba is as well known for its hospitality than the mountains of Oriente province. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new ...
- Throne of the King of the Congos:Read more
As this excellent display explains to visitors, Cuba’s slaves and free Blacks organized themselves by the ethnic group of their African origins into societies. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … ...
- Technology of genocide in Cuban slaveryRead more
One of the most disturbing exhibits in the Bacardí Museum of Santiago de Cuba features different instruments for brutalizing enslaved workers. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio ”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from ...
- Preserving evidence of slavery’s genocideRead more
One of the most striking aspects of Havana’s most important colonial era museums and memory markers is the shocking erasure of slavery and the enslaved from virtually all narratives. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio [Change without ...
- Bacardí’s national treasures:Read more
At the end of Cuba’s third war for independence, when the United States’ military intervention and occupation ended patriots’ dream of national sovereignty, Emilio Bacardí forged a clear path of redemption by doing what few of his class peers even ...
- Museo Bacardí, the Smithsonian of Cuba:
The intellectual love child of Emilio Bacardí, one of the two brothers credited with developing and running Cuba’s oldest rum company (founded in 1862), this museum in Santiago de Cuba remains a landmark of national identity, memory and freedom struggles.
- Mural to mend the broken-hearted:
Read moreDuring the post-Fidel Castro age, emboldened Cubans began painting unusual, often beautiful graffiti as seen in earlier posts I have made to Fotodiario. Like other examples, painting any image on a public space without authorization (usually signaled by the zone ...
- 1A (movie), 2 and 3: Cuban Emeralds!
Read moreFor many Cuban islanders, hummingbirds are a sacred animal, both a sign of good luck and of the presence of the Divine. No wonder Rafael Guerra, then a UF history major (and no relation to me) was shocked when he ...
- The (temporary) End of Tourist Apartheid!
Read moreIn 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 ...
- Guanabacoa’s Jewish Cemetery Bears Witness
Read moreFrom 2016-2018, Dean Judith Russell and I collaborated with Dr. Adela Dworkin, the President of El Patronato Synagogue and Jewish Life Center in Havana, to preserve, digitize and make public the tens of thousands of unique items in the Patronato’s ...
- A Fenceless fountain
Read moreIn contrast with the Plaza Vieja, whose restoration I detail above in the “Special Period” section of Fotodiario, this fountain, located in what had once been the heart of Havana’s financial and commercial center, was never fenced to keep Cubans ...
- Graffiti and its highly unusual meaning
Read moreTo most foreign eyes and surely many local ones, the sight of hand-painted graffiti is unwelcome. Yet, in Cuba, where Communist law bans all public displays of signs without prior government authorization and approval, the sudden appearance of brightly colored, ...
- Havana’s newly restored Johnson Drugstore on Obispo Street
Read moreOne of Cuba’s most unique national treasures are the many old-fashioned drug stores from the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century that decorate the landscapes of many cities. In Havana, many visiting Americans feel a special bond with the Johnson ...
- University of Florida’s academic and library exchanges with Cuba reach new heights
Read moreBetween 2012 and 2016, the University of Florida’s Smathers Library, under the leadership of Dean Russell, specialists of Cuba in our doctoral program in History, and the Center for Latin American Studies created unprecedented academic and intellectual exchanges with the ...
- Re-opening a restored National Library
Read moreOn 15 October 2012, I happened to have stopped by Cuba’s Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba in order to thank my colleagues in the Cuban bibliographic division for their help in 2005 conducting months of research on the post-1959 press. The ...
- “Cuba Libre”
Read moreThe survival of historical wreckage from Cuba’s past all around the island can sometimes make for startling experiences, especially when their irony is difficult to convey in words. Walking down a Havana street in the fall of 2012, I encountered ...
- The weight of history, 2011-2016
Read moreAcross Havana, Cuba’s apartment buildings and once opulent mansions bear witness to the extremes of history. Enormous trees like the ceiba could be seen growing from the roof and side of a still-inhabited building steps away from El Floridita, one ...
- Uncle Tiki examines a family heirloom, 2013
Read moreBecause we hail from a world shaped by consumerism and the cheap, invisible labor that makes our “lifestyle” possible, most visitors to Cuba are consistently astonished by both the sheer age of many of the objects on which Cubans rely ...
- Caught between Camilo and Che, 2012
Read morePossibly one of the most surprising first acts of Raúl Castro’s time in office was to put up a massive metal sculpture of Camilo Cienfuegos on the façade of the Ministry of Communications in the Plaza of the Revolution. It ...
- More proof of Cuban ingenuity and the start of a (short-lived) capitalist recovery, 2012
Read moreWhen asked what the greatest evidence of an emerging economic recovery might be, one thoughtful Cuban observer told me, “The return of the mamey and the health of our puppies.” Similar to the Catalina avocado in its fiber-free texture but ...
- Librarians at Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba “José Martí” and Dr. Jennifer Lambe, researcher and historian at Brown University, in the grand reading room, 2012
Read moreUnder the leadership of historian Dr. Eduardo Torres Cuevas, Cuba’s National Library went from being a sleeping giant whose quality of service and accessibility of holdings were infamously bad to becoming the world-class institution it was meant to be when ...
- The Capitol Building before Raúl Castro and Vladimir Putin gave it a facelift, 2011
Read morePresident (and soon-to-be dictator) Gerardo Machado built El Capitolio in 1929 as part of a massive program of public works that temporarily addressed the chronic underemployment created by Cuba’s monocultural dependence on sugar. Although a clear neocolonial homage to the ...
- Private exercise coach leads a class in Old Havana, 2011
Read moreAlmost as soon as Raúl Castro expanded the legal categories for self-employment and the hiring of personnel by small businesses in 2009-2011, entrepreneurial Cubans took quick advantage. Charging what most Cubans considered a pittance, young gym instructors and retired athletes ...
- Contrasting pro-government billboards, 2011
Read moreOne splashy new billboard announces the city of Cienfuegos’s faith in Fidel and Raúl Castro “has never failed” from the side of the road near the entrance to that city. Another pro-government sign made by a local Committee for the ...
- Cuban rap artist and founding member of Escuadrón Patriota Raudel addresses Professor Guerra’s class, Summer 2013
Read moreSince the mid-1990s, Black Cuban musicians had begun re-engineering the African American genre of hip-hop and rap in ways no-one expected. In contrast with earlier generations of musicians who performed and recorded during the first three decades of Communist rule, ...
- Interprovincial collective taxis lined up and waiting for passengers in Havana’s Parque de la Fraternidad, 2011
Read morePerhaps nothing is more more emblematic of Cuban entrepreneurs’ ingenuity and persistence than the now 70+-year-old American cars that drivers have rebuilt and maintained using hand-made and “cannibalized” parts from Soviet-made trucks, tractors, or even a rare Korean or Japanese ...
- The Historian of the City of Havana’s astute (and ironic) “anti-litter” campaign in action, 2013
Read moreFor the hundreds of thousands of habaneros who continue to live in neighborhoods riddled with corner garbage dumps, the fact that they can do nothing to increase the government’s once-a-month trash pick-ups is a source of daily indignation. In light ...
- Mural to mend the broken-hearted: