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 models nor build any on its own, Cuba’s communist government finally refreshed its supply of […]
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 during World War I. As the globe’s largest sugar producer, Cuba entered a near decade-long […]
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, students on March 13, 1957. Disguised as delivery men and driving a truck with weapons […]
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 life, legacies or even the simple fact of his commitment to constitutionalism and elections, the […]
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 the office was said to look “exactly as it did” the day General Fulgencio Batista’s […]
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 launched the first war for Cuban independence on October 10, 1868, by addressing his slaves […]
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, a subsidiary of the historic US monopoly AT&T. At the time, Cubans widely despised the […]
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 Havana’s Central Park stood out in sharp contrast to earlier times. From the 1990s to […]
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 (or fifty US cents) for a folded-over, newspaper-wrapped slice, the hot, gooey meal could taste […]
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 visitors returning to the island from exile) easily identified these paper rolls as the artisanal […]
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 true-sized dioramas of runaway slaves making a life outside colonial Cuba’s brutal plantation society. The […]
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 a cimarrón with his machete raised high, prepared to strike down his would-be captor. Just […]
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. Ensuring that the machine’s origins in the exploitation of slaves would not be lost on […]
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. Ensuring that the machine’s origins in the exploitation of slaves would not be lost on […]
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 slave sold in Trinidad. While the actual authenticity of these objects might not be certain, […]
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 dictated a letter to Spanish ecclesiastical authorities on April 1, 1687, the Blessed Mother of […]
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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 maintained the massive stone fortress in Santiago for the King. Yet within decades and long […]
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 milagritos, that these believers have brought and left at the shrine. Monthly, the nuns who […]
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 Russian city Stalin designed from the ground up as the Communist response to the success […]
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 Spanish tiled roofs and the large public housing complexes the Communist state built along the […]
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 Bay of Nipe and Baracoa itself once made it an ideal location for residents who […]
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 greeted them. The events served Columbus because the incident laid the foundation of his claim […]
The extraordinary, brightly colored Cuban Painted Snail is considered the rarest snail in the world. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 early times: here is the house of the President of Cuba’s Committee for the Defense […]
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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.
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 and internal marketing of homegrown coffee had not only been banned five decades earlier but […]
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 never entirely disappeared in earlier, more prosperous decades. Their drivers also claimed that horses 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 and personal heroism, the roadways of Cuba’s former Oriente province were suddenly pocked with small […]
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 is nothing like the view and conversation one has from the front seat of one […]
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 spice store that the Historian of the City of Havana established years earlier, had always […]
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, I was surprised to find a flirtatious vision of Frédéric Chopin, a Polish composer of […]
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 Old Havana. This silent young violinist wowed foreigners who often stood next to him or […]
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, the hotel had just been inaugurated when I took my former student (now historian) Genesis […]
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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, enormous, and slightly treacherous in its mysterious and anonymous way of life. Since 1948 when […]
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 could pay in CUC, a currency backed by Euros or US dollars, they could shop […]
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Most foreigners would be surprised to see how little merchandise Cuban government stores selling in moneda nacional [Cuba’s island-only, national currency] have available, despite leaders’ false claims to prioritize the needs of citizens. This is as much the case today as in decades past when the sparsity of goods in display windows and shelves of […]
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 a women’s cooperative that offers sturdy, gorgeously hand-painted wooden fans in all colors and sizes, […]
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 [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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Until the 1990s, the Cuban government provided a generous ration of nationally made cigarettes to all adults. From the series, “Cambio sin cambio [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 the Grand Prix of Havana in 1957 and 1958. Perhaps the world’s greatest ever Formula One […]
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 hundred years, especially from the Nineteenth Century to the present, devotion to him is intense. […]
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 [literally “the anvil” in Spanish] is massive by comparison. Part of a protected biosphere only ten kilometers from Baracoa and visible from all points in the city, El Yunque is one […]
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 Cuban independence: Generals Flor Crombet, José Maceo and the most legendary of them all, Antonio […]
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 [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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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 considered: he began scouring the countryside for the personal possessions and relics of Cuba’s black […]
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.
During 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 number of a CDR) remains strictly illegal. This graffiti caught my eye for the social […]
For 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 noticed not one, but two baby hummingbirds emerging from their nest while sitting on the […]
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 [Change without Change]”: Cuba steps toward … and then away from a new future with the United States (2009 – 2016)
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From 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 library. Jewels included such items as a weekly newspaper, originally in Yiddish, of Jewish Cuban […]
In 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 away. However, the fact that it started to work—meaning that water came out regularly from […]
To 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, spray-painted graffiti like these held a certain special meaning. Young people, the presumed “artists”, were […]
One 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 Drugstore on the corner of Obispo Street in the republican-era area of Old Havana because […]
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Between 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 Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba under director Dr. Eduardo Torres Cuevas and the Fundación Antonio Núñez […]
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On 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 book that research helped me create had just come out. To my delight, I chose […]
The 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 a sign on the sidewalk that had once announced the office of a pre-Communist era […]
Across 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 of the bars where Ernest Hemingway famously wiled the hours away drinking naturally lime flavored […]
Because 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 for daily activities as well as their quality. In my family’s houses, like most in […]
Possibly 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 was built to match a far older display of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s image on the […]
When 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 sweet and cantaloupe-like in taste, the Cuban mamey combines with milk, sugar and ice to […]
Read more "More proof of Cuban ingenuity and the start of a (short-lived) capitalist recovery, 2012"
Under 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 originally founded in the 1940s. Likewise, the leadership of Dean Judith Russell allowed UF to […]
President (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 US Capitol, Cuba’s Capitolio also reflected citizens’ and Machado’s own alleged commitment to nationalism in […]
Read more "The Capitol Building before Raúl Castro and Vladimir Putin gave it a facelift, 2011"
Almost 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 began offering early morning group exercise classes like this one. Many drew elderly folks hungry […]
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One 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 Defense of the Revolution, or CDR, reveals both the flagging nature of interest in pro-government […]
Since 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, rap artists in the 1990s benefitted from a Special Period reform that allowed artists to […]
Perhaps 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 import. Until recently, drivers charged a set fee per person to drive from Havana to […]
For 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 of this, the sudden appearance of delicate anti-litter signs like this one throughout the most […]
To the great delight of Cubans living abroad who returned as tourists to visit family on the island, Raúl Castro dismantled several of the state prohibitions on Cuban nationals’ ability to partake or enjoy the country’s tourist facilities and services. One of the most useful of his reforms applied to rental cars. For the first […]
A pioneering scholar of Cuban environmental history, Dr. Funes represented one of several historians who visited UF as a result of a convenio or mutual agreement between the Fundación Antonio Nuñez Jiménez and UF’s Center for Latin American Studies. Here he delivers a talk to graduate students in Spanish.
Established in the first two decades after the Spanish arrival in the New World, Trinidad de Cuba is an ancient jewel. Its every facet mirrors both the unimaginable human pain of hundreds of thousands of slaves who were worked to death to produce sugar as well as the magnificent wealth their pain generated for slave-owning […]
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Enabled for the first time to hire middle men and other intermediaries who in turn increased internal trade on the island, many government licensed entrepreneurs quickly built on their already solid reputation as reliable, top-quality purveyors of services and goods. At “Casa de Lilliam”, a private paladar, waiters wear black bowties and long sleeves amidst […]
Communist law made the fishing, sale and consumption of lobsters outside of government-owned vessels and venues strictly illegal in the early 1960s. From the 1970s to virtually today, Cuba imports fish (usually juvenile merluza of a type normally used for bait fish or pescadilla in any other country) rather than allow for the free fishing, […]
Read more "Cuban-Chinese Cooperative’s take on Caribbean lobster thermidor, 2014"
Located on San Miguel Street in Centro Habana, this historic, three-story mansion stands next door to Cuba’s internationally famous pre-1959 music recording studio (known as EGREM after its nationalization in 1961). A couple for more than twenty years, Alberto, a mulatto from Bayamo, and Samuel, the illegitimate son of a Jewish accountant and a poor […]
Read more "Artists Alberto Molina and Samuel Weinstein’s Bed-and-Breakfast, 2011"