Cuban Studies

Like the photograph that my maternal grandpa “Chichi” took of his three kids and his in-laws on Christmas Eve in December 1949, this image documents more than he probably intended about the social, economic, and cultural history of Cuba. At the center stands his ninety-plus-year-old mother, Teresa Rosado Rodríguez, known as “Mama Teresa,” holding the youngest member of the family, and his own mother, Carmen (in striped dress), the oldest of Mama Teresa’s 22 children.

Read more "Chichi’s Christmas"

Probably made in the late 1840s, this detailed map of Cuba features evidence of its “modern picturesque” advancement through historically sanitized scenes of commercial sugar and tobacco production that was— despite appearances to the contrary—made possible by hundreds of thousands of enslaved African and Cuban-born slaves.

Read more "Cuba’s Slave-Driven Economy & Map as Propaganda"

Printed in Holland in 1628, this map shows a “birds-eye-view” of the port of the Bay of Matanzas made by cartographers who likely never visited either Cuba or the province of Matanzas themselves. Hence, they erroneously depicted the Bay of Matanzas (whose name commemorates the Spanish massacre of native people on the site) as a volcanic mountainous landscape. 

Read more "400-Year-Old Map of Matanzas Bay"

In 1959, the most illiterate province in Cuba was not the most associated with foreign investors’ economic control or massive sugar plantations: it was Pinar del Rio, tobacco production’s legendary ground zero, where the belief that slavery and anti-Black racism has played little or no role in the region’s economic and social development continues to […]

Read more "Ñica and the Reality of Race in Cuba"

Marking the start of the Christmas holiday season of 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, this family photo speaks to a time in Cuba when electoral democracy had just ended the first of General Fulgencio Batista’s two regimes (1934-1944). Anything, for many Cubans, must have seemed possible. Those gathered include my ringleted, […]

Read more "A Cuban Family Celebrates the End of War"

Flanked by fellow instructors at an Escuela Básica de Instrucción Revolucionaria, Roberto García Añel, a young twenty-something who worked in the accounting division of his factory, led worker-students in revolutionary songs at this class session, held sometime in 1964. On the wall hangs a mass-produced portrait of the popular revolutionary Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos, whose plane […]

Read more "Cantando a Camilo [Singing to Camilo]"

It is impossible to know whether young loyalists like EBIR teacher Roberto García Añel would have chosen a Marxist path for Cuba if Fidel Castro had given them a choice. What is clear is that García Añel made a commitment to what he understood was “the Revolution” as a very young man, and he worked […]

Read more "Revolutionaries first, Marxists last?"

The popularity of the handsome (and almost always smiling) Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos rivaled that of Fidel Castro until late October 1959 when the airplane meant to fly him back from Camagüey to Havana mysteriously disappeared over open water. Only a few hours earlier, he had reluctantly arrested fellow Comandante Huber Matos for resigning his post […]

Read more "Camilo and continuity"

A dizzying array of commemorations covers this page of stamps in Abreu Hernández’s album. While top designs honor flora, fauna, art, cinema, and the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980 (boycotted by much of the Western world), other stamps depict guerilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara, as well as Tania Bunke, his lover and East German spy, […]

Read more "Your spies are our heroes"

A close-up of stamps reveals Cuba’s intense claims to solidarity with the world’s anti-colonial liberation movements in Africa and Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism in World War II. Yet contradictions persisted. One stamp honors Amilcar Cabral, a Marxist intellectual who launched independence in the Portuguese colony of “Guinea” (now Guinea Bissau) and […]

Read more "African solidarity…and the enslaved"

In the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, Fidel Castro created (and personally managed) a national crossbreeding and insemination program that most scholarly observers credit with the destruction of Cuba’s vast herds of beef and dairy cattle. Confiscated from their owners—both wealthy, middle-income, and poor alike between 1960-1962—Cuba’s cattle died or failed to produce enough milk […]

Read more "Fidel’s Bulls & Cows"

“You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” This famous quote, attributed to US President Lincoln, occupied an unlikely place in 1960s Cuba: unanimity—the opposite of pluralism, let alone democracy–had been […]

Read more "Cubanizing Abe Lincoln"

Issued at the same time (1970), these stamps depicting the evolution of humans and the “eightieth anniversary” of the birth of Vietnam’s liberator diverge radically in their illustrators’ style. Yet they are deeply didactic and precise in the lessons they convey. Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection, Smathers Libraries, University of Florida

Read more "Prehistoric Humans & the Birth of Ho Chi Minh"

Called by Fidel Castro to be the largest sugar harvest in Cuban history and carried out by a nationwide force of nearly half a million unpaid (“volunteer”) workers, the Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970 brought Cuba’s economic development to a grinding halt. Although they produced eight million tons—a historic record, the human cost workers […]

Read more "The Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970"

Thanks to the Soviet Union, Cuba enjoyed a short-lived “space program” that launched pilot Arnaldo Tamayo into space alongside Soviet cosmonaut Yury Romanenko in September 1980. Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection, Smathers Libraries, University of Florida

Read more "The Soviet Orbit"

With the disappearance of Soviet aid and the Soviet Union itself by 1993, Cuba’s mail service ground to a virtual halt. Yet stamps continued to be produced even though the island’s mail carriers were in short supply. These years, known by Fidel Castro’s moniker as “The special period in a time of peace,” coincided historically […]

Read more "Special Period Stamps"

The Cuban government printed postcards like this one as well as special stationery for Cuban volunteer teachers who participated in the 1961 Literacy Campaign. As former maestro voluntario Ernesto Chávez explained to his students, citizens were supposed to sign off their letters and notes, much as adherents of the state still do, “revolucionariamente” [revolutionarily yours] […]

Read more "“Revolutionarily Yours”"

This list of songs come from a teacher-training manual that Ernesto Chávez carried like a socialist Bible when he served for four years as a maestro voluntario [volunteer teacher] in the mountains of El Escambray and Oriente province (1960-1964).

Read more "Ideological Training Songs for Voluntary Teachers"

Some of the strongest memories we conserve are embedded in the fragile tokens of a striking experience we once felt deeply but can no longer fully describe. Ernesto Chávez conserved these ribbons for decades. Raggedy from pinning it to the front of his teacher’s olive-green uniform nearly every day in 1960, one ribbon reads Patria o Muerte [Fatherland or Death], Fidel Castro’s historic revision of the 1959 Revolution’s original mantra of Patria y Libertad [Fatherland and Freedom].

Read more "Mementos of a Euphoric Youth"

This card, commonly called a carnet in Cuba, belonged to the mother of Ernesto Chávez. She joined her local Comité de Defensa de la Revolución [CDR] soon after PSP strategists founded a block-to-block network of these organizations nationwide in the fall of 1960. At the time, the creation of CDRs—whose members’ task was to snoop […]

Read more "ID Card of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution"

Since the 1960s, many scholars have noted how Cuba’s virtually all-male leadership burdened women with the most work “for the Revolution” yet they enjoyed little power over policies not immediately relevant to their gender. Women were expected to fulfill domestic chores, stand in line for rations, work outside the home, volunteer for no pay and, […]

Read more "ID Card of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC)"

Directed for decades by Vilma Espín, the FMC was the “mass organization” in which all women were supposed to participate. The term itself connotes Cuba’s adoption of norms from the Communist bloc.

Read more "Cuba’s FMC: A Cost-Benefit Analysis"

The University of Florida remains grateful to Ernesto Chávez for the donation of his personal archive, papers, books, and memories of life in early revolutionary Cuba for researchers and future generations. A memoirist and scholar of peasant and Canary Islanders’ folk traditions, Ernesto Chávez lives in Cuba.  A guide to its contents can be found […]

Read more "Ernesto Chávez and Lillian Guerra in 2016"

For this edition, we invite you to see a gem from the BBC Archive, which transports us back to the struggles, questions, and drama of Cuba’s early years of revolution.

Cover Image: Revolutionaries listen to Fidel Castro’s weekly televised show, March 1960. Andrew St. George Collection, University of Florida.

Read more "BBC Archive: Robin Day in Castro’s Cuba"

I grew up with this 1898 portrait of Mercedes Sotolongo Suárez del Villar, my then fifteen-year-old great-grandmother-to-be, better known as “Cuca.” Like virtually anyone who saw it, I was struck by the oddity of her dress: why was she wearing the clothing of a Japanese geisha? Only later, as a doctoral student working in archives, […]

Read more "Turn-of-the-Century Geisha Fad"

This photograph shows four devoted Kindergarten teachers with their charges on an excursion to a park in Cienfuegos in 1941. The teachers include my great aunt Olga Sotolongo (second and tallest adult from left) and her cousin Silvia “Chacha” Suárez del Villar (first adult on the right). Like many women of the middle classes who […]

Read more "Cuban Kindergarten"

Herbert Matthews’ February 1957 blockbuster report in the New York Times of the survival of Fidel Castro and 18 members of an 82-man invasion force inspired young journalist Andrew St. George to go to the Sierra Maestra himself. With Coronet magazine’s funding and CBS’s heavy recording equipment, St. George made contact with clandestine activists of […]

Read more "First Tape-Recorded Interview of Fidel Castro in Sierra Maestra, April 1957"

Only at the insistence of the camp medic, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, did Fidel Castro finally concede a taped interview to St. George. He quickly convinced Fidel Castro of the value of addressing the English-speaking world directly. Castro subsequently wrote “Why We Fight”, the only single-authored manifesto of his entire time in the Sierra Maestra (December […]

Read more "Is that Fidel Castro?"

Halfway through St. George’s first trip to the Sierra Maestra, Che explained he had once made a living as a street photographer in Mexico after fleeing Guatemala and a job in the agrarian reform division after a CIA coup toppled Guatemala’s elected government. St. George then gifted Che Guevara with one of his three cameras and some film.  Che expressed sheer delight with the gift. He also took several well-crafted pictures of St. George in the Sierra that he later used to prove his own presence there. On his second trip in the fall of 1957, St. George also began to bring back rolls shot by Che of daily life in the Sierra, the surrender of enemy soldiers, and the army officers who switched sides from Batista to Fidel during the war. St. George also provided the 26th of July Movement’s propaganda wing with many pictures of his own.

Read more "St. George’s Gift of a Camera to Che Guevara"

In 1958, a large group of 26th of July Movement activists protested the presence of a Cuban delegation appointed by dictator Fulgencio Batista at a voting session of the United Nations in New York. I first found a photo of the whole group at the University of Florida and published it in Heroes, Martyrs, and […]

Read more "St. George and Anti-Batista Activists at the United Nations"

Although Kodak produced its first color film in the early 1940s, most photographers only reluctantly used it, in part because mid-twentieth-century readers were accustomed to magazines with articles whose texts did not “compete” with accompanying photos unless they were explicitly designed as “picture stories.” Many editors never fully trusted St. George because they were predisposed to favor native English speakers to write their articles. St. George nonetheless produced full-color covers for Life magazine’s first January 1959 coverage of the 26th of July Movement’s takeover of the state. Images like these represent rare, never-before-published shots in the color of New Year’s Day, 1959. Here, Fidel Castro meets with longtime underground activist and fellow lawyer Armando Hart, backed by anti-communist and former Orthodox Party member Luis Orlando “Pupo” Rodríguez, Fidel’s personal bodyguard, holding a semi-automatic weapon. A second portrait shows Fidel and soldiers riding on a jeep at the crack of dawn, just before jumping into an eight-day “caravan of triumph” from Santiago to Havana.

Read more "Caught in Color: 1st January 1959"

One of the characteristics of St. George’s photography is that it often resisted the mythification of revolutionary reality. Here, his lens reveals dusty, exhausted Rebel Army soldiers marching through a town in Oriente province on New Year’s Day, 1959. St. George also regularly photographed Judge Manuel Urrutia, hand-picked by Fidel Castro to be President of the Republic, in the first weeks of 1959 when few other reporters seemed interested. His trust in Urrutia lasted and deepened, especially when Urrutia’s efforts to echo Fidel Castro’s own disavowal of Communism got him in trouble. In June 1959, Urrutia’s assertion on national television that the government was “anti-communist” elicited rebuke from Fidel Castro who attacked him in turn as morally weak and incapable of rule. St. George subsequently hand-delivered Urrutia’s letter of resignation to Fidel. Urrutía’s marginalization contributed to Fidel’s power and ultimately, his ability to rely on Communists, not the members of his own 26th of July movement, to rule unconditionally.

Read more "Exhausted Soldiers and a Short-Term Anti-Communist President"

In the first three years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, no other photographer was as good at capturing the drama, charisma and sheer physical exertion typical of any of Fidel Castro’s hours-long speeches. In these frames, St. George relied on rapid-dire photographic methods to document Fidel in action. They evince a cinematographic quality.

Read more "The Word in Action"

Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s favored son-in-law, Porfirio Rubirosa, somehow managed to turn up at a Presidential Palace reception held for Fidel Castro, who had just completed his 8-day caravan-of-triumph from Santiago to Havana. Because Andrew St. George had written an exposé on Trujillo’s 1956 kidnapping and assassination of Jesús Galíndez, a Basque writer and legal […]

Read more "Rubirosa, the Original “Latin Lover” and Fidel Castro, January 1959"

St. George took these pictures in either late 1959 or early 1960 as Ernesto “Che” Guevara addressed a live radio audience at the national headquarters of Cuba’s largest labor union, the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos [CTC]. By then, the CTC had refused to accept any Communist Party participation in their leadership on multiple occasions, in […]

Read more "Che Guevara on National Radio"

A pro-business newspaper whose 128 years of publication in Cuba gave it a certain cache, Diario de la Marina lost its freedom from government interference in its content and publication in May 1960. Then, Diario de la Marina and other papers, including its ideological rival Prensa Libre, were intervened, and shuttered by Communist Party-organized militias. […]

Read more "José Ignacio Rivero, last director of Diaro de la Marina"

Perhaps naïvely, most Cubans believed the revolutionary government’s story that the Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan had come to Cuba in February 1960 in order to promote an exhibit of Soviet Culture in Havana. His real motives were to assist Fidel Castro in deepening Cuba’s ties to the Soviet bloc, particularly in areas of trade, […]

Read more "Fidel Castro and Armando Hart Toast Anastas Mikoyan"

Unlike the previous year when Cuba’s nationalist (but still pro-capitalist) policies generated an economic boom and mass support for the state, the radicalizing policies of the summer of 1960 produced palpable tensions and outright opposition to Fidel Castro’s version of revolution. Held on July 26, 1960, this rally to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Fidel’s failed Assault on the Moncada Barracks took on an oddly forced tone. Held outside the city of Santiago in a remote field in eastern Cuba, the rally entailed mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people to the site, including an unprecedented number of invited foreign Leftists from Latin America and the United States. Compared to its predecessor in July 1959, which relied on civic volunteers to coordinate the visit of 500,000 formerly landless peasants to Havana and their stays in private homes, the 1960 rally lacked the euphoria and spontaneity of citizen-led organization.

Read more "Government Rally outside of Santiago, Oriente in 1960"

For ten days in September 1960, Fidel Castro led a large delegation of top Cuban leaders to New York City where he was slated to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. Coming on the heels of an unexpected, blanket nationalization of all foreign-owned businesses that August, the trip catalyzed a frenzy of support. […]

Read more "The Myth of the Revolution Shakes New York"

Here Vilma Espín, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Che’s wife Aleida March, Raúl Castro, Alfredo Guevara and Guillermo Cabrera Infante are seen attending a performance of the famed soprano Elizabeth Schwartzkopf during Fidel Castro’s good will tour of the northeastern United States in April 1959. Ironically, Schwarzkopf had been a member of the Nazi Party who had […]

Read more "Communists and Opera Fans, April 1959"

In early 1961, St. George photographed these young Cuban exiles who had recently been recruited for “Brigade 2506”, an armed force of about 1,500 men whom the CIA trained and financed to invade Cuba and ultimately, they hoped, to topple the government. As part of the plan, the CIA secretly developed what was supposed to be a transitional, pro-United States government under the name Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria [MRR], led by Manuel Artime. Today both the CIA’s plot and its abysmal failure as a military operation are better known by the location of the invaders’ landing site at the “Bay of Pigs”. As these images bely, MRR members ranged dramatically in age and experience. St. George interviewed some of them at a hotel that served as a “barracks” in South Miami.

Read more "The CIA’s Answer to Fidel’s Revolution"

Over the decade of the 1960s, St. George was repeatedly baffled by how little attention the national media paid to the open warfare that thousands of Miami Cubans—with and (later) without CIA funding—were conducting against Communist-ruled Cuba.  This funeral procession likely took place in 1960 when the body of a Cuban man, charged with working […]

Read more "Life and Death in Anti-Castro Miami"

One of many photographs St. George made of the same event, the image appears innocuous: its subjects—almost all male except for the young woman at its center—seem to be holding a social gathering. Yet the group was engaged in high-intensity training and political discussions at a secret facility somewhere in South Florida. Meticulously, St. George […]

Read more "Exile commando force at secret training facility"

By the late 1960s, St. George had lost all hope that any armed exile group might succeed in toppling Cuba’s communist regime, particularly because he knew that such groups’ reliance on the United States, and often CIA funding, undermined their credibility—especially in Cuba. To his shock, one of the giants of the terror network on which Cuba’s former dictator Fulgencio Batista had relied began operating openly in Miami in 1965. Headed by ex-Senator, Spanish Republican exile, and Batista loyalist Rolando Masferrer, the militia took the same name it had once had in Cuba: Los Tigres. Famous for the atrocities they committed against civilians on behalf of Batista, Miami’s Tigres were mostly U.S. citizens. Their middle age and lackluster physical condition made them no less dangerous.

Read more "Rolando Masferrer’s Private Army Trains in Miami"

In this contact sheet, St. George catches Fidel Castro’s theatrical style of speaking on Ante la Prensa, a Cuban version of the United States’ popular Meet the Press. One difference obvious to any viewer, however, was that invited speakers on the American show offered comparatively short and courteous responses to on-stage reporters, whereas Fidel Castro’s answers often lasted two to three hours (on what was formerly a 45-minute telecast).  On these shows, Fidel regularly justified radical policy moves, denounced any critics, and demanded the resignation of officials he considered too democratic or independently minded—including many members of his own cabinet who had given their lives to the fight against Batista. In 1959, journalist Herbert Matthews called Fidel’s constant presence on TV and radio “government by television”.

Read more "“Government by Television”"

An earlier edition of Gems of the Archive featured this puzzle, manufactured and purchased by Andrew St. George in Cuba. Here we see the same puzzle in the context that explains why St. George found it so interesting. Surrounded by books that normalized hero worship in the pivotal year of 1960, it was one of […]

Read more "The Puzzle of Ernesto “Che” Guevara Solved"

Known in the US South as “topsy turvy” dolls because of their two-in-one design, dolls like these from Cuba differ fundamentally from ones I have seen at local Florida antique stores.

Read more "TOYS THAT TEACH WHITE SUPREMACY"

When I was a little girl growing up in Kansas, I often asked my mother to explain why she had left Cuba. Rather than speak in adult abstractions that flatly cited black-and-white reasons such as “communism,” my mother often referenced specific experiences she had before she left Cuba in 1964. They revealed the Castro regime’s […]

Read more "CUBA’S 1961 CURRENCY CRISIS"

After the Cuban state formally dropped its promotion of atheism in favor of official secularity in 1991, the Papacy successfully negotiated the right of the Catholic Church to edit and publish theological newsletters like this one, Vida Cristiana [Christian Life]. One goal was to recover the discursive public space that had long defined personal values […]

Read more "CATHOLIC COMMUNISM?"

A mixed media watercolor monoprint, Isla Herida is the unique creation of Florencio Lennox Campello, born in Santiago de Cuba in 1956, as part of a printing assignment while the renowned artist was still a young student at the University of Washington School of Art.

Read more "“The Wounded Island” (1980)"

Manufactured by a privately owned business in Cuba in 1960, this puzzle-portrait of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara speaks to the market for hero-making propaganda and revolutionary memorabilia that citizens’ trust in the Revolution then represented.

Read more "The Puzzle of Che Guevara (1960)"

One of the nine muses in the religion of the ancient Greeks, Terpsichore is primarily known as the patron of dance.

Read more "“Terpsichore” by Manuel López Oliva (1997)"

For much of its first three decades in power, the Cuban government spent an astonishing amount of money, time, and effort courting the white American and Western European “Left”, particularly through its Soviet-modelled Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos [Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People, ICAP], originally founded in the early 1940s by Stalinist leaders of the Partido Socialista Popular, a label Cuban Communists adopted until 1965.

Read more "“Free and Equal”: Really?"

Since the 1920s, Cubans have celebrated as a national holiday the birthday of José Martí, the nationalist writer and principal civilian leader of Cuba’s 1895 War for Independence from Spain.

Read more "Cuban Patriot Day, 1958"

In 1963, my father, Tomás H. Guerra, decided to leave Cuba for exile after the government passed communist reforms that eliminated his peasant family’s right to grow and sell crops independently of the state.

Read more "What a passport can say"

Before Fidel Castro’s government took over the press in the early summer of 1960, Bohemia magazine had a vast circulation among subscribers across the island and large swaths of Latin America.

Read more "The Liberty Editions of 1959"

In 1968, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced the confiscation of all remaining small businesses on the island without compensation to their owners.

Read more "Quinceañera Glamour Shots of the 1970s"

Most of us know that bubble gum companies once included collectible baseball cards in their packages in order to encourage sales. But did you know that Cuban cigarette manufacturers did something similar over a century ago?

Read more "Cuban Cigarette Cards of Erotica"

In 2016, Historian of the City of Baracoa, Dr. Alejandro Hartmann, took me on a whirlwind tour of chocolate farmers and “manufacturers” of artisanal chocolates in the mountains near the city.

Read more "Recycled toothpaste tubes and pull-off tops (2016)"

This pamphlet dates from the winter of 1959 when Nancy Macaulay first visited her husband Neill Macaulay in Cuba.

Read more "“Welcome to Our Revolution” (1959)"

In Cuba, like the Soviet Union, the practice of distributing small lapel pins as tokens of the state’s political appreciation became and remained fundamental.

Read more "A Communist Life in Medals"

How a cigar label revealed the hypocrisy of many pro-Embargo American politicians.

Read more "Cigar Label"