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 […]
Like all weddings, this one involved meticulous planning. Unlike similar celebrations across Latin America, it also reflected the unique realities of Cuba’s Special Period. When the Soviet Union vanished several years earlier, all commercial products disappeared from government rations. Once barely stocked with basic household goods such as towels and pots, the shelves of state […]
Of the four signs legible to passersby on Calle Belascoaín, a main thoroughfare of Centro Habana, when I took this picture in 1995, only one advertised for a still-functioning business: the rest (including a flower shop and record store) had been shuttered decades earlier when Fidel Castro decreed the nationalization of all remaining small, privately […]
When the adoption of socialism elevated the Cuban Communist Party to the pinnacle of power in 1961, its leaders acted to remap the landscape of memory and history in Havana by removing, defacing, or destroying its most iconic, Republic-era monuments in record time: most sources say that “the operation” happened overnight. No target was more […]
Perhaps one of the greatest skills a man can learn in Cuba is how to kill (or as peasants used to say, sacrifice) a pig without cruelty or suffering on the part of the pig. When I was growing up in Marion, Kansas, my father’s ability to kill a pig in the back yard without […]
When I went to Cuba for the first time in the summer of 1995, I assumed that the story of Cubans who lived in virtually the same environment as they did in 1959 was a fiction or myth. Boy, was I wrong! Experiencing a home deliberately “stuck in time” was not hard to find, especially […]
At the time of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, most average Cubans were deeply critical of the United States’ support for military dictatorships (like Cuba’s own under Fulgencio Batista) as well as monopoly capitalism. Yet Cubans were also enamored of Parker Brothers’ legendary board game, Monopoly, which in Cuba was available in translation as Monopolio. […]
As anyone who has lived with Cubans outside of the political elite can attest, two “basic” items most lacking—from the 1970s to the present—are towels (of any kind) and napkins. In fact, I only discovered I was a sloppy eater by nature when I went to Cuba and realized that almost everyone had grown up […]
When famous Italian opera star Enrico Caruso visited Havana’s luxurious Hotel Sevilla, built in 1908, bartenders created a Caribbean spearmint-laden drink in his honor called El Caruso. One part gin, one part dry vermouth, one-half part crème de mint, and one-half part muddled hierbabuena leaves, this cocktail has been my favorite since I first tasted […]
Although Santiago is Cuba’s second-largest city, few foreigners venture because flights are few and unreliable while driving east from Havana requires taking Cuba’s 1920s-era national highway, a two-lane and often twelve-hour commitment. Yet the visual landscapes of the region are varied and spectacular. The city is also eminently walkable. Taken after the port and waterfront […]
These portraits were taken just minutes apart in mid-July at Santa María, just outside Havana. There might be nothing as beautiful as a developing sunset on a deserted Cuban beach. (July 2016)
On a single night in 1961, the Cuban Communist Party carried out a “lightning operation” that physically removed all evidence from Havana’s iconic monuments of what leaders considered Cuba’s imperialist past. Famous examples included the toppling of the massive brass eagle that once topped the memorial to the Maine, an American naval vessel. Its destruction […]
Whether applied to its native people or the descendants of enslaved Africans, a long-standing fiction survives in Cuba that non-whites were deeply grateful to individual whites, as this monument argues, or whites in general, for having “saved them” from either their own savagery and “incultura” [inferior culture], or from the injustices perpetrated on them by […]
As the granddaughter of Agustín Guerra, an orphan who worked as a field hand until he could establish a tobacco farm of his own in the 1920s, I confess to loving Cuba’s exquisite cigars—even though my father, Agustín’s son, cringed when first I told him I had visited several state-owned cigar factories in the 1990s. […]
First announced by Fidel Castro in 1967, what might have been a mere off-the-cuff remark in any other context quickly became a decades-long policy and slogan that demanded adherence from all artists, writers, and cultural workers. Left up to the state’s censors at the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, top militants of the Communist […]
In June 2001, my students and I visited El Ingenio Carolina, a sugar plantation founded in 1835 by slave-owner and foreign investor William Hood Clemens. Fancying the use of an enslaved labor force a premier example of American ingenuity, Hood relied on homing pigeons to transmit and receive messages to his slave-drivers in the sugar […]
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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Funded through government loans approved by the dictator Fulgencio Batista for his friends and cronies in the mid-1950s, the “Carlos III Market” represented the epitome of modernity. From the series, “La Lucha [The Struggle]”: Citizen Resistance, Government Recalcitrance (2000-2008)
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In the early 1990s, many Cubans held out hope that small-time, artisanal businesses and state cooperatives like this one might thrive under the double barrier to neoliberal capitalism that the Cuban Communist Party’s monopoly on economic control and the US embargo together represented. From the series, “Special Period in a Time of Peace”: Post-Soviet, Proto-Capitalist Cuba (1989-2000)
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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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As rumor had it, Eusebio Leal, director of the Office of the Historian of Havana, modeled his efforts to revitalize public spaces in Old Havana on the practices of Colonial Williamsburg From the series, “Special Period in a Time of Peace”: Post-Soviet, Proto-Capitalist Cuba (1989-2000)
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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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One of the major shocks of my return to Cuba in 2011 after a two-year hiatus was stumbling across this museum in honor of Cuba’s neighborhood surveillance squads. From the series, “La Lucha [The Struggle]”: Citizen Resistance, Government Recalcitrance (2000-2008)
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Once the reserve of the literate and privileged few of colonial Havana, writing and mailing letters abroad was both a national past time for the elite and stamp of progress (no pun intended). From the series, “Special Period in a Time of Peace”: Post-Soviet, Proto-Capitalist Cuba (1989-2000)
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