When Cuba turned to international tourism as a source of revenue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the things citizens often noted was the fact that foreigners loved to photograph them. That they didn’t seem to mind being photographed, as islanders often admitted, had more to do with the rarity of privately […]
Flanked by a landscape of royal palms (a native icon of Cuba), these two peasant homes and their front yard gardens predate the Cuban Revolution of 1959. They speak to the resilience of Cuba’s guajiros amidst the beauty of nature and the society of strife created by humankind.
Cuba has only two national highways that connect one province to the other. The second, built with Soviet money and never completed, was an autopista designed to double as a landing strip for Soviet planes in case of war with the United States. It dominates the region from Havana to Pinar del Rio, the province […]
Young students at an elite government boarding school near Marina Hemingway compete in an individual sailing competition in this photo, taken shortly before the Soviet Union and the trading bloc on which Cuba relied disappeared. When massive Soviet aid vanished as well, most of these schools declined or, in some cases, closed altogether.
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.
After the Cuban state’s adoption of Communism in 1961, hunting was strictly prohibited for average citizens and gun possession was authorized only for members of Cuba’s vast security and armed forces. Nonetheless, because any kind of meat was regularly unavailable through the government ration system or state stores, Cubans often defied the law. During the […]
When I first met my Tía Jorgelina and Tío Tiki for the first time in the fall of 1996, I was astonished to discover that they had saved my parents’ set of crystal, a gift from my grandparents on the day of their wedding, for 35 years. The wine and champagne glasses were barely used: […]
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 runoff during Cuba’s torrential seasonal rain. Santiago de Cuba, 2016.
When my maternal grandfather’s niece, Pilar, turned eighty-three, she panicked that she might die before she could fulfill her promise to complete an oral history of her life with me. I was thrilled! I had been waiting for her consent for almost ten years. The only catch, Pilar told me in a letter, was that […]
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 with smatterings of post-1959 government apartment complexes mostly built between 1960-1962 by INAV [Instituto Nacional […]
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 taxi] driver’s declaration of faith in God stands in sharp contrast to typical state-imposed mottos […]
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 by telling them a story of her own. Havana, 2015.
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, together with Hernán Cortés, and helped brutally repress a final rebellion of indigenous warriors united […]
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 ages. Starting in the late 1990s and peaking in the years of Raúl Castro’s rule, […]
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 not simply seen, my Cuban fans lasted season after season. Their surprising durability taught me […]
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 musical acts for myself. To my delight, this incredibly talented, elderly cabaret singer capped off […]
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 1961, thousands of armed Cuban volunteers and Revolutionary Armed Forces famously defeated the CIA-directed invasion […]
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 city staffed by family members trained in Europe and the United States. Although the government […]
Little to nothing is known about this unique painting. It hangs in a room that depicts the master bedroom of the Palace of the Captain Generals, once the headquarters of Spanish colonial power, in Old Havana. More than twenty years ago, docents of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana permitted me […]
Playa Girón, a Museum: This little, unassuming museum commemorating Cuba’s April 1961 victory over a CIA-trained, US-organized invasion force at Playa Girón (also known as the Bay of Pigs) reflects the biblical parable of “David versus Goliath” that many Cubans used to explain the significance of that moment. Facing a voluntary militia and standing armed […]
The Pilgrim & the Parable: Every December 17th, the feast day of the Catholic Saint Lazarus, thousands of Cubans from all walks of life make a pilgrimage to the Rincón de San Lázaro, a former leper colony and shrine to the saint on the outskirts of Havana. Many do so on their knees while dressed in sack cloth and pushing a home-styled image of San Lázaro, …
Pilgrims transform the floor at the Shrine of San Lazarus into an extension of the altar for candles. Regularly lit as markers of prayer and expressions of faith in Catholic churches, these candles carry special significance on the day of Saint Lazarus: they signify a petition for help as well as the petitioner’s confidence in […]
The sale of religious statues on the pilgrimage route to the Shrine of Saint Lazarus is symbolic of the striking economic and cultural openings that President Barack Obama’s policy of normalizing relations with Cuba created over the course of his administration. Mostly acquired by island sellers through business partners in Miami, the statues reflect a […]
Cuban entrepreneurs selling sandwiches of pulled roast pork with freshly baked Cuban bread compete with this state-owned vendor whose cart announces “Long live 52nd Anniversary of the Revolution.” This policy of state-owned service providers and vendors trying to outcompete small-time, privately owned businesses was a highly visible feature of the Raúl Castro years (2006-2018). Photographed […]
These two young University of Havana students were most likely quemados, “burnt out” survivors of multiple confrontations with Batista’s police and security services, whose escape from Havana’s daily dangers in the late 1950s leaders of the revolutionary opposition authorized in order to save their lives and to reward them for their brave service.
A three-decade veteran diplomat of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo, Porfirio Rubirosa was famous for his lavish lifestyle and five marriages. His wives included Trujillo’s daughter Flor de Oro (“Flower of Gold”), two actresses, and two American heiresses who also happened to be the richest women in the world at the time, Doris Duke […]
In building an authoritarian state, control over a country’s labor movement is as important, if not more so, as control over the press and the willingness of citizens to criticize. This was especially true in Cuba after 1959 when the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba [CTC] committed to a “no-strike” policy in order to help […]
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) that he and his wife, Elvira Cape, hoped to put on display at the newly […]
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 on my own, but in the decade before 2018 when cell phones became widely available […]
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 Cuban-Mexican effort to modernize the communications grid, was one of the first and most visible […]
Unlike most tourists to El Morro fortress overlooking Havana harbor, our class did not confine our exploration of its history to the Spanish colonial era when it was a built. Instead, we discussed how its walls had been witnesses to multiple regimes of violence and terror, not only that of slavery, but the dictatorship of […]
University of Florida/IFAS faculty attend a meeting of members of the Cuban citrus agricultural production cooperative “30 de Noviembre”, Artemisa Province (2002). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.
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The new incentive-based management system used throughout Cuba’s Citricos Ceiba agricultural production cooperatives is based on a “finca” of around 15 hectares of citrus. The maintenance of the trees in each finca is overseen by a particular cooperative member, whose income is tied to the finca’s production. Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce […]
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University of Florida/IFAS faculty and UF students, along with the University of Havana researchers, are hosted at a Cuban citrus farm and meet with farm administrators and workers (2006). This was at the high point of production for Cuba’s citrus industry, when Cuba was the third largest grapefruit producer in the world, behind the United […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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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