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El Caruso

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 […]

Santería for sale

In Matanzas, a longstanding cradle of Black pride and cultural tradition, this display of orishas who take the form of Catholic saints, historical figures, and even racialized icons form part of a privately owned ‘store’ selling goods out of a residence.  Orishas are the deities and spiritual guides of a religion correctly called Regla de […]

Swan blankets in July

Most visitors to Caribbean hotels can attest to the (apparently) region-wide requirement that rooms come fully stocked with bath towels formed into the shape of swans. Less common, especially at the height of Cuba’s sweltering summer heat, are wool blankets shaped into related fauna. These lovely “bird-blankets” turned out to be a godsend, though, when […]

Modern housing and horse-drawn carriages

The outskirts of Matanzas City feature large, government housing projects originally built in the 1960s and 1970s, often based on the latest Eastern European or Russian designs. First-time residents included former slum dwellers and peasants whose small plots were collectivized, as well as many young revolutionaries, like the owner of this apartment, whom the state […]

Icons of Matanzas

These two monuments date from two very different post-revolutionary eras, but they are equally identified with Matanzas, a province whose name literally commemorates its decimated native populations’ experience with Spanish colonialism: massacre. The early twentieth-century statue of José Martí, flanked by a female ‘Cuba Libre’ [Free Cuba] breaking her shackles, stands in the middle of […]

Port of Santiago de Cuba

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 […]

Living Room

Sculpted from marble and designed by artist José Miguel Díaz, Living Room, deliberately titled in English rather than Spanish, evokes the Cuban collective custom of spending most nights sitting in public spaces rather than ensconced in one’s home. Much as we find in Havana, where half the population seems to reside on the malecón [sea […]

The Sunset in Cuba

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)

History belongs to the teller

In the first ten years after Fidel Castro fell ill in 2006 and passed his command over Cuba to his brother Raúl Castro, publicly displayed signs like this—announcing a gallery show by artist Duvier del Dago—were as irreverent as they were uncommon. The title of del Dago’s exhibit, “History belongs to whoever tells it,” gestures […]

Gratitude, not power

In the lead-up to what many watchful Cubans predicted would be the announcement of the death of 90-year-old Fidel Castro, the title of a summer 2016 exhibit at the Museum of the Revolution (in Cuba’s former Presidential Palace) succinctly reminded citizens of the limits of their power: “Thanks for everything, Fidel.” Photographs in the display […]

PIGS IN PRISON?

Perhaps one of the most common characteristics of life in Cuba under Communist Party rule might be its surreal quality. Until recently, when access to the internet dramatically changed citizens’ ability to judge truth from rumor (or fiction), the Cuban government’s control over media cultivated a stable sense of safety in any environment. Typical of […]

Weaponizing Unanimity

In the Special Period, most government propaganda signs seemed hypocritical because they insisted that Cuba had not adopted capitalism, that it was not experiencing an ideological crisis, and that it would never partner with foreign corporate capital to ensure the survival of the Communist state. All of those things were not only happening, but they […]

“Artisanal” open-air touring bus

Made from a decommissioned shuttle that had once been used to take workers to a local factory in Soviet times, this open-air touring bus—whose roof was simply carved off—filled in to meet the normal requirements of the tourist industry. Not surprisingly, the metal seats, heated by the tropical sun, did not make for an appealing […]

One-room rural schools

Together with the once revered Soviet-funded healthcare system, the greatest victim of the Cuban government’s new budgetary priorities after adopting state capitalism in 1992 has been education. Schools in rural communities may have suffered less simply because the human investment of local teachers made up in personal commitment to their kids what the system lacked […]

Private Sanctuaries

A common external feature of many homes in Cuban cities is the use of bricks, cement, and chain link fences to literally wall off intruding eyes and not simply discourage potential thieves. To foreign eyes, these efforts inexplicably destroy the aesthetics of many once majestic homes built during Cuba’s Gilded Age of the early Republic […]

Pay a Dollar, Ride a Bull

This lovely beast is a living relic of Fidel Castro’s legendary quest to cross-breed Cuban cattle with Indian Cebu cows in the 1960s and 1970s. After nationalizing most dairy cows and confiscating the medium-size farms that produced milk and cheese for domestic consumption, low productivity on state farms forced the government to guarantee milk only […]

Cuban Baptism

After decades of enforcing conformity to the ideals of atheism, the Cuban Communist Party decided to adopt secularity and allow, for the first time, even its own members to openly practice a religion. Because most Cubans had no knowledge of Catholicism as adults, they often turned to visiting relatives (like me) who were lifelong Catholics […]

“Socialism is the only guarantee of being free and independent”

However, we might dispute the social gains that the Cuban government claimed its version of socialism achieved in its Soviet-sponsored age (1961-1991), today’s version of Cuban socialism is a far cry from guaranteeing anything. Schools not only continued to hemorrhage students and teachers in these years but even new Communist Pioneer uniforms kids were required […]

Fragile signs of fidelity

A bulletin board in the doorway of this Committee for the Defense of the Revolution [CDR] serves as a metaphor for the scorn with which most citizens regarded their local neighborhood surveillance units by the early 2000s. Hand-made “Post-Its”, all apparently written by the same hand, echo five-decade-old slogans proclaiming Until Victory Always, Everyone to […]

Sabrina’s “Spanish Dance” Class

Before her father–an engineer and contract worker—found his way from Namibia to Spain and reclaimed his family, my goddaughter Sabrina attended a model government school in the Havana neighborhood of San Miguel de Padrón. Because the government often used the school to display the benefits of socialist education to visiting tourists and foreign dignitaries, Sabrina […]

Downtown Pinar del Rio at dusk

The glow of a Cuban sunset illuminates the elaborate columned buildings lining the city of Pinar del Rio’s main street. Just getting off work, dozens of Cubans line up on both sides of the road, awaiting transportation—mostly on flat-bed trucks rather than buses—to return to their homes in nearby rural towns. City of Pinar del […]

Family reunion

When I returned to Cuba after a two-year hiatus in visits in 2011, my closest relatives like Tío Tiki confessed to having prepared themselves emotionally to never seeing me again. I had been the first person in my family to “return” to Cuba when I first visited there in 1995. After the shock of so […]

TRIUMPH OF THE MIDDLEMEN

As documented in our first Fotodiario on the Special Period, artisans in Cuba were once relegated to selling their wares by hanging them from the handle bars of their bikes and riding past tourists on the beach in the hopes of awakening their curiosity and (illegally) making a sale. In those days, the 1990s, the […]

RAÚL CASTRO’S SHOOTING RANGES

Few Cubans who experienced the first five years of the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s rule would forget the preponderance of guns. Uniformed and ununiformed revolutionaries exhibited waists strapped with pistols. Anti-aerial weapons stood guard alongside the Malecón. Everywhere young boys and girls in uniform marched and drilled with large, Soviet-issued rifles. Yet, with no […]

ICE FOR SALE—IN CUBA!

Needless to say, trying to maintain an ice-making and ice-selling business was unthinkable during the Special Period when electricity was as hard to come by as fresh fruit and nutritious, varied food. Perhaps one of the greatest barometers of economic stability in Cuba was the appearance of vendors selling ice out of their homes in […]

Bacardí Corporation’s unmistakable bat:

Topping this building’s magnificent art deco turret is a bat, the symbol of the Bacardí family and Cuba’s oldest rum-making company, now headquartered in Puerto Rico. Built in the early 1930s, the twelve-story skyscraper symbolized an apex in the architectural development of Havana as well as the Bacardí family’s ascent as the creator of one of Cuba’s most recognizable brands.

Sabrina, Pionera de Martí:

Since the 1970s when Cuba more formally adopted the uniforms and practices of the Soviet Union’s Communist Pioneers, children in later years of primary school began to wear Stalin red kerchiefs and matching jumpsuits modeled after their Soviet counterparts. However, kids in the Cuban equivalent of kindergarten through third grade wore a blue kerchief, dyed […]

“Continuamos… [We continue]…”:

Painted by a local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, this propaganda sign echoes dozens like it displayed across Cuba’s public landscapes. It refuses to admit opposition and insists that all Cubans agree: “We continue defending the Revolution.” In the early years of the Revolution, the state’s radical revision of property laws and redistribution […]

My family’s house near collapse:

Found on Calle Virtudes, just steps away from the Hospital Hermanos Almejeira, my family’s home began to collapse under the weight of so many decades of neglect. It was not their fault. For three decades, Communist laws had criminalized the ability of citizens to repair their own homes without the authorization and rationing hand of […]

Comida exótica [Exotic food]:

As I have learned from bringing more than 80 students to Cuba in the last twenty three years, Cubans who have spent the last sixty-plus years isolated from the corporate capitalist world of fast and processed foods can sometimes misinterpret what we from the United States consider “a great lunch”. For Cubans who cannot afford […]

Orchids, endemic to Cuba:

More than two hundred species of orchids are endemic to Cuba, particularly Pinar del Río, the far western end of the island where any remaining patch of forest features them boldly. Although my extremely brown thumb has never managed to grow orchids from a pot or even the sides of trees, as my comadre Dianek […]

Homemade dulce de coco:

In the United States, even the most traditional Cuban cook rarely has at his/her disposal a grove of homegrown coconuts, let alone the knowledge (or even the machete required!) to prepare and grate them into the exquisite dessert called dulce de coco.

Samuel Weinstein’s Divine Loom

Samuel Weinstein was a religiously observant Jewish Cuban whose father had been an accountant on the sugar estate in the 1940s where his Spanish-born mother worked when Samuel was born. Although illegitimate, Samuel nonetheless benefitted from his father’s legal recognition and desire that Samuel read Torah and be raised a Jew. When I first got […]

New Chinese-Made Fridge

Between 2005 and 2006, Fidel Castro carried out a heavily promoted and wildly unpopular campaign to modernize Cuba’s electric infrastructure. Called “La Revolución Energética [The Energy Revolution]”, this policy of forced-purchases replicated Spanish colonial tactics that once allowed corrupt officials to supplement meager salaries by forcing indigenous people under their domain to buy large stashes […]

Spiderweb of Electric Wires

As these images demonstrate, the organization of Cuba’s residential system of electricity is not just poorly maintained but shockingly haphazard in its organization. Wires run every which way as Cubans share meters and illegally erected apartments in order to avoid paying the government for electrical service that is both over-priced and famously irregular—or often non-existent.  […]

Berta Martínez Paez with El Rumbero

Like many Cubans who grow up in tightknit barrios or small towns, El Rumbero refused to be called by any other name. Before 1965 when revolutionary activists shut down the small bars and dance halls where local entrepreneurs and free-lance prostitutes continued to work and, according to Berta’s informants, thrive, El Rumbero had played drums […]

Stalin red Lada

During the 1970s and 80s, Cuba’s car market witnessed a remarkable flood of two types of Soviet-build cars: the Lada and the “sportier” Muscovy. To no-one’s surprise, the privilege of buying one accrued to only a tiny few, usually professionals (such as doctors), military officers and Party militants whom the state wanted to reward, sometimes […]

The return of the “big” onion

Cuba’s barometers of abundance often taken unusual form. In this case, the availability of what most foreigners from Latin America, Europe or the United States would see as a normal-sized onion was one of those barometers. For nearly two decades since the Communist Party adopted reforms that allowed peasants to farm and sell their crops […]

Merolico at work

One of the most unusual forms of self-employment to foreign eyes is the refilling of lighters with the extra gas left in a spray bottle once the original product is used. Whereas in the United States such bottles carry warning labels that warn against extracting it, in Cuba, enterprising merolicos [tinkerers] ignore labels. This one […]

Homeless in Havana

Despite government assertions to the contrary, Cubans have suffered housing shortages since the 1970s. Dependence on the government to repair homes and the criminality of buying or selling property, let alone building, until Raúl Castro legalized these options shortly after taking state control in 2009, explain this. Yet laws in place since the early 1970s […]

Painted house, garden & pool

Like most foreigners who spend a lot of time in Cuba, I became accustomed over the years to the fact that the vast majority of houses and apartment buildings featured barren, gray façades and walls. Until 1994 when the Cuban government suddenly reversed course and made maintenance of homes the citizens’ responsibility, it had been […]

The Have & Have-Nots

Raúl Castro’s formal assumption of state power from his brother Fidel in 2009 coincided with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Suddenly, Western Unions around the United States began allowing transfers of cash, not only from family abroad to relatives in Cuba but from Americans with friends or emerging small business partners to send money, no […]

“Moros y cristianos con todo lo que Dios manda” [Moors and Christians made with all that God commands] – 2008

As Cuba moved from austerity to scarcity, certain signs of recovery and growth took hold in the early 2000s, despite state policies that continued to constrain the development of small businesses and small rural landholders. One was the surprising availability of the dozen or more ingredients that traditional recipes like Moors and Christians, a white-rice-and-black-bean […]

Librero – November 2003

From the 1960s through virtually the present day, the Cuban Communist state promoted the idea that the books, ideas, political history, culture and social struggles that preceded it were inconsequential themes for discussion at best and taboo topics at worst. Nonetheless, thousands of Cubans kept their families’ libraries, many of them in exactly the same […]

Houses in cages – August 2005

One of the most striking changes to emerge with the rise of Cuba’s hotels, factories and assembly plants owned by joint ventures between foreign investors and the state or corporations owned by the state alone lay in the lifestyles of the employees hired to staff them, particularly those in the upper echelons of the pay […]

Learning to live amidst permanent piles of trash and debris – 2002-2007

When government trash pick-ups from private homes slowed from once a week to once a month and then to “cuando les da la gana” [whenever they feel like it] during the Special Period, many loyal Cubans predicted that cleaning up their neighborhoods would become a government priority once the economy recovered somewhat. It never did. […]

The Small Business Boom – July 2008

The first decade of the 2000s saw the numbers of repairmen surge as relatives and former neighbors who emigrated abroad began sending materials to skilled artisans on the island who could serve citizens who needed to fix small but essential personal items such as watches (image 13). Known in Cuban parlance as merolicos [tinkerers], repairmen […]

Government pushback and the power of Cuba’s collective taxis – November 2003

On 13 March 1968, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced the seizure of all remaining (52,000) small businesses in the name of teaching citizens Communist behavior, values and consciousness once and for all. Only selected sectors of businesses remained in private hands—although unofficially. One was the system of collective taxis with established routes around the city; a […]

Diverse forms of transportation reflecting the political history of a Communist state – May 2005

With the rise of Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela, Cuban leaders again privately traded certain secret services in exchange for access to cheap oil and gas. As a result, Havana’s streets, while never a site of “traffic jams”, began to show the multiple classes of users whose access to any form of independent transportation […]

Squatters and scavengers amidst decades of scarcity – August 2005

With demand for fresh fruits and vegetables high, peasant production on the rise and many lots emptied by building collapses over the years, the most peculiar of places became sites for agropecuarios. Just a few blocks from where my cousin Rigoberto worked in Havana’s Santos Suárez neighborhood, the once privately owned, neighborhood movie theatre once […]

Cuatro Caminos – June 2005

Located on Monte and Arroyo Streets, this giant, indoor market was famous prior to the Revolution of 1959 for housing the most diverse and succulent of agricultural products as well as many vendors’ food stalls. Although most of the farm stands were still empty in 2005, the array of produce at each one was still […]