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 […]
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 […]
Part trophy of Cuba’s triumph over “the Yankee invaders” and part historical relic, the pieces of downed US aircraft flown by Cuban exile pilots of the US-backed invasion force, Brigade 2506, gleam like artwork made of metal in the bright afternoon sun. Photograph by Matthew Joseph, Playa Girón, 2013.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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)
When visiting Havana’s once-premier nightclub “Jazz Café” in the early 2000s, one wondered whether the typo in the Jazz Café’s paper placemats was intentional or not. Correctly translated, the slogan “Un lugar donde todo puede suceder” should have read “A place where anything CAN HAPPEN.”
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
While most fishermen say standing on the rocks below Havana’s sea wall at low tide is a more effective method for catching something to eat, this lone fisherman seemed content simply to try his luck from the wall itself. From the series, “La Lucha [The Struggle]”: Citizen Resistance, Government Recalcitrance (2000-2008)
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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 […]
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 […]
How can we explain the apparent return of 1950s Scarlett O’Hara ball gowns to Communist-ruled “socialist” Cuba in the early 2000s? For more than a decade, this was a top choice of fifteen-year-old girls in Havana with means. Posing girls with their doting moms in restored areas of the city always seemed within range of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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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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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
After several years of working with my beloved colleague and self-taught local historian, Berta Martínez Paez, we set out in July 2008 to document the many “monuments” to the pre-Revolutionary era still in use that told the story of Pueblo Nuevo [New People]. This area of Artemisa arose from the ashes of the concentration camps […]
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 […]
Probably one of the most common scenes on the streets of Cuban cities and open fields near towns is that of kids playing baseball. Despite its fame as the country’s national pastime, one of the scarcest items on the island has consistently been real baseballs! In fact, most kids create a ball out of paper […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Erected after the withdrawal of US forces that had occupied Cuba for the first time from 1898-1902, the City of Matanzas’ Central Park doubtlessly features the most dramatic dream of a Free Cuba of all those on the island. In the early 2000s, she was restored, along with the buildings surrounding the plaza and the […]
In 2004, the Cuban government reversed its reliance on US dollars and printed a new currency pegged to the dollar and other foreign currency that would substitute for it. Officially stamped as “CUC”, the new bills were promptly nicknamed chavitos, after Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez who provided the cheap oil that made both the […]
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 […]
Although the restoration of Old Havana resulted in the removal of thousands of Cubans who had once made homes out of abandoned colonial buildings, the raw beauty of many spaces and the admiration of foreign eyes contrived to strengthen the national pride of many Cubans who became frequent visitors to Old Havana. Palomas (the same […]
The artist and his wife pose in the sunlight on the balcony of the studio-workshop where Ramírez worked daily in the creation of new works, just across from the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, the seat of Spanish royal authority on the island for centuries. Despite its proximity to the Havana’s UNESCO-backed Office of the […]
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Since the early 1990s, Ángel Ramírez, a 1982 graduate of Cuba’s famed Instituto Superior de Arte and long-time professor of art, has created work deliberately referential of Medieval Europe. Like the hauntingly ghoulish images of his mentor Antonia Eiriz and the realist chronicler of consciousness (whom state censors forced into exile), Tomás Sánchez, Ramírez comments […]
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 […]
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 […]
Perhaps the most common sight in Cuba to emerge with the rise of tourism and the dramatic augmentation in the number of Cuba’s police and security forces is the constant stopping of young Black men on the street—in broad daylight, for no apparent reason, on the assumption that they were “naturally inclined” to criminal behavior […]
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. […]
Read more "Learning to live amidst permanent piles of trash and debris – 2002-2007"
Perhaps the most popular product to return en masse to Cuba’s post-Communist cuisine was the traditional plantain, known as the plátano macho. Thanks to farmers who worked in densely planted fields and pregoneros, street dealers who chanted or improvised songs about the quality and nature of their edible wares, younger Cubans learned just how good […]
Read more "The Return of the Plantain – July 2000 and August 2003"
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 […]
No longer content to sell braids of garlic or homemade guava paste and cheeses, guajiros by the early 2000s were taking risks and selling smoked chickens, ducks and even wild fowl for the same flat price of $5 USD each. This bird, smoked over leaves of the guava tree, and sold hanging from a 1950s […]
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 […]
Read more "Government pushback and the power of Cuba’s collective taxis – November 2003"
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 […]
One of the icons of the Special Period was Cuban government engineers’ creation of an eighteen-wheeler bus that could transport hundreds of standing passengers. Because of its two “humps”, Cubans called it el camello. A response to the sudden disappearance of the Soviet-oil-for-Cuban-sugar foundation of Cuba’s pre-1991 Communist economy, the camellos operated on a drastically […]
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 […]
Read more "Squatters and scavengers amidst decades of scarcity – August 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 […]
In 2005, my cousin Rigoberto Amores emerged from retirement to work for a small peasant cooperative of several families as a salesman at their farm stand in his neighborhood’s agropecuario, located in Havana’s Santos Suárez neighborhood. At the time, hiring someone outside the immediate family of producers was illegal but Rigoberto got away with it, […]
Read more "Rigoberto and the Best Mangoes in the World – July 2005"