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 […]
The bride, her mother-in-law and guests look on in this picture as the groom signs Cuba’s Family Code, a culminating moment in all island weddings since the mid-1970s. Passed in 1976, the Family Code responded to Fidel Castro’s admission two years earlier that the Revolution had not “yet” achieved full equality between men and women: […]
A homemade example of a traditional Cuban-style pound cake, this panetela was made with two of the greatest luxuries in the Cuban diet during the Special Period: milk and butter. I also coated and decorated with a food item whose fabled availability abroad many older Cubans nostalgically questioned: canned peaches! Most Cuban children I knew […]
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 […]
In 1995, when I first visited Cuba, the door to the Capitol building, constructed by the regime of President Gerardo Machado (1925-1933), still showed the evidence of public outrage over his betrayal of the Republic and democracy. Literally defaced by university student protestors were the faces of Cuba’s presidents on the panel of a bronze […]
Once Fidel Castro shelved elections and representative democracy, what had once been an aspirational symbol of government accountability, the home of Cuba’s Senate and House of Representatives, became a museum. When I first visited Cuba for a month in June 1995, I had to go several times in order to “sneak in” some picture-taking with […]
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Nicknamed “la aspirina” by Cubans, this teeny-tiny car manufactured in Soviet-controlled Poland was more formally called El Polki. Stick shift and extremely fuel efficient, Tiki’s Polki had been a reward granted to my grandmother, Aurora Almirall, in 1963 on the occasion of her retirement as a rural school teacher after 43 years of public service. […]
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 […]
In Pinar del Río, when my uncle’s family sacrificed a pig, all those who showed up to help chop up and fry its considerably thick layer of fat into odd-sized squares got to keep a portion. Raised on palmiche, the acorn-like seeds of Cuba’s palm trees, pineapple scraps and mango peel, my uncle’s pigs enjoyed […]
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 […]
As happens in most majority-poor countries dominated by authoritarian regimes, foreigners in Cuba often enjoy far more freedom than local citizens. To anyone familiar with Fidel Castro’s prior claims to have created the most anti-imperialist, socially just, and therefore “freest” country in the world, there was a palpable difference in the Special Period when the […]
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 […]
Encountering Cubans out for a stroll with their unleashed (and not always friendly) dogs remains a hallmark of my many visits to Cuba in the 1990s. The proud owner of twin Chinese pugs myself, I could not fathom how I would have corralled them away from other dogs and dangers on Cuba’s neglected and pot-holed […]
Few admirers of the world-famous surreal, modern art of Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) have visited his impoverished childhood home, just a block from the central plaza of Sagua la Grande, a once prosperous provincial city. When I made the journey in March 2002, I never expected to find the façade of his home and its ancient […]
As often happened during the Special Period (and, to a certain extent, continues even today), towns, historical sites, and cities like Sagua la Grande that prove off-the-beaten-path for most tourists brimmed with antiques and curiosities that local people often happily showed to a visiting historian. In this case, a woman invited me to her home […]
For nearly three decades, slave-owning planters had supplemented their enslaved labor force with Chinese indentured servants. However, the use of the term “servant” and the conditions of their contracts proved to be lies. Deceived into traveling to Cuba for what they thought was a commercial or business deal, tens of thousands of mostly Chinese men […]
In recent years, this once pristine area of Varadero Beach has been overrun by the Cuban government’s joint venture schemes with China to develop luxury rentals and even a golf course next to the shoreline. When I first visited, however, it was still a symbol of the power of social revolutions to reverse the evidence […]
In the 1940s and early 1950s, during Cuba’s short-lived democratic age, Cuban sugar workers achieved major labor demands from an elected government. These included not only the legalization of negotiated union contracts but also government mediation of strikes. For permanent workers on both foreign and native-owned plantations, conditions improved. Still, until the consolidation of a […]
In Cuba, as elsewhere, the invisibility of sugar’s labor-intensive production was always intrinsic to the profits driven first by slaves and later by an underpaid and overly exploited workforce. However, no other sugar island consumed more human lives through the slave trade and the brutally relentless system of violence and terror that white slave-owners, their […]
Like most Cubans, my elderly cousins Teresita and Pilar remembered how they had once taken for granted the centrality of products from Spain to Cuban cuisine—such as olives or cumin—before what they abstractly called “El Desastre” [The Disaster]. Wine, however, was another matter: too hot for its consumption, they claimed, Cuba had mostly been a […]
Perhaps the most common sight of the Special Period was that of Cubans standing or sitting for hours alongside city streets and highways, waiting for someone to give them a ride. Most cared little about the conditions. They were often happy to sit on the lap of a stranger or, as in this case, squeeze […]
Unlike Southern planters in the United States, Cuba’s “sugarocratic” elite of the eighteenth and nineteenth century considered living too close to the source of their wealth—that is, the daily violence reaped on slaves in sugar plantations—was demeaning. The German-Cuban Brunet family of Trinidad, a sixteenth-century colonial town in the Central Valley of the Sugar Mills, […]
A reference to the industrial nature of sugar production that arose from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the central lowlands of Cuba generated wealth for slave-owning planters on a scale that rivaled the monarchs of Europe. In January 1999, I took this photograph from a watch tower erected on the former estate of the Iznaga family. From the series, “Special Period in a Time of Peace”: Post-Soviet, Proto-Capitalist Cuba (1989-2000)
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Read more "El Valle de los Ingenios [The Valley of the Sugarmills]"
Until the late nineteenth century, few Cuban sugar barons could challenge the Iznaga clan’s fortune, nor the family’s legendary propensity to spend it on exorbitant decorations and lavish furnishings of the highest quality and design, mostly acquired in Europe. Their home in the center of Trinidad remained the depository of the family’s treasures, including huge […]
Most fans of the Cuban cuisine that South Florida’s restaurants serve know the staple of rice cooked with black beans— and onions, garlic, cumin, and herbs as moros y cristianos [Moors and Christians]. Apparently established when Cuban exile cooks from eastern Cuba launched the dish in the early 1960s, the label has stuck. Yet in […]
In Havana, the return of horse-drawn buggies accompanied the rise in tourism as the primary source of income for the Cuban state: bouncing around on the back of a fancy one in Old Havana cost up to $25 for less than 20 minutes in the late 1990s, much as it did in St. Augustine, Florida, […]
Built in 1716, the baroque façade of the Shrine of the Virgen of Candelaria and its location at the top of a hill overlooking the ancient town of Trinidad de Cuba bears witness to its once majestic past. Permanently closed in the 1980s due to the danger of collapse, the church once adjoined a hospital […]
In the summer of 2001, my students and I stopped near the town of Cruces to tour the ruins of El Ingenio Santa Catalina, a nineteenth-century sugar plantation. At the height of slavery, its managers famously used homing pigeons to direct the work of slaves and send messages to the fields. Because the Special Period’s […]
From November 1999 until June 2000, the story of five-year-old Elián was inescapable news in the United States. Rescued by fishermen from an innertube on Thanksgiving Day after his mother died while fleeing Cuba, the boy became the focal point of a media war and harrowing legal battle between exiles who demanded that he stay […]
Prior to the 1990s, triumphalism characterized most Cuban state propaganda. Self-congratulatory statements and predictions of Communist victories once universally pocked the landscape. However, after billions of dollars in annual aid disappeared along with the Soviet Union, messages on billboards and government-made signs like these evinced a reactive, often defensive tone. Painted on a wall in […]
In 1961, the Cuban government took over and expropriated the property of all Black mutual aid societies and social clubs, despite the critical role they played in representing the interests, history, and outlook of Black Cubans independently of white structures of power. One of the oldest and wealthiest of these was El Fénix, a society […]
As residents of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, trinitarios were able to remain in their homes rather than face forced relocation to settlements on the edge of the city as thousands of residents of Old Havana endured in the 1990s. They did so thanks to the heroic efforts of Roberto López Bastida (better known as […]
For a little more than a month in the summer of 2001, I traveled to the Colonial Archive of Trinidad with Dr. Marial Iglesias Utset, now of Harvard University and then a professor at the University of Havana’s Department of History and Philosophy. We were joined by a recent graduate of Bates College in Maine, […]
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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Unlike most coffee consumed in Cuba since the 1960s, this coffee is 100% pure because it was homegrown by peasants who then roast it for bartering and personal use. So if there is great, homegrown coffee in Cuba, why is the coffee that most people consume on the island today so bad? The answer to […]
Cuba’s dependence on Soviet oil and mostly Soviet-built parts for public transportation vehicles meant that the public transportation on which citizens relied to get to work, school, home or virtually anywhere ground to a near halt from 1991-2000. The state turned to buying millions of Chinese bikes and selling them for $25 each to citizens. […]
Owned by the state but supplied by individual farmers and newly legalized autonomous farming cooperatives, this butcher’s stand was always mobbed despite its limited selection (pork) and hours of operation (mainly Saturday mornings). The disappearance of already limited “proteins” in the ration system of food distribution after the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that […]
When the Cuban government legalized self-employment and small-time entrepreneurial businesses in 1992, Cubans who had once owned drink and snack stands prior to their criminalization in 1968 were suddenly back in business! Located in Havana’s Barrio Chino, this gentleman’s batido (tropical fruit smoothie) stand enjoyed immediate success. When I asked the owner and his son […]
In March 1968, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced that the Cuban state would shutter and confiscate all remaining 52,000 small businesses in a policy maneuver he called La Ofensiva Revolucionaria [the Revolutionary Offensive]. He also announced that they would re-open—supposedly as quickly as the following day—under the new management of Cuba’s most loyal citizens, that is, […]
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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When the Cuban state authorized self-employment in 1993 for the first time since 1968, it also created a dual currency system which, theoretically, was to ensure that hard currency (the US dollar) flowed from the hands of foreigners, especially tourists, directly to the state. That meant that Cuban entrepreneurs whom the state licensed to sell […]
In apparent effort to compete with foreign standards for providing cheap fastfood, the Cuban government opened a state-owned chain of small restaurants called El Rápido [The Fast One]. To no-one’s surprise, service was slow, servings of French fries were always half the size of their pre-fabricated container and the ketchup was so watered down that […]
In the late Special Period, Cuban bookstores still sold the ideologically curated works of the “High Soviet” years. As my students soon discovered, this meant mostly the collected works of Lenin, Engels, and Martí along with countless editions of Don Quixote or other European works the Party had deemed universal, such as those by Shakespeare.
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As I often discovered, the highly restrictive laws of the United States’ Office of Foreign Assets Control governing the US Embargo and US citizens’ spending in Cuba rarely seemed to apply to wealthy Americans. This might be especially true of those who own yachts, sailboats and other watercraft: many Americans housed their boats in Cuban […]
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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Built in the 1740s and owned by the German-Cuban Brunet family, this mansion’s positioning at the very heart of Trinidad’s sixteenth-century central town plaza speaks to the vast wealth that the Brunets garnered from sugar plantations and the hundreds of enslaved people who worked them. The house itself boasted an enslaved staff of over fifty […]
Located in the former convent of St. Francis of Assisi and marked by a large colonial bell tower, this museum in the colonial town of Trinidad memorializes the Communist regime’s six-year repression of peasant uprisings in El Escambray, the country’s central mountainous region (1960-1966). Initially stoked by CIA operatives and large landowners during its first […]
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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With a newly made toy machete that his grandpa Tiki fashioned from some refuse wood, little Daniel pretends to be a mambí, one of the tens of thousands of nineteenth-century independence fighters drawn from the poorest ranks of peasants and enslaved of Cuba. His hobby horse is a hand-me-down, made in the United States and […]
One of the many wonders of Pinar del Río’s lush landscapes, the “Valley of the Vineyards” has no vineyards anymore, if it ever did. Early Spanish conquistadors supposedly grew grapes for their sacramental wine in this valley during the 1500s rather than ferment local fruits for wine like guavaba [guava], guanabana [sour sop] or anon […]
One reason most foreigners who visit Cuba love the country relates to the absence of traffic, of noise from traffic and—with the singular exception of Havana—of the pollution that thousands of old cars and government trucks (most still lacking catalytic converters) creates. In the interior, however, once abundant wildlife like the boar, turkey and land […]
The day before Fidel Castro’s birthday every August 13th, legend had it that Cubans lost their fear and carried out minor acts of protest and sabotage in the middle of the night. As I later documented in the introduction to my book Visions of Power in Cuba, the fact of this activism became clear to […]
The coincidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union with the centennial anniversary of Cuba’s last war for independence in the 1890s could have been disastrous for the Communist regime: after all, Fidel had contended since his pre-dawn victory speech on January 1, 1959 in Santiago de Cuba that the revolutionary government was the long-awaited […]
In January 1997, if I was astonished to discover the pervasiveness (and popularity) of cockfighting on the island, I was even more stunned by the prestige that Cubans who raise these birds for that purpose enjoyed in rural communities. Engaging in cockfighting had been illegal from the earliest years of the Cuban Revolution. Then Fidel […]
By the early 2000s, progress on the relocation of residents paralleled the radical facelift and restoration of building interiors on the Plaza Vieja. German financing produced Cuba’s first craft brewery. The old post office, remembered as one of the “only good things the Americans knew how to run” during the US Military Occupation of 1898-1902, […]
Like much of Cuba’s old and ruined colonial relics, Old Havana’s Plaza Vieja, literally meaning “Old Plaza”, underwent restorations ordered by UNESCO-backed Cuban government agencies, beginning in the late 1990s. Residents who had spent decades dealing with collapsing ceilings and most fundamentally, a deeply damaged water system, were “invited” to relocate with the promise of […]
Like most cities, Havana’s municipal government had prohibited the raising of livestock within city limits for decades at the time of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. However, in the Special Period, the despair of citizens over the unavailability of virtually all food in urban areas except for age-old beans, sugar and poor-quality rice led government […]
Founded in 1689 and completed in the early 1700s under the direction of the Jesuit order, the seminary, when I first visited, served not only as a church office for the Bishopric but was still a functioning Jesuit seminar for the training of priests. In 1995, government-sanctioned discrimination against religious believers had ended only two […]
Although begging for money and performing for it on the street was illegal since the adoption of Communism and, assumedly, the elimination of need in 1961, both beggars and street performers returned visibly in the 1990s across Cuba’s cities. Unable to offer alternatives, authorities tolerate their presence. Passersby and tourists sometimes glory in their talent. […]
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A gorgeous tobacco plant awaits harvest near a town for peasants who rebelled against Communist laws to control crop production and seize lands during a five-year long civil war in the Escambray highlands of central Cuba from 1961-1966. Utterly unknown to most today is the secret history of this war. It included the forcible translocation […]
Read more "Tobacco field near the political prisoners’ colony of Briones Montoto – 1998"
Working side-by-side with his son-in-law Felipe on a scant two acres of land the government granted them after state farms failed in the Special Period, Pucho grew everything from black beans and corn to tomatoes and onions for his family of six adults and four kids. Drastically reduced in quantity and quality, the “guaranteed” rations […]
My father’s brother Pucho returned to subsistence farming full time in 1991 after government-owned farms began closing one by one in the wake of disappearing Soviet aid and subsidies. Like his horse (who lost twenty pounds in less than a year), Pucho also lost weight, precipitously. Only sixty years old in 1995, he looked like […]
Here my uncle Tiki Guerra stands with his wife’s nephew Luis, and Mingo, a long-time friend and former small farmer whose land once bordered my grandparents in Marcos Vásquez, Pinar del Río. They pose with the recently slaughtered pig that my gift of twenty-five dollars in June of the previous year had allowed them to […]
Like the small family-owned restaurant, the re-legalization of timbiriches (street snack stalls) in 1992 for the first time since 1968 sparked a highly visible restoration and revival of many of the same businesses by the very same people who had operated them years earlier. Most, like this timbirichero [street vendor], used exactly the same equipment […]
Located in the former coach house of a giant mansion on Old Havana’s Plaza of the Cathedral, this tiny twelve-seat restaurant opened under family management thanks to the early reforms of 1991-1992 that allowed small businesses to operate for the first time since Fidel Castro unilaterally ordered the last remaining 52,000 of them shut down […]
Three hundred years ago, Cuba’s Spanish colonizers deliberately planted a kind of acacia typical of arid regions of Spain along riverbanks: they acted on the arrogant assumption that doing so would prevent rivers from overflowing their banks during Caribbean hurricanes. Enslaved Africans later renamed it marabú after beating the quickly growing, voracious plant back became […]
When I first visited my vast extended family in the provinces of western Cuba in the mid-1990s, it was obvious that the wrenching austerity with which they had lived was not simply a product of the Special Period or the challenges presented by the US Embargo. After all, the 1980s was what islanders called la […]
When I first met my father’s younger brother José Antonio “Tiki” Guerra in the fall of 1997, he had spent most of his life attempting to sustain the small farm that his parents had founded in the 1940s. While a key goal of the Revolution of 1959 had been to implement an agrarian reform that […]
Read more "Evidence of a peasant’s hard life – December 1996"
Between 2007 and 2018, Raúl Castro temporarily expanded the number of categories and marketing reach of licenses for Cubans to operate small businesses such as the home manufacture of artisanal goods for tourists and their sale by middle men. However, from 1991 until then, the Castro government led by Fidel markedly restricted artisans from selling […]
Read more "Illegal artisanal jewelry vending to tourists at Varadero Beach – December 1996"
In the early spring of 1997, this building collapsed just seconds after historian Dr. Manuel Barcia passed it while biking to the National Archive of Cuba. It was located on the corner of Obispo Street, the principal pedestrian-only thoroughfare connecting the seat of the Spanish colonial government to the monument of José Martí in Havana’s […]
Because Cubans found Chinese bikes expensive, many families took to sharing their bike in a startling way: by placing a long sponge poached from old furniture cushions on the grill over the bike’s tire so a lighter member of the family could ride in the back or by handcrafting a small, removable wooden “seat” for […]
Frequently celebrated abroad for its alleged commitment to preserving bio-diversity, the Cuban government’s actual history of environmental-policy-making-by-whim or simple resource extraction for sale to undisclosed foreign buyers without public accountability is little known. For peasants in affected areas, memories of such history run deep. That history includes Fidel Castro’s massively destructive decision to introduce an […]
Read more "Clear-cutting in Cuba’s “protected” national forests – July 1997"
Although the package of economic reforms launched in 1992 included the legalization of a non-state-owned, private sector of small businesses, laws limited licensing to a highly limited number of categories. In order to monopolize profits from both tourists and citizens, the state banned the sale of many goods and services by entrepreneurs that its own […]
Read more "Illegal garlic vending on the autopista to Pinar del Rio – April 1997"
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late December 1991, Cuba’s previously privileged pricing and supply guarantees of Soviet oil also disappeared. For the next several years, public transportation ceased to exist throughout the island. Not only could workers not get to work but fears soared that unintended idleness might lead to a national […]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its annual subsidy of $4.4 billion to Cuba’s economy in 1991, Fidel Castro and fellow Communists suddenly reversed their condemnation of foreign capitalist investors and luxury tourism to embrace both. The Communist state also opened government-owned resorts for foreign tourists like this one, Arenas Doradas, located on […]