Cuban Studies

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cuban entrepreneurs selling sandwiches of pulled roast pork with freshly baked Cuban bread compete with this state-owned vendor whose cart announces “Long live 52^nd Anniversary of the Revolution.” This policy of state-owned service providers and vendors trying to outcompete small-time, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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)

Read more "The Sunset in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A bulletin board in the doorway of this Committee for the Defense of the Revolution 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 ...