Cuban Studies

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” ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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” . Wine, however, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 . Apparently established when Cuban exile cooks from ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...