Cuban Studies

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 ...

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 ...

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 . He also announced that they would re-open—supposedly as ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 . To no-one’s surprise, service was slow, servings of French fries were always ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The day before Fidel Castro’s birthday every August 13^th, 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...