Cuban Studies

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...