Weekend reading / June 20, 2026
We want to see Cuba as the pleasure colony of the past. Today, it is rather a country on the verge of collapse.
Avenue 23 or La Rampa in Havana, Cuba, circa 1959.
(File photos/Getty Images) Writing about Cuba in the United States is often like shouting into an abyss whose only echo is the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan” played on repeat. The opening guitar lick. The bass walks underneath. The refrain we’ve all heard, whether we’ve ever set foot in Havana or not. The nation I speak to, which collects the island’s books, opinion pieces and dispatches, wants Cuba as its soundtrack, as its background music. He wants peeling paint and old cars, big black abuelas with cigars and dark rum to accompany the dancing. He wanted to go to the island before it changes. He wanted to leave before the end.
What no one says out loud, when they say “before it changes”, is what they mean by changes. This sentence is an imperial premonition. The change that Americans are waiting for (and which is now imminent) is the return of American capital: restaurants and hotels, condos and package tours, the culmination of a desire suspended for 67 years. In the American imagination, Cuba has always been an island entrusted to a future arrival. The “end” that Americans imagine is the end of Cuba’s refusal to be what America wants it to be. That ending is here.
The Cuba to which Americans want to return is the same plantation that nourished the American sugar bowl and the American fruit bowl and provided the labor force for the pleasure economy: the sugarcane workers, the casino workers, and the brothel workers, all exhausted at the same time. THE before it changes that Americans speak of with such nostalgia is not nostalgia for the socialist Cuba of yesteryear (or the communist Cuba that perhaps could have been) but the nostalgia for a pleasure colony. Before 1959, Havana was Vegas before Vegas. Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano ran the Hotel Nacional and the Tropicana, attracting the celebrity trade; Havana’s casinos, brothels and nightclubs were designed for northern leisure. It is a requirement to go back…today like yesterday…to a Cuba that has never ceased to be available.
But “Chan Chan,” the song that played in hotel lobbies across the island in the 1990s and early ’90s, and that people hummed on their imaginary vacations, doesn’t say what they think it says. Compay Segundo wrote it in 1984, not in pre-revolutionary antiquity but in the contemporary era of the Revolution that he loved. The chorus names a real route through a real Cuban landscape of four villages in the agricultural eastern province of Holguín, near the Sierra Maestra, where Castro began: “From Alto Cedro I go to Marcané / I arrive at Cueto, I go to Mayarí.” The song is at once domestic, erotic, and effective—tourists heard it as an irresistible soundtrack, without viewing its lyrics as descriptors of Cuban labor, geography, and desire. The end Americans wanted has now arrived, delivered by a president who declared he could “do whatever he wanted” with Cuba.
On May 20, Cuban Independence Day, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Raúl Castro, 94, at Miami’s Freedom Tower, the building where refugees from the Revolution were once processed to enter the country. Castro, out of power for five years but still a prominent figure in Cuba, was charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder and two counts of downing planes for the Brothers to the Rescue shooting in 1996. There was no pretense of diplomatic ambiguity in the U.S. State Department’s message. The indictment is the legal architecture of extraction: the same model the United States used against Nicolás Maduro in January.
In the days leading up to the indictment, Cuban officials told CNN that the action would “end negotiations and open the way for military intervention in which they would sacrifice their lives if necessary.”
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Just a day later, on May 21, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1. Havana Docks Corp. c. Royal Caribbean Cruisesreviving a lawsuit that holds U.S. cruise lines responsible for docking their ships in Cuban port facilities nationalized by the Revolution in 1959. In other words, the pleasure colony is reaffirming its ownership.
The ruling sets a $440 million precedent and is expected to not only trigger hundreds of similar claims, but also pave the way for the former private owners to return. The revolutionary government had nationalized the property abandoned by the exiles, for example transforming the family homes of Vedado into schools, hospitals and apartments for the families of former servants of the original households. Today, the Mafia is back, fulfilling the desires of the North, this time in dresses. “The end” now has three stages: the founding embargo, intensified into a blockade in January; criminal jurisdiction over Cuban leaders; and restitution of property to the Americans. The speed is astonishing – all in five months. The last two happened within 48 hours.
The recent economic blockade — including tariff threats against Cuba’s oil suppliers, sanctions halting maritime shipments and the refusal of U.S. destroyers to transport tankers — has had as much impact on the country as an invasion could have had. The power grid collapsed three times in March; 11 million people are left in the dark, with no promise of a return to electricity. Hospitals have canceled surgeries, refrigerators no longer work, and food – if you can get it – is rotten. A Russian tanker delivered 730,000 barrels of crude oil to Matanzas in late March, which was only enough for 10 days. CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on May 14, following a U.S. offer of $100 million in humanitarian aid intended to bypass the Cuban state by being distributed through the Catholic Church, to practice what Peter Kornbluh called “submissive diplomacy.”
This does not mean that the Cuban government is completely innocent. The Revolution, which purported to make the abolition of the color line a founding task, also imposed real costs on black Cubans, queer Cubans, and dissident artists whose policies it found illegible or dangerous. Although much of what the United States currently exploits is structural, some of it is not forced. Black Cubans who took to the streets in July 2021 chanting “Homeland and life » they did not ask for help from the United States; they demanded a revolution that kept its word. The state sentenced them to up to 20 years. Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo, the rapper who co-wrote “Patria y Vida” and won two Latin Grammys from his cell, serving nine years in the maximum security prison Kilo 5 y Medio in Pinar del Río. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the visual artist who led the Movimiento San Isidro in the black working-class neighborhood that gave it its name, received five. The longest sentences fell, as might be expected, on those who had the least margin to absorb them.
A senior Trump administration official said Axios As of May 17, Cuba has acquired more than 300 attack drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, and Cuban officials have discussed their use against U.S. military ships, Guantanamo Bay and Key West in the event of a U.S. attack. The Iranian Shahed-136 has an estimated operational range of approximately 1,500 miles. Miami is 230 miles from Havana.
The Friday before Memorial Day, I flew to Florida for what I considered a little relaxation, keeping all these contradictions in mind. What the moment demands is something Americans have always refused to achieve: a different kind of attention. I have spent more than 25 years documenting the life of black Cubans, from its negotiations and refusals to its ultimate irresolution. The book I wrote began with the reverse revolutionary exclamation: no We will win! (We will win) but Are we going to win? (Are we going to win?). This question was an answer to the question Americans I spoke with always asked me about Cuba: When will it fall? While Cubans wondered if they could continue, Americans wondered when Cuba would end.
The image on the American postcard is not the image of Cuba that I documented. The country I spoke of is the one populated by people like the man I called Domingo, who trafficked in counterfeit cigars and anything else that could bring divide while his wife held their squalid apartment together, seemingly only through heartfelt prayers directed at a small altar next to the photos of Ché, Fidel, and Malcolm X taped to the wall. The Cuba I lived in included Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, a neo-Afrikan revolutionary who arrived in Havana as a fugitive and became the godmother of Cuban hip-hop, who taught me the cost of political exile and what it produces; and Assata Shakur, who I can now name in print because she died a free man in Havana on September 25, 2025. I have tried to document a laundry list of artists, intellectuals, sex workers, academics, healthroslovers and neighbors who lived in the contradictions of the Revolution with full knowledge of what surrounded them and refused to allow themselves to be reduced to propaganda or postcards. This refusal is what the loop of “Chan Chan” cannot convey and what Americans apparently cannot hear.
The blockade and the accusation did not come out of nowhere: they have a face in the person of Marco Rubio, son of Cuban exiles and former US senator from Florida, now Trump’s secretary of state, fulfilling what seems to be the climax of the story of his hero’s return before the next chapter. Rubio is the author of the policy that is finishing the job that the bounty on the heads of Assata and Nehanda could not achieve. The Cuban-American political class – Rubio, Mario Díaz-Balart, María Salazar, Carlos Giménez and the institutions represented around the Freedom Tower and gathered in front of Versailles on May 20 – seized control of United States policy towards Cuba. After what I’m sure was a delicious shortthey sang the national anthem, cried and chanted. They have been waiting 67 years for this particular ending – and their return.
On Memorial Day, I stood by a pool in Florida, looking up at the blue sky with not a single Russian or Iranian attack drone in sight. Don’t think for a moment that I – also an “American” – am not involved and a little worried about the potential fallout on this side of the Florida Straits.
Imagine for a moment that the drones which, according to the Cuban administration, are stored in strategic places on the island have arrived. Imagine that they do not hit Guantánamo – the contingency the administration uses to justify the threat – but Key West, South Beach or Palm Beach: the clubs, the resorts, the tourists who have finally arrived quite close to the beaches of Cuba. before it changes. Or imagine them interrupting the chants, the songs and the ax during the celebration in front of the Freedom Tower.
This scenario is not military; it’s moral. I’m not predicting that. I don’t want it. Most analysts believe that drones, if they exist, are positioned as defensive: Cuba’s response of last resort to a U.S. attack, not a first strike.
Yet, like many of my more privileged fellow citizens, I was a quiet man on the right side of the strait. The moral question is therefore mine before that of others: What would it take for me to feel what they feel? Eleven million people in the dark. Hospitals no longer have antibiotics. The food is rotting. Hunger is increasing. Deaths due to canceled surgeries and inadequate care. The American gaze apparently cannot keep this in its sights. He considers indictment as delayed justice and the blockade as pressure on a regime. What would it take to feel what is already happening, without the imaginary explosion that makes it credible?
And then a second question, perhaps a little philosophical: Imagine the reverse look. Imagine if the island’s residents had spent 67 years looking north the same way the United States looks to Havana – as a fantasy. I wanted to consume before things changed. Imagine their news stories about America’s hospitals running out of insulin, America’s food deserts, underbridge encampments, a civilian invasion of the Capitol, and bold reversals of voting rights, with the same loop of imperial premonition: We should go before this ends, before it’s not what it used to be, before America turns into something else.
This is the question posed by the accelerated loop of “Chan Chan”, its magnificent traditional style. They are Cuban the tempo brightened to reduce it to a tourist earworm, was never meant to be considered. What is happening in Cuba is not unique: the ability of the American gaze to transform distant suffering into a holiday backdrop or geopolitical opportunity continues as usual. Gaza has been portrayed as a take-it-or-no-go position, rather than a place reduced to rubble where people are starved and killed. Haiti has been portrayed as ungovernable rather than a place nearly ruined by two centuries of American intervention. Yemen, Sudan and Iran: these are yet other examples. Cuba happens to be the context that I have spent my professional life discovering. The structure is that of the Empire.
For over 25 years, I’ve been trying to understand what the people I love do beyond simple survival. The book I’m writing revolves around what I call “the good black life.” The name refers to what my fieldwork, from Havana to Harlem, continues to show me: that black people, in conditions that should make this impossible, do something more than endure. They create their life, not as a future condition that the Revolution will provide or that the Empire will allow, but as a present demand. The good black life is not transcendence. This is not naivety. It is method and orientation, philosophy and dance. It is the candle, made from the detritus of past ceremonies, reconstituted and lit when the grid falls; the party was made up of what family, neighbors and friends had on hand; the disco ball I imagine starting again the moment the lights come back on. This is what the postcard is supposed to obscure. The fantasy of Cuba is not a vacation; it is a foreclosure of our own life.
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The sophisticated practice and ethical philosophy by which blacks have insisted on a life that is not merely endured but lived poses a question to the American who can’t put the postcard down, who can’t help but indulge in the more Ricky Ricardo version of the “Chan Chan” loop long enough to hear what Cuba has been saying for 67 years: What kind of life is it to demand that others remain a fantasy? What kind of citizens are produced by a policy that turns 11 million people in ignorance into an opportunity for regime change? What kind of humanity is sustained by the imaginative violence that transforms the suffering of others into its own consumption – whether in the form of a vacation or studied or imposed silence?
It is also a question of good living. The Cuba fantasy is not just Cuba’s problem; it is also that of America. This is what makes the good life impossible for the American. The blockade not only produces Cuban suffering, it also reproduces American moral incapacity. The ability to look at 11 million people in the dark and feel only nostalgia for what one had planned to consume is not an ability belonging to a free people. It is the symptom of a political system that has organized its identity around the right not to resent what the state does in its name.
As I relaxed by the pool, the ice in my glass keeping a Cuban clave, I looked up at the sky. I remember Assata. Nehanda. The dancers. The doctors. The disco ball. I raised a glass to my Cuban friends in the fight.
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Jafari Sinclaire Allen Jafari Sinclaire Allen is a professor at Columbia University and director of the African American Studies Research Institute.
