The Weekend Learn
/
June 20, 2026
(Archive Images / Getty Photographs)
To put in writing about Cuba in the US is usually to scream into an abyss whose solely echo is the Buena Vista Social Membership’s “Chan Chan” taking part in on a loop. The opening guitar lick. The bass strolling beneath it. The refrain we’ve all heard, whether or not or not we’ve ever set foot in Havana. The nation I’m addressing, which picks up the books and op-eds and dispatches from the island, needs Cuba as a soundtrack—background music. It needs peeling paint and classic automobiles, heavyset Black abuelas with cigars, and darkish rum that goes with the dancing. It wished to go to the island earlier than it modifications. It wished to go earlier than the top.
What nobody says out loud, after they say “earlier than it modifications,” is what they imply by modifications. The phrase is an imperial premonition. The change Individuals are awaiting (and which in the present day is imminent) is the return of American capital: eating places and inns, condos and tour packages, the consummation of a need that has been suspended for 67 years. Within the American creativeness, Cuba has all the time been an island held in belief for a future arrival. The “finish” Individuals think about is the top of Cuba’s refusal to be what America needs it to be. That finish is right here.
The Cuba that Individuals wish to return to is identical plantation that fed the American sugar bowl and the American fruit bowl and equipped the labor for the pleasure economic system: cane employees, on line casino employees, and brothel employees, all used up without delay. The earlier than it modifications that Individuals discuss with such wistfulness isn’t nostalgia for the socialist Cuba that was (or the communist Cuba that, maybe, may have been) however nostalgia for a pleasure colony. Pre-1959, Havana was Vegas earlier than Vegas. Meyer Lansky and Fortunate Luciano ran the Lodge Nacional and the Tropicana, drawing the movie star commerce; Havana’s casinos, brothels, and nightclubs have been curated for the leisure of the North. It’s a demand to go backward—hoy como ayer—to a Cuba that by no means stopped being out there.
However “Chan Chan,” the track that performed in each lodge foyer on the island within the Nineties and early aughts, which of us on their fantasy holidays hum, doesn’t say what they assume it says. Compay Segundo wrote it in 1984—not in some prerevolutionary antiquity however contemporaneously with the Revolution he beloved. The refrain names an actual route by way of an actual Cuban panorama of 4 cities in Holguín Province, within the agricultural east, close to the Sierra Maestra the place Castro started: “De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané / Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí.” The track is home, erotic, and dealing without delay—vacationers heard it as an irresistible soundtrack, not registering its lyrics as descriptors of Cuban labor, geography, and need. The top that Individuals wished for has now arrived, delivered by a president who has mentioned he can “do something I need” with Cuba.
On Might 20, Cuban Independence Day, the US Division of Justice unsealed an indictment towards 94-year-old Raúl Castro at Miami’s Freedom Tower, the constructing the place refugees from the Revolution have been as soon as processed for entry into the nation. Castro, out of workplace for 5 years but nonetheless a potent determine in Cuba, has been charged with conspiracy to kill US nationals, 4 counts of homicide, and two counts of plane destruction for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. There was no pretense of diplomatic ambiguity within the US State Division’s messaging. The indictment is the authorized structure for extraction: the identical playbook the US used towards Nicolás Maduro in January.
Within the days earlier than that indictment, Cuban officers advised CNN that this motion “would finish negotiations and set the stage for a army intervention to which they’d sacrifice their lives if wanted.”
Present Problem
Only a day later, on Might 21, the US Supreme Courtroom dominated 8–1 in Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, reviving a lawsuit that holds American cruise traces accountable for docking their ships at Cuban port services that the Revolution nationalized in 1959. The pleasure colony, in different phrases, is reasserting its property deed.
The choice units a $440 million precedent and is anticipated not solely to set off tons of of comparable claims but additionally to make method for the return of the previous private-property house owners. The revolutionary authorities had nationalized property deserted by exiles—for instance, turning household mansions in Vedado into colleges, hospitals, and residences for the households of former servants of the unique households. Now the Mob is again, catering to Northern needs—this time in robes. “The top” now has three flooring: the foundational embargo, intensified right into a blockade this January; legal jurisdiction over Cuban leaders; and property restitution to Individuals. The rate is staggering—all of this in 5 months. The latter two occurred inside 48 hours.
The current financial blockade—together with tariff threats towards Cuba’s oil suppliers, sanctions halting maritime shipments, and US destroyers turning tankers away—has had as a lot of an impression on the nation as an invasion might need had. {The electrical} grid collapsed thrice in March; 11 million individuals have been left in the dead of night, with no promised return of their electrical energy. Hospitals have canceled surgical procedures, fridges have stopped working, and meals—if you will get it—has rotted. A Russian tanker delivered 730,000 barrels of crude oil to Matanzas in late March, which was solely sufficient for 10 days. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Havana on Might 14, after a US provide of $100 million in humanitarian help designed to bypass the Cuban state by being distributed by way of the Catholic Church, to follow what Peter Kornbluh has known as “submission diplomacy.”
This isn’t to say that the Cuban authorities is totally innocent. The Revolution that claimed to take the abolition of the colour line as a founding activity has additionally imposed actual prices on Black Cubans, queer Cubans, and dissident artists whose politics it discovered illegible or harmful. Whereas a lot of what the US is now exploiting is structural, a few of it’s unforced. The Black Cubans who took to the streets in July 2021 chanting “Patria y Vida” weren’t asking for rescue from the US; they have been demanding a revolution that stored its phrase. The state met them with sentences of as much as 20 years. Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo, the rapper who cowrote “Patria y Vida” and received two Latin Grammys from his jail cell, is serving 9 years within the maximum-security jail Kilo 5 y Medio in Pinar del Río. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the visible artist who led the Movimiento San Isidro from the Black working-class neighborhood that gave it its title, obtained 5. The longest sentences fell, predictably, on these with the least margin to soak up them.
A senior Trump-administration official advised Axios on Might 17 that Cuba has acquired greater than 300 assault drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, and that Cuban officers have mentioned utilizing them towards US naval vessels, Guantánamo Bay, and Key West within the occasion of a US assault. The Iranian Shahed-136 has an estimated operational vary of roughly 1,5oo miles. Miami is 230 miles from Havana.
On the Friday earlier than Memorial Day, I flew to Florida for what I considered a little bit of rest, holding all these contradictions in thoughts. What this second requires is one thing that Individuals have persistently refused to carry out: a distinct sort of consideration. I’ve spent over 25 years documenting Black Cuban life, from its negotiations and refusals to its final irresolution. The ebook I wrote started with the revolutionary exclamation turned on its head: not ¡Venceremos! (We are going to win) however ¿Venceremos? (Will we win?). The query was a solution to the query the Individuals I spoke with have been all the time asking me about Cuba: When will it fall? Whereas Cubans have been asking whether or not they may proceed, Individuals have been asking when Cuba would finish.
The American-postcard picture isn’t the Cuba I documented. The nation I wrote about is the one populated by individuals like the person I known as Domingo, who hustled counterfeit cigars and no matter else would deliver divisa whereas his spouse held their squalid condo collectively, seemingly solely on earnest prayers directed to a small altar to 1 aspect of the pictures of Ché, Fidel, and Malcolm X taped to the wall. The Cuba I lived in included Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, a New Afrikan revolutionary who arrived in Havana as a fugitive and have become the godmother of Cuban hip-hop, who taught me what political exile prices and what it produces; and Assata Shakur, who I’m now in a position to title in print as a result of she died free in Havana on September 25, 2025. I attempted to doc an endless checklist of artists, intellectuals, intercourse employees, students, santeros, lovers, and neighbors who lived contained in the contradictions of the Revolution with full data of what surrounded them and refused to be diminished to both propaganda or postcard. That refusal is what the loop of “Chan Chan” can not convey and what Individuals seemingly can not hear.
The blockade and the indictment haven’t fallen from nowhere: They’ve a face in Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles and former senior US senator from Florida who’s now Trump’s secretary of state, fulfilling what appears to be the apex of his hero’s-return narrative earlier than the subsequent chapter. Rubio is the writer of the coverage that’s ending the work that the bounty on the heads of Assata and Nehanda couldn’t. The Cuban American political class—Rubio, Mario Díaz-Balart, María Salazar, Carlos Giménez, and the establishments represented round Freedom Tower and assembled outdoors Versailles on Might 20—has captured the US’ Cuba coverage. After what I’m positive was a scrumptious cortadito, they sang the nationwide anthem, wept, and chanted. They’ve been ready 67 years for this specific finish—and return.
By Memorial Day, I used to be by a pool in Florida, trying on the blue sky with no Russian or Iranian assault drones in sight. Don’t assume for a second that I—additionally “an American”—am not implicated and a bit uneasy concerning the potential fallout on this aspect of the Florida straits.
Think about, for a second, that the drones the Cuban administration says are saved in strategic areas throughout the island arrived. Think about them not putting Guantánamo—the contingency that the administration makes use of to justify the menace—however Key West, South Seashore, or Palm Seashore: the golf equipment, the resorts, the vacationers who had lastly arrived shut sufficient to Cuba’s seashores earlier than it modifications. Or think about them interrupting the chants, the songs, and the cortaditos on the celebration in entrance of Freedom Tower.
This situation isn’t army; it’s ethical. I’m not predicting this. I’m not wishing for it. Most analysts assume the drones, in the event that they exist, are positioned as defensive: Cuba’s last-resort response to a US assault, not a primary strike.
Nonetheless, I—like most of the most privileged of my countrypeople—was a person at leisure on the proper aspect of the straits. The ethical query is subsequently mine earlier than it’s anybody else’s: What wouldn’t it take for me to really feel what they really feel? Eleven million individuals in the dead of night. Hospitals out of antibiotics. Meals rotting. Starvation spiking. Deaths from canceled surgical procedures and insufficient care. The American gaze seemingly can not maintain this in its sights. It sees the indictment as justice deferred and the blockade as strain on a regime. What wouldn’t it take to really feel what’s already occurring, with out the imagined detonation that makes it credible?
After which a second query, maybe a bit philosophical: Think about the gaze reversed. Think about that the individuals on the island had spent 67 years trying northward the best way the US has checked out Havana—as a fantasy they wished to eat earlier than it modified. Think about their press writing about American hospitals operating out of insulin, about American meals deserts, the encampments beneath bridges, a civil invasion of the Capitol, and daring reversals of voting rights, with the identical loop of imperial premonition: We must always go earlier than it ends, earlier than it’s not what it was once, earlier than America turns into one thing else.
That is the query that the sped-up loop of “Chan Chan,” its beautiful conventional son Cubano tempo brightened to scale back it to a vacationer earworm, was by no means designed to think about. What is occurring to Cuba isn’t distinctive: The capability of the American gaze to transform distant struggling right into a trip backdrop or geopolitical alternative is enterprise as standard. Gaza has been narrated as a place to take or refuse, quite than a spot diminished to rubble the place individuals are being starved and killed. Haiti has been written as ungovernable quite than as a spot practically ruined by two centuries of US intervention. Yemen, Sudan, and Iran—these are but extra examples. Cuba occurs to be the context I’ve spent my skilled life studying about. The construction is the Empire’s.
For greater than 25 years, I’ve been making an attempt to grasp what the individuals I like do past merely survive. The ebook I’m writing activates what I name “the Black good life.” The title belongs to what my fieldwork from Havana to Harlem retains exhibiting me: that Black individuals, beneath circumstances that ought to make it inconceivable, do one thing greater than endure. They make a life, not as a future situation that the Revolution will present or the Empire will allow, however as a gift declare. The Black good life isn’t transcendence. It’s not naïveté. It’s technique and orientation, philosophy and dance. It’s the candle, created from the detritus of ceremonies previous, reconstituted and lit when the grid goes down; the feast assembled from what was readily available from household, neighbors, and mates; the disco ball I think about resuming the second the lights come again. It’s what the postcard is designed to occlude. The fantasy of Cuba isn’t a trip; it’s a foreclosures of our personal good life.
Well-liked
“swipe left under to view extra authors”Swipe →
The delicate follow and moral philosophy by which Black individuals have insisted on a life that isn’t merely endured however lived poses a query for the American who can not put down the postcard, who can not cease shimmying to the extra Ricky Ricardo–esque model of the “Chan Chan” loop lengthy sufficient to listen to what Cuba has been saying for 67 years: What sort of life is it, to require that different individuals stay a fantasy? What sort of citizen is produced by a politics that turns 11 million individuals in the dead of night right into a regime-change alternative? What sort of humanity is sustained by the imaginative violence that converts different individuals’s struggling into one’s personal consumption—whether or not as trip or as studied or imposed silence?
That is additionally a good-life query. The fantasy of Cuba isn’t solely Cuba’s downside; additionally it is America’s. It’s what makes the great life, for the American, inconceivable. The blockade isn’t solely producing Cuban struggling however reproducing American ethical incapacity. The capability to take a look at 11 million individuals in the dead of night and really feel solely nostalgia for what one had deliberate to eat isn’t a capability belonging to a free individuals. It’s the symptom of a polity that has organized its sense of self round the proper to not really feel what the state does in its title.
As I chilled by the pool, the ice in my glass retaining a Cuban clave, I appeared on the sky. I remembered Assata. Nehanda. The dancers. The docs. The disco ball. I raised my glass to my Cuban mates en la lucha.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the query is whether or not Democratic candidates will do greater than merely occupy poll traces as gentle alternate options to the red-hot disaster that’s Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing battle on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “take into consideration Individuals’ monetary scenario,” tens of millions throughout the nation are fighting the surging prices of necessities. Democrats should seize this second and advance daring, small-“d” populist concepts—not accept cynical warning that after once more snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive concepts, actions, and elected officers reaching actual change throughout the nation into the nationwide dialog. On the similar time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded tremendous PACs are spending tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impression of the Supreme Courtroom’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on makes an attempt by pink states to rapidly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
We will play this essential position due to assist from readers such as you. This June, we’re elevating $20,000 to energy The Nation’s impartial journalism within the run-up to November’s immensely consequential elections.
It’s in our energy to construct a extra simply society, and your assist at this essential second brings us nearer to that daring imaginative and prescient. I hope you’ll donate in the present day.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Writer, The Nation
Extra from The Nation
Characteristic
/
Dave Zirin
Chris Lehmann
Sarah Carr
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', '
fbq('init', '233793277040432');
fbq('track', 'PageView');
Leave a Reply