There’s a building across the street from our house on Calle 13, and from the roof you can see everything. Sometimes my friends and I, on temperate afternoons or after rainstorms, sneak up in the elevator. We climb a rusty old latter to the very top of the building where the lightning rod is, silently […]

I have an idea. But first, a little backstory: Since the ‘60s, Cuba had been supported materially by the Soviet Union. The USSR acted as a surrogate mother for Cuba, subsidising things, buying exclusively Cuban sugar and tobacco, and importing things at a dramatically lower cost to Cuba. So essentially, Cuba’s relationship with the USSR […]

“I have some really bad news from home that I should tell you about” are words you never want to hear. Somehow the fact that I found out at a rest stop in the outskirts of Cienfuegos made it worse, because there’s nothing I could do about it, couldn’t contact my friends and find out […]

Upon returning to the United States, one of the things I will be most interested in asking about will be tourists’ experience of Cuban food. Before coming, Elliott told me that the food in Cuba is shit. This is true. The food in Cuba is shit. On the other hand, it’s extremely cheap. I can […]

Being a woman in Cuba can be annoying. Some have told me that my experience extends to all of Latin America, or at least the Caribbean, but I’ve only been to Cuba, so I won’t generalize. All American women know what it is to receive a catcall, how awful it can feel, how it can […]