We want to see Cuba as the pleasure colony of the past. Today, it’s more of a country on the brink of collapse.
Avenida 23 or La Rampa in Havana, Cuba, circa 1959. (Archive Photos / Getty Images)
To write about Cuba in the United States is often to scream into an abyss whose only echo is the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan” playing on a loop. The opening guitar lick. The bass walking under it. The chorus we’ve all heard, whether or not we have ever set foot in Havana. The nation I am addressing, which picks up the books and op-eds and dispatches from the island, wants Cuba as a soundtrack—background music. It wants peeling paint and vintage cars, heavyset Black abuelas with cigars, and dark rum that goes with the dancing. It wanted to go to the island before it changes. It wanted to go before the end.
What no one says out loud, when they say “before it changes,” is what they mean by changes. The phrase is an imperial premonition. The change Americans are awaiting (and which today is imminent) is the return of American capital: restaurants and hotels, condos and tour packages, the consummation of a desire that has been suspended for 67 years. In the American imagination, Cuba has always been an island held in trust for a future arrival. The “end” Americans imagine is the end of Cuba’s refusal to be what America wants it to be. That end is here.
The Cuba that Americans want to return to is the same plantation that fed the American sugar bowl and the American fruit bowl and supplied the labor for the pleasure economy: cane workers, casino workers, and brothel workers, all used up at once. The before it changes that Americans speak about with such wistfulness is not nostalgia for the socialist Cuba that was (or the communist Cuba that, perhaps, could have been) but nostalgia for a pleasure colony. Pre-1959, Havana was Vegas before Vegas. Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano ran the Hotel Nacional and the Tropicana, drawing the celebrity trade; Havana’s casinos, brothels, and nightclubs were curated for the leisure of the North. It is a demand to go backward—hoy como ayer—to a Cuba that never stopped being available.
But “Chan Chan,” the song that played in every hotel lobby on the island in the 1990s and early aughts, which folks on their fantasy vacations hum, does not say what they think it says. Compay Segundo wrote it in 1984—not in some prerevolutionary antiquity but contemporaneously with the Revolution he loved. The chorus names a real route through a real Cuban landscape of four towns in Holguín Province, in the agricultural east, near the Sierra Maestra where Castro began: “De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané / Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí.” The song is domestic, erotic, and working at once—tourists heard it as an irresistible soundtrack, not registering its lyrics as descriptors of Cuban labor, geography, and desire. The end that Americans wished for has now arrived, delivered by a president who has said he can “do anything I want” with Cuba.
On May 20, Cuban Independence Day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against 94-year-old Raúl Castro at Miami’s Freedom Tower, the building where refugees from the Revolution were once processed for entry into the country. Castro, out of office for five years yet still a potent figure in Cuba, has been charged with conspiracy to kill US nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of aircraft destruction for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. There was no pretense of diplomatic ambiguity in the US State Department’s messaging. The indictment is the legal architecture for extraction: the same playbook the United States used against Nicolás Maduro in January.
In the days before that indictment, Cuban officials told CNN that this action “would end negotiations and set the stage for a military intervention to which they would sacrifice their lives if needed.”
Just a day later, on May 21, the US Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, reviving a lawsuit that holds American cruise lines liable for docking their ships at Cuban port facilities that the Revolution nationalized in 1959. The pleasure colony, in other words, is reasserting its property deed.
The decision sets a $440 million precedent and is expected not only to trigger hundreds of similar claims but also to make way for the return of the former private-property owners. The revolutionary government had nationalized property abandoned by exiles—for example, turning family mansions in Vedado into schools, hospitals, and apartments for the families of former servants of the original households. Now the Mob is back, catering to Northern desires—this time in robes. “The end” now has three floors: the foundational embargo, intensified into a blockade this January; criminal jurisdiction over Cuban leaders; and property restitution to Americans. The velocity is staggering—all of this in five months. The latter two occurred within 48 hours.
The recent economic blockade—including tariff threats against Cuba’s oil suppliers, sanctions halting maritime shipments, and US destroyers turning tankers away—has had as much of an impact on the country as an invasion might have had. The electrical grid collapsed three times in March; 11 million people have been left in the dark, with no promised return of their electricity. Hospitals have canceled surgeries, refrigerators have stopped working, and food—if you can get it—has rotted. 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 flew to Havana on May 14, after a US offer of $100 million in humanitarian aid designed to bypass the Cuban state by being distributed through the Catholic Church, to practice what Peter Kornbluh has called “submission diplomacy.”
This is not to say that the Cuban government is entirely blameless. The Revolution that claimed to take the abolition of the color line as a founding task has also imposed real costs on Black Cubans, queer Cubans, and dissident artists whose politics it found illegible or dangerous. While much of what the United States is now exploiting is structural, some of it is unforced. The Black Cubans who took to the streets in July 2021 chanting “Patria y Vida” were not asking for rescue from the United States; they were demanding a revolution that kept its word. The state met them with sentences of up to 20 years. Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo, the rapper who cowrote “Patria y Vida” and won two Latin Grammys from his prison cell, is 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 from the Black working-class neighborhood that gave it its name, received five. The longest sentences fell, predictably, on those with the least margin to absorb them.
A senior Trump-administration official told Axios on May 17 that Cuba has acquired more than 300 attack drones from Russia and Iran since 2023, and that Cuban officials have discussed using them against US naval vessels, Guantánamo Bay, and Key West in the event of a US attack. The Iranian Shahed-136 has an estimated operational range of roughly 1,5oo miles. Miami is 230 miles from Havana.
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On the Friday before Memorial Day, I flew to Florida for what I thought of as a bit of relaxation, holding all these contradictions in mind. What this moment requires is something that Americans have consistently refused to perform: a different kind of attention. I have spent over 25 years documenting Black Cuban life, from its negotiations and refusals to its ultimate irresolution. The book I wrote began with the revolutionary exclamation turned on its head: not ¡Venceremos! (We will win) but ¿Venceremos? (Will we win?). The question was an answer to the question the Americans I spoke with were always asking me about Cuba: When will it fall? While Cubans were asking whether they could continue, Americans were asking when Cuba would end.
The American-postcard image is not the Cuba I documented. The country I wrote about is the one populated by people like the man I called Domingo, who hustled counterfeit cigars and whatever else would bring divisa while his wife held their squalid apartment together, seemingly only on earnest prayers directed to a small altar to one side of the photos 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 became the godmother of Cuban hip-hop, who taught me what political exile costs and what it produces; and Assata Shakur, who I am now able to name in print because she died free in Havana on September 25, 2025. I tried to document an unending list of artists, intellectuals, sex workers, scholars, santeros, lovers, and neighbors who lived inside the contradictions of the Revolution with full knowledge of what surrounded them and refused to be reduced to either propaganda or postcard. That refusal is what the loop of “Chan Chan” cannot convey and what Americans seemingly cannot hear.
The blockade and the indictment haven’t fallen from nowhere: They have a face in Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles and former senior US senator from Florida who is now Trump’s secretary of state, fulfilling what seems to be the apex of his hero’s-return narrative before the next chapter. Rubio is the author of the policy that is finishing the work that the bounty on the heads of Assata and Nehanda could not. The Cuban American political class—Rubio, Mario Díaz-Balart, María Salazar, Carlos Giménez, and the institutions represented around Freedom Tower and assembled outside Versailles on May 20—has captured the United States’ Cuba policy. After what I am sure was a delicious cortadito, they sang the national anthem, wept, and chanted. They have been waiting 67 years for this particular end—and return.
By Memorial Day, I was by a pool in Florida, looking at the blue sky with no Russian or Iranian attack drones in sight. Do not think for a moment that I—also “an American”—am not implicated and a bit uneasy about the potential fallout on this side of the Florida straits.
Imagine, for a moment, that the drones the Cuban administration says are stored in strategic locations across the island arrived. Imagine them not striking Guantánamo—the contingency that the administration uses to justify the threat—but Key West, South Beach, or Palm Beach: the clubs, the resorts, the tourists who had finally arrived close enough to Cuba’s beaches before it changes. Or imagine them interrupting the chants, the songs, and the cortaditos at the celebration in front of Freedom Tower.
This scenario is not military; it is moral. I am not predicting this. I am not wishing for it. Most analysts think the drones, if they exist, are positioned as defensive: Cuba’s last-resort response to a US attack, not a first strike.
Still, I—like many of the most privileged of my countrypeople—was a man at leisure on the right side of the straits. The moral question is therefore mine before it is anyone else’s: What would it take for me to feel what they feel? Eleven million people in the dark. Hospitals out of antibiotics. Food rotting. Hunger spiking. Deaths from canceled surgeries and inadequate care. The American gaze seemingly cannot hold this in its sights. It sees the indictment as justice deferred and the blockade as pressure on a regime. What would it take to feel what is already happening, without the imagined detonation that makes it credible?
And then a second question, perhaps a bit philosophical: Imagine the gaze reversed. Imagine that the people on the island had spent 67 years looking northward the way the US has looked at Havana—as a fantasy they wanted to consume before it changed. Imagine their press writing about American hospitals running out of insulin, about American food deserts, the encampments under bridges, a civil invasion of the Capitol, and bold reversals of voting rights, with the same loop of imperial premonition: We should go before it ends, before it’s not what it used to be, before America turns into something else.
This is the question that the sped-up loop of “Chan Chan,” its gorgeous traditional son Cubano tempo brightened to reduce it to a tourist earworm, was never designed to consider. What is happening to Cuba is not unique: The capacity of the American gaze to convert distant suffering into a vacation backdrop or geopolitical opportunity is business as usual. Gaza has been narrated as a position to take or refuse, rather than a place reduced to rubble where people are being starved and killed. Haiti has been written as ungovernable rather than as a place nearly ruined by two centuries of US intervention. Yemen, Sudan, and Iran—these are yet more examples. Cuba happens to be the context I have spent my professional life learning about. The structure is the Empire’s.
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For more than 25 years, I have been trying to understand what the people I love do beyond merely survive. The book I am writing turns on what I call “the Black good life.” The name belongs to what my fieldwork from Havana to Harlem keeps showing me: that Black people, under conditions that should make it impossible, do something more than endure. They make a life, not as a future condition that the Revolution will provide or the Empire will permit, but as a present claim. The Black good life is not transcendence. It is not naïveté. It is method and orientation, philosophy and dance. It is the candle, made from the detritus of ceremonies past, reconstituted and lit when the grid goes down; the feast assembled from what was on hand from family, neighbors, and friends; the disco ball I imagine resuming the moment the lights come back. It is what the postcard is designed to occlude. The fantasy of Cuba is not a vacation; it is a foreclosure of our own good life.
The sophisticated practice and ethical philosophy by which Black people have insisted on a life that is not merely endured but lived poses a question for the American who cannot put down the postcard, who cannot stop shimmying to the more Ricky Ricardo–esque 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 require that other people remain a fantasy? What kind of citizen is produced by a politics that turns 11 million people in the dark into a regime-change opportunity? What kind of humanity is sustained by the imaginative violence that converts other people’s suffering into one’s own consumption—whether as vacation or as studied or imposed silence?
This is also a good-life question. The fantasy of Cuba is not only Cuba’s problem; it is also America’s. It is what makes the good life, for the American, impossible. The blockade is not only producing Cuban suffering but reproducing American moral incapacity. The capacity to look at 11 million people in the dark and feel only nostalgia for what one had planned to consume is not a capacity belonging to a free people. It is the symptom of a polity that has organized its sense of self around the right not to feel what the state does in its name.
As I chilled by the pool, the ice in my glass keeping a Cuban clave, I looked at the sky. I remembered Assata. Nehanda. The dancers. The doctors. The disco ball. I raised my glass to my Cuban friends en la lucha.
Jafari Sinclaire AllenJafari Sinclaire Allen is a professor at Columbia University and the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies.