This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Cuba’s possible future transition away from socialism would likely be similar to what happened in various Eastern European socialist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He appears to have really taken to this line of argument, since a fragment of the interview was promoted online by the official Department of State twitter account.

While I think that Rubio reached for these comparisons mostly as a way to reduce pressure for action from the GOP’s hardline constituencies in Florida, I also think it would be illuminating to take the comparison seriously for a second. Regardless of whether he sees Eastern European regimes as true models or is merely using comparison as a rhetorical device to give the White House breathing room, such comparisons can often reveal hidden consequential differences that reshape how we understand the present.

First, though, Ric Herrero, of the non-profit pro-engagement organization Cuba Study Group, has already made an excellent point in response, saying

Rubio mentions Poland as “the best example.” Of what exactly?

Communism was foisted on a reluctant and decimated Poland by the USSR, and Poles shed it as soon as Moscow loosened its grip over Eastern Europe.

Castro, on the other hand, led a popular indigenous revolution, aligned it with the USSR, then doubled down on “socialismo o muerte” after the Soviet collapse.

Cuban exiles strongly identify with the Polish experience because they too had communism forced upon them. And perhaps (most likely, really) they are the main audience here. But the history on the ground and the conditions that enabled a transition in Poland were very different from those in Cuba.

The point that socialism in Cuba came not on Soviet tanks but rather the cooptation of a broad based domestic political movement not one brushed aside lightly. The struggle against the Polish regime was simultaneously one of struggling for a better life, greater rights, and national sovereignty. In the Cuban case, the government not only successfully fused (in the minds of supporters) the ideas of the current government with nationalism and national identity, but Trump has actively played into the role of American ogre trying to recolonize the island (‘take Cuba’ comments, etc.). Thus the US’ pressure campaign is more akin to the USSR launching a campaign to force Albania back into the fold of Eastern European satellite states (though obviously it’s also quite different from that case too) than it is Poland.

A second major difference is that of civil society. In his classic extended essay, Uncivil Society, Stephen Kotkin argues (fairly convincingly) that contra the received wisdom of the 1990s, the Eastern Europe of the 1980s lacked true civil society movements. For a more extended exploration of this, see this older post that I wrote on Kotkin and the concept of ‘civil society’ writ large. The main exception to this generalization, and perhaps the only one, is Poland, where despite illegality the independent union movement Solidarity had managed to build up its strength outside of the total control of the Polish state. Solidarity is not, in simple and direct causal terms, the reason that the Polish regime fell, but it certainly was certainly an important organizing force that the opposition could rally around in its efforts to navigate its transition.

Cuba has no equivalent to Solidarity. The closest it came, the organization Archipelago formed in the aftermath to the J11 protests in 2021, was quickly disarticulated through systematic harassment and its leaders largely forced into exile to escape jail time. Since then the Cuban government has continued to proactively jail or exile any sort of emerging leadership on the island, including the recent case of Cuba’s expulsion of its high profile opposition leader Luis Manuel Otero Alcantará. Opposition exists but it is essentially atomized, outside of social media, and everyday people are scared of draconian prison sentences, though in extremis they will still protest if pushed to the point of total despair. The Catholic Church exists in Cuba, as it did in Poland, and the Vatican has played an important role in negotiations with the US repeatedly in the past, but it is not the unifying national political force that Catholicism played in the Polish case. Evangelical churches are increasingly powerful in Cuba, but while collectively potent they are not a single unified organization in a way akin to Catholicism or other more centralized major religions. They have also focused more on challenging specific government policies, like marriage equality, rather than a direct challenge to the regime itself. Even if that changes, Evangelicals remain a minority of the population and can’t play the unifying role that the Catholic Church did in Poland even if it tried (at least, I don’t think it would).

In political transitions, the pre-existence and support of civil society organizations are not exactly prerequisites, but they help quite a bit. The Spanish Communist Party, for example, played an important role in tempering the far left during the delicate tightrope act that was the Spanish democratic transition (1975-1978).

Another big difference between Cuba and Poland is the state of the countries. While Communist Poland was not exactly living the high life, things also weren’t in a state of near total collapse. Poland was increasingly faced with a debt crisis as its productivity fell behind that of Western Europe, incentivizing it to use debt based spending to subsidize domestic consumption, but the country itself was more or less fine. The state of agriculture is especially helpful as a point of comparison; Poland never completes the policy of agricultural collectivization that gets imposed elsewhere in Eastern Europe. After being abandoned due to widespread popular resistance in the 1950s, Poland was allowed to continue to the end of the Cold War with a majority of independent farmers rather than Soviet style kolkhozes. It also had a fairly large population with much of it perfectly within normal healthy working ages.

Contrast this with Cuba, where the country’s infrastructure is essentially in a state of collapse akin to the aftermath of a war. The country’s electrical grid and power generation infrastructure are FUBAR and require a staggering amount of money just to get it back to something like functional again, which is a problem not solved by just opening the country back up to oil after 8 months of an oil blockade by the US. From a population peak of just north of 11 million, the population has collapsed to at most around 9 million and likely even less, mostly due to mass exodus but also due to the fact that the population is increasingly elderly and lacks basic medical care due to the economic crisis worsened by the US. Many of those who leave appear to be young, talented, and experienced workers, meaning that the exodus also disproportionately would affect the exact kinds of human capital reserves that a transition would depend on.

The country imports basically everything now despite being a major agricultural product exporter for the past three centuries. Most of the stocks of chickens, cows, and pigs are gone, meaning it will take serious time and money to build them back up. Cuba has a small private farm owning minority of around ~10% who were smart enough to never buy into government pressure to accept collectivization in the 1960s and 1970s, and they do seem to have produced about ~30% of ag output in the 2010s on average (pretty disproportionate contribution to a country that is dependent on food imports). Most of agriculture, however, is still organized around state farms that are essentially reformed kolkhozes and which suffer from the same decapitalization problem as everyone else.

None of these huge problems go away even if Trump decided tomorrow to return to a policy of full normalization with Cuba. Sure, more oil shipments will likely come from countries eager to support the island, or at least be seen to do so as a middle finger to the US, or some combination of both, but the island has little to sell without selling off land and what little else they have left. The country needs massive amounts of aid, urgently, to staunch the economic hemorrhaging as inflation soars, people die due to lack of basic medical care, and much of the economy remains paralyzed.

In short, not only do I not think Poland is a very helpful guide for Cuba, but it’s one that hides the huge scale of the challenges to come. Too much is different on too many levels for it to be a helpful guide here. Honestly, if any country seems a closer fit for what may happen in Cuba, it would be Romania; where instead of a fairly peaceful transition of power there was regime collapse. That still looks, to me, more likely than Poland or other Eastern European parallels. And it’s still not one that grapples with how bad things are, or how bad they can still become.

A key pillar of the Spanish democratic transition in the 1970s was the so-called ‘Pacto del Olvido’; literally the ‘Pact of Forgetting’. There was a lot of violence in the Spanish 20th century, especially during the Civil War (1936-1939), a pattern to which the final decades of Francisco Franco’s personal dictatorship (1939-1975) were no exception. When the old Caudillo mercifully died in November of that year, he left his regime in a precarious position.

The Franquista regime was falling apart. The youth had already been lost to ‘the Movement’ (as the official party was known) and the oil shocks of the early 1970s were creating sufficient economic instability that strikes were growing geometrically; this usually not a great development even in an autocracy. The regime continued to have a solid sector of supporters but aside from a group of ultras, nicknamed ‘the bunker’ in a reference to Hitler and his closest associates, there was growing awareness among most of society that the status quo was untenable.

For one thing, Spain’s regime being undemocratic meant it couldn’t join the EEC (now the EU) and all the benefits this brought. For another, the shrinking share of the population who supported the regime made it increasingly untenable to hold onto power, especially without ratcheting up the use of force. Separatism was also on the rise, with the Basque terrorist group ETA having turned Franco’s would-be successor, Luis Carrero Blanco, into ‘Spain’s first astronaut‘; they packed so much explosive material under his car’s commute route that when it blew up his vehicle flew over a building and into the yard behind it. While the regime was brought to power by hardliners and more traditionalist conservatives, the Spanish ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s and 1970s was more a product of conservative but technocratic and pragmatic businessmen who did not necessarily need the regime to be authoritarian, just stable and capitalist. Here I’m thinking of figures in government like reformist government minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne, but also businessmen like car mogul Eduardo Barreiros; both hunting buddies of the Caudillo.

The benefits of liberalization in politics were clear to many, and even those who weren’t true believers in it could accept it pragmatically, but there was one major problem; what to do about the day after? Say you ended the dictatorship tomorrow, ok, how do you make sure you’re safe if you were a supporter, a minister, a mid-level bureaucrat, a former thug who had cracked Republican skulls, etc.? They continued to have control of the country through police and military repression, but what happened the moment they put down their guns?

The opposition was also not exactly in a strong position either. While the regime was weak, they had the weapons, the trained troops and cops, and the lack of any sort of organized opposition within the country which would permit it to succeed if it tried some kind of uprising. The leadership of most opposition organizations was abroad, even that of the Spanish Communist Party, which continued to function illegally within Spain in spite of constant repression. In the long-term, it was clear the regime was doomed, but how long would its fall take? And, if the opposition forced the issue, how many would die in the process?

For both sides, the memory of the 1930s still weighed heavily on them; did thousands and thousands of Spaniards have to die all over again in order for the country to move forward? But, without forcing the issue, they were at an impasse. Franco’s regime was brutal and people would want revenge; so his supporters had reason to fear a transition. The opposition lacked the strength to force the issue yet and if they tried many would likely die while the regime itself might survive in some form. It was seemingly a stalemate.

The solution both sides found was to agree to ‘forget’. Amnesties for the crimes of the past, both Franquista and anti-Franquista alike, were a key part of the late regime’s approach to the uncertainty of what would come next. But what made this a workable solution was that the opposition was also willing to play ball. Even Santiago Carrillo, a key leader of the Spanish Communist Party, refused to blow up the transition in order to demand justice for the crimes of the past. As neither side had a decisive advantage and neither wanted the bloodbath required from a test of strength, an understanding seemed the most practical solution. Too many had died already, it was time to turn the page and build a new Spain. One built on mass graves full of dead who would never get justice, sure, but also one that provided a path to democracy and shared prosperity for that generation’s kids and grandkids. One that spared them the mass violence that would have to come from a test of strength with the regime. Enough fratricidal political violence had happened already, and recrossing that river of blood once more wouldn’t bring back the dead or guarantee a better future for those still living.

From this shared understanding, the Franquista coalition was willing to accept a democratic transition. It was directed from above, was a close thing at times (especially the failed coup attempt of 1981), it took the conniving support of Juan Carlos I, and the replacement of the insufficiently pliable Carlos Arias Navarro, sure, but it happened.

These kinds of solutions are not specific to the Franquista regime either. A negotiated transition where the perpetrators of the previous regime received varying degrees of immunity is also seen in other famous cases, like Chile after the exit Augusto Pinochet. It is also my understanding that this applies to the Brazilian Junta but I am far less informed on that example. Was it justice? No. Did it guarantee that there wouldn’t be hard right figures in the future who tried to restore the old regime? Certainly not, just look at Bolsonaro’s attempted coup a few years ago. But it was a solution that was available and which, for all its flaws, actually worked in a situation where neither side was willing to surrender.

I am sure that by now my readers have already guessed at the parallels I am thinking of in terms of Cuba. A Pacto del Olvido for Cuba seems hard to imagine at the moment. You do have a regime with its back against the wall and no clear way to continue holding onto power without increased repression, sure, but you also have the context of Florida exiles (led and personified in this by Marco Rubio) who would be unlikely to accept a transition without being able to take their fury out on at least the leadership and likely also other collaborators, including those who served as undercover sources for Cuba’s police state apparatus. If at all, an amnesty for those who break with the regime seems far more likely to me than a total amnesty that allows the country to move forward. As with Spain, neither side is strong enough to overturn the other and a test of strength will bring more suffering and death, but the regime in this case (rightly) fears that surrender would be total and the vengeance swift and brutal not just for themselves but everyone they care about around them. Surrendering to US pressure and Florida influence would be simultaneously a betrayal of their entire ethos and identity but a betrayal of their own interests and those of the people they care about most.

This means that US pressure, like a Chinese finger trap, is pulling the frayed fibers of the regime coalition together, giving it cohesion rather than pulling it apart. In this sense Trump’s maximum pressure strategy is continuing the role the US pressure has historically played in domestic Cuban politics. Like any finger trap, with enough pressure the fibers will begin to snap until the whole structure snaps in half; continued US pressure seems to set the country on a course for violent and chaotic regime collapse rather than regime change.

In advising his readers back in the early 16th century, Machiavelli argued time and again that for foes the solutions were either magnanimity or to be so brutally devastating that they could never hurt you ever again. In his book Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, Book 2, Chapter 23, he cites the mistake of the Samnites with Rome, to humiliate rather than pardon or destroy a force they had trapped, which resulted in the Romans coming back on the Samnites to wreak vengeance. He argued the Romans had to have either been destroyed there, whatever the cost, or pardoned such that they were demoralized. With Cuba, forgiveness seems to be off the table; I worry about what the alternative looks like.

Late last week, the slow train of market reforms appeared to have finally arrived at the station. Amid the nigh total crisis of the country, the government has finally enacted sweeping market reforms that promise to mark an end to the current halfway stop between socialism and capitalism; with the vices of both worlds and the virtues of neither.

Among the many important areas of reform are

• End to state monopoly on imports/exports in agriculture and other ag reforms that have been pending since end of the Cold War

• Foreign investment possible even in hitherto state monopoly sectors like energy

• End of state imposition of itself as middleman between foreign companies and Cuban employees, which hitherto allowed it to select who would be hired and to take a large cut (sometimes larger than what employee was paid) for its role

• Taking an axe to a lot of the ‘gratuidades indebidas’ (undue gratuities); basically, state subsidies that were purely based on paternalistic redistribution but which didn’t necessarily make sense economically.

  • Note here that supposedly those who actually need state assistance will continue to receive help, though given collapse of basic services and lack of money and goods to redistribute, it’s unclear when the state will be in a position to do this.

• Massive simplification of state bureaucracy and organizations; fused where it makes sense, closed or liquidated where not.

• Liberalization of salaries to reflect company capacity to pay rather than top-down imposed salary levels across the board (relevant for state sector presumably)

• Facilitating foreign investment in private sectors, including allowing and even encouraging Cubans abroad to invest in the island.

• Cubans can now finally open multiple private businesses at once and cap of 100 employees in a given private business has been removed

• Permitting purchasing/sale of shares in even state sector

  • This one is going to be particularly important to watch given Russian precedent for how this played out in a way that helped to create post-Soviet Russian oligarchs

• Private banks allowed once again, for first time since 1960s

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Honestly, there are way too many reforms to even explain them all coherently. Even if you were to copy and paste just the summary of the announced reforms published in Granma three days ago into a word document, at single space Times New Roman with 12 point size, you get a full 18 pages of announced changes.

In light of this, and given the fairly technical background required to fully appreciate the limits and promises of the reforms, I heartily recommend following scholars of Cuba with actual economic backgrounds. In particular, Cuban economists Pedro Monreal and Ricardo Torres have generously provided their expertise to the public for years on this type of issue and continue to provide important context for those of us who lack econ backgrounds. If you’re a journalist reading this who wants to understand technical aspects of this question, I recommend starting with them rather than historians (like me) or political scientists.

These changes are quite welcome and indeed reflect many of the things that reformers and everyday Cubans have asked for over the course of decades. It is even something the Chinese have been pleading for in private. I have also spent years saying this was kind of reform was necessary, though the weight of my comments is likely null in Cuban government circles, so I have something of a dog in this fight, even if it’s just that I think this is the right solution. So, in light of this good news, the question you’re probably thinking by this point is, ‘ok, this is what you wanted, why the tone of ambivalence?’

I’m not ambivalent about the changes themselves, but I am about the timing. Late is better than never, but by deferring these changes to the 11th hour, as the whole economy comes to a screeching halt, also diminishes how much they can achieve as well as how fast they can improve things.

Let’s start with one of the most important crises that the country faces; demographic collapse. Since reaching a peak population north of 11 million in the 2000s and 2010s, Cuba has since collapsed to 8 million people or fewer. Admittedly, not all of this is going to be outmigration; Cuba has an increasingly aged population, meaning that part of this is the slow but steady grind of an aging population in a country where births have been below replacement rate since the middle of the Cold War. Still, in the past few years we have seen 1-2 million leave the country, most for the US but many for anywhere they can. Cuba has long been described as a place with the aging population problems of a first world country but the economy of a third world one; the exodus of the past half decade has turned this from a major problem on the horizon to an acute crisis in the present. Cuba desperately needs young, able bodied, healthy people to do hard work, from agriculture to services, and (hopefully) industry too, for the economy to not just stabilize but recover.

This could conceivably be partly addressed through the return migration of large numbers of Cubans eager to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the reforms. However, how many will be drawn back after so much expense leaving? This leap of faith back to their homelands will be a risk some will take, but who does this make sense for, precisely? If I were a cubano de a pié, this is not a gamble that I personally would make. If anything it makes the most sense for people for whom the emigration experience has been so abysmal that returning to Cuba somehow does not seem as bad or paradoxically for those for whom things are going well enough that a high risk investment in Cuba, to get in on the ground floor of market reforms, is an acceptable gamble. Given the possibility to invest from abroad, promised in the reform package, I expect that many will prefer that limited risk to uprooting themselves to move back, but then who is going to do the labor (especially more complex technical tasks) given the exodus of so much qualified younger talent?

This takes us to another key problem; the uncertain future of the regime itself. Cuba is currently under an actual blockade, specifically an oil blockade. Yes, one Russian fuel ship was let in, but the second one was stopped and redirected, and no third one has been sent. There are loopholes, like private businesses importing small amounts for themselves, but this is nowhere near enough to satisfy the demands of a national economy and private companies like this aren’t really equipped to store and handle large amounts of oil. The blockade is part of a broader maximum pressure strategy by Washington to overthrow the government once and for all, spearheaded by Marco Rubio (for whom it is partly personal). It also seems to have buy-in from Trump, who wants easy foreign policy wins akin to his ‘success’ case of Venezuela, especially with the embarrassment of the Iran deal that he is struggling to sell to his base. Now that the Iran War is, seemingly, over, at least for now, kind of, Washington’s attention passes like the Eye of Sauron back to Cuba. Trump’s term in office ends in two more years and the Cuban economy is in a state of paralysis and collapse already. The US also has additional measures of pressure that it can bring to bear if it wishes, including military strikes against the island, though as with Iran it is unclear whether these would do what Trump might hope they would.

In this context, with mass discontent domestically and the US breathing down their necks, how does the Cuban government convince people to invest in Cuba? I can see people who have a significant amount of money already investing as a gamble in an attempt to get in on the ground floor of a post-socialist economy, but what trust is there that the current government will survive in power? What guarantee is there that the government won’t simply stop or reverse reforms or kill new ventures by a thousand cuts through administrative measures? How does Cuba convince people to reinvest in a country where protests now rock the streets regularly even in daylight and basic infrastructure, like water and electricity, cannot be counted on? Again, this is not to say Cuba’s approach won’t attract investors at all, just that this diminishes the pool of people whose economic position and psychology makes them both willing and able to gamble their capital at a time of maximum uncertainty; a big problem with uncertainty is that even when not an absolute barrier it imposes a premium on everything else.

The total crisis is not just one of basic economic infrastructure like electricity and water but also social institutions like healthcare and education. Both are essentially in freefall, caught between staffing issues (especially as educated doctors flee for more opportunity abroad) and a lack of basic supplies/inputs needed to do their jobs. The exodus of so many Cubans, especially younger, healthy, and well educated ones, has meant a loss of Cuba’s last main resource; human capital. This is arguably the key sector that helped it to survive the post-Soviet crisis. After 1991, Cuba shifted from exporting sugar to exporting services; doctors, teachers, technical experts, etc. Many of these went to Venezuela as part of the ‘doctors for oil’ agreements of the 2000s but others went to other countries where those governments paid doctors a small part of their wages and the Cuban state the rest. The Trump administration has been working ceaselessly to end such programs in Latin America, especially medical programs abroad, which it and other international organizations have referred to as a form of modern slavery.

Finally, there’s another factor, and it’s one that’s kind of intangible but no less important; despair. I was in Cuba during the key years of the early reforms (2008-2013) under Raúl and visited regularly since. I also lived there for most of 2024, as the wheels really started to come off, since until then Havana had been (mostly) insulated from how bad things were getting in the provinces. I cannot really describe how massive of a shift there was between 2008 and 2024, much less now. From cautious optimism in the early Raul era, after so many failed and reversed openings under Fidel, to hope and growth of the mid-2010s, at the high water mark of Raul’s reforms and amid thaw with the US, there is now widespread distrust of the government’s promises combined with despair that things will get any better. Many reforms were deferred with no explanation, others (like monetary unification) done incompetently and at the worst possible moment, and all while the state remained the monopoly of the Party.

Add to all this that Raul is now 95 years old and there is no real unifying figure left in the party with the same authority once he passes. Admittedly, many already hate the party anyway, but this is relevant vis-a-vis government coalition unity. With Raul gone, who is there to restrain the ultras, push for the continuation of institutional mechanisms for rule rather than gruff power politics, or sign off on unpalatable solutions with the US?

Perhaps we are at a turning point in Cuban history, where things start to become better. I hope so, I really do, with all my heart. These reforms are, on their face anyway, positive and very welcome. They don’t fix the underlying problem of the undemocratic nature of the political system, to which so many problems of policy are tied, nor to the asphyxiating limits to free speech, which also negatively impact policy since they limit the transition of clear information on problems and solutions. It also doesn’t get all the political prisoners rotting in cells out, nor those who have become de facto stateless persons. But, for now anyway I will continue to watch the island’s development with caution. Better late than never, sure, but hopefully not so late as to not make a difference.

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Several years ago, Ada Ferrer published perhaps the single best overview history of Cuba to have been written thus far; Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021). This won her a Pulitzer Prize in History as well as a much deserved wider public recognition of how incredible of a writer she is. Less well known was an article written the same year in The New Yorker Magazine, titled My Brother’s Keeper. In it she describes a deeply personal and complicated relationship with her older half-brother, Poly, who her mother had had to leave in Cuba when she emigrated to the US with the baby Ada Ferrer in the early 1960s.

The story was absolutely heartbreaking and shockingly transparent for something so difficult. Many families have painful and complicated family stories in similar veins; few have someone with Ferrer’s pen or historian’s mind to bring them to life for a wider audience, much less a desire to do so. Years later, I was overjoyed to hear that this too was becoming a book of its own.

I’ve known Professor Ada Ferrer for almost a decade now, though only digitally. Her scholarship meant that together with names like Lillian Guerra or Rebecca Scott or Maria del Carmen Barcia, if you studied Cuba you knew who Ada Ferrer was, regardless of whether you’d had the chance to actually read her. While applying to graduate schools back in the late 2010s, I included an application to work with Ferrer at her previous institution, NYU. As you might have guessed, I ultimately didn’t get in, though was quite lucky to land in UW-Madison to work with Patrick Iber. Even if we didn’t work together as advisor/advisee, thanks to my growing social media presence I had the good fortune to be noticed and eventually followed back on Twitter. She would even occasionally interact with my tweets, which given her senior position at the top of the feel was immensely flattering.

However, having never met in person and still feeling like one grad student who liked her work among many, I was extremely pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Scribner & Sons. They informed me that she had put me on her list of people to receive free advanced copies of the new book. It arrived just a few days ago and I’m pleased to say that it’s everything I expected from Ferrer and more.

The book itself is, interestingly enough, a sort of mirror to her Pulitzer Prize winning Cuba: An American History. If the latter was a wide overview of Cuban history, the former was a deeply personal history of her life and family history that helps the reader understand Cuba better. This is not just a series of reflections based on family stories but a historian’s memoir of themselves, where the author brings her historian’s techniques and research knowledge to bear on her own family’s past. We follow her not just into memories but archives and the complicated and sometimes painful contradictions between what families tell themselves and harder truths that children and grandchildren can only guess at, if they are aware of these stories at all.

I am still worming my way through the book and may eventually write a fuller review once I am done, but I felt it important to try to put it out there that you should buy this. While I got the book a week ago, today (May 19th, 2026) is publication day so I can finally recommend you check it out either at your local bookstores or on Amazon. There is even an Audiobook version over on Audible so you can listen to Ferrer narrate this deeply personal story in her own voice.

Reading it at a local cafe this past weekend, I found myself struggling not to sob in public at parts. I’m a historian, I’m used to reading deeply painful stories about the past, but I was caught off-guard by the combination of transparency about these stories and Ferrer’s abilities as a storyteller that make you feel like you’re being let in on something very intimate and personal. I had to put the book down several times as I worked my way through the introduction and first few chapters, in order to get control of myself, while simultaneously feeling the drive to keep going to learn more.

Often when an academic writes a book that I like I immediately think of how to pitch it in a classroom setting. This book obviously fits extremely well into that, since this is like gold for scholars trying to explain Cuban history, Latin American history, the history of migrants to the US, or a dozen other angles, all of which would match up entirely organically with the text; this is an instant classic and I see it being assigned to undergrads and graduate students alike for years.

But honestly, the strength of this book is precisely that I don’t feel the need to push it to academics. The assigning of this book to help people understand various topics will happen entirely on its own and needs no help from me. To the extent that I feel the need to pitch it to anyone it’s to non-academics. This is a treasure; it’s a deeply personal memoir which will help you to understand so much of Cuban and American history while also never feeling like you’re reading the dense academic prose of a scholarly work. In fact, don’t read it for its benefits; that feels like trying to sell people on eating honey because it’s good for you. You eat honey because it tastes good; in the same way, once you pick this up you’ll devour it because it is so excruciatingly delicious.

10/10 book, go buy it.

I make zero money from this, am not her advisee or in any way set to personally benefit from writing this mini-review, and could have just posted a photo with the book saying ‘excited to read! hashtag pub day!’ and that would have more than met the implicit social expectations of an advanced copy to a colleague. I said all the other stuff because I believe it.

Yesterday Marc Caputo over at Axios dropped a piece about how Cuba was allegedly importing attack-drones. You can read the piece itself here.

In contrast to the reception to the piece, the piece itself is actually quite measured. It’s clear that its sourcing for the story is an unnamed US government official; in short, this is not something they are saying is an independently confirmed fact. They also have sources agreeing Cuba is not a military threat to the US and does not have the capacity to close the Gulf of Mexico like Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.

What really made me want to respond to this story on the Substack was more the reaction to it. Some are bringing up comparisons to Operation Northwoods, the infamous US secret operation that was drafted by the military during the Kennedy Administration (but thankfully never enacted) where the plan was to do a false flag attack on the US, blame it on Cuba, and then use this as casus belli for an invasion, alleging self-defense. Others are just saying it’s clearly and entirely made-up; a case of the US government under Trump feeding preposterous stories to justify military intervention in Cuba through sympathetic journalists.

In my humble opinion, I get where people are coming from, but I think some are being too quick to dismiss these claims. For one thing, as Caputo himself has pointed out in defense of his reporting, the Cuban diplomatic corps is notably avoidant of denying any of the specifics of the piece itself, especially the drones. For another, aside from the Cuban government’s highest echelons, I don’t think anyone ‘knows’ whether these allegations are true one way or another. If someone has either secret Cuban military intel or a high level Trump admin source willing to state in no uncertain terms that this is made up, we’re all in the dark here to some degree. We can talk about likelihood, but not about certainty. So, if we’re talking purely about whether the claims here make sense, in my view they do.

In fact, it’s something I wondered about almost two months ago in response to the ratcheting up of tensions in the direction of US military intervention in Cuba. At the time people rightly pushed back on this idea, because Cuba can’t emulate the Hormuz strategy as this is no small thing. It required significant economic and military preparation for it. Cuba is also much closer to the US, so the American military response would presumably be even easier than sending ships to the literal other side of the planet. I agree Cuba can’t just ‘do the Hormuz strategy’ in the sense of emulating it at the same level, but in my view it doesn’t have to in order for this to be a viable component of a broader strategy of resistance. Cuba has no huge fleet of drones, but it can make vessels going through the straits of Florida or Yucatan feel like they’re rolling the dice by passing through, at least American vessels, and the mere threat that something happens is enough to increase costs and deter vessels from trying without guarantees, maybe an escort, etc. Thus, Cuba doesn’t have to be Iran in order to see this as a tool in their toolkit if they are attacked. Cuba cannot beat the US militarily, but like with its long-standing strategy of guerrilla warfare if invaded, all they have to do is impose pain on their adversary until the economic and political costs force a change in tact from the aggressor. If I were the Cuban government, I would probably be doing exactly this, while also keeping it secret for fear of being seen as escalating the situation.

So, we’ve handled the factual question (it’s still an open question), and the likelihood question (it makes logical sense), but there’s a third component at play; regardless of truth, it serves the purpose of drumming up a war. This is undoubtedly true. Whether with Trump’s authorization or on their own initiative and regardless of intent, the idea that Cuba is potentially a military threat to US shipping or military vessels in and out of the Gulf of Mexico is an escalatory piece of news. One that a hawkish Marco Rubio could cynically use as the casus belli he has been looking for; an excuse for preemptive intervention. I don’t contest this argument, already being put forward, in the sleightest.

So the last question becomes ‘okay, how do we respond?’ I think the first step is to not overstep what we actually know here. We do not know the truth of the claims, ergo we should neither state them as fact nor deny them out of hand. We can explain likelihood if that’s something people are interested in, and I’m sure my analysis doesn’t map onto what others think is likely, so this is a space for earnest debate. What we can be clear on, however, is that regardless of drones, Cuba isn’t a military threat to the US. That the US oil blockade is causing widespread economic pain suffered first and foremost by Cuba’s poor, who cannot afford solar panels nor battery power for nights nor the hard currency with which they might buy gas (when there is gas,) or the high prices for food and imported medicine. That if the US administration tries to use this unsubstantiated story as an excuse for war with Cuba, we should oppose it as something they have neither proven nor do they have the credibility to say we would never make something like this up; don’t even go back to WMD claims during the Bush administration, just look at Trump’s long history as a pathological liar over the past decade. I wouldn’t trust him to say the sun is shining, much less that a country he wants to invade potentially has something which he thinks justifies a military intervention.

Above all, I think discussions should focus on truth and transparency. Not out of some kind of blind idealism, but because being the honest brokers in a conversation is one of our greatest strengths. Dismissing things out of hand when we can’t know one way or the other is precisely like shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s hard to stop a moving train once it gets going, but it’s even harder to catch up with one while hobbling around with a gunshot wound.

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Was honored to be asked back to Deutsche Welle, this time to talk about the latest protests and fuel shortages in Cuba. You can watch the interview here.

As many of you will no doubt have already heard by now, the Iran War is bad for the world economy. In fact, bad may not do justice to how terrifying the impact on global energy supply may be. An excellent, if profoundly sobering, recent piece out of The Economist, just came out last week. You can read it here.

Some of the biggest problems flagged by the piece are

• projected jet fuel shortages are already resulting in airlines cutting back on flights

• energy prices in places like Europe are currently being insulated from the worst of the shock but this is unsustainable

• energy shortages in South and Southeast Asia (outside of China which has significant reserves) are already forcing people to work from home and are on track to paralyze their economies

• even if Iran-US war was fully and magically resolved tomorrow, it will take a while (i.e. months at least) for both production and transportation to restore some semblance of normal

• markets are currently not pricing in just how bad things are and when they do this is going to hurt really bad

• this has major implications for food production around the world as well, given that chemical fertilizers are now in short supply indefinitely

• finally, both the duration of the war and the fact that Hormuz can be used as a bargaining chip again in future conflicts around Iran mean that the pre-2026 oil infrastructure situation no longer exists and the world will have to adapt to higher energy costs indefinitely as insecurity is priced in to things like significantly higher insurance, etc.

Again, pretty sobering. This is one of those pieces of news with implications for every other part of the world economy, so of course one of my first thoughts was what does this potentially mean for Cuba.

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If you subscribe to this newsletter, I’m going to take the liberty of assuming you know Cuba’s general status quo at present, so I’ll limit myself to bringing up some key points:

• the Cuban economy is largely already paralyzed due to lack of energy supply

• tourism is more or less already dead on the island as it struggles to maintain minimal functions

• what food and energy the country receives right now is significantly subsidized thanks to foreign assistance from places like China and Russia, but neither in anywhere near enough for the Cuban economy to function

• whether the US militarily intervenes in Cuba, which it has already threatened to do, remains an open question

Now that you’re up to speed, what on Earth does Hormuz mean for Cuba? For one thing, it makes economic recovery on the island even more of an unrealistic project than it already was.

Long-distance travel from Europe, China, or Russia are now harder, at least if you’re trying to take a direct flight, since the existing fuel crisis made refueling something airliners could no longer rely on. If jet fuel is about to become hard to get even for commercial airliners operating in the developed world, what does that mean for Cuba? Sure, the island can still get local flights and long-distance travelers can stop at a neighboring country before taking the extra final flight to Cuba, but less jet fuel means higher prices, so the added cost of an additional, separate flight will get even more expensive. This both affects the prospects of tourism recovery, dead in the water at the moment, as well as the informal supply chains made possible by ‘mulas’ (mules).

Mulas are not drug mules in Cuba, or at least mostly not about drugs. They are trafficking food, clothing, medicine, computer parts, car parts, and anything else someone on the island asks them to bring (like cash). For some this is a full time profession, and it is certainly something you will have had in your face if you’ve ever flown to the island, even if you didn’t realize who these people were. You can usually spot them with the numerous extra suitcases, all packed to the point of bursting, who arrive at the airport. They can easily frame all their stuff as providing for their families and friends, so it’s possible to confuse them with those who just haven’t been to the island for a while and are looking to bring a ton of stuff on this rare trip, but mulas tend to travel constantly. Sometimes it’s thanks to having dual citizenship somewhere, like the US, and others use visa free travel to places like Russia to bring parts for cars like Ladas or food or whatever else they can get on the cheap their and fly them in. It’s kind of insane that an indeterminate but not insignificant part of Cuba’s supply lines function like this, and have functioned like this for decades at this point. Insane or not, it’s also a crucial part of the economy that will be further affected by issues with flight cancellations and higher costs to fly in future, as they were already charging high commissions before and will simply pass the higher costs onto consumers on the island.

Beyond flights, the next factor is energy writ large. Cuba produces about 1/3rd of what it needs for minimal daily demand, using its super heavy crude from the belt along its northern coast, but obviously requires significant foreign imports to function at a meaningful level. Chinese solar panel imports have helped, especially with providing hospitals and other basic institutions that have hitherto depended on generators during blackouts, but it’s not enough. As multiple energy experts agree, significant imports of solar panels only help so much when the dual problems of storage and transmission of energy are still largely unaddressed. In a March paper on the issue, Cuban economist Ricardo Torres estimated that Cuba needs an infrastructural investment of “at least” $6.6 billion just in new investment in its generation capacity, “not including additional resources needed to modernize the energy grid.”

Beyond the obvious problem that keeping the lights on in the 21st century is the bare minimum for a functioning economy in the digital age, you also have the huge headache of transport. Despite significant investment and loans to build up Cuba’s train infrastructure a decade ago, much of the country runs on combustion engines. This applies to both people and goods, so even if their workplaces have power (still a long ways off) getting both workers, inputs, and merchandise to places of business is a huge problem that will maintain Cuba’s fuel import dependency indefinitely.

The longer-term crisis of oil supply dates back at least a decade, to Venezuela’s economic crash in the mid-2010s following the collapse of the commodities boom, which was later followed by a collapse in oil production capacity in Venezuela in recent years, and finally an end to Venezuelan oil shipments by US fiat after the kidnapping of Maduro in January. Interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez seems unwilling to cross Trump on this issue, and as such Cuba was without subsidized or free oil for several months of this year. Trump compounded this by imposing a fuel blockade (something usually considered an act of war) which he only relented on several months in so that a Russian fuel ship could dock.

He has also permitted private companies in Cuba to import fuel, but this isn’t really a fix. They lack the storage capacity and the overall volume to address Cuba’s energy shortages, plus a lot of the problems they face are more about lack of energy at a central level (power plants, the bus fleets, the various state and private trucks that ferry goods and people, etc.).

All of this reinforces how Cuba’s energy import dependence isn’t going anywhere. While Russia has sent one ship, promised another, and may send another after that, this is not the reliable basis on which to build a functioning economy. As prices soar amid Strait of Hormuz Crisis, Russia will also have strong incentives to send as much fuel as possible to markets that pay well, rather than Cuba that cannot pay, much less ‘well’. This is a conjunctural crisis that may or may not last a while and Russia’s buckling economy demands urgent attention. As such, there’s a tension between playing sugar daddy for Cuba for positive PR and wanting to maximize cash flow given that they have no idea how long the present crisis will last. Given that Ukraine is now in the practice of hitting Russian energy infrastructure, scaling up production isn’t exactly easy either. As Russia wins big from the Iran War’s fallout, Ukraine also has added incentives to go hard and fast against the Russian oil sector. The big headline grabbing news that ‘Russia breaks US fuel blockade against Cuba’ has also already achieved the maximum PR returns Moscow could hope for, diminishing the incentives to keep directing meaningful amounts of oil to the island outside of wanting to keep Havana in power as a thorn in the US’ side (a standard not likely to mean the same thing as ‘functioning economy’).

Finally, you have the problem of a moribund tourism industry. This has come up a couple of times already, what with fuel shortages already limiting flights and the country’s energy infrastructure collapse making the island less than an idyllic place to go on vacation. Tack onto this the older problem of Trump putting Cuba on the list of State Sponsor’s of Terrorism, which makes people ineligible for the simplified entry process for visiting the US provided by ESTA Visas, and you have a serious problem on your hands when it comes to tourism from developed economies. Add to that noxious cocktail a dose of global recession, thanks to the looming global oil shock, and it’s hard to figure when Cuba’s tourism economy will recover.

This is not just a question of low returns on investment, but also one of credit. During the pandemic Cuba poured a ton of money into building hotels, and it is unclear how much of that was cash it had stored up and how much was on credit. As bills come due from both its tourism sector and its looming older debts, it’s hard to see Cuba making the case for new ones that are not either de facto forms of aid where there is no intent of being paid back. With Cuba’s economy paralyzed, getting credit for the massive investments required to jumpstart the economy again would be important in helping the island get past the present crisis in something like a reasonable timeframe.

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As always, I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t tell you how things will play out. What I can say, rather safely, is that up to now the looming oil shock and the crisis in Cuba have been discussed as separate issues. In future, the shadow of Hormuz will fall over Cuba and lord knows when it will lift again.

As many of you hopefully know at this point, I have a podcast! Orígenes: A Cuban History Podcast explores the history of Cuba from the pre-colonial era to the present.

As many of you who do listen know, I also update it… irregularly, let’s say. Starting a podcast on this scale was quite ambitious for any time in one’s life, even if I had no work but this project, so doing it in parallel with graduate school, COVID, and all the other chaos of the past 7 years has been especially crazy as far as decisions go. That said, it’s also been one of the most fun and most fulfilling things that I’ve set my mind to. Beyond being able to help others understand parts of Cuban history that most just jump over, it’s also taught me to be a better writer and researcher; not least because I kept making the same mistakes over and over and over and it helped me identify them and fix them.

The most recent episode, The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Early Colonial Cuba dropped last November. In the meantime, with all the work on my dissertation, job apps, and Cuba news and media appearances, I had to put the next episode on the backburner. Good news is, things are locked down enough that I can now move forward with the writing phase for a full (and probably long again, sorry!) episode just on Cuba from 1520-1555.

The episode is going to explore how colonization actually worked in practice, especially how effective (or mostly ineffective) Spanish rule was outside of its initial settlements. We’re going to see how Cuba almost collapsed as a colony in these first three decades due to rapid depopulation through an exodus of most of its first colonists who saw gold and glory on the continent in Cortes or Pizarro’s forces, and saw Cuba as a stagnant backwater increasingly devoid of its two most important resources; gold and free Taino laborers.

Far from a story of a bunch of faceless subservient Indians who died off from disease or were butchered like lambs to the slaughter, what I find is years of rebellion, of escaped natives living free up in the hinterlands, and of Spaniards dying left and right to native raids and rebellions. Here is a short taste of the upcoming script, currently framed as a series of episodic vignettes across time and space to show not just what happened but how the history of these events were written and rewritten down the centuries. Enjoy.

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Seville, Spain, 1916

Irene Aloha Wright sat in the Archivo de Indias, storehouse of centuries of Spanish colonial documentation stretching back all the way to the start of Spain’s empire. It was an unlikely place to find a woman born in Colorado in the late 19^th century, but her life was already an unusual one. On a whim she had taken a train to Mexico City as a teen with some of the gold from her late father’s prospecting days sewn into her clothes. There she had learned Spanish and translated guidebooks as well as working as a governess. After several years, surer of what she wanted to do with her life, there she returned to finish her studies in the US, where she enrolled at Stanford University and got her BA in History. She then spent a decade working in Cuba as a news correspondent before moving to Spain in 1914 to study the island’s history in the seemingly inexhaustible Archivo de Indias.

Now, in 1916, she was just publishing her second book on Cuba, and her first true archivally based study; The Early History of Cuba, 1492-1586. Having spent the previous two years combing through Spanish colonial archives,[1] she concluded that

The Cubeño were, therefore, not a warlike people; but no student of early chronicles gathers the impression that they were cowards. […] the aborigenes sought to resist the slavery to which the white man’s supremacy […] readily reduced them. Failing to withstand it, they preferred death, and those who did not succumb to hard and continuous labor and lack of food […] killed themselves by poison and hanging to escape the servitude which the Christians imposed. The women, rather than be slaves and become mothers of half-breed slaves, committed abortion and suicide. I am not relying for authority to make such statements as these upon the impassioned preachings of the good clerigo, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, but rather upon documents in the Sevillan archives, in the inditing of which that priest can have no hand. They turn the blood cold. A people disappeared, not vanquished without the loss of a man in a single march of an expedition from Baracoa to Havana, as is usually supposed, but resisting to the end of a generation that knew what freedom meant.[2]

[1] All biographical information is from Jordan Blumetti, “The Immortal Mind of the Archive,” Roundtable, June 16, 2019, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/immortal-mind-archive.

[2] Irene Aloha Wright, The Early History of Cuba: 1492-1586, Written from Original Sources (Macmillan, 1916), 14–15.

According to recent reporting, Cuban officials met with a delegation of American counterparts on April 10th, in Havana, to discuss mounting tensions between the two countries. I am sure I don’t have to recapitulate the entirety of this year’s somewhat insane ratcheting up of tensions, but if you have been following things casually and want a primer, here’s a video I did with Deutsche Welle covering the basics.

This post is more of a short reflection on whether or not the ultimatum and deadline being reported are true. The Miami Herald’s Nora Gámez isn’t exactly in the business of publishing baseless reporting, and indeed has been a step or two ahead of most reporters on the Cuba beat for years, so I’d take it seriously. Her source in the article is a State Department official, but as a nota bene for non-journos this doesn’t necessarily mean this is her sole source. Usually, a claim like this has to go through not just fact-checking but a rigorous editorial process to make sure the source isn’t yanking the chain of the journalist. This is just the source we know about, which isn’t to say the claim is true or false, just that there’s normally due diligence behind the scenes to confirm the story beyond ‘this dude told me’.

The Cuban government has responded to claims of an ultimatum involving the release of high profile political prisoners and a hard deadline of two weeks (which would mean approximately April 24th) by denying them categorically. Government officials have also responded even more forcefully, decrying the claims as attempts to derail talks, like former Cuban Five spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, who was given a post as national coordinator for the CDR but who seems to spend most of his time tweeting boomer memes about ‘haters’.

We don’t really know for certain either way, so let’s game out the likely scenarios a bit.

Scenario 1: The Cuban government is telling the truth, no ultimatums were issued, there’s no hard deadline. Ok, so who benefits from burning their relationship with a journalist and possibly being outed as the source? In that scenario, officials within the government opposed to talks would benefit. This would help to poison the well over negotiations as concessions could be retrospectively attributed to the deadline and ultimatum. Ergo, the Cuban government’s response would be true.

Scenario 2: The claims being leaked by the State Department official are actually true. Much of the above still applies in terms of the intent, trying to poison the well before negotiated solution can prosper, but what changes interpretively is that Cuban government’s denial is them trying to avoid being boxed in. Whether or not they actually plan on giving in on the White House’s demands, denying the leaked ultimatum gives them the breathing room to say one thing while going along with demands on the other. To admit the truth of the claims (assuming they’re true) would make concessions on these issues humiliations, and more importantly would undermine the message of strength, national sovereignty, and dignity that they are relying on to rally their base.

Havana will regularly deny stories that end up being true; it’s been doing that for decades. This is true of most if not all governments, I’m not trying to depict this as a uniquely Cuban practice. I’m instead trying to point out that when most governments would be cagey, use weasel words, or make more sophisticated non-denial denials, Havana will simply deny something until they’re ready to admit it or have no choice but to do otherwise.

It will be interesting to follow this story in the weeks to come. If there is a deadline, and dissidents like Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara are part of it, we’ll find out soon enough.

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‘Civil society’ is one of those terms that are nigh inescapable when talking about Cuba, but at the same time nigh impossible to pin down with a clear definition. For years I specifically avoided using the concept at all because, well, I don’t like using terms that I don’t feel that I actually understand; that’s usually a good way to embarrass yourself.

However, following the completion of my comprehensive exams in graduate school, I felt really lost in terms of what project I should study. My original idea had had to be reshaped into something that I didn’t recognize, and wasn’t interested in, so I wanted to look at Cuba from an entirely new perspective. The bigger idea of trying to understand why Cuba’s government survived the crisis of the 1990s seemed obvious in the wake of the 2021 protests and the subsequent protest waves on the island, but now the puzzle was how to approach it. Since the term ‘civil society’ came up a lot, I thought it might be an interesting starting point for reading. Did Cuba even have a ‘civil society’? If so, what is it? And is its existence or non-existence tied up in why the government survived the fall of the USSR?

Ultimately, I moved away from this original project idea, in no small part thanks to Kotkin’s book. I couldn’t study civil society in Cuba, I realized, because, well, there is none. Not really, anyway. Not in any meaningful sense. But to explain this, I want to first go back and explain what civil society is - on a basic level - and how this maps onto societies like Cuba’s.

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Originally, before the 19th century, ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’ were essentially synonyms. Sociologist Krishan Kumar summarizes this pre-19th century understanding, saying

'Civil society' was a more or less direct translation of Cicero's societas civilis and Aristotle's koinonia politike. Locke could speak of 'civil government' along with, and as an alternative term for, 'civil or political society'. Kant sees burgerliche Gesellschaft as that constitutional state towards which political evol- ution tends. For Rousseau the etat civil is the state.1

While the 18th century did contain some exceptions to this rule, with Kotkin briefly mentioning several figures in the Scottish Enlightenment,2 this was not the norm.

It was instead German thinkers in the first half of the 19th century who really started to advance the partition of state and civil society into entirely discrete concepts. Hegel used civil society to mean, more or less, the sphere of civic action in which citizens are forged, including both public institutions as well as social spaces in which the citizen can develop themselves.3 If that sounds a bit vague to you, this is because, first, we are talking about Hegel, and second, because this is one of the many concepts you will come across in the humanities and social sciences that are mostly vibes based.

As a former Young Hegelian himself, it should be little surprise that Marx also actively engaged with the idea. For him, the concept of civil society was more or less synonymous with the literal meaning of the German translation of the concept, burgerliche Gesellschaft, which can mean either bourgeois or citizen society depending on the context and intent of the author.4 Engels built on this, seeing the economic dimension of society, socially organized, as the root element that subordinates the state to its interests and purposes.5

While the concept continued to be used in the 19th century, including by big names like Alexis de Tocqueville,6 whom I assume most Americans have read, by the early 20th century it had more or less fallen by the wayside. Its sudden revival was largely thanks to influential Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci who used the concept liberally, pardon the obvious joke, in his Prison Notebooks.

The best primer that I found on the intellectual history of the concept of ‘civil society’ in Gramsci and beyond is, funnily enough, the father of one time presidential candidate turned Biden administration staffer Pete Buttigieg, the renowned Maltese Gramsci scholar Joseph Buttigieg.7

Joseph Buttigieg argues,

What brought the concept of civil society to the attention of a broader spectrum of political observers, at least in the United States, were the events that resulted in the political trans-formation of the Eastern European countries and the dismantling of the former Soviet bloc, or, rather, the efforts to interpret and account for the un- expected, breathtakingly rapid developments occurring during that period. The phrase civil society recurred frequently in the writings and speeches of Eastern European intellectuals who were participating in, when not actually stimulating and guiding, the sociopolitical recomposition of their countries. Predictably, it was quickly picked up by many journalists, commentators, and pundits who were only too anxious to find some general theory or abstract concept that would help them explain the complex phenomena they were witnessing.8

Gramsci used the concept to discuss how in bourgeois societies (i.e. capitalist countries), the class power of the bourgeoisie emanated not merely from the state but was reinforced through various bourgeois organizations. In essence, the bourgeoisie as a class ruled not just by force but through the reproduction of their ideas and normative frameworks about how society does or should work. This is how the bourgeoisie exercised ‘hegemony’ over the rest of society. In particular, media were the cornerstone of this process; publishing houses, political newspapers, even literary magazines, clubs, schools, associations, and the Church.9 While the concept is a sprawling one and not exactly something Gramsci was crystal clear on (and when was he ever?), the basic idea is in a society where the bourgeoisie control the state, the way that they reinforce their control and the tacit consent of the rest of society is all these non-state institutions which also advance their hegemony.

Hegemony is noncoercive power, but it is power nonetheless; indeed, the flexible, and often camouflaged, apparatuses of hegemony provide the dominant groups in society with the most effective protection against a successful frontal attack from the subaltern classes. Once a particular social group or grouping becomes hegemonic, it means that it has not only acquired control of the politico-juridical apparatus of the state but also permeated the institutions of civil society-in Gramsci’s sense of the terms, it has assumed leadership (direzione) in the cultural sphere.10

Thus, its evolution in the subsequent decades is more than a little amusing. For Buttigieg, the attempts to impose Gramsci’s analysis of the concept of civil society on Soviet style systems were a categorical error even from a Marxist perspective. When Gramsci said

In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West there was a proper relationship between state and civil society, and when he state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed

the ‘East’ that the Italian Communist thinker was referring to was Czarist Russia, not the USSR. Gramsci’s writings on this concept were almost exclusively about how ‘civil society’ functioned in Western societies, not ones where it had failed to take root.11

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This brings us back to Stephen Kotkin’s book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. I read this towards the end of a couple of months of reading tons of books and articles on civil society and it’s a big part of what not only helped clarify things for me but helped me decide to move on from this as a part of my approach to understanding Cuban regime durability.

With the proliferation and translation of his prison writings around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, Gramsci’s use of ‘civil society’ helped to reinvigorate its popularity in the later years of the Cold War. Prominent dissident movements like Solidarity made civil society one of their cornerstone concepts. However, while the concept was invoked frequently, Kotkin argues that civil society was more of an aspiration and a tactic than real existing phenomenon. Definitionally, these types of Soviet style societies could not permit the active organization of individuals outside of the reach of the state. Dissident movements, while symbolically important, were numerically small essentially everywhere, with the key exception of Poland’s Solidarity.

What framing one’s organization and project as civil society was supposed to permit was that it allowed people to challenge the state without directly challenging it in a way that was suicidal. These were not the organizations of new political parties nor movements calling for armed insurrection; instead, the idea was that you acted ‘as if’ the nominal rights guaranteed to you on paper were real. In this context, the squishiness of the concept of civil society was an asset, rather than a liability.12 You could, in essence, expose the hypocrisy of a system that gave you rights on paper but not in practice, forcing it to reveal itself for what it truly was.

This has important parallels and differences with civil rights activism in the American South during the same period. The American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s used the rights enshrined in the constitution, which were not respected in practice, to draw attention to their plight as well as to push the Jim Crow state to enforce its discriminatory laws in ways that would bring negative media attention as well as opportunities to present legal challenges. The Soviet style system had some similarities, especially in daring the state to expose itself as tyrannical in ways that would bring negative media attention, but was obviously quite different in other ways. There was no free press within the country to shape public opinion, nor were there realistic means by which popular opinion could be brought to bare electorally; this was more about exposing these regimes internationally and to the unknown but likely small number of the population who followed their cases through samizdat (self-published and individually copied) and tamizdat (printed abroad) publications.

Kotkin’s excellent short book, Uncivil Society, is more of an extended essay than it is an in-depth look at dissident movements. As such, for a deeper look into how this worked I strongly recommend To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. An obligatory read for those trying to understand how dissident movements worked in Soviet style systems. As those who will have read it will be well aware, Nathans shows time and again how the dissident movement’s used the strategy of acting as if their rights on paper were real in order to challenge the state to obey things like human rights or ‘socialist legality’, which in practice were overridden without much thought where convenient. Even the post-1975 Helsinki Act activism around human rights was framed in terms of what the state, nominally, agreed that its citizens deserved rather than direct challenges.

For Kotkin, the vagueness of the concept of civil society itself is actually quite intentional.

“Civil society” was in many ways the conceptual counterpart to the concept of totalitarianism, but if it was precisely the all-encompassing totalitarian despotism that made the term “civil society”— as something outside the state— so appealing, this very system also did not permit anything like a civil society to exist. […] “Civil society,” explained the Hungarian novelist and essayist Gyorgy Konrad (1933-) in 1984, “is still only an idea.”13

However, this does not mean that civil society like institutions did not exist in Soviet-style systems, even if on paper they were also extensions of the state. Indeed, for Kotkin part of the point was that these state controlled institutions were in fact invaluable for elite cohesion.

Unlike the people in whose name they ruled, the regimes enjoyed a full panoply of institutions, associations, patronage, and other networks. They carried special identity cards that opened doors and, when flashed, advertised their status. Within a hierarchy, they shared life experiences, beginning in youth groups, places of training and work, and an ideology, which “appealed to the simpletons and to the sophisticates alike,” explained Zbigniew Brzezinski. […] They forged lifelong contacts at Romania’s Stefan Gheorghiu Party School, East Germany’s party schools, or Poland’s Higher School for the Social Sciences, as well as at Moscow’s Higher Party School. Many attended special military or spy academies, such as the Securitate School in Baneasa or the Stasi College in Potsdam. With their former classmates they ran entire industries and provinces, had acquaintances and relatives in charge of parallel agencies and locales, and gossiped about the differing comfort levels of the various “closed” hospitals and spas. […]. They cultivated patrons at the feasts known as party congresses. And when problems arose— such as how to erase a child’s arrest record— they could approach the “party affairs” section. The swath of people in the elite formed a society, just not a “civil society,” meaning not one constituted, protected, and held in check by rule of law. To put the matter another way, totalitarian or would be totalitarian states did not eliminate society— they created their own societies. Our term “uncivil society” refers to these formidable bonds and forms of social organization that accompanied an illiberal state, particularly an illiberal state without private property.14

There are aspects of Kotkin’s argument that I don’t think have fully held up intact, at least not without some added nuance. For example, while he rightly points out that fear of surveillance or being ratted out by colleagues or more open and less mediated forms of information with which to make policy decisions were major problems for ‘uncivil society’ elites,15 I think that Martin Dimitrov does an excellent job in Dictatorship & Information poking holes in the idea that Communist states lacked good data for decision-making.16 However, that is a topic for another post.

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The key point in this post is more of a counterpoint to the sometimes assumed importance of civil society in explaining regime survival or collapse. In not just activism but older scholarship and journalistic coverage of the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, you have a more than sympathetic view to the importance of these dissident civil society style movements and actors. A great case in point is Timothy Garten Ash’s classic work of eyewitness journalism on this topic, The Magic Lantern.17 However, with the advantages of both time and far greater archival access, it seems increasingly clear that such movements were - as Kotkin argued - symbolically important and well poised to play roles in shaping transitions, but not helpful in understanding why such systems collapsed or survived.

We know that Eastern European dissident movements had an impact on Cuba’s own civil society style dissident movement,18 and such dissident movements have clearly played high profile roles in post-1991 coverage of Cuba, but if anything they are an illustration of how situational the importance of such a movement is. The Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco), whose male family members had been detained in the 2003 mass roundup of dissidents known as the Primavera Negra (Black Spring), garnered sympathy for the abuse they faced and gained a high profile for their cause, but never became the nucleus of anything that threatened the Cuban state.

During the heyday of ‘civil society’ as a concept in the wake of the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, even Cuban government supporters felt the need to reinforce that they also had their own civil society. Reformist Party member and leader of the permitted loyal opposition, Rafael Hernández of Temas, published a book in the late 90s compiling several articles he had written in defense of Cuba’s ‘civil society’ in Granma. After straw manning the weakest and clumsiest version of the arguments of government critics,19 he dances around explaining who exactly composes Cuba’s civil society, suggests that various government controlled organizations are part of the dialogue between both, and points to the existence of Yoruba associations (which were only recently tolerated at that point…) as proof of Cuba’s growing civil society.20 The closest he comes to admitting that rights and self-organization outside of the control of the state are severely curtailed is when he argues, very late in the game, that the limits of democracy in Cuba are subordinate to national sovereignty.21

While I do not agree with Kotkin on everything in his book, his main point - that civil society was a strategy and not a key factor in the collapse or survival of such regimes - seems pretty unassailable.

Basic Overview Text

Let’s start with the very basics. You know something about Cuba, otherwise you wouldn’t have been assigned this story, but outside of big moments in Cuban history you don’t feel confident you have solid context for the history of the country. Great news: historian Ada Ferrer published an overview popular history of the island just a few years ago that won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s also available as an audiobook, so you can listen while you’re doing groceries or commuting. There’s plenty of other overview texts, but this one is special not only because the writing is exquisite but because it is by an actual expert in Cuba, who does original research on the island’s history. You’re not just getting a summary of an outdated summary, as you often do with well meaning books by non-experts who write about Cuba because it’s exotic or because they’re fellow travelers and want to do activism. This is a work of serious history written by someone condensing several decades of reading about the island into light, clear, and thoughtful prose. Read it.

Who should I talk to?

Ok, you know the basics (or don’t have time for the above because you are on deadline) and want to know who to even talk to. Here is a short list of people based on expertise:

• Race and politics:

  • Race is obviously extremely important for understanding Cuban history and, given the prominent roles played by protesters from Afro-Cuban neighborhoods and the rise of prominent Afro-Cuban dissidents in recent years, it is all the more important that it gets the coverage it deserves. I recommend two main scholars, Alejandro de la Fuente & Ada Ferrer, both of whom are Cuban born historians whose original work has explored the intersection of race, politics, and national identity.

• Cuban memory politics and its diaspora:

  • Both Michael Bustamante (historian) & Guillermo Grenier (sociologist) will be helpful here, in different ways. Bustamante’s work has engaged not just with Cuban policy but the struggle over historical memory, while Grenier has spent decades conducting a helpful Cuba Poll, which polls the diaspora on various issues and tracks their opinions over time. Different approaches, both helpful for getting a grounded and well sourced baseline in a world full of unsourced generalizations built on personal experience.

• Economic policies and attempts at reform:

  • So, you want to talk about Cuban economic policy and history and everyone has an opinion but nobody seems to know what they’re talking about? I have just the duo to give you a solid baseline. Carmelo Mesa-Lago & Pedro Monreal are two prominent Cuban scholars now in the diaspora who have written and researched these topics extensively. You can Google them to see a litany of publications, not least from Mesa-Lago who puts an overwhelming amount of analysis, especially given his advanced age. Mesa-Lago is the doyen of post-1959 Cuban studies and one of the founders of Cuban Studies Journal (the number 1 journal in the field), not to be confused with the International Journal of Cuban Studies (totally different and unrelated).

• Post-1959 evolving media control, policies, and access:

  • For two very different looks at Cuba’s mediascape over the decades, see Ted Henken’s work on Cuba’s ‘digital revolution’ in recent years as access to the internet has expanded & Jennifer Lambe, who just wrote a book on how the post-1959 Cuban state took over and used mass media

• Institutionalization of the political system and its mechanisms for social control:

  • Lillian Guerra’s twin books Visions of Power in Cuba and Patriots & Traitors explore how both the ideology, ‘mass organizations’, and surveillance state were built and found purchase among the Cuban government’s supporters in the population. Visions of Power in particular is still the book on the Cuban 1960s.

• Cuban foreign policy:

  • For Cuba, foreign policy is a crucial part of understanding its positive image around the world and a crucial part of its post-1959 survival strategy. Two key scholars on Cuba’s foreign policy, with very different regional focuses and approaches, are Renata Keller & Piero Gleijeses. There is another name you’ll come across a lot related to this, Jorge I. Domínguez, but he is currently being kept at arms length by both his former teaching institution and scholarly conferences for reasons that will become immediately apparent if you look him up online. His books are still great, but I recommend reading them second hand instead.

Leaving myself for last because while I can speak to a lot of these issues, I imagine if you are coming across this you already know who I am and what I do. Just in case this isn’t true, my current work straddles Cuban foreign policy history and regime durability scholarship. Basically, how Cuba’s foreign policy strategies helped it to survive the US’ attempts to isolate it politically and economically, especially post-Cold War. Contrary to traditional narratives of ‘isolation’, Cuba had abundant trade with developed capitalist countries in Western Europe, especially Spain, whose consumer goods, investment, technical expertise, and credit helped it to scrape by in the 1990s before Venezuela became the island’s new patron state.

I had originally thought about offering a long list of books on Cuba on various topics, but then I realized what I would recommend would make this so long, and what journalists need is often so specific, that it is basically a post all on its own. As such, I take my leave, and hope this was helpful.

Everyone knows about the Berlin Wall, but to be honest I hadn’t really thought much about how small and specific of an example it was next to the long militarized border that once divided East and West Germany. The photo above is one that I took while visiting the former border between the two; the now abandoned watchtower was one of a series of measures set up by the GDR. Along the GDR side of the former border there is a partially paved mini-highway for East German military vehicles to traverse single file up and down the country, so that they can quickly respond to any crisis along the frontier between capitalist West and socialist East. I was shown around by a colleague’s father, who for a time had worked as a West German border guard. He pointed out the tall staves along the border painted in the colors of the German flag, which helps visitors understand where the respective guard posts stood during the Cold War. Under the GDR stave was a stone with handwriting explaining the date that someone had fled to freedom in the West many decades ago. The towers used to have guard dogs on leashes tethered to them, to help sniff out anyone trying to cross, and potentially maul them in the process of stopping their flight.

Further along the border we come across one section of the border fence and defensive works that were preserved entirely intact. The border had been two parallel fences enclosing a series of defensive works. Between this initial fence and the fence that faced the West German border was a small partially submerged bunker which East German guards could look out from and aim at escapees from the GDR; they had discretion as to whether to fire or not, even though that meant shooting fellow citizens in the back. Beyond the bunkers but before the chain-link fences, the earth slumps into a ditch, with the slope facing the East German side and the little earthen wall facing the West German side; the goal was to stop a vehicle being used to ram through the fence, but clearly the worry was that the fence would be rammed from the Easterners trying to escape, not rammed by Westerners trying to break in or overrun the boarder.

This impression was further consolidated by seeing the tight metal fence that was the last line of defense between the East and freedom in the West. I gasped when I saw that the screws that held the fence to the large posts that kept it up at regular intervals were facing the West not the East; again, the worry was not West Germans unscrewing them and climbing in, representing a military threat, but East Germans unscrewing them and climbing out, representing the flight of fellow citizens, mostly civilians. While no longer in place, the fence also had the added measure of shrapnel devices that could be triggered by movement, which would shred any would-be escapees into hamburger meat.

And yet, despite all of this, people still did flee. They fled even though they might be shot or arrested for long periods and tortured. They fled despite the dogs ready to maul them and the local informants who might help sniff them out. They fled despite the possibility that the motion of climbing the fence might trigger a device that could shred them into mince meat. They fled despite the risk to their loved ones, many of whom would have to be left behind for practical reasons and who would face possible reprisals for their family member’s apostacy and flight. Despite every barrier and threat, hundreds of thousands continued to leave the GDR even after the erection of the Berlin Wall and the militarization of the border with West Germany.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that part of my fascination with the GDR’s harsh, even cruelty, as it tried and failed to prevent its exodus lies in the fact that it reminds me of a much harsher version of Cuba. Somewhere between 20-25% of the island’s population has left in half a decade. That is, in a word, insane, especially for a country not in a state of war or suffering from an environmental catastrophe of some kind. With so much of the island’s infrastructure and economy on life support, the Trump administration’s embargo of Venezuela will further reduce already greatly reduced imports of all important fuel which Cuba’s energy infrastructure needs to keep the lights on even a few hours a day nationally. This is critical because the Cuban government has spent the past half decade doing everything possible to insulate the capital against the near 24 hour blackouts facing the rest of the country. Other factors, like wanting to keep the capital functioning for economic and administrative reasons, obviously also play a role here, but during the national blackouts of late 2024 and early 2025, the big threat that led to Diaz-Canel dressing himself once again in military uniform (as in 2021) was when Havana’s protests in late 2024 started to take over parts of Central Havana.

Maybe the country’s government will squeak through yet again, but also maybe not. The degree of uncertainty is fairly novel to the 2020s and is worth thinking about seriously. Being a historian, it is only natural that my approach to this problem is to see what the literature on regime collapse and democratic transitions says, as well as looking at some of the more prominent relevant examples to Cuba’s case.

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Over the coming months, as an excuse to piggyback off of the fact that I have to review my old notes on various authors on regime durability for the dissertation, I will post short Substacks on key texts that I think will help shed light on Cuba’s current crisis.

The next post, the first of the actual series, will focus on Levitsky & Way’s recent opus, Revolution & Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism.

One hypothesis that I did feel like it was worth commenting on, though, is whether the Cuban state was also ‘in on’ betraying Maduro. Former Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, now self-exiled in Canada, certainly thinks it a strong possibility. He links to this Substack and suggests to his fairly large Twitter audience of over half a million followers that it is ‘reasonable‘ to ask whether the Cubans were part of the plot to sacrifice Maduro to keep Chavismo alive.

The Substack blog itself is run by Michael Weiss, a journalist focusing on Eastern Europe, who as far as I can tell does not have much of any expertise in Latin America. It is not even clear to me whether the author speaks Spanish, not that speculation requires knowing a language, of course, but it’s helpful to know if you’re modeling hypothetical 4D chess moves by high level decisionmakers in opaque dictatorships. This is not to take a swipe at Weiss; I found the Substack post interesting and it had interesting details about Ramiro Valdés’ Czechoslovakian connections that I was unaware of. It also very much just asks a question, rather than claim it as fact, so I want to be absolutely clear here that I do not see Weiss as either disingenuous or paranoid. The question of ‘how did the Cubans not know?!’ is a totally fair one, especially given the infamous lack of even basic infosec on the part of the Trump administration.

Here, in short, is my response as to why I do not think at present that this is the case, though I obviously cannot rule it out completely.

Cuba is a small place. A country of around 11.7 million at its peak, down to a stagnant 11.2 million until recently, now somewhere between 8-9 million and falling due to a massive exodus and rapidly aging population whose birthrate has been below replacement since before the end of the Cold War. Like most of Latin America, the world of high Cuban politics, culture, and economic life, centers on the capital, Havana. The world of high level intelligence and military officials is smaller still; a small subset of institutions, schools, social circles, etc. These are people who have known each other for most of their adult lives, and if they went to elite prep schools like La Lenin together even earlier. Some will be the sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, or even grandkids of important figures in Cuban politics. This is a vanishingly small world that rarely, begrudgingly, and only slowly lets in outsiders; it is not quite a closed system, but it is one that most of the population will never see and some can only guess at.

At present, the Cuban government is besieged on all fronts. The electrical grid is chronically working at only a fraction of its full capacity due to lack of fuel and the obsolescence of the grid itself, which dates to the Cold War. There is a demographic collapse due to mass exodus and its aging population, with waves of various epidemics and the collapse of the healthcare system no doubt also playing a role. The economy is paralyzed, there is a total lack of hope, protests have gone from historic events (e.g. Maleconazo in 1994) to a relatively normal part of Cuban life once again. Many are predicting the imminent collapse of the system, which has failed to break mainly because its military, police, and intelligence services have repeatedly refused to defect or remain inert when protests break out.

With that context, how does it make sense for Cuba to trade 32 highly trained military and intelligence officials in a political gamble that, if true, has a medium to high likelihood of coming out? Even suspicion of this would be radioactive material pressed against the beating heart of the Cuban state. Trading dozens of people from this very small and secretive world, who knew each other, probably even intermarried with one another or saw their close family marry into the families of the dead, seems like insanity. It tells the most important bulwark of the state ‘you are pawns and your loyalty to us will not be returned’, just as the Cuban state is threatened on all sides. These are committed people, ideologically loyal people, people they will have known personally, intimately. How on earth would this make sense even on a cynical and Machiavellian level?

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More speculatively, I’m also unclear as to whether or if Delcy Rodríguez will prove as close of a friend of Cuba as Maduro once was. Delcy is in Russia, or at least was, and it is unclear whether she has a Cuban security detail of her own, or wants one. We know Maduro continued to supply oil to Havana even as Venezuela’s oil production per day collapsed; will Delcy? Maybe they think they know, but are they willing to bet the continued supply of oil from Venezuela on it? (it is of course paused for now, but presumably Delcy might try to negotiate its reopening later)

Maybe Snyder is right on the mark and Weiss has stuck a bullseye with this, but for now I am deeply skeptical of how this makes sense. Time will tell.

There’s an old saying that if you see horse tracks in the forest (in a temperate climate anyway) it’s normal to assume it’s a horse or a deer, but your mind shouldn’t leap to a zebra. Sure, it’s always possible that there’s an escaped circus animal out there or something, but extremely unusual occurrences like that require extraordinary evidence, like seeing the zebra, rather than a huge leap of logic based on what’s vaguely possible

In November of 1975, the Caudillo of Spain, Francisco Franco, passed away in Madrid. To the surprise of many, the Communist Cuba of Fidel Castro declared three days of official mourning for the dead anti-Communist Spanish dictator. This is something that many are aware of, as a cultural oddity, but which isn’t usually explained all that well. The article that I just published over on the Leibniz Institute for European History’s blog fleshes out not just this amusing paradox but the deeper why of continued Spanish-Cuban relations during the height of the Cold War, despite the ideological chasm dividing the two countries.

You can read the article here.