Cuba

Nothing about that week announced a communist state. The programme Castro had published in 1953 while defending himself for the Moncada attack was nationalist and reformist: land for those who worked it, profit-sharing for workers, an end to corruption, the restoration of the constitution of 1940. The first cabinet contained liberals, professionals and businessmen. The old Communist Party, the Partido Socialista Popular, had opposed the insurrection until the last months and was not represented in it. Yet within two years Cuba had a single party, a state-directed economy, a militia of hundreds of thousands, and a patron in Moscow; within three it had been invaded, had declared itself socialist, and had come closer to nuclear war than any other country has.

The state that resulted is the only socialist republic the western hemisphere has produced, the only one that survived the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and one of the few that has been governed for six decades by the same party, under the same leaders, against an American embargo that has outlasted fourteen American presidents. Its constitution of 1976, revised in 1992 and 2002 and replaced in 2019, made the Communist Party the "superior leading force" of society rather than one competitor among several, and organised the state around assemblies that ratify decisions taken elsewhere. Its economy was built on sugar sold at Soviet prices, was rebuilt on tourism, nickel and medical services after the subsidy ended, and is now failing on all three. The border data draw the island from 1960 and stop in 2024, so the state appears on the map from its second year, and the first eighteen months of the revolution are off the slider altogether.

It matters beyond the island because it has been, for sixty years, an argument. For the Latin American left it was the proof that a poor country could feed, educate and doctor its people against the will of the United States. For its exiles — and there are more than two million of them — it is a forty-year theft of a country's future, and the reason their children grew up in Florida and Spain. For the people who stayed, and who are leaving in the largest numbers since 1959, it is neither of those things but a daily negotiation with shortages, queues, blackouts and the state's insistence that nothing fundamental is wrong.

At a glance

How did a nationalist revolution become a socialist state?

The first eighteen months were a contest rather than a plan. Manuel Urrutia, a judge who had refused to sentence the Moncada rebels, was provisional president; José Miró Cardona, a lawyer, was prime minister until February 1959, when Castro replaced him; the cabinet included Pedro Díaz Lanz, an anti-communist, as chief of the air force, and Felipe Pazos, a former central banker, at the National Bank. Against them stood the comandantes of the Sierra, the only men with troops. The revolutionary tribunals that tried Batista's policemen in the first months — by one count several hundred executions before the summer — were defended by Castro as an answer to forty years of impunity and condemned in Washington as a massacre.

Three decisions turned the balance. The first was the Agrarian Reform Law of 17 May 1959, which took the large estates and turned them into cooperatives and state farms; it was popular, it was nationalist, and it immediately made an enemy of the cattle and sugar interests that had property in both countries. The second was the response to American pressure. When Eisenhower cut the Cuban sugar quota in July 1960, Cuba nationalised the refineries; when the United States cancelled the rest of the quota in the autumn, Cuba nationalised the banks and some 380 American-owned firms. The third was the militia: after the explosion of the freighter La Coubre in Havana harbour on 4 March 1960 — sabotage, Havana said, and never proven — the government armed tens of thousands of workers and peasants who had never held a rifle.

By then the old communists were inside the government rather than outside it. The Partido Socialista Popular had a disciplined organisation, a Moscow connection and cadres who could run a planning office, all of which the Sierra group lacked. Its leader, Aníbal Escalante, was given the task of building a united party, and did it so clumsily, stacking the new organisation with old communists, that Castro removed him in 1962 and packed him off into diplomatic exile. The fusion of the 26th of July Movement, the PSP and the Revolutionary Directorate into the United Party of the Socialist Revolution in 1961, and its transformation into the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965, is covered in the entry on the Cuban Communists.

The declaration came on 16 April 1961, at the funeral of seven people killed in the air raids that opened the Bay of Pigs invasion. "This is a socialist revolution," Castro said, and the crowd's answer became the slogan of the campaign that followed. In December he told a television audience that he had been a Marxist-Leninist since before the revolution, which is a claim historians have been arguing about ever since. The evidence points to a conversion rather than a concealment: in 1959 he was reading Marx for the first time seriously, and the men around him were nationalists of the left, not communists. What changed his mind was the combination of American hostility, which made private capital a strategic enemy, and the discovery that a mass base could be mobilised by decree, which made the Soviet model attractive.

Why did Washington decide to overthrow it?

The decision was taken early and never really revisited. In March 1960 Eisenhower approved a covert programme to arm and train Cuban exiles, and by the autumn the CIA had a brigade in Guatemala, a radio station on Swan Island and a plan that assumed the landing would trigger an internal rising. John Kennedy inherited it, was told in April 1961 that the alternatives were to proceed or to look weak, and allowed it to go ahead after removing the air cover that the plan required. On 15 April B-26 bombers painted in Cuban colours attacked three airfields; on 17 April some 1,400 men of Brigade 2506 landed at Playa Girón and Playa Larga on the Bay of Pigs.

The operation failed within seventy-two hours. The expected uprising did not happen; the Cuban air force, which the raids had been meant to destroy, flew; the swamp ground made the beachhead a trap; and Castro, who had been expecting an invasion for a year, had the militia and the army in place. The brigade lost 114 dead and about 1,200 prisoners. On 21 December 1962, after months of negotiation conducted for the United States by the lawyer James Donovan, Cuba released 1,113 of them in exchange for $53 million of food and medicine.

The consequences were larger than the battle. The invasion discredited the exile political parties in Washington, handed Castro a founding myth of the whole country united against an invader, and pushed Cuba openly into the Soviet camp, which was the opposite of what the operation had been meant to achieve. It also fixed the terms of American policy for a generation: after the Bay of Pigs no president would again send an American army to Cuba, and every later attempt — assassination plots, sabotage, the embargo, the support of exile groups — operated in the space between covert action and invasion. Havana, for its part, drew a conclusion it has never abandoned: that the United States would destroy the revolution if it could, and that Cuban security therefore required a great-power guarantor.

What did the missile crisis of 1962 settle?

The guarantor arrived in the summer of 1962, in the form of Operation Anadyr. Nikita Khrushchev, worried about the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey and about a second invasion of Cuba, decided to deploy medium-range missiles on the island. By October some 42 R-12 missiles and more than 40,000 Soviet troops were there, along with tactical nuclear weapons and cruise missiles whose presence the Americans did not suspect. American intelligence, which had been watching the build-up since August, badly underestimated it. In the retrospective it wrote afterwards, the CIA admitted that its photographs had identified only 33 of the 42 medium-range missiles, and as late as November the Pentagon believed there were 16,000 Soviet soldiers in Cuba when there were more than 40,000.

A U-2 flight on 14 October brought the photographs that settled the argument inside the American government. Kennedy announced a "quarantine" on 22 October, and for six days the two fleets and the two air forces moved towards a collision. The crisis turned on 27 October, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile battery at Banes shot down a U-2 and killed its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson; Kennedy, against the advice of most of his advisers, held back the air strike he had ordered and answered Khrushchev's public offer to withdraw in exchange for a pledge not to invade, while his brother Robert told the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, privately that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would come out within a few months. On 28 October Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. The Jupiters were duly withdrawn the following spring, a part of the bargain the American public was not told about and the Cubans were not told either.

Castro was not consulted at any point in the crisis, and his fury at being treated as an object rather than an ally shaped Cuban foreign policy for thirty years. He issued five conditions — an end to the embargo, an end to subversion, an end to pirate raids from Florida, an end to the Guantánamo base and an end to the violations of Cuban airspace — none of which was met. What Cuba did get was the non-invasion pledge, which held, and which is the single most important reason the revolution survived. What it did not get was any say in the terms of its own security.

What changed in ordinary lives?

The social programme was real, and it is the part of the record that even the revolution's enemies concede. The literacy campaign of 1961 sent some 100,000 young volunteers, many of them children, into the countryside with primers, lamps and hammocks; the official figures are 23.3 per cent illiteracy before and 3.9 per cent after, and although those are the campaign's own counts, the direction and the scale of the change are not in doubt. Schooling was made free and compulsory to the ninth grade and then to the twelfth, and university enrolment multiplied several times over; the nationalisation of the private schools in 1961 also put the last independent institutions of the old middle class under state control. Health care was nationalised, rural hospitals were built, and infant mortality fell from about 32 per 1,000 live births in 1957 to under 10 by the 1990s, the lowest in the Americas after Canada.

The gains were uneven and some were paid for by others. Women entered the labour force and the universities in numbers that transformed the professions, and the Family Code of 1975 made housework and child-rearing legally shared — forty-seven years before the code that replaced it. Racial inequality, which the republic had denied and practised, was attacked by opening schools, beaches and hotels, and the black middle class that had existed in 1959 largely disappeared into emigration or into the new state sector. Sport and the arts were funded as never before, and Cuban ballet, boxing and cinema became exports of a kind.

The coercive side was there from the beginning and hardened in the 1960s. The independent press was gone by 1961; the churches lost their schools that year and their broadcasting soon after; the Interior Ministry, built with Soviet help, became the instrument of a surveillance state whose reach ran through the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution on every block. Between November 1965 and July 1968 the government ran the Military Units to Aid Production, labour camps in Camagüey to which it sent men it classified as antisocial — homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, long-haired youths, draft resisters — a programme it has never officially repudiated. The "grey years" of 1971 to 1976, when writers and artists were policed for deviation and the poet Heberto Padilla was jailed until an international campaign forced his release, belong to the same history.

Who actually governed?

The constitution of 1976 gave the system its enduring shape, and almost all of that shape was Soviet. Article 5 made the Communist Party the "highest leading force of society and of the state", a formula that placed the party above the constitution rather than under it. Article 69 made the National Assembly of People's Power the supreme organ of state power; in practice the Assembly met twice a year for a few days, heard reports, passed laws drafted by the Council of Ministers and unanimously approved them. A Council of State of about thirty members acted between sessions, and its president was the head of state. Below the national level sat provincial and municipal assemblies, elected by show of hands until 1992 and by secret ballot afterwards, which administered housing, repairs and rationing.

The party's own structure mirrored the state's. A congress met roughly every five years, the first in December 1975; it elected a Central Committee of a hundred or more members, which in turn elected a Political Bureau of a dozen or so and a secretariat. In practice the Politburo and the First Secretary decided, and the First Secretary was Fidel Castro from 1965 to 2011, his brother Raúl from 2011 to 2021, and Miguel Díaz-Canel thereafter. The army, the Interior Ministry and the party overlapped at the top: Raúl Castro ran the armed forces for forty years before he ran the state, and generals who had commanded in Angola moved into ministries and state corporations.

The mass organisations were the system's other half. The Confederation of Cuban Workers, the Federation of Cuban Women, the National Association of Small Farmers, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution and the Union of Young Communists enrolled most of the adult population and gave the party a transmission belt into every workplace and street. They were not independent; they were the means by which the state knew what people were saying. This is why the vocabulary of Cuban politics is so insistently about "the people" and so rarely about citizenship: the people is an organ of the state, and the state is the party.

How did Soviet money shape the 1970s and 1980s?

Cuba joined the Soviet bloc's trading system, the CMEA, in 1972, and the terms it got from the Soviet Union were the best in the socialist world. Sugar was bought at a price indexed to the world market but above it, oil was sold below it, and the difference was settled in non-convertible roubles that Cuba could spend only in the bloc. Bruno Sovilla's reconstruction of the accounts puts the convertible-currency value of the subsidy at an average of about $3.1 billion a year between 1976 and 1988, rising to roughly $4 billion a year in 1980–85; measured another way, some 90 per cent of Cuba's imports from the Soviet Union were paid for by the subsidy rather than by Cuban exports. Valued at world prices, Cuban sugar exports would not have paid for Cuban oil imports in a single year of that period.

The money bought a welfare state and a planning system. The System of Direction and Planning of the Economy, adopted in 1976, gave ministries, enterprises and a planning board called JUCEPLAN the apparatus of Soviet-style planning; the 1970s saw the first five-year plans and a consumer economy in which rationed goods were cheap and plentiful by Caribbean standards. It also bought the illusion that Cuba had solved the problem of underdevelopment. The ten-million-ton sugar harvest of 1970, the greatest mobilisation of the revolutionary period, produced a record of about 8.5 million tons — and fell a million and a half short of the target, which Castro admitted in public; the lesson drawn was not that the model was wrong but that the Cubans had not applied it properly.

The 1970s were also the years of internationalism. In November 1975 Cuba sent troops to Angola at the request of the MPLA, and its armoured columns helped stop the South African advance on Luanda; by the end of the operation about 300,000 Cubans had served there, and more than 2,000 died. In 1977 it airlifted a division-sized force to Ethiopia to repel the Somali invasion of the Ogaden; in October 1983 its construction workers and advisers were caught in Grenada when the United States invaded the island; and in the 1980s it trained and advised the Sandinista army in Nicaragua and sent doctors and teachers across the Caribbean and Africa. This was not merely Soviet subcontracting. Havana chose its interventions, ran them, and paid for them in lives, and it did so in the name of a racial and anti-colonial solidarity that had deep roots in Cuban nationalism.

The bills came due in the 1980s. When the price of sugar fell and the Soviet Union began to trim its subsidies, Castro responded not by liberalising but by reversing: the "rectification of errors and negative tendencies" announced in 1986 closed the small farmers' markets that had been opened in 1980, banned private trade, and recentralised what had been decentralised. The result was a stagnant economy, a foreign debt it stopped servicing in 1986, and an elite that had learned to live with shortages. The Mariel boatlift of 1980, when some 125,000 Cubans left from the port of Mariel in six months after a stand-off at the Peruvian embassy, was the first time the island's discontents had been exported in bulk; the government's response was to denounce the emigrants as antisocial and let them go, which it has done at intervals ever since.

What was the Special Period?

The crisis arrived in two stages. In 1990, with the Soviet bloc already dissolving, the government proclaimed a "Special Period in Time of Peace" — a euphemism for permanent emergency — and began rationing fuel, electricity and food by decree. In December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and with it went a trading system that had carried some four-fifths of the island's trade. Oil imports fell by more than half; fertiliser, animal feed, spare parts and wheat disappeared; the sugar harvest collapsed and the buses stopped running. Measured by the official statistics that Cuban and American economists have since reconstructed, GDP fell by 33 per cent between 1990 and 1993, a contraction comparable in scale to the American fall of 1929–33, and faster.

The social consequences were severe and are still visible in the island's demography. Average daily calorie intake fell to about 1,800, and the ration book that had guaranteed rice, beans, sugar, coffee and a little meat since 1962 now guaranteed less of each. There were outbreaks of optic neuropathy and a rise in low birth weight; electricity cuts ran to twelve hours a day in parts of Havana. The government's answer was to open the economy just enough to survive. The constitution was amended in July 1992 to permit foreign investment, joint ventures, new forms of property, direct elections to the National Assembly and freedom of religion. In 1993 the dollar was decriminalised, self-employment was licensed in a list of trades, the state farms were broken into basic units of cooperative production, and farmers' markets were reopened. Tourism was pushed hard, and by the late 1990s it had overtaken sugar as the largest source of foreign currency.

The result was a society stratified by currency. Those who earned dollars — hotel workers, taxi drivers, prostitutes, families with relatives in Miami — could buy in the dollar shops; those who earned pesos, including doctors and teachers, could not. The egalitarianism of the 1970s gave way to a visible inequality that fell along the old lines of race and region, because the tourist jobs went to Havana and the remittances went to white families with relatives abroad. It was in these years that the Cuban academic literature began to speak of a "second economy" and of the re-emergence of a colour line that the revolution had claimed to abolish.

The safety valve was emigration. In August 1994, after a riot on the Malecón in Havana, Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, and some 35,000 Cubans took to rafts and small boats in five weeks. The United States, which had been interning the rafters at Guantánamo, negotiated a migration agreement on 9 September 1994 that ended the automatic admission of Cubans picked up at sea and committed Washington to admit at least 20,000 a year. The "wet foot, dry foot" policy that grew out of that agreement lasted until 2017; the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which gives Cuban arrivals permanent residence after a year, is still law.

How did the system survive the 1990s, and what did Raúl Castro change?

It survived by a combination of external protection, internal policing and limited reform. The external protection came from Canada, Spain, Mexico and the European Union, which refused to join the American embargo and kept investment and tourists coming; from the Vatican, which negotiated the visit of John Paul II in January 1998; and from Venezuela, after Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 and began shipping oil on preferential terms in exchange for doctors. The internal policing was directed at the dissidents who had begun to organise in the 1990s, and it became harsher as the economy improved: in March 2003, in what became known as the Black Spring, the security services arrested 75 dissidents, journalists and librarians in a few days, and the courts sentenced them to terms of up to 28 years. Weeks later the government ended a three-year moratorium on executions and shot three men who had tried to hijack a ferry.

The limited reform came from two directions. In 2002 a petition organised by the Christian Democrat Oswaldo Payá, the Varela Project, collected more than 11,000 signatures for a referendum on political rights and a market economy. The National Assembly did not put the question to the vote; instead it amended the constitution to declare socialism "irrevocable", a change it justified with 8,198,237 signatures collected in three days of public signing. In 2006 Fidel Castro, then 79, underwent emergency intestinal surgery and handed power provisionally to his brother; in February 2008 the National Assembly elected Raúl president, and the era of the comandante en jefe ended without a succession crisis.

Raúl governed as an economic pragmatist and a political conservative. He legalised the sale of houses and cars, distributed fallow land in usufruct to private farmers, announced the shedding of hundreds of thousands of state jobs, opened self-employment in a long list of trades, later extended past 200, and allowed Cubans to travel abroad without an exit permit. The sixth party congress of April 2011 adopted 313 "guidelines" for the "updating" of the economic model, and the phrase became the official name for the reform era. The results were modest: the private sector grew to employ perhaps a third of the workforce, but it was never allowed a wholesale market, access to credit on reasonable terms or the right to form companies, and from 2017 the licensing of new businesses was frozen in several categories. What Raúl refused to touch was the party's monopoly, the censorship, or the security apparatus, and his reforms therefore produced the worst of both systems — the insecurity of a market without the growth.

Why did détente and the 2019 constitution not settle anything?

On 17 December 2014 Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced simultaneously that the two countries would restore relations. The deal included the release of the American contractor Alan Gross and of the remaining members of the "Cuban Five" — intelligence officers convicted in 2001 — and the reopening of embassies in July 2015. Obama visited Havana in March 2016, walked through Old Havana in the rain and met dissidents in the American embassy; it was the first visit by a sitting American president in 88 years. Nothing was settled. Congress would not lift the embargo, Cuba would not concede on political prisoners or on the single party, and the opening remained a set of executive measures that the next president could reverse.

Donald Trump reversed them. His administration restricted travel and remittances in 2017, activated Title III of the Helms-Burton Act in 2019 so that Americans could sue over expropriated property, and sanctioned the Venezuelan oil shipments on which Cuba depended. In the same years the succession was completed: Díaz-Canel replaced Raúl as president in April 2018 and as first secretary in April 2021, the first head of state born after the revolution. A new constitution, approved by 86.85 per cent of valid votes in a referendum on 24 February 2019 with more than 700,000 voting no, created the offices of president and prime minister, recognised private property and foreign investment, and kept the party's leading role. Its article on marriage, after the public consultation, defined it as between a man and a woman, which disappointed the activists who had campaigned for something else.

The breaking point was 2021, and it was economic and epidemiological at once. Tourism had collapsed with the pandemic; remittances fell; and on 1 January the government dismantled the dual currency in a reform called the Tarea Ordenamiento that raised prices, cut subsidies and left wages worthless. Then came the worst wave of COVID-19, with record deaths, full hospitals and crematoria working through the night, in a country that had developed its own vaccines and could not produce them fast enough. On 11 July 2021, in San Antonio de los Baños and then in dozens of towns, thousands of people came out shouting "freedom" and "we are not afraid"; it was the largest nationwide protest since 1959. The state's answer was to call it a foreign conspiracy, send out its supporters, and arrest more than 1,400 people, of whom more than 700 were still in prison a year later, many after summary trials on charges of "public disorder", "contempt" and "sedition".

What did the Family Code change?

In September 2022 the government put a new Family Code to a referendum and won. The code runs to 474 articles and replaced the 1975 code entirely. It legalises marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, permits assisted reproduction and surrogacy for couples regardless of sexual orientation, recognises "socio-affective" families that are not based on marriage, requires parents to share housework and childcare, and sets out protections against domestic violence and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. It is, by some distance, the most progressive family law in the hemisphere.

The vote was 66.87 per cent in favour, on a turnout of about three-quarters of the electorate. That is a comfortable majority and a revealing one: the yes vote was under half of the registered electorate, a third of those who went to the polls voted no, and the campaign against the code was led not by the party's opponents but by evangelical churches and by ordinary Cubans who found the code's language about gender and sexuality alien. The government had spent two years consulting on the draft, clause by clause, in a process it presented as participatory democracy; the result was a genuine debate in which the state found itself on the liberal side of its own society.

The episode says something about how the system now legitimises itself. With the economy failing and the ideological appeal of socialism thin among the young, the party has turned to rights and welfare as the ground of its authority — the same move it made with the 1975 code, the literacy campaign and the 1962 ration book. It also shows the limits of that move. A government that can deliver same-sex marriage in a referendum cannot deliver diesel, and the voters who approved the code in September 2022 were the same people who queued for hours for bread and whose children were planning to leave.

Why is Cuba in crisis again?

The economy has been shrinking, with brief interruptions, since 2019. The pandemic destroyed tourism, the reform of 2021 destroyed the peso, and the American sanctions of 2019 and after cut off the Venezuelan oil that had replaced the Soviet subsidy. By 2024 the country was living through daily blackouts of up to 20 hours, inflation that the official statistics understated, and an emigration without precedent: the government itself conceded that the population had fallen below 10 million, and independent demographers put it far lower. In March 2024 people came out in Santiago de Cuba, the city that calls itself the cradle of the revolution, over food and electricity. In July the government announced a "war-time economy" of price rises, subsidy cuts and budget discipline, which made things worse.

The years since have been worse still. In January 2025, within days of taking office, the new American administration reversed its predecessor's rescission and put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism; it then tightened the remittance and travel rules, sanctioned the medical mission agencies through which Havana earns hard currency, and pressed third countries to cancel their Cuban doctor contracts. The decisive blow came in 2026. On 29 January the American president signed an executive order declaring Cuba a national emergency and threatening tariffs on any country that supplied it with oil; the Venezuelan shipments stopped after the American operation that removed Nicolás Maduro in January, Mexico stopped too, and Russian crude, carried in tankers that sanctions made ever harder to insure, could not fill the gap. By the middle of May the energy minister was telling state television that Cuba had no crude, no fuel oil and no diesel at all. Havana went to 20 and 22 hours a day without power, and on 13 and 14 May the city's neighbourhoods came out — banging pots, burning rubbish, blocking roads — in the largest protests since 2021. Washington offered $100 million in direct assistance in May; Havana refused, then accepted, and the first shipment arrived through Catholic Relief Services in July.

The grid has not recovered. On 16 October 2026 a fire at the Ernesto Guevara de la Serna plant at Santa Cruz del Norte knocked out generation, and the system's available capacity fell to about 740 megawatts against a peak demand of some 2,900; 75.5 per cent of the island was dark at the evening peak, the worst figure in the official statistics. It was the eighth national blackout of the year. The dollar, which stood at 24 pesos when the currency reform began in 2021, closed that week at 800 on the informal market. Tourism, the industry on which the reforms of the 1990s were built, had fallen by around 60 per cent in the first seven months of the year. The regime has not fallen, and there is no visible mechanism by which it would; but it is governing a country whose population is leaving, whose infrastructure is failing, and whose principal ally has been removed.

What is the revolution's balance sheet?

The gains are not in dispute, even if their size is. Cuba has a literacy rate near universal, a life expectancy in the high seventies, an infant mortality rate in the low single digits per thousand, and a ratio of doctors to population that most rich countries do not match. It eliminated polio and malaria, trained tens of thousands of doctors from other poor countries, and sends medical brigades abroad as a matter of policy — a programme that is both a genuine expression of internationalism and a hard-currency export whose participants have sometimes been held against their will. Cuban culture, from the film institute to the ballet to the plastic arts, was funded at a level unimaginable in the Caribbean of 1959.

The costs are not in dispute either. Sixty-five years of one-party rule have produced no mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power other than the party's own choice; a prison population of political dissidents that human rights organisations put in the high hundreds after 2021; a press that exists only as an instrument of the state; and an economy that has failed, three times over, to produce enough to feed the island. The revolution's defenders answer that no small country could have survived an American embargo and sabotage for sixty years, and that the social achievements were bought with the sovereignty that a market economy would have surrendered. Its critics answer that the embargo did not build the one-party state, and that a government which has to imprison 1,400 people after a protest is not one that commands consent.

The historical literature has moved beyond both positions without reconciling them. One school, which descends from the exile memoirs and from the political science of the 1970s, sees a revolution betrayed: a democratic movement hijacked by a communist clique that had been waiting for its moment. Another, stronger in the academy since the 1990s, sees a revolution besieged, in which the turn to socialism was a response to American hostility rather than its cause, and in which the survival of the 1990s was a genuine achievement of a small state against a superpower. A third, newer school writes the social history of the everyday — race, gender, housing, music, the informal economy — and finds neither heroes nor villains but a population that has negotiated with the state for sixty-five years and is now voting with its feet. The most reliable evidence of what Cubans think is not in any of these books. It is in the departure lounges at José Martí airport, and in the rafts that no longer have to be rafts, because a passport and a plane ticket will do.

Common myths about Communist Cuba

Timeline of Communist Cuba

What the map shows next

At 1961 on the map the map shows the island in the year of the invasion and the literacy campaign, two years after the revolution took power and a year before the missiles arrived. At 1980 on the map it shows Cuba at the height of the Soviet subsidy, with the Mariel boats leaving and the first farmers' markets opening in Havana.

At 1991 on the map the subsidy is collapsing and the special period has begun; at 2016 on the map the American flag is flying over an embassy in Havana for the first time in fifty-four years. At 2024 on the map the island is dark for much of the day, the population is falling, and the republic of 1902 to 1959 has become, for a third generation of exiles, the country their grandparents describe.