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The American Fantasy of Cuba

We want to see Cuba as the pleasure colony of the past. Today, it’s more of a country on the brink of collapse.

Avenida 23 or La Rampa in Havana, Cuba, circa 1959.

To write about Cuba in the United States is often to scream into an abyss whose only echo is the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan” playing on a loop. The opening guitar lick. The bass walking under it. The chorus we’ve all heard, whether or not we have ever set foot in Havana. The nation I am addressing, which picks up the books and op-eds and dispatches from the island, wants Cuba as a soundtrack—background music. It wants peeling paint and vintage cars, heavyset Black abuelas with cigars, and dark rum that goes with the dancing. It wanted to go to the island before it changes. It wanted to go before the end.

What no one says out loud, when they say “before it changes,” is what they mean by changes. The phrase is an imperial premonition. The change Americans are awaiting (and which today is imminent) is the return of American capital: restaurants and hotels, condos and tour packages, the consummation of a desire that has been suspended for 67 years. In the American imagination, Cuba has always been an island held in trust for a future arrival. The “end” Americans imagine is the end of Cuba’s refusal to be what America wants it to be. That end is here.

The Cuba that Americans want to return to is the same plantation that fed the American sugar bowl and the American fruit bowl and supplied the labor for the pleasure economy: cane workers, casino workers, and brothel workers, all used up at once. The before it changes that Americans speak about with such wistfulness is not nostalgia for the socialist Cuba that was (or the communist Cuba that, perhaps, could have been) but nostalgia for a pleasure colony. Pre-1959, Havana was Vegas before Vegas. Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano ran the Hotel Nacional and the Tropicana, drawing the celebrity trade; Havana’s casinos, brothels, and nightclubs were curated for the leisure of the North. It is a demand to go backward—hoy como ayer—to a Cuba that never stopped being available.

But “Chan Chan,” the song that played in every hotel lobby on the island in the 1990s and early aughts, which folks on their fantasy vacations hum, does not say what they think it says. Compay Segundo wrote it in 1984—not in some prerevolutionary antiquity but contemporaneously with the Revolution he loved. The chorus names a real route through a real Cuban landscape of four towns in Holguín Province, in the agricultural east, near the Sierra Maestra where Castro began: “De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané / Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí.” The song is domestic, erotic, and working at once—tourists heard it as an irresistible soundtrack, not registering its lyrics as descriptors of Cuban labor, geography, and desire. The end that Americans wished for has now arrived, delivered by a president who has said he can “do anything I want” with Cuba.

On May 20, Cuban Independence Day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against 94-year-old Raúl Castro at Miami’s Freedom Tower, the building where refugees from the Revolution were once processed for entry into the country. Castro, out of office for five years yet still a potent figure in Cuba, has been charged with conspiracy to kill US nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of aircraft destruction for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. There was no pretense of diplomatic ambiguity in the US State Department’s messaging. The indictment is the legal architecture for extraction: the same playbook the United States used against Nicolás Maduro in January.

In the days before that indictment, Cuban officials told CNN that this action “would end negotiations and set the stage for a military intervention to which they would sacrifice their lives if needed.”

Just a day later, on May 21, the US Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, reviving a lawsuit that holds American cruise lines liable for docking their ships at Cuban port facilities that the Revolution nationalized in 1959. The pleasure colony, in other words, is reasserting its property deed.

The decision sets a $440 million precedent and is expected not only to trigger hundreds of similar claims but also to make way for the return of the former private-property owners. The revolutionary government had nationalized property abandoned by exiles—for example, turning family mansions in Vedado into schools, hospitals, and apartments for the families of former servants of the original households. Now the Mob is back, catering to Northern desires—this time in robes. “The end” now has three floors: the foundational embargo, intensified into a........

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