Whither Cuba?
Guerrilla Journalism, Che Guevara and the state of Cuba with Jon Lee Anderson.
“Hemingway did not drink here.” — bar in Havana.
My one and only Cuban sojourn was a family trip in January 2014, a cultural exchange organized through the Center for Cuban Studies to study art and agriculture. It felt immediately as though we had stepped into a time capsule not far from the Florida coast, trapped between the fervor of the Cuban Revolution and the thaw of the Cold War. We soon met many hardworking, creative, joyful people. But the undercurrent was that of a nation frozen in time, waiting to be liberated.
NEW Full Expression Episode: Che Guevara, Cuba and the Craft of Conflict Journalism
This was not my first encounter in a socialist country. As a 23-year-old just out of graduate school, I spent the summer of 1983 in Shanghai. At that time, China was the poorest and least developed country I had ever visited. Most of Shanghai’s twenty million residents lived without refrigeration. The broad boulevards were literal seas of bicycles, some ingeniously retrofitted to carry heavy loads, bells constantly jangling.
Thirty years later, Havana gave off some of those 1980s Shanghai vibes. Revolutionary iconography was inescapable. Call it hustle or human nature, the people possessed a similar hunger for modernization and economic opportunity. There was also the unmistakable presence of clunky Chinese bicycles—Flying Pigeons—on the roads.
The bikes were scars of a lingering trauma. After its violent revolution, Cuba became a satellite country of the Soviet Union, trading its political independence for a lifeline of Soviet oil, arms, resources, and agricultural expertise. The country made heroic gains in literacy and health care. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the economic plug was pulled. With no petroleum and no industrial imports to sustain their export agriculture, Cubans had to start from scratch. They learned to grow food organically by default. During this grueling “Special Period,” the average Cuban literally shed up to fifteen pounds because there was simply not enough food to go around and no money to buy any. One of the government’s desperate responses was to import boatloads of bicycles from China.
By the time we arrived in 2014, Cuba had a Venezuelan pipeline to petroleum, but the long-term effects were still on full display: crumbling charm masked by a dual economy. If you were in the tourist business, you seemed to fare better than the vast majority of the population living on a fixed state salary of thirty dollars a month. We spent our days navigating these parallel worlds, visiting artist studios, touring organic farms (one where a 40 foot well had been dug by hand), and eating occasionally in paladares—private residences quietly transformed into restaurants where an entree could cost as much as a Cuban’s monthly stipend.
Havana was a sensory landscape of defiance and decay. Baseball was a popular topic in the public squares. American cars from the 1950s and 60s were resuscitated with mechanical mojo and hand-machined parts, available to rent by the hour. An old man took our portrait using a primitive box camera, developing the print in a chemical bath on the sidewalk. It was mandatory to pick up a hitchhiker—a rule that felt progressively appropriate. Two decades after the Soviet pullout, Cuba’s coral reefs, once poisoned by agricultural runoff, were making a remarkable recovery, a tribute to the cascading benefits of organic farming.
We discovered the whimsical collage paintings of Sandra Dooley and the arresting photography of Cirenaica Moreira, who often used her body as conceptual subject matter. Musicians entertained us in every bar, restaurant and event, playing, singing, and dancing with effortless agility. A sign in one restaurant said it all: “Hemingway did not drink here.”
When Cuba’s Venezuelan oil lifeline was severed in the winter of 2026, I imagined how quickly daily life must have unraveled in this nearly seventy-year-old time capsule. In the past five years 20 percent of the population—1.5 million people—fled to other countries. I felt the need to revisit what was happening with someone appropriately informed.
That deeply embedded perspective is why I reached out to New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson. He has spent decades reporting from the trenches of Latin American politics and global conflicts. Jon Lee was a journalist living with his young family in Cuba during the dark days of the Special Period, watching the system fracture from the inside out. He spent years amassing the investigative work required to write his definitive biography of Che Guevara, eventually piercing the flattened, stereotyped legacy of an international revolutionary icon.
In this week’s Full Expression interview, we learn about Jon Lee’s wildly adventurous childhood including moving to Liberia at age 13 to live with his uncle, finding his way into the world of conflict journalism, untangling the myth of Che by circling back to his boyhood in Argentina, and continuing to report on the intertwined, fragile fates of nations like Cuba and Venezuela.
All for now.
