The Social World

Tag: Havana

  • Hurricane season in Cuba

    A cold front blew in off the Florida Straits, sending waves over Havana’s famous corniche, the Malecón, and announcing what has traditionally been the end of the hurricane season. After 13 named storms, it seems as if the 2025 season finale was Hurricane Melissa, a humdinger. She paused south of Jamaica, getting herself into a lather, before killing 32 on that lovely island and causing at least $7 billion of damage.

    Fortunately for Cuba to the north, Jamaica’s mountains plucked the murder from Melissa’s eye – but she still cut a devastating trail through this bigger island’s eastern reaches a day or so later.

    As Cuba’s communist leadership donned military fatigues and began its traditional mobilization for such events, my phone lit up with messages from friends around the world. They had seen images of the vast, spiraling cloud, top-lit by lightning and imagined apocalypse.

    But we, unlike many, were fine. Hurricanes are surprisingly localized. You really have to be within 50 miles of the eye to feel the full force and Cuba is huge, the same length as California. And its government is good at the immediate stuff. No fatalities were reported on the island.

    But I appreciated the concern. If a Cuban city does take a direct hit, it will be calamitous. Storms that pass 50 miles away from you might be OK, but in the eye of the storm, even in well-prepared countries, the suffering can be terrible.

    I’ve been sideswiped a couple of times, which was frightening enough. But pros such as my friend Patrick, who as a CNN correspondent is forever stepping into the path of tempests with names like Beryl or Dorian, says emerging after a direct hit is terrible. “You are greeted by scenes of damage so extensive as to be otherworldly,” he says. “Cars flung into trees, houses cleaved from their foundations, trees stripped of every leaf.”

    Cuba’s long-term financial woes mean the island’s beautiful old cities are falling down, even in clement weather. Habaneros tend to walk in the middle of the street because of the danger of falling masonry. Last month, an entire house collapsed in the old town, killing a mother and son.

    Any hurricane, let alone one the size of Melissa, would probably annihilate a Cuban city. Which would be a pity. Cuba’s capital has been a storied wonder for five centuries; a recent visitor reminded me that Norman Lewis once called Havana “the most beautiful city of the Americas.” A big storm has the power to bring that story to an end, along with untold lives.

    So, we depend on luck. In summer I obsessively watch the National Hurricane Center’s website, tracking storms forming off Cape Verde which grow stronger as they head west. It feels like being a pin in a bowling alley, watching the ball coming down the lane and praying it will miss.

    Cubans have developed a whole slew of coping mechanisms. First they turn to the sainted Dr. José Rubiera on the news. For many years the director of the National Forecasting Center, his mustachioed cool acts like a balm as he rationally describes a storm’s possible paths.

    If a hurricane begins to get close, the Cuban authorities declare an estado mayor de la defensa civil and show off the advantage of being an authoritarian regime. In Jamaica in October, people refused to flee. One resident of Port Royal was quoted as saying the last time she took to a shelter, “females weren’t safe and to top it off, people stole our stuff.” In Cuba, by contrast, the residents had no choice. Some 735,000 people were moved whether they liked it or not. But they were safer.

    Here in Havana, when hurricanes approach, an eerie calm takes over. People sweep their roofs of junk and stones or anything else that might shatter windows. Queues form for bread, often to the last minute. I once ran to the bakery with my brother-in-law as electricity transformers exploded above our heads. “Do we really need a loaf this much?” I remember shouting.

    Afterwards, the unafflicted gather aid for the stricken. And then it’s the long road back once everyone has forgotten. My colleague Eileen recently returned with a convoy to the areas affected by Melissa. She tells me of a dam overflowing, washing away houses and livestock, of misery piled on misery.

    Without money to rebuild, Cuba now carries the scars of past storms. One of my favorite places on the island is a village called Isabela de Sagua. In 2017, Hurricane Irma passed by, a terrible storm because she never touched land but instead sent the sea inland all along the coast. Isabela was all but washed away. There’s a restaurant there I like where boats arrive under sail (there isn’t a lot of gasoline at the moment) to unload fish, crab, oysters and lobster. The food costs pennies and tastes sublime. It feels like the restaurant at the end of the world.

    But putting aside my suspect love for trauma tourism, that’s not great, is it? Such stoic tenacity from residents is not really enough. One day a hurricane is going to prove Cuba’s authorities inadequate. Nonetheless, for now, and until June next year, I will be able to sleep soundly, certain my family is not going to be wiped out by a storm with a silly name.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • In Cuba, a revolution is over

    In Cuba, a revolution is over

    If you’ve ever thought of visiting the crocodile-shaped island of Cuba, or run into someone recently returned from sultry nights in the country’s salsa halls, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard the phrase “See it before it changes.” And I don’t mean because of Hurricane Melissa.

    The idea is that the centrally planned communist state, one of the last on Earth, will soon morph into America and a balmy Brigadoon full of people unencumbered by money, modern cars or Alexa will evaporate.

    I think most people, if they knew what Cubans have endured, wouldn’t use that phrase, which is up there in its lack of tact with “they’re poor but they’re happy.”

    But shortly after I arrived on the Caribbean island almost eight years ago, the same idea was put to me by a Cuban, although in a different way. She asked: “When does a revolution end?” That’s a question that has stayed with me. I remember my sweaty journey in from Havana’s José Martí International Airport that January 2018 evening. Having visited the island regularly before, on the cusp of turning 50 I’d come for a three-month break. I’m still here, married, with a four-year-old son.

    The roadside billboards advertised nothing other than the government’s answer to my friend’s question: “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” (An imperfect translation: “Until the eternal victory.”)

    At the time, the country was still enjoying a great burst of hope that had begun in 2016, when then-US president Barack Obama flew in to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War.” The Rolling Stones played and Chanel used Havana as a catwalk.

    Yet, the city still had rebel undercurrents that I remembered from earlier visits, a population of offbeat expats, some on the run from the US authorities. There were fraudsters and rogue CIA agents, Black Panthers and South and Central American liberation fighters – or terrorists, depending on your point of view.

    It was still easy to meet Cubans who, if critical of the day-to-day work of the government, supported the Castro brothers’ grand project. The young intellectuals, the artists and musicians, were often offended by the abuse being thrown across the Florida Straits by the exile community in Miami.

    The older generation were even more bonded to the revolution. Having answered Che Guevara’s call to subsume personal ambition to the common good, they were living on the promised reward of free healthcare and food.

    The government, however, which controlled everything including the importation of food, was low on funds, a situation soon worsened by the Covid pandemic. Shortages cut in, with days-long lines for essentials. Botched economic reforms then saw inflation take hold and pensions and wages reduced, in real terms, to what is now less than $10 a month.

    Soon many people were pondering when a revolution ends. In July 2021, protests erupted and were put down with force. Private entrepreneurs were given permission to import food, sold at prices far beyond what most people could pay. The rations of rice, sugar and beans distributed by state bodegas faltered.

    While there have always been people who go through the street-corner rubbish bins, their numbers blossomed. Older people, their dignity still showing in their neat if frayed clothes, began to ask for money from other Cubans on the street. The fumigators who used to demand access to your house to spray for mosquitoes disappeared.

    A grand exodus began, with estimates of up to 18 percent of the population leaving for the US, Latin America, Spain and oddly – due to a lack of visa restrictions – Serbia. Some fools even went to Russia to fight against Ukraine. The obsolescent electricity grid collapsed, again and again, and the water system with it. Power cuts have become a fact of life.

    I live a far more privileged life than most of my neighbors, but I find the water shortages hard. Nothing spells “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” like glancing up to see your child pooping on the floor when you haven’t had running water for two days. But, like the frog in boiling water (lucky him), somehow we seem to get used to it.

    It’s not easy. As I write, the awful Hurricane Melissa, which caused chaos in Jamaica, carried on through Cuba’s east, bringing landslides, flooding and misery. Meanwhile, there is an outbreak of chikungunya fever, spread by the mosquitos that the state can no longer afford to spray against. (Chikungunya means “contortion” in Tanzanian Makonde, and is as much fun as it sounds.)

    Yet, to my surprise, I still feel that same thrill as I take the sweaty journey in from the airport, past the increasingly faded slogans on the billboards, through this city of crumbling grandeur, to what’s become my home, looking forward to being among the Cubans once more. This is what I hope to write about in this column as we move forward.

    So, when does a revolution end? I was talking to my Cuban friend again, blathering on about how her question could currently be asked of the American Revolution. But she remained focused on Cuba’s own, saying: “Maybe it’s already over, and we just haven’t noticed it.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Why Russia is flaunting its ships in the Caribbean

    Why Russia is flaunting its ships in the Caribbean

    Two Russian ships docked Tuesday in Venezuela’s La Guaira port, twenty miles away from Caracas. The stop comes after military exercises were conducted in the Atlantic, with four vessels stopping in Havana late last month. This is all part of a decades-long “look-at-us” operation, also known as a “show the flag” move, as Russia’s defense ministry puts it.

    While Russia’s presence in Cuba and Venezuela is not a new phenomenon, conflict in the East has only accelerated their muscle-flexing in the West. These movements mark Russia’s first extensive military exercises in the hemisphere in five years, as well as their first deployment of a nuclear submarine in close proximity to the US since the Cold War. This ship, which didn’t join the others in the Venezuelan port, is the Kazan. Its capabilities include being able to fire Oniks supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles. On its way to Havana with its other friends, it sounded alarms when passing close to Florida.

    The US responded then by dispatching three guided-missile destroyers, which were joined by a Canadian and a French warship. 

    One of the vessels that did make its way to La Guaira, Caracas’s “gateway” since before 1580, is the Federation’s Admiral Gorshkov. The ship is named after Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, the commander in chief of the Soviet navy from 1956-85. Symbolically, Gorkshov is the man credited for transforming the Soviet Union’s coastal fleet into a global one — “The man who challenged the US Navy,” as researchers at the US’s Naval War College now remember him. In early 2020, the ship test-launched the maneuvering 3M22 Zircon, a hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile, from the Barents Sea. 

    Kazan and Gorkshov are among the most advanced ships Russia operates, built in 2017 and 2018 respectively. In parading them in the Caribbean, the message is clear: “We can cause harm, too.”

    Joseph Humire, an expert in hemispheric trans-regional threat networks leading the Center for a Secure Free Society, warns The Spectator not to see “Russia’s latest deployment as just a response to whatever armament the United States recently sent to Ukraine.”

    “The preparation for these ships to come to Latin America, specifically Cuba and Venezuela, began before any of the most recent shipments into Ukraine were even approved,” Humire said. “Putin and his propaganda machine will play up this narrative — but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the case.”

    “The US’s defensive and political countermeasures to dissuade the ships [when they were first arriving in Havana] from continuing this voyage didn’t work,” Humire added. He argues that the US’s deterrence wasn’t strong enough, though, “they did send a double-message: publicly not raising the alarm and privately mitigating the dangers.”

    Like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicolás Maduro are quite fond of Vladimir Putin. Maduro has called him his “big brother,” following his most recent electoral win, and Díaz-Canel visited him in Russia last month. 

    Thousands of condemnations have been delivered against  “the Yankee empire” by these leaders. The visits, the statements and, to some degree, the exercises themselves are nothing new. What’s concerning is the pace and the reasoning.

    For Humire, the fact that the ships arrived to La Guaira the day before Nicolás Maduro began his renewed negotiations with the US is not a coincidence: “They are building leverage… The reality is that this leverage has more to do with [Venezuela’s] conquest strategy — including Guyana — and less to do with free elections.” While Humire acknowledges the logic for why to see this as yet another Russian show of force, he thinks that properly assessing Maduro’s actions is necessary, criticizing a “permissive” Biden administration that refuses to “penalize” a deal-breaking Venezuelan government.

    On a broader note, it is important to assess both the particularities and the high strategy at play here.

    In 2022, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega signed a decree giving Russia permission to establish military bases in the Central American country. That same year, Honduras went from calling for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine to abstaining; El Salvador didn’t show up to vote for the UN resolution. In 2018, the Russian military released a plan to deploy supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bombers in Venezuela’s La Orchila island — Russia’s largest presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 2017, Bolivia and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding for defense cooperation.

    The list goes on. 

    Russia, and Iran and China for that matter, increasingly look at Latin America as a crucial piece of their geostrategic puzzle. In reminding the US that their so-called backyard is in disarray, adversaries hope to elicit fear — and restraint. How the US ought to respond is a difficult question. What’s for certain, however, is that the US must openly communicate, if not formulate, its regional agenda. Latin America is a priority, whether Washington knows it or not. A lack of strategic prudence globally, deprioritizing its neighborhood, will come back to bite.