million slaves rose up to kill their masters and ask the West, in 1791, if human rights applied to black people, too. The triumph of Haiti’s “Black Jacobins” birthed modern politics. The Haitian Revolution, contended its great chronicler C. L. R. James, also shaped the emergence of a new Caribbean civilization. That civilization spanned the French and English and Spanish islands alike, and its members—C. L. R. James included: he was born in the English crown colony of Trinidad in 1901—were destined to have a unique role in world history over the span of time implied by the title of James’s seminal essay, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” His arguments, in that piece, shaped my approach for a region whose plurality of islands—including Trinidad—won self-rule in the years after World War II.
The Caribbean’s uniquely modern societies were built by people who moved vast distances, centuries ago, to toil at industry; who lived in societies shaped by global trade and cultural mixing from the start; who were forced, long before the subject nations of Africa and Asia became part of Europe’s empires, to learn Europe’s languages and make them new. Among the hundred-odd erstwhile colonies, worldwide, reborn as nations in the postwar era, the peoples of the Caribbean were “the most highly experienced in the ways of Western civilization,” wrote C. L. R. James in 1963, “and most receptive to its requirements in the twentieth century.” They were the best placed among all the world’s once-colonized people, in other words, to shape culture everywhere in our era.
In Island People, I traversed the region to explore how and why they’ve done just that. I immersed myself, in Jamaica, in the story of how the reggae legend Bob Marley became “the first third-world superstar.” I explored the life and legacies, in Martinique, of the philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose ideas about violence and freedom became gospel for would-be revolutionaries around the globe. I explored how, in recent decades, several brilliant writers from the region—from Jean Rhys to Jamaica Kincaid to V. S. Naipaul—became leading figures in the world republic of letters by visiting the “small places” they’re from. I traced the current politics and deeper histories of Puerto Rico and Dominica and the Dominican Republic. I also explored how the rhythms of daily life on these nations have fed musical idioms—from reggae to hip-hop to salsa to zouk—to which people far beyond them now move. But nowhere did I spend more time doing so, or writing the book those explorations became, than in the atmospheric city of Havana, which has been the Caribbean’s de facto capital since colonial days—and whose island’s role in the larger story of the Americas, since long before Fidel Castro turned up, has always been outsized.
The greatest of the Greater Antilles drapes across the region’s northern rim, fully eight hundred miles in length: Cuba’s sheer size has always shaped its self-image, for devotees who love debating the meaning and contents of cubanidad (Cuban-ness), as a singular land. Cuba is a bridge between the United States and the lands and peoples to its south that also functioned, for centuries, as an essential node in Spain’s New World empire: it was in Havana’s harbor that Castile’s treasure fleet convened to bring the Americas’ gold back to Seville. As that empire declined and a new power rose, Cuba was gazed at longingly by U.S. presidents and treated, by occupying yanqui soldiers and rum-swilling fun-seekers alike, as a plaything with which to do what they wished.
But then in 1959, Fidel Castro’s barbudos seized Havana. Cuba took on new roles—as the unofficial capital not merely of the Caribbean but of the Nonaligned Third World during the Cold War; as putative threat, in the same era, to U.S. dominance of Latin America (and rather more serious threat to the world for some tense weeks in 1961, after Castro welcomed Khrushchev’s nukes); and as a kind of historic curio, decades later and after the Soviet bloc’s fall, as a still-communist state that Americans, in the 1990s, were still banned from visiting.
When I first landed in Havana late in that decade, with the help of a travel agent in Toronto practiced at helping determined Yanks outflank the U.S. bloqueo, I was a young student fascinated by the island’s history and its music. But I quickly grew just as enamored with simply being there—with walking Havana’s streets. All revolutions frame themselves as radical breaks from the past. Cuba’s was no different. After Fidel’s shaggy comrades seized power from the corrupt Fulgencio Batista and then began seizing the property of foreign mobsters and local grandees, they spoke in the ’60s of building a new society—a socialist one, rational and just, that would banish old superstitions and create what Che Guevara called “the New Man.” By the time I turned up, four decades of socialism had certainly changed a city filled with peaceful blocks dotted by schools whose devoted teachers taught all its citizens to read—but where those citizens lived in disintegrating homes and had few opportunities for advancement once they graduated from those schools and unless they worked for the state. Such were the changes. But just as palpable, on those jangling streets, were the many aspects of life which one sensed hadn’t changed at all since 1959—and not merely because of the ’57 Buicks rumbling down them.
The unique Caribeño Spanish that people spoke, tuneful and loud and full of only-in-Cuba slang; the complex and eloquent rhythms they played on drums brought here from Congo and Calabar but made, in Havana, to speak a new rumba-tinged language in conversation with instruments from many lands; the all-white clothes and colorful beads sported by devotees of the Yoruba-cum-Catholic gods of Santeria, the faith of many Cubans with brown and light skin alike. Such “superstitions” and habits remained at least as important to life here, it was plain, as any of the ideas of Karl Marx—or of a revolution that had long ago abandoned its idea of the “New Man” and slouched, all too human, into a stolid middle age.
As I returned again and again, increasingly as a journalist covering changes underway in a revolution its leaders insisted was ongoing, I grew only more entranced by the traditions and innovations shaping a culture that has always been, as the island’s foremost scholar of cubanidad, Fernando Ortiz, put it, “creative, dynamic, and social.” And I grew ever more determined to understand, from Cuban experts like Ortiz and my own experience alike, the varied wellsprings feeding the culture that continued, even and especially amidst the political tumult of recent decades, to shape Cuban life.
The first three chapters in this ebook, taken from Island People, represent that determination’s results. The last, covering what’s happened in the two years since Island People appeared, is new. It’s an edited version of an essay I recently published in The New York Review of Books on a period that’s been nothing if not eventful. With Fidel’s death followed, eighteen months later, by his brother’s handing-off of power to a handpicked party apparatchik, Cuba is now being led by a man not named Castro for the first time in six decades. As Miguel Díaz-Canel directs new constitutional reforms with Rául’s backing and that of the army, Cuba’s politics have been further roiled by a new decline in relations with the United States. This decline, prompted by the mendacious policies of Donald Trump, has been worsened by a bizarre diplomatic kerfuffle in Havana involving a mysterious “sonic weapon” rather scarier than the drums with which Cuba’s congueros still slay dancers. Alleged attacks on U.S. diplomats, using this weapon or agents unknown, caused a range of ailments among officers and staff at the U.S. embassy in Havana—and saw the embassy all but shuttered by the end of Trump’s first year in office, as Cuba recalled most of its own diplomats from Washington D.C.
My reporting on the current situation, together with the foregoing chapters on the decades and centuries leading to now, is intended for anyone, whether a first-time visitor or already intimate, interested in Cuba and how it got that way—and in where the island may be headed now that Fidel’s revolution has not only survived his death but passed through the other side. There’s an old saying: one writes the books that one wants to read. This one contains much of what I wanted to know when I first arrived to Havana and what I’ve learned since about an island that remains—for all its old challenges and current uncertainties alike—my favorite place to spend time, and to listen to, on Earth.
J. J. S.
