Cuba / Useful Notes

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As someone once said, that long, sad, unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.

— G. Cabrera Infante, View of Dawn in the Tropics

Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba (Spanish: República de Cuba), is the largest and second most populated country in The Caribbean, as well as the sixth most populated country in the continent of North America, after The United States, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, and Haiti. A land where the music is good, the drink flows freely (at least where the tourists are) and the tourists come for both. Oh, and it's famous for its cigars and Communism.

A brief history of Cuba: Cuba was an island in the Caribbean inhabited by the native Tainos, before the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century and colonized the place. The Tainos who weren't killed off through disease were assimilated into the colonist population. The Spanish colonists brought in African (mostly Yoruba, although they were from many different parts of Africa) slaves to operate plantations and such.

Eventually, the Spanish colonists became upset with Spain and started to fight a war of liberation, which bled on for decades on and off. It featured some of the most intensive fighting in the history of The Americas, and included the first formal use of Concentration Camps. All of this generally caused a great deal of instability, and made Spain look like it had egg on its face before the United States, flexing its muscles on the world stage, became involved due to popular outrage turning Cuba into a cause célèbre. First unofficially and at a grassroots level, and then Not So Unofficially. After decades of being the Cuban rebels' most popular support base, it entered the war claiming that Spain had attacked the US, following the then-mysterious 1898 explosion and sinking of the USS Maine off the Cuban coast (a 1976 investigation revealed its boiler had exploded accidentally). The war became called the Spanish-American War; the US was victorious and Cuba became "independent".^noteAn American protectorate. During this time a chess player named Capablanca became famous around the world. He went on to become a Chess Master and is now regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

Of course, newly independent Cuba faced several problems, not the least of which being that it was not-so-independent: the establishment of the now-infamous Guantanamo Bay military base was just one of the many strings attached to the country's independence under the terms of something known as the Teller and later Platt Amendments. According to these, the US gave Cuba its nominal independence, though the American shadow continued to hover over Cuba. That sort of went awry when Cubans started asking for a greater voice in government, coupled with diplomacy from Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This status quo remained more or less until the reign of "President"/dictator Fulgencio Batista, who maintained strong ties with the US government and even moreso with "legitimate" US businesses. While the role of The Mafia in pre-Revolutionary Cuba is heavily exaggerated, it was definitely present on both sides of the Florida straits. All of this made it seem like Batista would be able to continue lording it over, like so many other strongmen had before him. But this state of affairs began to change when clamor for reform on the island was coupled with growing US antipathy towards supporting his regime (particularly since he also wanted Guantanamo Bay back). This combination ate away at Batista's support until the 1959 Cuban Revolution, in which Fidel Castro and his left-wing M-26-7 (26th of July Revolutionary Movement) took over the country after waging a fierce six-year guerrilla war against Batista in the jungles and mountains. Although he initially enjoyed high popularity in the US, the Castro regime's socialistic policies rapidly led to a complete breakdown of relations between Cuba and the West.

The resulting "Bay of Pigs" amphibious assault by a troop of Cuban exiles was a Last Stand on par of Thermopylae tactically. Strategically and politically, it was an embarrassing failure. Enough to convince the U.S. establishment to abandon support for anti-Castro insurgents inside Cuba, who were progressively defeated in the bloody but relatively unknown Escambray rebellion. Already drifting closer and closer towards authoritarian socialism, Castro officially became a communist following the Invasion. He also entered an alliance with the Soviet Union, inviting Soviet ground and naval forces in to act as a counterbalance to another attempt, and accepting heavy Soviet economic aid that his country eventually became totally dependent on. Things got hairy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wherein the US learned that the Soviet Union had transferred some missiles to Cuba. After several days of nuclear brinkmanship and frantic diplomacy, the two superpowers avoided all-out war by promising to take out missiles from each other's proxy country (the USSR from Cuba, and the US from Turkey. The negotiations led to a relative thaw in US-USSR relationships. Castro was not present at the talks concerning the crisis, particularly because the Soviets were not sure if they could rely on him or allies like Che Guevara to keep their cool.

From 1966 to 1989 Cuba would aid the Angolan military in its military conflict, first against Portugal, then against an alliance of the rebel group UNITA and Apartheid South Africa in The '60s. Cuba financed a number of revolutionary insurgencies around the world, including the Sandinistas and the South African rebel organizations, such as the African National Congress. They also sent soldiers and other advisors to aid the Arab nations in their attempts to wipe out Israel in both the Yom Kippur War and the earlier War of Attrition. Cuba unsuccessfully attempted to start insurgencies in Bolivia and Venezuela (even sending soldiers to the latter at two separate points). Che Guevara would die in this type of effort in Bolivia, most likely executed to avoid a trial. As a result of these military efforts, Castro's reputation abroad is... mixed. On one hand, he's considered a ruthless, opportunistic tyrant with a thirst for military adventurism that often was uglier than the US or even the Apartheid government cared to stomach. On the other, he is considered by some as one of the founding fathers of Namibia, Angola, and the racially-equal South Africa (to the point where Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro were reported to be close friends). The breakdown of ties between Cuba and the US was cemented when the latter, under Ronald Reagan, added Cuba to its state sponsors of terrorism list in 1982, locking it out of the global banking system, as this meant that any country that traded with Cuba would be threatened with sanctions, as well.

The status quo in Cuba tottered along until the Soviet Union's collapse in the late 1980s. Cuba's enormous social spending and foreign adventurism had only ever been sustainable due to heavy Soviet aid, and they had no real systems in place to account for said aid stopping. This had an immediate and devastating effect on the Cuban economy, since the Soviet Union was both the main commercial partner of Cuba for decades and the source of nearly a quarter of its entire economy via handouts in the form of $4-5 billion in annual subsidies. Cuban GDP contracted by over 25% in less than three years, in a time where the rest of the developing world (including its neighbor, the formerly very poor Dominican Republic) was rapidly getting richer. Like North Korea but unlike many other states from the Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba and the U.S did not normalize relations. The U.S. instead maintained its embargo, hoping that Castro's regime would eventually collapse. In what is known as "the Special Period" (the early 90s), Cuba's economy suffered immensely, with simple necessities like toilet paper and food becoming even harder to find. Cuba started to focus more on tourism, and enough trade was attracted from Europe to slow the descent into the Crapsack World-ness of some of its Caribbean neighbors.

Cuba continues to suffer shortages of every day commodities, a situation not helped by the ongoing US embargo. The embargo was fiercely maintained through every US Presidential Administration for the past fifty years. The Castro government's own refusal to display fiscal responsibility, its failures to utilize the rest of the world market, and its unstinting hostility towards the US, helped maintain the financial crisis. However, Cuba did partly recover from the hell of the 90s, thanks to rolling back some communist policies (for example, 11,600 positions in 32 government ministries were eliminated in 1993, Soviet-style farms were abandoned, and farmers were now legally allowed to sell the surplus from their yield), cutting social spending as a direct result of the latter (the government also raised the rates for public services such as telephone, transportation and electricity), and instituting minor liberal reforms, such as legalizing self-employment, decriminalizing the possession and circulation of foreign exchange, and introducing bonuses based on work performance. This drew Castro heavy internal criticism for having "abandoned the socialist revolution", prompting him to respond that he had not abandoned the goals of socialism, but that Cuba "has to be ready to conduct necessary changes to adapt to present world conditions." However, on a separate occasion, Castro bitterly described his reforms as "concessions to the enemy."

Until his official retirement in 2008, Castro was one of the longest-serving leaders in world history who wasn't a monarch. His brother Raúl took over after his death and he's no young 'un; what will happen after his passing is anyone's guess. So far, Raul's most notable domestic policies involve more liberalization of the Cuban economy, moving further away from the centrally planned economy (which even Fidel admitted in 2010 was not sustainable) it had previously possessed for decades. The heaviest changes occurred in 2011, effectively creating a new Cuban economic system; generally there was a decrease to government intervention and increase to foreign engagement, whether it be making it easy for foreigners to invest or easier for Cubans to travel to foreign countries. He even signed into law a bill creating a Special Economic Zone in the city of Mariel, where one hundred percent foreign ownership is permitted and foreign companies are able to transfer their profits abroad without paying the usual property taxes, sales taxes, or tariffs. In 2021, Raúl announced his retirement, with the position of First Secretary being handed over to the comparatively young Miguel Díaz-Canel, officially ending the Castro dynasty's hold on power.

If you like crumbling Spanish architecture, 1950s cars, lovely beaches uncluttered with stupid tourists, ballet, and the best music Latin America has to offer, modern Cuba is the place to go-unless you're American, in which case, as of December 2014, you were only allowed to go under one of the 12 reasons designated by the US government and with other restrictions such as only being allowed to buy $400 worth of goods (of which only $100 can be tobacco and/or alcohol products). Many of these restrictions and exemptions have been tightened or removed respectively starting in June 2017 (see this Wikivoyage page for more details for Americans wishing to travel to Cuba). All other travel to Cuba by US citizens (such as pure tourism) remain a violation of the embargo and therefore a crime. The US still rigorously maintains its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, where the last remnant of American hold over Cuba is present (it has the island's sole McDonald's!). Technically, the 1903 treaty that stipulated the lease of Guantanamo Bay to Americans is still intact, and the U.S. continues to send monthly checks (currently $4,085) to Cuba. Since Cuba regards the lease as an occupation after the 1959 Revolution, it has refused to deposit every single one of them. (In 2007, Fidel Castro admitted that his government accidentally deposited one check in the confusion after the revolution.)

Also notable is the country's human development (average healthcare, education, nutrition, life expectancy, et. al.) which throughout the last decades has been higher than those of the countries that surround it and Latin America in general. All this despite the crumbling infrastructure, the secret police, the embargo, and the continued repression of free speech and human rights abuses against those elements deemed "counter-revolutionary".

In 2015, there was a thawing of relations with the United States under Barack Obama, amid increasing pressure to end the embargo. The US took Cuba off of its state sponsors of terrorism list, and embassies were established in each other's capitals. However, in 2017, many of these re-engagement policies were rolled back under Donald Trump. The generational issue among Cuban-Americans meant that the decision had mixed reaction; people who fled the Castro regime or whose parents did are generally opposed to engagement, but younger Cuban-Americans tend to see the embargo as reflecting Cold War prejudices and favor full normalization. In the final days of his presidency, Trump also readded Cuba back to the US state sponsors of terrorism list, joining Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

Cuba in fiction

The Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventures novel Cyclops
The Airwolf episode "Mad Over Miami".
The JAG episodes "Smoked", "Florida Straits" and "Camp Delta".
James Bond went there sometimes (although no Bond film was actually made there):
- GoldenEye: The JANUS base is on a small island off the coasts of Cuba. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was used as the base.
- Die Another Day: The Havana scenes were actually filmed at La Caleta, Spain.
- No Time to Die: Bond meets the Badass Adorable CIA agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) in Santiago de Cuba after going there on boat from Jamaica. Actually filmed in Jamaica and at Pinewood Studios.
The movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is set in Cuba on the eve of the revolution.
TAPIOCA!!
Cuba in Hetalia: Axis Powers is a big guy who loathes America but hangs around with Canada.
The Godfather Part II has a number of scenes set in pre-Castro Havana.
- The Godfather had a level set right before Castro's revolution.
Red Zone Cuba
Our Man In Havana, a 1958 novel by Grahame Greene is about a British vacuum cleaner salesman coerced into spying for England shortly before Fidel Castro came to power. It was made into a film starring Alec Guinness.
Juan of the Dead: A Zombie Apocalypse horror/comedy film shot on location in Havana.
A subtle then-and-now gag in the Back to the Future series has the 1955 travel agency advertising "10 Days in Cuba!"
In I Love Lucy, Ricky is Cuban (as was his actor, Desi Arnaz). The series ended two years before Castro came to power. Following the U.S. embargo, the episode "The Ricardos Visit Cuba" was not shown in syndication for several years.
The 1990s revival of Flipper had a two-part episode, "Kidnapped", where Flipper was captured and taken to Cuba, necessitating our U.S. heroes illegally sneaking into the communist country to mount a rescue operation. Incidentally, the commies wanted Flipper as entertainment for a new resort hotel — how surprisingly capitalist of them.
The band Buena Vista Social Club became world famous in 1999 after acclaimed film director Wim Wenders made a documentary film about them. It featured aging musicians still performing well in their seventies and eighties, performing traditional songs. Their album Buena Vista Social Club became an international bestseller.
The Discovery Channel series Cuban Chrome focuses on the old cars and the realities of keeping them running.
The George Lopez Show has Victor Palmero, George's Cuban-American father in law that often expresses his hatred of Castro due to him and his family having to flee the island during The Revolution. The episode Fishing Cubans had him, George, and family friend Ernesto picking up Vic's brother Octavio in the middle of the Florida Straits as it as the only way he could leave Cuba.
I Am Cuba is a famous Soviet propaganda film about life in the late Batista era and how the people of Cuba rose up in revolution.
The original script for Resident Evil: Extinction, then called Afterlife, featured a brief scene of American refugee boats attempting to seek refuge in Cuba but were sunk by the Cuban navy gunboats.
World War Z': Cuba manages to weather the zombie apocalypse better than any nation, along with Tibet and some other isolated countries. After the zombie war, Cuba became a democratic nation after Fidel Castro stepped down in favor of democratic elections. Post-war, Cuba is a first world nation with the Cuban peso taking the role of the U.S. Dollar as the international currency.
The Fate of the Furious opens with Dominic and Letty holidaying in Havana, where the former meets with Cipher. It includes a scene where the main characters have a drag race in the city streets.
Call of Duty: Black Ops: The first mission of the campaign takes place in Havana during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories has Cuban exiles in the city.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist has a mission in Guantanamo Bay.
Driver 2: Havana appears as one of the game's four explorable cities (albeit heavily scaled down so it can fit on a PS1 disc), and was the first non-American city in the series as a whole. As expected, the streets are full of classic '50s automobiles, even the cop cars.
Miami Vice has Sonny visiting Havana.

Cuban Spanish

One of the most notable things about Cubans to non-Cubans is their way of speaking Spanish. The stereotypical Cuban speaks Spanish quickly, slurring words and leaving off word endings. It's pretty similar to Puerto Rican Spanish.

Some characteristics of Cuban Spanish include...

velarization of 'n' (so that pan [pan] becomes [paŋ])
debuccalization of s in syllable coda (so that perros ['peros] becomes ['peroh])
deletion of final intervocalic d (so that acabado [aka'bado] becomes [aca'bao])
doubling consonants when an r is before them (so that parque ['paɾke] becomes ['pakke])
r becoming l in certain situations (so that vivir [bi'biɾ] becomes [bi'bil])

Cubans in rural areas say things like 'comenos' (rather than 'comemos') and 'haiga' (a leftover from 17th century colonial Spanish, as opposed to modern 'haya'), although the latter can be found all throughout Latin America.

Cubans also use different vocabulary, leading to confusion among people who Did Not Do the Bloody Research. For example, 'coger' is a Perfectly Cromulent Word in Cuban Spanish and only means 'to get' as opposed to the more obscene meaning of 'fuck' that it has in most of Spanish America. 'Papaya', however, is slang for vulva and so the Papaya fruit is called 'frutabomba' instead. 'Guagua' meaning bus is pretty well-known; it is also used in the Canary Islands and comes from the beeping sound that buses make. Cuban Spanish has quite a few loanwords from American English, like 'pulover' for shirt, 'chor' for shorts, and (for some people!) 'frigidaire' for refrigerator. Cubans can say 'elevador' (whereas the word is 'ascensor' in many other places), 'keik' and 'pai' (cake and pie). The diminutive for words with a t in the last syllable is formed with 'ico/ica' rather than 'ito/ita' so that 'chiquita' becomes 'chiquitica' rather than 'chiquitita' (and yes, that ABBA song does sound odd).

It's important to note that not all Cubans speak the same way. The phonological changes mentioned above may change depending on the speaker so that some may not say 'pakke' or 'peroh' but keep other features. It varies, and there are different accents within Cuba, too.

Useful Notes / Cuba

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Useful Notes / Cuba

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