Cuba 60+ Years After the Cuban Missile Crisis - Travel & History Contextualised
- Languages on a Plate
- 13 hours ago
- 18 min read
I went to Cuba in 2016, in that strange moment when it felt as though the island’s political standoff with the outside world might finally be loosening its grip. It was a trip that left me with mixed impressions. In the lead-up to it, I was excited to go somewhere that felt like a time capsule. It was also my first return to Latin America since my university year abroad in 2014, and I was curious to see a country that had been held in place by geopolitics while the majority of the rest of the world accelerated into homogeneity.
Nearly a decade on, my trip to Cuba still stands out in my mind because I've never really resolved how I felt about it. I met warm, generous people; I felt immersed in its layered history; and I walked through beautiful (and sometimes decaying) streets not yet strangled by global (or rather, American) branding. While at the same time, I had first-hand experience of corruption and saw how decades of embargo, counter-policy, and scarcity had shaped daily life for ordinary Cubans. Strangely, it is not a holiday I look back on with fond nostalgia, but it is one I return to constantly in conversation. It was formative for me, partly because I went somewhere less obvious than the usual, but also because I was forced to hold contradictions rather than come to concrete conclusions about what I thought about the country.
So, without further preamble, in this blog post I want to revisit that 2016 trip and connect it to the wider story of the bloqueo, the seemingly ever-changing US migration policy, and the Cuban diaspora in other parts of the world. I chose to write it now because Cuba has been catapulted back into the headlines amid renewed embargo tensions and US pressure in the region. It's also worth noting from the outset that when Cuba is debated, it is rarely people on the island who shape the narrative. More often than not, it is the diaspora, particularly those in the United States, who drive the conversation. Many of whom left during, or soon after the Revolution, others left in later economic crises, and their memories and loyalties understandably colour how Cuba is discussed. So while I will try to be as balanced as possible when bringing in historical context, I am not speaking on behalf of Cubans themselves, I am simply trying to place what I saw within that wider historical context.
We see this dynamic play out constantly in public debate. The current American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whose parents left Cuba before Fidel Castro seized power, remains one of the most prominent advocates of a hardline stance towards Havana, and his position carries weight both diplomatically and domestically. At the same time, even a relatively measured statement from Cuban-born singer Camila Cabello the other week, made against the backdrop of the current humanitarian strain, was enough to reignite arguments online about who has the legitimacy to comment on Cuba at all.
Anyway, back to my trip nearly ten years ago.
In 2016, then-President, Barack Obama had reopened diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba. Even Airbnb had just been allowed in Cuba, Americans expected to travel more freely in the near future, and there was a quiet optimism in Havana that the world was about to rush back in. My then-partner and I also naively assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the US presidential election that November and that Washington would continue the process of opening up to Cuba. I remember joking that I wanted to see the country before the “Yanks” made it their playground again. And that was precisely why we chose to go then. It felt like a closing window to see the country before it changed too much.
Bienvenidos a Cuba: The Car, The Guns, The Reality
When my ex and I landed in Havana, we waited hours at the airport to collect our rental car. Armed guards stood around the terminal. Eventually, instead of the Peugeot we had booked, we were handed a Geely. Having never heard of it before, we looked it up online and laughed when we found out it had a terrible safety reputation and was not allowed in the EU, the USA, or Canada at the time. We could have argued and waited to potentially get the Peugeot that we'd booked, but after a long journey already and an ominous atmosphere due to an alarming volume of uniformed men with rifles, we took the keys. It was obvious that this was the only option available if we wanted to get moving before it got dark.
When we finally left José Martí Airport, the drive itself gave us the first real glimpse of how Cuba’s isolation shows up in everyday life. As we headed north towards Viñales, the motorway felt strangely vacant. The road was almost completely empty. No lorries hauling goods, no steady flow of traffic, barely another car in sight for long stretches. Just kilometres of tarmac running through open countryside beneath an enormous sky.
By the time we reached Viñales, frustratingly, it was already dark. There were minimal streetlights, almost no signage, but somehow we miraculously navigated our way to the Airbnb via a satellite phone call to our host. We were greeted by a brood of clucking hens and a kind man who took us to our simple lodgings (that we couldn't really see due to the sheer darkness of the sky). When I woke up the next morning and pulled back the shower curtains that were being used as curtains, I was confronted by one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen: tobacco fields stretching towards limestone mogotes that rose out of the landscape (see pictures below).
Viñales was probably my personal highlight of the trip as I was rather mesmerised by its beauty, but it's also a place that gives you pretty good insight about the economic history of the island. In Viñales, farmers still cultivate tobacco largely by hand, and the cigar industry captures one of Cuba’s enduring ironies. It produces a luxury product with global prestige, strongly tied to the island’s identity, and exactly the sort of commodity American consumers have long coveted. Yet for decades, the largest nearby market was politically closed, so the industry has grown in a distorted manner, with prestige and scarcity in the USA on one side and the everyday shortages the Cubans experience on the other.
While we were exploring the area around Viñales, we also visited Cueva del Indio, a cave system where, we were told, enslaved Africans once hid after escaping nearby plantations. Cuba’s sugar and tobacco wealth had depended heavily on enslaved labour, and slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886, making it one of the last societies in the Americas to end the institution formally. Standing inside that cave system, it struck me how recent that history actually is. Slavery on the island ended only seventy-three years before the 1959 Revolution. It contextualised something for me: the Revolution unfolded in a society still marked by plantation hierarchies, racial divisions and concentrated land ownership, structures many Cubans had grown up around. With that in mind, the scale of the political rupture in 1959 starts to make more sense. Many of the people involved in the Revolution would have had grandparents who had lived through that system, and the inequalities it created would not have disappeared overnight after abolition.
The Road to Playa Girón: Corruption and Fear
The uneasy atmosphere I had felt at José Martí Airport became tangible on the road to Playa Girón. And all because of my (then) fear of driving and a simple bureaucratic decision. In Cuba, rental cars carry number plates beginning with a “T”, making tourists immediately identifiable in a country where private car ownership is limited. The logic is practical: it allows police to quickly check whether a vehicle is being used by a tourist legally, or whether it's been stolen.
Anyway, to my dismay, halfway along the empty motorway, an officer coyly stepped into the road and signalled for me to pull over. I slowed and stopped a few metres past him rather than directly beside him. He approached and told me I hadn't stopped quickly enough, although to be perfectly honest, I wasn't even sure if he was signalling for us to pull over. He told us calmly, presumably to avoid being overheard by the other officers: either accompany him to the station to process the offence, or pay him a $100 fine immediately and get on with our day.
Trying to come across as calm, but panicking inside, we handed over $100 (which we didn't really have). We didn't want to waste time and risk escalating a nothing situation in a country that we didn't understand, and one that had a bit of a reputation for police corruption. In hindsight, I sometimes wonder if that situation would have turned out differently, for the better, had I played the dumb tourist and pretended I didn't speak Spanish. Or if I hadn't even pulled over given the ambiguity of his symbol.
When we later reached our homestay in Playa Girón and explained what had happened, our hosts were indignant. They insisted we had done nothing wrong and that the officer had exploited the situation. They were furious and told us that we should have gone to the police station in town and reported it. We didn't, but the more I reflected on it, the more it seemed less like a dramatic brush with danger and more like a small example of how leverage works in constrained systems. $100 was a lot of money to me in my post-graduate economic lull, but in Cuba, it represented a substantial sum for the police officer, and sadly our situation could have encouraged later similar ones with other tourists.
Playa Girón and the Bay of Pigs: It Still Shapes Cuba’s Psychology
After thoroughly talking through the roadside incident with our hosts, we went out to explore Playa Girón, on the Bahía de Cochinos, (the Bay of Pigs), somewhere I had wanted to visit, ever since studying it in GCSE History. Interestingly, there is a distinction between the wider Bahía de Cochinos and Playa Girón itself. The bay is the broader inlet along Cuba’s southern coast, whereas Playa Girón is one of the specific landing sites where the invasion unfolded.
For anyone less familiar with Cold War history, Playa Girón is known for what happened there in April 1961, when around 1,400 Cuban exiles landed on the stretch of coastline in a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Most of them had left Cuba after the 1959 Revolution toppled Fulgencio Batista and began rapidly restructuring Cuba’s political and economic order. Land was expropriated, US-owned companies were nationalised, banks and utilities were brought under state control, and opponents were sidelined or imprisoned. The US-backed invasion at Playa Girón was an attempt to reverse a revolution that had moved quickly and decisively.
To understand who those exiles were, we have to look at Batista’s Cuba. After seizing power in a 1952 coup, Batista ruled through a mixture of patronage networks, censorship and repression, while maintaining close ties with US business interests in sugar, tourism and gambling. Although Havana in the 1950s projected an image of glamour and prosperity, deep inequalities and rural hardship persisted, tied to concentrated land ownership and the seasonal nature of the sugar economy. When Castro dismantled that system through nationalisation and political restructuring, those most directly connected to the previous order were among the first to leave, often heading for the US. Their return at the Bay of Pigs was an attempt to reverse the Revolution and reclaim control over Cuba’s political and economic future.
The US assumed the landing would ignite a popular uprising against Castro. Instead, Cuban forces defeated the brigade within three days. Although the United States denied direct responsibility, the operation was widely understood as US-backed and proved deeply embarrassing for the Kennedy Administration. In Cuba, the victory became embedded in revolutionary identity as evidence that sovereignty could be defended against a superpower. Internationally, the failure pushed Havana decisively towards the Soviet Union and directly intensified the confrontation that would culminate in the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.
Given what had unfolded there in 1961, arriving in Playa Girón felt slightly surreal. We pulled into the town and walked along a shoreline thick with sea urchins and lined by heavy defensive remnants jutting out into the water. The town itself felt quiet and almost sleepy, the kind of place you might pass through without realising its history if it weren't for the military aircraft displayed outside the small museum. We did manage a brief sunbathe on the beach, although the crumbling concrete and scattered defensive structures made it hard to forget where we were.
The following day we went scuba diving nearby and, to my surprise, it was one of the most tightly regulated dives I have experienced, fully compliant with (ironically, American) PADI standards. Beneath the surface, the water was remarkably clear, and the remains of boats and aircraft lay scattered across the seabed, now colonised by dense marine life. Fish moved through twisted metal and broken fuselages that once belonged to the invasion force. It was beautiful and unsettling at once, a Cold War battlefield reclaimed by nature.
Cienfuegos and Trinidad: Sugar Wealth, Crumbling Grandeur and a Time Capsule
After Playa Girón we drove down to Cienfuegos, and I loved it immediately. The symmetry of the streets, the pastel façades and the open sweep of the bay give it a different atmosphere to much of Cuba. Founded in 1819 by settlers of French origin, the city grew prosperous through sugar exports and maritime trade, which helps explain the neoclassical buildings that still dominate the centre. It felt orderly, almost refined, although parts of the downtown streets still showed the familiar Cuban pattern of peeling plaster and slow decay. Like much of the island, the elegance and the deterioration sit side by side. The wealth that produced that refinement came from the same plantation economy that fuelled much of Cuba's nineteenth-century prosperity.
What genuinely caught me off guard in Cienfuegos was the yacht club. A white building topped with green domes sat grandly beside the water (see below), looking far more polished than pretty much anything else in the country. The surprise was the mere fact that a place like this existed so comfortably in a country most people associate with embargo, shortages and economic isolation. Seeing the club there, complete with tennis courts and a swimming pool, felt odd. It was yet another reminder that Cuba has always contained layers of access and privilege. Even in a system that officially prides itself on equality, some spaces have clearly remained more exclusive than others.
After Cienfuegos we continued south to Trinidad, and the shift in atmosphere was immediate. If Cienfuegos felt elegant, even if perhaps a little down on its luck, Trinidad felt like stepping back through time. Cobbled streets rattled under our poor Geely’s tyres, horses pulled wooden carts through the centre, and pastel mansions with wrought-iron balconies and shaded verandas lined the squares in the centre. Like Cienfuegos, the wealth that built these houses came from the sugar boom that once made this region one of the richest in Cuba.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the valley became one of the most productive sugar regions in the Caribbean, worked by thousands of enslaved Africans. When sugar production declined, Trinidad’s economy stagnated and large-scale redevelopment never followed. That economic stagnation is largely what preserved the colonial architecture that survives today. In 1988, UNESCO recognised this and declared the city a World Heritage Site.
That preserved history also came with a noticeable lack of modern infrastructure. On our first evening in Trinidad our hotel lost power, which by then did not feel unexpected. Without electricity the whole town slipped into torchlight. What did catch me off guard was turning on the TV after the power flickered back on and finding American channels bleeding through the satellite signal. The most surreal moment was when a US pharmaceutical advert appeared, complete with its breathless list of side effects and the familiar insistence that you “ask your doctor” to avoid any lawsuits. From a European perspective, it was hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it. Watching the famously over-medicalised American healthcare industry advertised in a country under embargo by that same state felt almost satirical.
From Trinidad we passed through the Escambray mountains, stopping at Poceta de los Enamorados, a small natural pool hidden in the hills, before continuing on to Cayo Coco and Cayo Santa María for a few days of r&r on some of the best Caribbean beaches I have ever seen. We deliberately chose to visit the cayos instead of heading to the better-known resort, Varadero. The hotels there are dominated by large Soviet-era blocks, whereas the resorts on the cayos were built further back from the beaches and felt far less intrusive. In that respect it proved to be the right decision as they were invisible from the beach, which added a sense of tranquility.
And then, finally, after the Cayos, we drove towards Havana, our last port-of-call.
La Habana: Two Currencies, Two Realities, and the Hotel Nacional
By the time we reached Havana, our poor Geely was very much on its last legs. We had to jump-start it twice once we were inside the city, and by some miracle we did not get charged extra when we eventually returned it in that state (albeit through no fault of our own). Despite the well-meaning help from locals to get us going again, compared to everything we had experienced up to that point, Havana felt overwhelming. There was an undeniable energy about the capital, which at times was intense, especially when we felt like walking dollar signs.
Part of the overwhelming feeling came from how much Havana throws at you at once. Grand buildings crumble beside small bars. Elegant façades sit next to cracked pavements and improvised repairs. Spanish colonial buildings stand alongside Soviet-era architecture, and in places you come across military traces embedded into older structures.
One building stood out above almost everything else, with the possible exception of the Capitolio itself: the Hotel Nacional. Set above the Malecón, Havana’s seafront, it condenses an enormous amount of Cuban history into one place. In the 1950s, during the Batista period, it hosted Hollywood stars, wealthy American gamblers and mafia figures, back when Havana served as a sort of playground for US money and organised crime.
After the Revolution, the hotel was absorbed into the state’s own narrative about Cuban identity. Then, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the grounds were used as part of defensive preparations, with weapons installed. Ironically, a building once so associated with American glamour and excess later found itself at the heart of one of the most serious confrontations with the United States.
When we visited the Hotel Nacional, we were more interested in its earlier Batista era, as we'd read some incredible stories about some of the guess. However, to our amusement, our guide had other priorities. She was gloriously eccentric and far more animated when talking about the hotel’s more recent guests. She kept pointing out that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Hugo Chávez had all stayed there, as if to underline that the place still mattered for foreign dignitaries and celebrities.
Looking out over Havana from the hotel, it was difficult not to think about how quickly the city could change if restrictions were lifted. You could easily imagine the buildings being restored, the streets filling with tourists, and the waterfront redeveloped. But you could also see how quickly that would shift the balance of the city. The same networks of money and influence that had once shaped Havana could return just as quickly, backed by American capital and diaspora wealth, and reshape large parts of the city almost overnight.
Havana was also where the then two-currency system became impossible to ignore. For most of the trip we had pre-paid accommodation and kept spending relatively limited. In Havana, we were on our own in a big city, dealing directly with restaurants, bars and day-to-day costs. Back in 2016, Cuba still operated with two currencies: the Cuban peso, or CUP, used mainly by locals, and the convertible peso, or CUC, used in tourist transactions and roughly pegged to the US dollar. In practice, it created two overlapping economies. (The CUC was officially phased out between 2020 and 2021.)
Up to that point, the difference between the two currencies had been there but manageable. In Havana, it became much harder to ignore. Some places simply charged a marginal bit more in CUC, but others pushed the gap much further. The clearest example was at Coppelia, Havana’s famous ice cream parlour. There was a long queue of locals paying in pesos and a much shorter queue for foreigners paying in convertible currency. It was the same ice cream in the same building, but effectively at two different prices. Later that day we stopped at a small local bakery and found none of those distinctions. Everyone paid the same. That contrast stuck with me.
The Embargo and the Legacy of the Missile Crisis
The embargo, or bloqueo, is omnipresent in Havana’s mindset. Navigating the roads in and around the capital, you start to notice the messaging everywhere. Not tucked away, but brazenly lining main routes and central junctions. Large murals and billboards denouncing the bloqueo, some of them explicitly calling it genocidio.
It was striking how direct it was. There was no attempt to soften the language or make it abstract. And given what we have seen even recently, with energy shortages feeding into prolonged power cuts and reports of hospitals struggling as a result, you can at least understand why that framing resonates inside Cuba, even if it is politically loaded. People have died during the current energy crisis, which has prompted countries such as Spain and Mexico to stepped in with support, including oil shipments and solar panel infrastructure (albeit after a bit of hesitation).
So while we had seen the remains of invasion in Playa Girón and the defensive history around the Hotel Nacional in Havana, the embargo is the part of that story that still shapes everyday life in the country.
The restrictions began in 1960 after the Revolutionary Government nationalised major US-owned businesses and property, much of which had developed under Batista’s rule, when American investment, tourism and organised crime were deeply embedded in the Cuban economy. In 1962, as tensions escalated into what became the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy formalised a full trade embargo. Over time, that policy expanded into something far broader than a simple trade ban, reaching into banking, shipping, insurance, investment and international trade. This is why Cubans refer to it as el bloqueo rather than simply an embargo.
In practice, it severely restricts US individuals and companies from doing business with Cuba, with only narrow exceptions that have shifted slightly over time but never fundamentally changed the overall system. The knock-on effect is wider than just the US. Because global finance runs through American institutions, even non-US firms tend to avoid Cuban transactions, which leaves the country cut off from large parts of the global economy, including access to technology and infrastructure.
One of the most significant developments for Cuba-US relations came with the Helms-Burton Act in 1996. The law effectively locked the embargo into US legislation, limiting how easily a future president could dismantle it without Congress, and it extended the pressure outward by allowing American citizens to sue foreign companies accused of using property confiscated after the Revolution. In practical terms, it warned international firms that even indirect involvement in Cuba could carry legal or financial risk. It is also one of the reasons why the Obama Administration’s attempts to thaw relations moved more slowly than many expected.
Migration: Ley de Ajuste Cubano and “Wet Foot, Dry Foot”
Migration became another part of the story of the Cuban bloqueo.
The Cuban Adjustment Act, or Ley de Ajuste Cubano, passed in the US in 1966, meant that any Cuban who made it onto US soil could apply for permanent residency after just a year. Later, the “wet foot, dry foot” policy made it even clearer. If you were picked up at sea, you were sent back to Cuba. If you made it onto land, you stayed. In Spanish, it's called "la ley de los pies mojados y pies secos".
For decades, Cubans were treated differently to pretty much every other Latin American group trying to migrate to the US as it suited the politics. Taking in Cubans helped reinforce the idea that people were leaving the island, and by extension, leaving communism. That policy ended in 2017, and from that point Cuban migration was pulled into the same wider politics of the US border and Latinx people.
You see the impact of Cuban immigration in the US most clearly in places like Miami. When I passed through in 2023, there were regular flights to Havana, many filled with Cuban Americans visiting family. This completely surprised me. I had assumed, especially after the Trump-era tightening, that travel between the US and Cuba was far more restricted than that. But those routes never really stopped. Cuban-Americans, rather than ordinary Americans, have long been allowed to return for family visits, and even now they make up a large part of that traffic. Alongside them are Americans travelling under specific categories rather than straightforward tourism, things like family visits, education, or the loosely defined “support for the Cuban people”.
It also puts some of the politics into context. From the outside, you might expect the Cuban diaspora in the US to align more closely with other Latin American communities in major cities. In reality, it is much more mixed. Some families left because of repression or economic hardship. Others left after losing businesses, land, or status following the Revolution. Those are very different starting points. If your family story is tied up with losing everything in 1959, your view of Cuba is likely to be very different from someone whose family left later with far less to lose. Both sit under the same label as Cuban-Americans, but they come from very different worlds.
How Franco Shaped Cuba? Spain, Zapatero and a Two-Tier Society - Again
Some of the most important changes affecting mobility in modern Cuba did not come from the United States, but from Spain.
In 2007, under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain passed the Ley de Memoria Histórica. Among other things, it allowed descendants of those who had left Spain during the Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship to reclaim Spanish nationality. In Cuba, where many families have Spanish ancestry, the impact was significant.
It created a quiet dividing line. Some Cubans, often through grandparents or great-grandparents, could obtain an EU passport, and with it access to travel, banking, and the wider global economy in a way most people on the island simply could not.
When we were in Cuba, we could see what that meant in practice. Our Airbnb hosts in Havana had acquired Spanish passports through this route. They could move money, travel more freely, and crucially, they could access foreign income streams. That is what allowed them to buy and rent out property in a way that most Cubans could not.
The law was meant for descendants of Spanish exiles from the Civil War and Franco period, but in practice it was applied much more broadly. Many Cuban families with Spanish ancestry, often going back generations, were able to qualify even if their relatives had originally come to Cuba for economic reasons rather than political exile.
A Brief Thought on the Future
Nearly a decade on, despite my mixed impressions at the time, I would like to go back.
Partly to see how much has changed, and partly because it feels like the country is still in a kind of holding pattern. It is hard to shake the sense that at some point Cuba will open up more fully to the United States. When that happens, it will likely happen quickly. If I go back, I would want to see it before that shift really takes hold.
I just hope that when it does happen, it happens on terms that feel fair to Cuba itself. With the current political climate just 30 miles to the north, there is always the risk that economic opportunity turns into something more extractive, where outside interests move in quickly and local control is pushed aside, even from the diaspora.
