What We Talk About When We Talk About Cuba

Sara Kozameh offers a rigorous analysis of cultural production during the Cuban Revolution in conversation with Jennifer L. Lambe’s book “The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba.”

By Sara KozamehNovember 20, 2025

• History

• Politics

CUBANS CALL IT “el bloqueo” (the blockade). In the United States, we know it as “the embargo.” Technically speaking, US economic sanctions against Cuba comprise a set of laws in place since 1962 that prevent most avenues for trade between the two nations. However one refers to it, it is the longest trade embargo in modern history, and arguably one of the harshest. The measure was passed by President John F. Kennedy two years after the culmination of the Cuban Revolution, when armed insurgents toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushered in an era of leftist radicalism and social transformation. Upon taking power in 1959, the insurgents’ leader, Fidel Castro, swiftly nationalized the land and assets of US nationals and companies across the island. Vastly underestimating the popularity of Castro and his movement, the US government responded with the sanctions and their explicit goal to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow” of the regime.

While a trade embargo implies legal constraints on bilateral economic trade, the term blockade carries a heavier connotation. It implies warfare and isolation and recalls bygone eras of naval fleets barricading enemy ports, their sheer presence obstructing the possibility of movement or action by the besieged. The United States has not mounted a physical “naval quarantine” against Cuba since the tense days of the 1962 Missile Crisis, when Soviet missiles were discovered on the island. Yet the blockade-embargo lexical battle persists, with the Cuban government tirelessly insisting that US sanctions constitute economic warfare.

How should we make sense of the figurative gulf separating these two perspectives? For those of us who do research on and in Cuba, it can often appear that the two sides of the Florida Straits inhabit different worlds, with signifiers, meanings, and belief systems that don’t easily translate across. It is this discursive and often irreconcilable interpretive terrain that Jennifer L. Lambe’s recent study, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (2024), sets out to interrogate.

When the revolution that shook US-Cuba relations took hold, it broke existing structures of US and local elite power on the island. The question of foreign control over Cuba was paramount. A combined legacy of Spanish colonization, centuries of chattel slavery, and Cuba’s rise as a leading exporter of sugar left the island dependent on the sugar industry. By 1860, while still a Spanish colony, Cuba produced a third of the world’s crop. To the dismay of Cuban nationalists, the US military took power in Cuba following its 1898 independence from Spain, and although it did become an independent republic in 1902, Cuba functioned as a US protectorate for 30 more years. US politicians who expected to formally annex the island had to settle for economic power, occasionally deferring to on-and-off military occupation. By 1958, US businesses controlled more than half of Cuba’s sugar crop and 40 percent of its arable land, as well as its electricity, telephone networks, and other public utilities. When Cuba’s revolutionaries nationalized foreign-owned companies and landholdings the following year, they stripped the United States of its vast power over the island.

A deep process of political polarization followed as Cubans seeking long-awaited control over their economy turned toward socialism, a pivot that quickly merged with the overarching Cold War bipolar conflict. As the United States severed diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba, the island grew closer to the Soviets. That political juncture birthed a particular flow of information about Cuba in the US, mediated by the broader geopolitical questions at stake, and in which virtually all knowledge produced about the island was read as either support for or opposition to the revolutionary government. As travel between the two countries collapsed and the CIA undertook more covert operations to overthrow Castro, much of what could have been knowable in the United States about the Cuban Revolution quickly became unknowable.

Lambe addresses the thorny history of US-Cuba relations and the limits to knowledge that entrenched enmity has caused. The book explores the history of the 1960s and 1970s, examining how fields of knowledge about Cuba were produced—the discourses, policies, and scholarship that emerged from the revolutionary process and Washington’s reaction to it. The goal is to reveal the deep politicization behind our own understandings of Cuba: the use of radio for political ends by both governments, the role of television, the implications of travel restrictions for Cubans and US citizens, and the many fascinating representations of Cuba in academia and popular culture. The book covers familiar terrain for people already devoted to understanding the Cuban Revolution and seeking granular detail. Though it is not an easy starting point for those newer to the history of Cuba, it approaches well-known episodes with ample new perspective.

The 1960s were a moment of lively revolutionary experimentation in Cuba, characterized by active participation and youth protagonism. That dynamism waned in the 1970s, as Cuba reluctantly embraced the Soviet Union and its many possible paths converged into Cuba’s current one-party communist system. Both processes are rarely understood in the United States. While the book’s earlier chapters convey this dynamism, the final chapters, focused on music and popular culture, appear to fall into the very epistemological trap that Lambe is attempting to interrogate, privileging US concerns on the question of culture.

Readers familiar with the 1960s literature on the Cuban Revolution will enjoy the chapter delving into the world of international experts. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, René Dumont, C. Wright Mills, Oscar Lewis, and K. S. Karol, among many others, traveled to Cuba to discover and disseminate “truths” about the revolution. Lambe summons universal concern over the question of objectivity—is our understanding of “objectivity” itself objective at all? The historical deployment of the term is laden with political weaponization, as she points out. Some US-based “revolution watchers” in particular had direct ties to the US government and the CIA. Lambe masterfully lays out the political affinities driving the arguments of prominent Cuba scholars. In a political climate with plausible contemporary parallels, sociologist Maurice Zeitlin lost his teaching job at Princeton in 1963 for voicing a favorable opinion of the revolution and criticizing US policy. Conversely, when historian Theodore Draper argued that the “true” goal of the revolution had been betrayed by the move to socialism, the State Department was quick to deploy his arguments in hopes of toppling Castro. Experts who supported the revolution found themselves on the other side of this dance. With revolutionary leaders often hostile to criticism, professionals issuing guidance on agricultural and other matters found themselves navigating an almost impossible balance between showing commitment to the Cuban cause and providing honest and constructive critique.

Lambe holds up a mirror to common tropes about Cuba, turning existing logic on its head, and sometimes challenging US perspectives entirely. The book, like Cuba itself, offers an invitation to US readers to consider their own nation’s political shortcomings. Lambe’s treatment of the free press in Cuba beckons us to examine the limitations of our own press freedoms. The question has assumed a new immediacy as the Trump administration works to erode the First Amendment protections that US citizens have long considered a sacred tenet of their democracy. US readers could be forgiven for insisting that their press in the 1960s was freer than Cuba’s. But many Cubans living the revolutionary moment saw things differently. They thought of US reporting as political bullying, arguing that the press was parroting CIA directives, and thus hardly free.

In response to what they considered one-sided reporting, newspaper workers in Cuba included addendums to articles that they disagreed with but were required to publish, refuting the contents of the passages above them. In doing so, they made the politics of editorial decisions transparent to readers while universally defending freedom of expression. Importantly, people also saw the fall of private newspapers as expanding the freedom of expression that, according to one worker, had previously been “only enjoyed by the capitalist, the latifundista, etc.” When workers took over Prensa Libre and Diario de la Marina, two of Cuba’s most conservative newspapers, in 1960, 100,000 people attended a mass mock funeral to celebrate their downfall.

By 1961, travel bans to and from Cuba had been imposed by both the US and Cuban governments. Lambe juxtaposes the legal regimes that have prevented US citizens from visiting the island with those denying Cubans the ability to emigrate, explaining the highly politicized nature of mobility between the two countries and the contested flows of information that followed. Again, the author presents us with a mirror: although we tend to regard Cuba as distinctively repressive, US citizens who traveled to Cuba faced persecution by the CIA, FBI, and State Department: some were jailed, lost their jobs, and had their passports taken away for decades.

One question examined in the literature about all the big revolutions—the French, the Russian, the Mexican, the Chinese, and also the Cuban—is the role ordinary people played in crafting each revolutionary state and its policies. My own research on Cuba’s nationalization and redistribution of farmland in the 1960s shows how peasants from across the island helped propel and radicalize the revolution, pushing it further than initially intended by Castro’s government, even as he made his commitment to socialism explicit.

Lambe, too, describes a democratizing process in which a receptive government incorporates demands from the people. Much as with the democratization of private newspapers, television-as-medium helped “incorporate the populace into [the] revolutionary process,” making Cubans both audience and virtual protagonist. This phenomenon is worth acknowledging, as it challenges facile assumptions that Cold War communist systems governed exclusively through coercion or oppression.

The ability to see Cubans as participants and drivers of revolutionary politics is key to any careful analysis of the Cuban Revolution. This shift in perspective allows us to see beyond entrenched narratives, and to consider the aspirations and intentions of regular people as they seek to make social change. The Cuban Revolution thrust Cubans into all sorts of new spaces. During the 1960s, new institutions and bureaucracies were often made up of people who had not previously had access to government positions. The National Institute for Agrarian Reform, for example, created in 1959 to enact new land reform laws, was often staffed by poor and sometimes illiterate peasants whose vision of the change that was necessary helped drive local agrarian policies. In essence, it was regular people who made change in Cuba a reality.

The Subject of Revolution seeks to move us away from the trap of politicization—to, in Lambe’s words, “shift the terms of the conversation[s]” in which Cuba’s revolution “has traditionally been presented.” The book succeeds in bringing critical nuance and context, but it cannot transcend the questions of objectivity and politicization. Five days before leaving office, outgoing president Joe Biden removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Donald Trump immediately placed Cuba back on the list a day after he took office for his second term. A punitive amplification of the already crippling 63-year-old economic sanctions, being labeled a “state sponsor of terrorism” results in additional restrictions that deny all Cubans access to international financial institutions. This, in turn, limits Cubans’ access to remittances from family members living abroad, long a crucial lifeline to many on the island. This suffocating policy coincides with converging disasters in Cuba in recent years: hurricanes, earthquakes, COVID-19, a nationwide energy emergency, and migratory exodus. Together, they have thrust the island into humanitarian crisis.

In the face of political spectacle, in which Cuban lives are at stake, Cuba’s future is inevitably rendered political. For Cubans, the battle over the bloqueo/embargo is not just discursive; the fight for their political future also continues in very material ways. There can be, perhaps, no successful shift in the debates The Subject of Revolution engages in while we remain in a broader context in which hostile and inhumane policies against the Cuban people persist.