Seen through an American lens, Havana becomes distorted—less a city and more a threadbare tapestry of mystery and misery: the midcentury cars somehow still cruising the Malecón; the illicit cigars and rums that have become status-signaling fetish objects; the physical and human ruins of the revolution’s seemingly-perpetual implosion.
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there are cracks in Cuba’s 60-year-old Marxist government, with the Castro regime allowing limited property ownership and private enterprise. But for many, Cuba—and Havana specifically—remains a frozen-in-time specter of Cold War Communism, a Yanqi destination for Instagrammable ruin porn.
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