Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Cuba: Off the Island

Lygia Navarro, for the Pulitzer Center

In Havana, people are accustomed to having to get in line early in the morning to achieve anything. The day I leave, I arrive at the airport before sunrise, exactly two hours before my flight, as I have been told. Like the rest of the passengers—mostly Mexican, European and American tourists—I end up sitting on my bag for nearly an hour waiting for the gate agents to arrive at work. To our right is a separate line of dozens of Cubans preparing to move to the United States. They all carry large white plastic bags with their visas, printed with the logo of the International Migration Organization, and wear their best clothes, mostly tight jeans and metallic-printed t-shirts.

Once we have all passed security, I sit at the gate and watch a Cuban man in his thirties standing with his young son. Both are wearing suits and black dress shoes, like a vision from another era, when air travel was the highlight of your year and you dressed for the event. The father has the sun-baked face and humility of someone from the Cuban countryside, a guajiro, and as he turns away to buy a piece of candy for his son, I notice that his dark blue suit has a long hole running down his back. The image leaves me overwhelmed with sadness at the reality that, in order to provide some measure of a comfortable life for their children, so many Cubans are forced out of their own country.

Cuba: Domestic Pressure

Lygia Navarro, for the Pulitzer Center

After work one afternoon, Alejandro finally takes me to his tiny one-room apartment. A few blocks before his house, we pass a large apartment building that once filled most of a square block; half still holds families, while the other half has disintegrated into heaps of rubble. As we turn onto his block, dodging jagged potholes, Alejandro stops and sighs heavily. “The majority of the time when I’m coming home I feel depressed,” he says. “That I don’t want to come home. That I wish I could stay away.”

It isn’t his parents, who are in his 80s, who upset Alejandro. He gets along surprisingly well with them, considering they’ve all shared a single room for more than 40 years. Alejandro knows it isn’t their fault they are stuck in the apartment, although his mother has railed against his father off and on for Alejandro’s whole life, blaming her husband and not the revolution for their predicament. Their story is the converse of Marta’s: Instead of losing their property, the government actually gave them an apartment.

This was not just any apartment, but the dark tenement rental they’d moved to in the mid 1950s thinking that, by moving closer to downtown, they were sure to move up in the world. Instead, once Fidel took over, the building’s owner was dispossessed, and the renters were granted deeds to the apartments. Now, because of Cuba’s housing shortage—which even forces couples to live together for years after divorcing—Alejandro’s parents have no way of getting a larger place.

Cuba: Sweeping the Streets in Havana

Lygia Navarro, for the Pulitzer Center

One evening early in our reporting, Virginia Quarterly Review photographer Jason Florio and I are invited to an outdoor art opening on a dock in Old Havana. A muggy afternoon has given way to rain, and by the time we arrive at the show, which is officially sanctioned by the government, the party has started. The police have also already shown up.

We slip past through the corrugated tin door shutting the dock off from the street before the cops block anyone else from entering, and hurry to see as much off the show as possible before everyone is kicked out—which is clearly how the night will end. Seeing anything, however, is difficult, as the police have shut off the lights. Around us dozens of mostly 20 and 30-something Cubans are also shuttling from sculpture to sculpture , trying to decipher some kind of message through the dark and drizzle.