Cuba just marked the 100th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s birth. Since the 1960s, the communist island has occupied a special place in the imagination of the American left. Yet when I spent nine days there in 2024, I saw Cuba through two pairs of eyes: those of someone raised in Maoist China and those of someone who has lived in America for nearly four decades.
To many Western visitors, Havana means sunshine, beaches, cigars, rum, Latin music, and American cars from the 1950s. To me, it also resurrected the China of my childhood: nearly empty state stores, ration books, subdivided mansions, and daily life sustained by endless repairs and improvisation. I recognized the logic of scarcity because I had lived under a similar system.
Havana is undeniably beautiful. Its churches, arcades, balconies, and wrought-iron railings retain the elegance of the Spanish colonial era. Yet beauty and decay are inseparable. Plaster peels from walls, windows stand broken, and rubbish piles up in the streets. Houses once occupied by single families were redistributed after the revolution and divided among numerous households.
The sight reminded me of Guangzhou in the 1960s and 1970s. I grew up in an American-style house built with money my great-grandfather had earned as a railroad worker in the United States. By the time I was a child, nine families lived in it. Cuba resembled a chapter of my own life that China had since left behind.
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