“It’s incredibly empty.” Young people are leaving Cuba in droves and heading to the United States—only to find themselves caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Jon Lee Anderson reports. Plus:
• Donald Trump’s fishy TikTok deal
• Eric Adams slips out the side door
• Where the speech wars are leading us
Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Newsletter editor
Just ninety miles separate Florida and Cuba. And yet, for decades, the two have existed on either side of an invisible line.
Now one side of that line is crumbling: a Communist Cuba is failing—this time, seemingly for good. In this week’s issue, Jon Lee Anderson, a New Yorker staff writer who lived in Havana thirty years ago and wrote a biography of Che Guevara, reports that the island has fallen into disrepair in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Cubans, especially young people, are fleeing, often to the United States, and specifically to Florida, where they are falling victim to Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Once again, the cities of Miami and Havana are caught up in the larger tensions, as political change unfolds in their respective countries.
I spoke with Anderson over Zoom to discuss his new feature on the Cuban exodus—and what this moment says about the state of the Cuban Dream, as well as the American one. This interview has been edited and condensed.
What’s it like in Havana right now?
It’s incredibly empty. There were very few cars on the road. All of the public spaces were just empty. I also travelled beyond Havana to the countryside, to the cities of Santa Clara and Cienfuegos, and also to what Americans call the Bay of Pigs. Nobody was there.
Talk to me about what’s going on.
Ten years ago, President Obama brokered an extraordinary, historic rapprochement with Cuba, when Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel, was the President. Suddenly you couldn’t go anywhere in Cuba without seeing Americans going around in those candy-colored Chevys from the fifties, smoking cigars.
And then it all came crashing down. Fidel died in November, 2016, the same month that Donald Trump was elected President. All of the bilateral progress that was being made between American and Cuban diplomats ground to a halt. And there was this bizarre series of phenomena called the Havana Syndrome, which has still not been clarified.
Then came COVID. Cuba was very dependent on foreign tourism. So a country that was already hard pressed economically really got a lot worse. In the summer of 2021 protests began over the shortages and the penuries that people had been feeling. After a few months, the government crushed the protests. It was a message: Don’t do that again.
So, if you’re a twenty-two-year-old Cuban, you want out, right? And that’s what began to happen. As many as two million Cubans out of a population of eleven million have left since 2022. At least eight hundred and fifty thousand are believed to have ended up in the U.S., with most of those people settling in Florida, which is where, of course, the Miami Cuban community lives.
We’ve got this all happening at a moment when Trump is the President, and there’s a crackdown on immigration.
Which now includes Cubans. The welcome mat that was there for decades for Cubans has essentially been withdrawn. Suddenly, there are several hundred thousand Cubans who can be deported.
And, of course, Florida’s a MAGA hub.
They say that nearly seventy per cent of the Cuban Americans that live in Florida voted for Trump. And so you have this queasy paradox whereby the Republican Cuban Americans who are Trumpists have seen their own community targeted by the guy they helped get into office.
I kept wondering what I was feeling, having been on the island and then in Miami. I feel like what I saw in Cuba was definitively the end of the dream of the Cuban Revolution. For years, while Fidel was still alive, some people clung to it. During the negotiations between Obama and Raúl, there was still the idea that somehow parts of the revolution—its socialist project—could be saved, and that Cuba could somehow transmogrify into a fairer, more modern place with a social cradle. Now it’s over.
