What does a revolution look like sixty-seven years in, when the cameras leave and the power grid fails? The New York Times recently assembled decades of photojournalism into a visual timeline of Cuba since 1959, framing a government that has outlasted thirteen U.S. presidents and now faces what many observers call its gravest crisis. The images are striking: Fidel in fatigues, rafts in the Florida Straits, crowds outside empty pharmacies. Photographs, even great ones, compress whole lives into single frames. They show the crisis. They rarely show the Tuesday after, when someone still has to find cooking oil.
Most English-language coverage of Cuba toggles between two registers: geopolitical overview and crisis dispatch. You get the diplomatic timeline or the blackout footage, sometimes both in the same piece. What falls out of that frame is the texture of sustained, ordinary life under extraordinary constraints. How does a small manufacturer source parts when legal supply chains barely exist? What does party loyalty feel like in a household where someone else risked death on a raft? Photo essays and news retrospectives can't answer those questions. Answers require years of presence in a single place, watching the same families make the same impossible calculations over and over.
Anthony DePalma spent two decades reporting in Guanabacoa, a suburb of Havana with its own dense local identity, and *The Cubans* is built from that accumulated proximity. The book tracks five families whose lives intersect with every major turn in recent Cuban history without any single one of them standing in as a tidy symbol for the whole country. That restraint is one of its real strengths. The scenes are concrete and sometimes uncomfortably specific.
One thread follows a man who assembles small manufacturing equipment from black-market parts, jury-rigging an enterprise in an economy designed to prevent private enterprise. Another traces an artist who left for Mexico and returned, a decision that looks different depending on which year you ask about it. A Communist Party stalwart appears with her convictions intact and her material circumstances deteriorating; DePalma lets the contradiction sit without editorializing it into a punchline. A man grieving relatives lost at sea gets space to grieve without becoming a policy argument. Contrast this with a standard oral-history collection.
Oral histories give you voice but often lack connective tissue. DePalma supplies the reported context: the policy shifts that made one year's hustle illegal and the next year's tolerated. The U.S. embargo, the Special Period, the Obama-era thaw, the Trump-era freeze, each lands differently when you've already watched a specific family rearrange its kitchen economy in response. The personal stories gain weight from chronology rather than sentiment. A fair criticism: DePalma's structural choice to stay in Guanabacoa means the book is geographically narrow. Rural Cuba, eastern Cuba, the particular pressures on Afro-Cuban communities outside Havana, these appear at the edges but never with the same granular attention. A suburb of the capital is still the capital's orbit, and the depth costs breadth. You should know that going in. The method still produces something rare. Because DePalma returns to the same households across years, you see how adaptation compounds. A workaround invented in 2005 becomes a family tradition by 2015. A political stance that looked principled in one decade looks like exhaustion in the next. Time, applied consistently to the same people, does analytical work that a single reporting trip cannot.
So: what does a revolution look like sixty-seven years in? DePalma's answer is that it looks like people figuring out Tuesday. *The Cubans* won't give you a theory of regime change or a prediction about what comes next. It gives you five households in a Havana suburb, making decisions with incomplete information and limited options, recorded with patience and without false comfort. That is a different, and right now perhaps more useful, kind of knowledge.