News + analysis

Dispatches

Short editorial pieces on the country in transition — politics, sanctions, day-to-day shifts.

50 stories

People standing on a street near a doorway in Havana.

Cuba’s Raft Has Become a Return Ticket

The Coast Guard’s return of six Cubans to the island reveals one of the last working mechanisms of the 2015–2017 opening: a migration arrangement that outlived the opening itself. The raft has become less a passage north than a return ticket issued by two states.

Natalia Suyos · Oct 14, 2026

More from Dispatches

Cuba’s Medical Missions Are a Passport Held by the State

Natalia Suyos · Oct 10, 2026

Havana’s Water Tank Is a Measure of the State

Natalia Suyos · Oct 8, 2026

Cuba Has Sent a Community Newsletter Into Exile

Austin Llerandi’s departure for Brazil shows how Cuba’s state can silence a community journalist without filling another prison cell. The exile of a newsletter editor is a warning aimed at everyone still trying to pass unapproved facts from hand to hand.

Natalia Suyos · Oct 2, 2026

Cuba’s Trial of Anna Bensi Makes a Doorstep a Crime

Anna Bensi and her mother are due in court after recording plainclothes officers delivering a State Security summons at their home. The prosecution turns a claim of privacy into a test of whether Cubans may document power when it arrives at the door.

Natalia Suyos · Sep 29, 2026

Cuba No Longer Calls Venezuela an Ally

Cuba’s deputy foreign minister has reduced Venezuela from an ally to a friendly country. The phrase marks more than diplomatic caution: it exposes how quickly a regime built on external rescue can be left redrawing its map.

Natalia Suyos · Sep 28, 2026

Cuba Is Not a Contingency Plan

Natalia Suyos · Sep 26, 2026

Cuba’s Dengue Numbers Are a Test of the State’s Silence

Natalia Suyos · Sep 24, 2026

Costa Rica’s Break With Cuba Was Announced Through a Newspaper

Costa Rica has clarified that its diplomatic relationship with Cuba is broken. Havana’s claim that it learned the news through the press exposes the regime’s dependence on the formalities of legitimacy even as its regional standing erodes.

Natalia Suyos · Sep 21, 2026

Cuba’s Empty Chair in a London Court

Natalia Suyos · Sep 16, 2026

A Candle at El Cobre Cannot Replace Cuba Policy

Natalia Suyos · Sep 9, 2026

Cuba Has Put Raúl Castro Back Behind a Guardrail

Raúl Castro’s return to public view came at a ceremony for the unit that protects Cuba’s highest leaders. The setting revealed a system still using the body of its aging patriarch as proof that its inheritance remains intact.

Natalia Suyos · Sep 7, 2026

Cuba’s National Airline Is Now a Debtor in Moscow

Natalia Suyos · Sep 3, 2026

Cuba’s Prison Door Still Opens Inward

The reported detention of former 11J prisoner Andy García Lorenzo after he filmed a protest in Santa Clara raises a harder question than whether Cuba has released its political prisoners. A prison sentence that follows a citizen home is not a sentence with an end.

Natalia Suyos · Aug 31, 2026

Cuba’s Medicine Cabinet Is Now a WhatsApp Group

Havana’s new Farma Joven program uses WhatsApp, volunteers, and donated medicines to reach patients. Its kindness is real, but so is the institutional collapse it quietly records.

Natalia Suyos · Aug 29, 2026

Cuba’s Volleyball Bronze Is Not a Restoration

Cuba’s women returned to the NORCECA podium after fifteen years away. Their bronze medal is a real achievement, but it is not evidence that the system claiming it has restored what it lost.

Natalia Suyos · Aug 28, 2026

Cuba’s Guestbook Is Now a Sanctions List

Natalia Suyos · Aug 21, 2026

Cuba Cannot Be Governed as a Contingency

Natalia Suyos · Aug 19, 2026

A Judge’s Robe Is Not a Party Card

Natalia Suyos · Aug 17, 2026

Cuba Registers the Vehicles It Could Not Build

Natalia Suyos · Aug 16, 2026

Cuba’s Application Window Closes

Natalia Suyos · Aug 15, 2026

The Empty Chairs in Santo Domingo

The Dominican Republic’s expulsion of Cuban diplomatic officials leaves more than vacant desks in Santo Domingo. It exposes how Havana’s old language of siege now meets a Caribbean increasingly willing to leave it outside the room.

Natalia Suyos · Aug 14, 2026

Cuba’s Book Fair Leaves the Fortress

Natalia Suyos · Aug 10, 2026

Cuba’s Centenary Conference Hall

Havana’s Communist parties conference arrives just before Fidel Castro’s centenary. The regime is using remembrance as a test of continuity in a country that needs a future more than another ceremony.

Natalia Suyos · Aug 8, 2026

Cuba’s Power Grid Cannot Restart

Natalia Suyos · Aug 5, 2026

The Cuban Rider at the Tour de France

Natalia Suyos · Aug 4, 2026

Colombia’s Closing Embassy Door in Havana

Gustavo Petro’s final foreign trip is expected to take him to Havana just as Colombia’s incoming president promises to close the embassy behind him. The real question is whether a diplomatic door can be used without becoming another piece of the Cuban regime’s stagecraft.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 31, 2026

Raúl Castro’s Absence at the Moncada Ceremony

Raúl Castro’s absence from Cuba’s July 26 ceremony matters because Moncada is not merely an anniversary for the regime. It is the living credential of a revolution now forced to read its founding authority from a letter.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 27, 2026

The State Department’s Cuba File Cabinet

Natalia Suyos · Jul 24, 2026

The Parish Carts Carrying Aid in Cuba

A U.S. humanitarian flight carrying food and hygiene kits has opened a narrow supply route into Cuba through Catholic parishes. The boxes matter less as diplomacy than as a challenge to the regime’s claim that all care must pass through the state.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 22, 2026

The Flagpole at the Cuban Embassy

Natalia Suyos · Jul 21, 2026

The Map in the Pentagon Briefing Room

Natalia Suyos · Jul 18, 2026

The Last Cuban Doctors Leave Guatemala

The departure of the last Cuban medical contingent from Guatemala closes a decades-long arrangement built from real care, state control and political need. What remains is the harder question of who will be waiting in the clinic after the white coats are gone.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 16, 2026

U.S.–Cuba Relations: A Timeline of the Thaw (2015–2018)

A running chronicle of the U.S.–Cuba diplomatic thaw and its aftermath — the announcements, votes, and openings that reshaped relations between Havana and Washington.

Staff · Jul 13, 2026

Cuba’s Unofficial Negotiator

Cuba has publicly placed Raúl Castro’s grandson near its negotiations with Washington without giving him a formal public office. The arrangement reveals where authority still resides when the regime is under pressure.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 13, 2026

The Blank Space on the Gallery Wall

Natalia Suyos · Jul 12, 2026

The School Register That Became a Prison Ledger

Natalia Suyos · Jul 11, 2026

The Exit Door the Revolution Left Open

Cuba's new immigration laws quietly abolished the exile penalty — the twenty-four-month cliff that turned departure into legal death — at the precise moment the regime is staging its most theatrical performance of revolutionary resistance. The revolution has opened the door it spent sixty years pretending wasn't there.

Natalia Suyos · Jul 1, 2026

The Dish That Wasn't on the Menu

Simons Chase · Jun 23, 2026

The Indictment That Waited Thirty Years

On May 20, a federal indictment unsealed at Freedom Tower charged Raúl Castro with murder for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. The file had been ready for thirty years — and kept closed, at a price no one in Washington ever announced publicly.

Natalia Suyos · Jun 15, 2026