Cuba is the Caribbean island that faces Florida

Cuba lies in the Caribbean, and Havana lies so that the Florida Straits are the nearer view abroad. The island is long enough for provinces, a mountain range and a second large city in the east. Politically it remains marked by nearness to the United States.

The capital stands on the north coast. East of it the island reaches Santiago de Cuba and the Sierra Maestra, west to Pinar del Río. The Isla de la Juventud lies south of the main island. The area is 109,884 square kilometres, the population 10,937,203. Cuba is not a scatter of equal islets. It is a large island with smaller ones beside it, and the capital sits on the side that faces Florida.

The capital on the strait

Havana is port, capital and the city whose waterfront is built toward the strait. Opposite lie the United States. This nearness is the political geography of the island. It explains why families live on both sides of the strait, and why an embargo concerns the port and not only a file. The United States maintain a comprehensive embargo. It is a policy across generations, and it turns the short stretch of water into a political distance.

Santiago de Cuba in the east is the other large city, closer to the mountains from which the campaign of the revolution of 1959 came, and closer to a Caribbean that is not only Florida. Pinar del Río in the west is tobacco country, attached to the capital and still rural. The island has an interior life. See only the strait and you see the decisive external position and miss the length. Describe the length without the strait and you describe one Caribbean island among others and miss why this one is so strongly determined by a neighbour with which it shares no land border.

The socialist state on the island

The revolution of 1959 reset the political order of the island and moved the Communist Party to the centre of the state. The constitution of 2019 describes a socialist state and assigns the party a leading role. Spanish is the official language. The Cuban peso is the currency. These sentences carry an order that has held itself against nearness to the United States and is at the same time defined by that nearness. Without the embargo the economy would be different. Without the revolution the nearness would be a more ordinary neighbourhood.

Emigration across the strait belongs to the society. Families live on both sides, and the crossing is an old means of hope and of flight. The state has sent medical staff to other countries and at the same time administered scarcity at home. Both belong to the same order. It is not to be confused with a picture of the old town, and it is not exhausted by a single sentence about the embargo. It is the way this island has been governed since the revolution replaced the older republic.

The strait is near. The political order has set itself against that.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Sugar, the port, and a base in the south-east

The colonial economy was sugar and the port of Havana. Plantations wrote themselves into the population history, African enslavement included, and they produced a city that worked as gate and as capital at once. The socialist state rebuilt that inheritance. It took over an island whose soils and whose port were set up for export. The geography of production is tougher than a slogan. When the trading relation with the Soviet Union ended, the island lost the partner that had carried this order for a time.

In the south-east the navy of the United States maintains a base in Guantánamo Bay. The government in Havana regards this presence as without right. The base is nearness in its sharpest form: foreign military on the island itself, while the embargo constrains the ordinary port. After the end of Soviet trade, Florida still lay where it had lain, and the state remained socialist. The capital on the strait is the place where scarcity, family and foreign policy come together.

Cuba is near a very large state and politically separated from it. Havana is the capital of that nearness. The length of the island does not change which coast is the decisive one.