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.
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