Cuba: What the Republic Promised and the Revolution failed to Delivered

I arrived in Havana in the early nineties with a copy of Castro's Final Hour in my luggage. Andrés Oppenheimer, the Miami Herald correspondent, had just published it. The premise was reasonable and widely shared: the Soviet Union had collapsed, the subsidies that had kept the Cuban regime alive were gone, and the regime would not survive the year. I had come to see the end.

La Habana, Cuba

I stayed at the Hotel Nacional. One afternoon, returning from the city, I found that my copy of Oppenheimer had vanished from the room. The maid had not come. The safe was untouched. Only the book was missing. Cuban state security had its own methods of bibliographic review. I understood two things at once: the regime read what its visitors read, and the regime was not dying. What was dying was the idea that the regime was dying.

Castro lived another sixteen years. He died in his bed. He was succeeded first by his brother and then by a functionary, and now by Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has the consistency and stature of the butler in a house whose owners have all gone. Oppenheimer was wrong. I was wrong. The world was wrong. That is the first thing to say before saying anything else about the present.

And yet. I am writing this in May of 2026, and yet.

A few days ago I retrieved from the Internet Archive a short film I had used years earlier in my documentary on the Cuban painter Humberto Calzada: Adelante Cubanos, from 1959. Twenty minutes, color, narrated in Spanish, produced by Profilms de Cuba. I had originally taken it for what it appeared to be: a last portrait of the Cuban Republic before the curtain fell. I watched it again this week and saw something different.

Adelante Cubanos is not a document of the Republic's end. It is a document of the Revolution's beginning. It was made after January 1, 1959, and the narration leaves no room for ambiguity. The voice praises "the ideal of Martí," announces "a new homeland that has begun to be of all and for all," and describes the paths "the Revolution opens" for Cuban children. The voice that accompanies the images is the official voice of the new regime in its first months. The film is the Revolution speaking to itself in its own founding language, before it knew what it would do.

That is what makes the film unbearable to watch now. The images show a Cuba that manufactures electrical cable at 5,000 feet an hour, that processes 10 million pounds of copper a year, that builds prefabricated houses in days, that runs a domestic cosmetics industry calibrated for the tropical climate, and that takes pride in not having to import. The narrator insists: "to consume what the country produces is to build the nation." It is the most Republican sentence in the film, spoken by a Revolution that had not yet decided to dismantle what the Republic had built.

Sixty-seven years later, the images read as surrealism. Cuba no longer manufactures cable. It does not build houses. It does not produce cosmetics. It does not produce enough of almost anything. To build the nation, which in 1959 meant buying Cuban beer and Cuban wire and Cuban cream, today means standing in a bread line that often does not come. The Revolution did not fail against the Republic's promises. It failed against its own promises, in its own voice, in its own first film, in its own first year. Adelante Cubanos is the exhibit signed by the defendant.

That is what changes now. Not the prediction that the regime ends this year or next — we made that count once before, and there is no reason to make it again. What changes is that the regime can no longer sustain its own story. The recent visit of senior CIA officials to Havana — unthinkable in another era, when any dissident could be accused of working for the Agency and imprisoned for it — says something no official communiqué will say. It says that even the security apparatus is reading the room. What is collapsing is not only economic and strategic. It is moral. The Revolution no longer believes itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOg6sjpNx08

And if the day comes — and I will not say when, because I have learned not to say — in which Cuba can produce again what it produced in 1959, not out of nostalgia for the Republic but out of the long-deferred fulfillment of the Revolution's own promise, Adelante Cubanos will be one of the few moving-image documents to survive showing what that promise looked like when it was still possible to believe in it.

The film is not nostalgia. The film is the measure. It is one of several sources I am drawing on for The Lost Republic — Cuba, 1902–1959, a documentary in development at Heritage Film Project.

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