The Essential Reading List on Cuba’s Past, Present and Maybe Even Its Future

Ever since the capture of Cuba’s principal benefactor and ally, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, on Jan. 3, US President Donald Trump has been telling the world that Cuba is next. Those ominous statements are the reason Michael J. Bustamante, a prominent Cuba scholar, has been busy fielding calls from reporters around the globe who are trying to fathom the fate of the communist-run island nation. “I can’t recall a time when I’ve been this busy doing this kind of public engagement,” says Bustamante, speaking from the University of Miami, where he’s the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “It’s just been a flurry of phone calls.”

The author of the 2021 book Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile, Bustamante is also the director of academic programs at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, the largest repository of historical documents outside the island and the biggest collection of materials on the Cuban diaspora. It’s a treasure trove containing the papers of former Cuban heads of state and also some hidden gems, such as a letter sent from Cuba to exiled political groups in the US that contains secret messages in invisible ink. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” Bustamante says of the coded message. “But it was written into a pretty anodyne family letter.”