By Michelle Patiño-Flores

The Cuban Revolutionary project occupies a privileged space when thinking about alternatives to North Atlantic systems of domination. And rightfully so. The Revolution came into power on January 1, 1959, as the United States entrenched itself as an imperialist force to contend with the scientific and cultural interventions born in the Soviet Union. Revolutionary Cuba emerged at a necessary and pivotal moment in global history, demonstrating once again that the Caribbean engenders life, sovereignty, and freedom. The Cold War era — which many scholars propose has not concluded — formalized a polar spectrum of political possibilities arranged as: left:right, indexed by communism:capitalism. This artificial binary, while a useful heuristic for organizing important political propositions, has unfortunately sedimented the possibilities of governance that we have been able to imagine as scholars, generally speaking.

This is most clear now that well over half of Cubans on the island have a more accessible connection to the internet, an enormous upgrade from the 43% of Cubans who had access just ten years ago (World Bank). Online today, it’s impossible to ignore the politically heterogenous multitudes of Cubans and write them off as anomalous when they categorize their government as authoritarian, dictatorial, and otherwise violent. In the streets of Havana, these expressions are multiplied, and they are contextualized by the trash and trash fires that speckle the city, the exorbitant price of food (when it is available), constant stream of blackouts, and growing list of arrests of public dissenters and especially artists (with whom I conduct my ethnographic work). The instinctive explanation for these circumstances that many non-Cuban scholars offer proposes the history and recent exacerbation of US sanctions as the cause of such suffering. However, Cubans insist that it’s not only the US embargo that wrought these conditions, but also, crucially, internal corruption, abuse of power, and overall failure of the Revolutionary system. Many of us in academic circles in the North Atlantic choose to overlook these local theorizations or categorize them as outlying perspectives, insisting that such comments are ignorant to the sacred truth of socialism and simply products of US propaganda. Are these dismissals not forms of epistemological violence?

As ethnographers, we are tasked with making meaning out of the raw material of life. We couch our practice–sometimes–upon a position of cultural relativity, from which we develop narratives and explanations for how and why things come about and, oftentimes too, what they mean. So it’s worth deeply considering what it is that Cubans mean when they say they live under authoritarian conditions. And what if what they mean is exactly what they say? It’s preposterous to have to propose what we have long ago already accepted as feminist, activist, and other avowedly decolonial scholar praxis: to trust the knowledge of our interlocutors when they explain their experiences–especially when they are all almost invariably saying the same thing. So why is it so hard to accept that what many Cubans are saying may be true? This truth does not dilute other truths: that the US has effectively waged war on the world, and on Cuba and the Caribbean in particular, through its foundational ethos of imperialism; or that the present US government has tightened its violent grip on the embargo. Acknowledging that Cuba, but more specifically that the Cuban government, is a complex system that, like many others, is not impervious to corruption, violence, and abuse of power can only strengthen our understanding of political organizations and refine our efforts for alternative projects that affirm life.

Academia loves the Cuban Revolution. We might say it satisfies our need for an Other to aspire towards. And it’s clear that it was able to secure rights and privileges to Cubans, especially impoverished (, and) Black, and otherwise peripheralized Cubans, for some decades, though it has always done so at a great cost (like labor camps and censorship, sometimes targeting those very people it sought to enfranchise). The haze of the Revolution, what it symbolizes for the Cold War, and its significant but limited constellation of successes in the face of surrounding imperialist violence, has convinced us that it is the only or at least a worthwhile alternative to sustain against the neoliberal global order. But is it, really? Many of us are students of abolition. But it appears we get confused when the police are socialists. Why uphold the power of a system that deploys military and secret police to surveil, persecute, and arrest children, adults, and elders who post dissenting personal videos online or create art that critiques the government? Why side with power, when we can side with freedom? Cuba must not be made to occupy a hopeful slot for academics to project partisan fancies.

The solution to the Cuban Revolution is not capitalist domination. The way out of this political binary is still being imagined and prefigured in everyday fugitivity. We must dare to dream with and plainly listen to the screams, whispers, dances, and songs that countervail power and gestate the as-yet “unthinkable” paradigm shift towards an otherwise, against a binary we have invented for ourselves.

Michelle Patiño-Flores is an artist and PhD Candidate in Anthropology with a minor in Art History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Through multimodal ethnographic research, she learns from and collaborates with Black (and) queer Cuban artists to understand practices of creative freedom in contemporary Cuba. She is an arts and culture writer and has exhibited her photography across various states. Michelle is a student editor at American Ethnological Society.

by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures at El Museo del Barrio is a much needed and long awaited retrospective of the photographer's work. Active from the late 1960s through the early aughts, Sophie Rivera is a key figure of the Nuyorican arts movement of the 1970s and 80s, lending her sharp photographer’s eye to a beautiful variety of portraits and street scenes, all unmistakably of New Yorkers in the glory of their urban environment.

Perhaps the most gratifying surprise in the exhibition is the group of Halloween portraits Rivera took during the traditional Greenwich Village Halloween parade (c. 1986-87). This grid of large color photographs highlights several of the artist’s most traditional ways of working, including catching people in the moment and asking them to pose as-is for her lens. The images unveil the truly creative nature of New Yorkers and the amazing costumes they fashioned from ordinary materials, long before widely-available and inexpensive plastic and polyester costumes could be shipped to one’s home. One of the best examples is a group of three young women covered in transparent pink plastic bags with rubber gloves, syringes, face masks, and ziploc bags filled with unidentifiable “medical waste” attached to them. The final touch is the three beauty-queen style sashes they wear that read “Jones Beach,” “Staten Island” and “Jersey Shore” (🤣).

Her penchant for the abject and her feminist lens also led her to create a series of photographs of a toilet, sometimes featuring a discarded bloody tampon, sometimes presenting human waste. Installed as a grid in the exhibition, the elegantly titled Rouge et Noir (1976-78), offers an unexpected view of a woman’s excretions and makes reference to so many other historic works of art that evoke toilets and related content, not to mention, bathroom humor more generally.

Rivera got her start working for leftist publications like the Liberation News Service in the late 1960s. Her perceptive eye and progressive inclinations led her to document protests over the Vietnam War, the New York City Department of Education, the cancellation of a Latinx focused television show from public media and other scenes. Her training with the noted street photographer Lisette Model is evident in these kinds of images and a host of others that show, for example, MTA workers painting the overpass bridge of the number 1 train.

This will to show regular folks in ordinary circumstances also led Rivera to the interior of the NYC Subway, featuring a host of people on their daily rides. Mothers and children, the unhoused, graffiti artists, regular New Yorkers are all presented with dignity and tenderness.

Among the most well-known works in the exhibition is the monumental series titled Latino Portraits, which have been the most shown and most collected works by the artist. Rivera gathered these individuals in the hope of showing a group of Latinx “archetypes,” that were generally missing from all media, including books, magazines, films and television

This invisibility that the artist tries to counter is the main drive of her work and underscores her sensitivity to her subjects and their appearance. The large-scale images have now been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In this way, they have managed to complete the task that Sophie Rivera set out for them, to highlight representation in a way that is both unassuming and proud, featured in the velvety light and dark, black and white of her gelatin silver prints. Shown in 1989-1990 in a Bronx subway station under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, they underscore the “belonging” of these subjects to their community but also to the larger world of “art.”

I end with one of the most beautiful images in the exhibition, of falling snow [Fig. 5]. The attempt to take such an image is nearly impossible for an untrained photographer. Rivera’s image is magical, with subtle layers of glowing, fuzzy, sparkly dots of snow in all different sizes. It is yet another example of the unexpected, the beautiful, the quotidian as presented by this artist with loving care. For Puerto Ricans on the island, the magic of a snow falling from the skies is unknowable. For Nuyoricans like Sophie Rivera, it presents another chance to capture a lived experience in a singular and poetic image.

Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures through August 2, 2026 at El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan). The exhibition is organized by El Museo’s Chief Curator, Susanna V. Temkin, and is accompanied by a color catalog published by Aperture, available at El Museo and online.

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, is an art historian and a curator and is currently a Senior Program Officer in Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation. She worked for nearly 10 years at Jersey City Museum, where she organized an exhibition of Sophie Rivera’s large portraits and another 9+ years at El Museo del Barrio. Her curatorial work and research explores modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on US Latinx art. 
@artyrocio @100latinxartists

We at Small Axe invite you to check out Kiskadee Watch. On 14 June 2026, the independent, digital-first media company launched, "with the intent ... to provide the public with the news that it needs on a daily basis and to serve as a watchdog for accountability in all parts of society". The project is led by former Stabroek News employees following the publication's closure three months prior. Read the first installation of the publication's Diaspora Voices, written by Small Axe contributor Dr. Alissa Trotz, on the successful grassroots movement imposing a moratorium on offshore drilling in Belize.

On Wednesday, 20 May 2026, US Federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against Raúl Castro, former president of Cuba. The indictment accuses the 94 year old (and a number of others) of ordering the shoot-down in February 1996 of two civilian planes operated by the Miami-based group, Brothers to the Rescue. Castro was the Minister of Defense at the time. Now, whatever the purported legal standing is of this action, no one is in any doubt that the United States government has hit upon a saleable rationale for invading Cuba in order to kidnap Castro and topple the regime of current president Miguel Díaz-Canel. We can now see more clearly the reasons for the US imposition of an inhumane oil blockade on the island-state since the beginning of the year: to weaken the resolve of the Cuban people to resist, to increase the likelihood that the American forces will be welcomed as saviors. Unable to score decisively in its illegal war on Iran, the US government believes it can secure a cheap victory against Cuba. We in the Small Axe Project condemn this groundswell of aggression, an expression of barbarism and evil. Will Iran issue criminal charges against US president Donald Trump for the wholesale slaughter of 168 people, including more than 100 children, in the missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, on 28 February 2026, that Amnesty International has now determined was carried out by the US? And what if it does, since the US believes itself answerable to no law but its own. As Caribbean people we have a real challenge before us: either we submit supinely to these threats and transgressions of our sovereignty and dignity, or we stand up for our right to determine our collective futures.

We in the Small Axe Project view with alarm and deep dismay the Trump administration's intensification of threats against the Cuban regime, and what appears to be its preparations for some kind of military intervention. We urgently call upon the leaders of the Caribbean community of nations to vigorously protest this US aggression in the region in every available diplomatic forum, and to defend the sovereign right of the Cuban people to self-determination.

Small Axe 79 includes essays by Anasa Hicks, Elizabeth Jackson, Raul Fernandez, Max Gruber, and Jessica Adams. It features the special section "Rhoda Reddock: Scholar, Activist, Relentless Optimist", with essays by Kamala Kempadoo, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, Jocelyne Guilbault, Carole Boyce Davies, and Rhoda Reddock. The visualities section features Shoshanna Weinberger's work. The Book Discussion explores Ryan Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, with essays by J. Brent Crosson and Chelsea Angela Schields.

The Small Axe Project joins others in the Caribbean and elsewhere in condemning the US imposed oil blockade on Cuba, significantly worsening an already acute energy crisis in the country and threatening the health and economic well-being of millions of ordinary Cubans. We condemn such strategies blatantly aimed at precipitating regime change, one more illustration of the new imperialism shaping US policy. The Small Axe Project calls on CARICOM and Caribbean peoples to speak out in the strongest terms against this and other threats to Caribbean sovereignty.

The Small Axe Project team joins others in the United States and around the world in unequivocally condemning the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3rd, 2026, and their forced transport to New York to stand trial on drug-related charges. We utterly condemn the murder of the 32 Cubans and nearly 50 Venezuelans this act of wanton state violence entailed. We condemn the flagrant U.S. breach of those articles of the United Nations charter that enshrine the rights of sovereignty: Article 2(1), protecting the sovereign equality of member-states; Article 2(4), prohibiting the use of force against the territorial integrity of member-states; and Article 2(7), protecting the right of non-interference in domestic affairs. We are alarmed that the U.S. administration has now issued threats against the sovereignty of Colombia and Cuba. It is a sad reflection of the supine posture of Caribbean states when the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM, which met later that morning, could rise no further than to meekly offer that the “situation is of grave concern” to the region. Where are our leaders?

We are happy to welcome Carlos and J who are joining our team as editorial assistants. And welcome back Dantaé and Laura, our returning assistants. We also thank our outgoing editorial assistant, Luis, for all of his intellectual and organizational contributions to the Small Axe Project.

Incoming Editorial Assistants

Carlos Montes Jiménez is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His research focuses on transnational networks of material and affective solidarity in the Caribbean, and how they articulate political imaginaries beyond the nation-state. Prior to moving to New York City, Carlos received a Fulbright Research Award to conduct research in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He is originally from Añasco, Puerto Rico, and holds a B.A. with distinction in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Mellon Mays Fellow. Carlos is passionate about dance, including genres like Brega, Samba de Gafieira, Bachata, and, above all, Salsa.

J Jokhai is a Master’s student at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the relationship between oil and nationalism in Guyana, in the context of the country’s ascendant position in the world-system, its fraught socialist history, and its orientation towards U.S hegemony in the Caribbean. J is interested in political anthropology more broadly, as well as the anthropology of religion, art criticism with an emphasis on Modernist and contemporary art, and Marxism generally. He is honored to serve as a new editorial assistant for Small Axe. When not in class or writing for this journal, J is watching MMA, and reading a Manchette thriller on the F train in Queens, where he was born and raised.

Dantaé Garee Elliott, Ph.D., is a visiting lecturer at NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her work focuses on barrels (both as remittances and diasporic practices), the Caribbean diaspora, and contemporary art. Her dissertation, "Barrel Poetics", investigates barrel culture and its creative afterlives across Caribbean visual worlds. She has held diverse roles in academia and the arts, such as Co-Director of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Summer Seminar (Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022), Editorial Assistant at Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and contributor to Forgotten Lands Art, Currents of Africa (Volume 04). She also served as a copy editor for Volume 05, The Haunted Tropics, and translator for Volume 07, Poetics of Architecture. A 2023 Mellon Fellow at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Elliott co-curated "Coral & Ash", the first solo exhibition of Vincentian photographer Nadia Huggins, at NYU’s KJCC. She was a 2024–2025 Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and a Dean’s Dissertation Fellow at NYU, continuing her work at the intersection of Caribbean studies, visual culture, and critical imagination

Laura Berríos is a PhD student in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research focuses on artistic and literary responses to disasters in the Caribbean. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico and is a returning Editorial Assistant who enjoys poetry, dancing, and being near the sea. 

We thank Luis Frías and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Luis Frías is a New York-based scholar and writer pursuing a PhD in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center. Luis’s interests revolve around Mexican literature and cinema, archives, feminism, masculinities, violence, and neoliberalism. He splits his time between parenting his 5-year-old son, Leo, writing his dissertation, teaching Spanish and Portuguese languages, and wrapping up a book of tales. His current obsession is improving his times to run the NYC Marathon.

Small Axe 78 includes essays by Florian Gargaillo, John P. Sloan, Rachel Fulford, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. It features the special section "History as Repair: A Forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley," with essays by Jennifer L. Morgan, Vincent Brown, Robin D. G. Kelley, Walter Johnson, Sasha Turner, Kathleen Wilson, and Catherine Hall. The visualities section features Daniel Goudrouffe's work. Nathan H. Dize writes in the section Translating the Caribbean. The Book Discussion explores Malcom Ferdinand's Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen / Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, with essays by Alex A. Moulton and Sophie Large.