I Watched Cuba Crumble From the Inside
The author standing with a tank by Havana’s Malecon in 1988 (Courtesy of Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez)
Every Thursday at 5 p.m., my grandmother would go into her bedroom in Havana, lock the door, and tune her Soviet-made radio to Radio Martí, a Miami-based station run by Cuban exiles who had fled Fidel Castro’s revolution. She always set the volume barely above a whisper. “Walls have ears,” she would say.