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.

Havana is undeniably beautiful. Its churches, arcades, balconies, and wrought-iron railings retain the elegance of the Spanish colonial era. Yet beauty and decay are inseparable. Plaster peels from walls, windows stand broken, and rubbish piles up in the streets. Houses once occupied by single families were redistributed after the revolution and divided among numerous households.

The sight reminded me of Guangzhou in the 1960s and 1970s. I grew up in an American-style house built with money my great-grandfather had earned as a railroad worker in the United States. By the time I was a child, nine families lived in it. Cuba resembled a chapter of my own life that China had since left behind.

Nothing felt more familiar than Cuba’s ration book. Families use it to obtain limited quantities of rice, cooking oil, and other necessities. A clerk weighs each portion while customers watch the scale closely, anxious not to lose even a little. Rationed goods are inexpensive, but the allotments are inadequate. The same products can cost many times more on the open market.

Cuba therefore contains several economies at once: the official wage economy, the ration system, the open market, and, above all, the dollar economy. A tourism worker who receives tips can easily earn more than a doctor, teacher, or engineer. Pay no longer reflects the value of work. Access to foreigners, hard currency, and scarce goods determines one’s real economic status.

The American embargo has imposed genuine costs, but it cannot explain everything. Cuba, once famous for sugar, now imports it. For decades, the Soviet Union bought Cuban sugar on favorable terms and supplied the island with oil, machinery, and aid. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the system collapsed with it. Abandoned mills and factories remain as monuments to a dependent command economy. A government cannot credit every success to the revolution while blaming every failure on foreigners.

Havana’s famous cars capture this contradiction perfectly. Chevrolets, Buicks, Fords, and Cadillacs share the streets with Soviet Ladas. They survived not because Cuba was wealthy enough to preserve them, but because Cubans could not buy replacements or obtain original parts. A single vehicle may combine an American body, a Soviet engine, and components from several countries. Cuban mechanics keep them alive through ingenuity and necessity. Tourists buy nostalgia; owners manage scarcity. Poverty, packaged for tourism, becomes scenery.

The young people idling on Havana’s streets reveal another kind of stagnation. Official unemployment may be low, but having a job is not the same as having a future. When salaries cannot support a dignified life and education brings little reward, young people turn to waiting, hustling, or leaving. A society does not need mass demonstrations to show that its youth have lost faith. Emigration is also a vote.

Against this fatigue stands the eternally young face of Che Guevara in Revolution Square. Western admirers wear his image as a symbol of freedom, often without asking about his role in revolutionary tribunals, executions, and repression. Once detached from its consequences, revolution becomes fashion. Guevara never has to queue for cooking oil or watch his apartment crumble. Reality ages; the icon does not.

My clearest lesson about the Cuban state came not from Revolution Square but from a police station. After I took photographs near the U.S. Embassy, plainclothes officers detained me for about three hours. Using translation software, I told one officer, “I am an American. This is my embassy. I only wanted to see what my money bought.”

He did not understand.

I tried again: “In America, we own our government.”

This time, he said he understood.

Before I was released, I was permitted to photograph a revolutionary poster on the wall—but not the room around it. That detail captured the logic of a controlled society. It does not reject the camera; it decides where the camera may point. The poster is meant to be seen. The room behind it is not.

The Cuba presented to foreign tour groups is similarly curated. Interestingly, several programs we visited were organized by gay and transgender groups. I quietly asked one organizer how the project was funded. He answered candidly that it received support from an American nongovernmental organization. Apparently, USAID money was also at work in Cuba.

Cuba is not China. China eventually undertook a vast market transformation. Ration coupons, foreign-exchange certificates, and empty shelves became history for most people. Cuba preserved much of the older system. Havana therefore conveys a sense of suspended time: the cars have aged, the buildings have aged, and the revolution has aged. Only the heroes remain young.

Two Cubas coexist. One belongs to visitors: rum, cigars, music, beaches, Hemingway, Guevara, and vintage cars. The other belongs to those who live there: wages, rationing, deteriorating housing, shortages, dollars, policing, and emigration.

In the gap between them, I repeatedly saw the China of my past. Political systems leave their deepest marks not only on constitutions and speeches but also on kitchens, shops, homes, and human faces. A revolution may change flags, slogans, and rulers. It cannot invoke its ideals forever to escape responsibility for its results.