Cuba on My Mind. Part Two: My time and travels in Eastern Cuba

In 2016, I entered my doctoral program at Fordham and decided to intentionally intersect my times as a tourist to connect with Eastern Cuba. Habaneros informed me that the East was the Blackest and most Caribbean part of the island. My interaction with Rastafarian community members in Havana, Cuba, also deepened my interest in the East. Additionally, my family and friends have fluid cross-cultural upbringings as Cubans of Jamaican descent and Jamaicans of Cuban descent in the United States.

I took a 16-hour bus ride across the island to Santiago de Cuba and then two motorcycles, a local bus, and a “dollar-van” Ford military-style truck to Guantánamo City. This was my first visit to the British West Indian Welfare Centre. It was 2017.

Lisa V. BettyJune 18, 2026Comment

Selective Silence: Celebrity, Empire, and the Politics of Moral Visibility

Public outrage over celebrity silence often reveals something deeper than disappointment. It reveals a collective desire for moral clarity in a culture built to avoid it.

Recent tensions involving Drake’s criticism of DJ Khaled’s silence on Palestine sparked predictable accusations of hypocrisy. Critics questioned how Drake—a Jewish Black artist who has also avoided sustained public condemnation of Zionism or explicit advocacy for Palestinian liberation—could publicly challenge another artist’s silence while remaining politically ambiguous himself.

Felicia ThompsonJune 4, 2026Comment

No Press Allowed

he press badge sat on my desk for weeks until the ink started fading from the laminate. It was never used for Rosalía’s closed door show at Lisbon’s Primavera Sound festival, a performance staged for ten thousand people but closed to independent eyes. The images that reached the public came pre-approved, pre-lit, and pre-curated.

By midafternoon steel barricades circled the venue like polite cattle fencing, security checked credentials at every entrance, and names like mine were not on the list. Inside, the stage stayed dark while no photojournalists fidgeted with lenses and no critics scribbled notes. Nothing was left to chance as reality was scripted before it even happened. Only hired shooters waited for the director’s cue, moving with the easy confidence of people who know exactly what story they are paid to tell, and the only voices covering the night belonged to those who had paid for the stage. The rest of us were fed the finished product and told it was “truth.”

Eman MohammedMay 21, 2026Comment

The god of Order vs. the God of Liberation

In moments of instability, political power rarely stands on its own. It reaches for something older, deeper, and harder to challenge: divine authority. When legitimacy begins to erode, governments do not simply tighten policy, but moralize it. They wrap enforcement in scripture. They frame control as righteousness.

Felicia ThompsonMay 7, 2026Comment

Yesterday I Walked to Foodtown

I’ve been walking to the same Foodtown for 16 years, but yesterday was the first time I counted: 7 blocks, 21 minutes.

The walk, as always, was punctuated with tree-lined streets, beautiful front gardens, the brownstones in Brooklyn you hope to live in one day, and restaurants of all kinds that could satisfy the pickiest of eaters. Signs pledging “Black Lives Matter,” “I Voted For Her,” and “Freeze the Rent” hung outside unconsciously expensive apartment windows. The neighborhood that had been my neighborhood made me feel more like a tourist and less like a native these days.

T.G. BrownMay 7, 2026Comment

Wounded, Untreated, and Lethal: The Male Crisis Nobody Is Diagnosing

This question has been sitting in the back of the mind of every Black woman paying attention for a long time now, and in recent weeks it has gotten louder and more urgent and more impossible to ignore. Why do men hate women so much—and why, in 2026, are they still killing us for it?

Last Sunday, Shamar Elkins shot his wife Shaneiqua Pugh in Shreveport, Louisiana, and then turned the gun on seven of his own children—ages three to eleven—and another child in the home, leaving eight children dead and two women wounded. Days before that, former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot his estranged wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in their home and then turned the gun on himself, leaving their two children to find them. And somewhere between those two tragedies, influencer Ashlee Jenae was found dead in a hotel room in Zanzibar—her birthday trip with her partner ending not in a proposal but in her death, her family notified not by him but by the hotel. Four months into 2026, story after story after story: Black women killed by husbands, partners, the fathers of their children—acts of violence so senseless they begin to blur together, and yet each one is devastatingly, irreversibly distinct.

Mishel NoorApril 30, 2026 Comment

Cuba on My Mind

I have been traveling to Cuba for over 10 years. In November of 2015, I arrived for the first time for a conference at the University of Havana. With free time in the convening schedule, I walked down the streets of the backroads of Old Havana. I passed four-story colonial-styled homes, which lined the streets packed tightly and were colored in light teals, pinks, and off-white. An older Black man and his grandson stood at his door and shouted in English, stern but inviting: “We are Black here!” My Spanish was rudimentary, so I replied back, “I know,” and smiled. He stated back, “Inglaterra,” implying that I may be a Black British visitor. I said, “No, jamaicana,” not claiming the political weight of the American passport in my bag. He returned my statement with a smile and nodded with connection and approval. His grandson, about five years old, attentively watched the diasporic rhythm of our interaction.

Lisa V. BettyApril 23, 2026Comment

The Quiet Crisis I See Every Day in Schools That No One Is Talking About

My editor asked me to write about the war in Iran and what students think about it. Here’s the honest answer: most of them don’t. And that terrifies me far more than the war itself.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, killing the Supreme Leader and pulling the region into an expanding, open-ended war. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed. Civilians—including 165 children inside a girls’ elementary school in Minab— are dead. A genocide in Gaza has been unfolding for over a year. The Congo continues to bleed. And I walk into school every morning and watch teenagers scroll past all of it without flinching.

Mishel NoorApril 9, 2026Comment