When you first arrive in Cuba it's hard not to wonder what Shakespeare would have done with a character like Fidel Castro. Then it doesn't take long before you realize the better question is what Fidel Castro would have done with Shakespeare. Guidebooks and legions of tourists warn you that Cuba is frozen in time, but Cuba had been reeling for years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and their subsidies to Cuba, the choice Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon had made rejecting millions had become much harder for Hector Vinent. Fidel called this dire time in Cuba's history a "Special period." As blackouts and food shortages became commonplace and desperation grew, Vinent's growing motivation to leave, compared to champions past, reflected the new realities and concerns all Cubans were confronted with...

While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history co-exists at once. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote, "To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt." Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand-in-hand with their pain. Whomever you might encounter in this place lacking the capacity to walk or even stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet, Jose Marti. From what I'd seen of it, the revolution's hold on Cubans looked less like poetry and more like the term zugzwang from chess: you're forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of 11 million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dyke.