In 2021, when satellite internet connection came to the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land, which is made up of seven ethnically Guarani communities just south of the city of São Paulo, unexpected collateral issues arose. Younger members began to detach from communal activities. They stopped going to the house of prayer (the sanctuary) and the mutirões, or collective actions. Instead, they spent evenings on their cell phones watching videos on TikTok, compulsively using Free Fire and consuming pornography. Though the internet did facilitate political organization for the inter-town committee of the region made up of 23 communities spread across five Indigenous reservations in southern São Paulo, it was leading to more problems than solutions.

Local elders decided to disconnect from the internet, and pulled out the cables. “The internet is a kidnapping tool to Indigenous communities, we aren’t used to it. People stop learning their cultural practices and fall into content that disrespects women, incites violence, and [encourages] drinking. They begin to laugh about the misfortunes of others in funny videos that circulate quickly,” Jerá Guaraní, one of the leaders of the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Land, tells EL PAÍS.

But merely unplugging the internet didn’t solve these issues. Given the closeness of the region to the São Paulo metropolitan area, younger members simply set out in search of a WiFi connection. Sometimes, they’d disappear for several days. “We began a series of conversations to find a collective way of dealing with it. We helped the elders to understand that there was no going back, that the internet is like television, here to stay. The youngest members also understood that they couldn’t immerse themselves in that way, because it was going to destroy the Guarani way of life,” says Pedro Ekman from the Intervozes collective, who works on technological projects with the inter-town committee.

Jerá Guaraní says the internet has worsened problems that arose with the entry of cell phones. “Those who have cellular phones stop understanding what others are saying, they waste a lot of time, they even stop paying attention to the children, grandchildren, husband or wife,” she says. This is why the Nhandeflix platform was invented: to strengthen their culture and to value that which took place in their own lands.

The idea didn’t come immediately. First, Intervozes and Coolab designed a kind of partial blockade of the internet. With the help of a Raspberry mini-computer and blockade software Pi-hole, they made it impossible to access pornography or betting sites from the area. Plus, platforms like YouTube and TikTok were blocked at night. “The first method was to block everything except messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. The problem is that young people made a mockery of that domain blocking with VPN services,” says Ekman.

In 2022, after several failed attempts, an idea arose to launch a platform featuring Guarani content. In Guarani, nhandé means “us” or “ours.” “In order to avoid a restrictive agenda, we are proposing a kind of local content server. Each town has a mini-computer with a memory card full of films, videos, audios, even podcasts, which everyone can access. This way, we’re offering an alternative, a Guarani internet,” says Lucas Kesse of the inter-town committee, in the mini-documentary Nhandeflix.

Nhandeflix works like a local intranet. It uses a familiar format, but one that is only accessible locally. The domain nhandeflix.com doesn’t exist, but the project works for the 23 towns through access to the community platform. It utilizes the program Jellyfin, whose interface is similar to that of Netflix, and is available on cell phones. Initial content curation was done by the inter-town committee. “The majority of its content is already online, but no one was accessing it. The algorithm leads you elsewhere, even if you’re interested in these things,” Ekman points out.

Using the platform, users can find Guarani cultural productions like Roda Cutia (a Guarani children’s song), Bicicletas de Nhanderú (a documentary about a Guarani-Mbya town in southern Brazil), Xondaro Mbaraete (a documentary about the passing down of Guarani wisdom) and Como a noite apareceu (a fictional film based on a Guarani legend). It also includes material from other ethnic groups, like A Arca dos Zo’é (1993), which is about a historic meeting between the Waiãpai and Zo’é communities in the Amazon. “In addition to documentaries and films about the lives of Indigenous peoples and healthier, educational things, we want to highlight content made in our own lands,” says Jerá Guaraní. And so, Nhandeflix also features content filmed in the region’s communities.

At a presentation of the platform in one of the area’s towns, young Karai Tiago highlights its “videos to raise awareness among young people,” because “it is a challenge to maintain the Guarani way of life.” That, according to Lucas Kesse, is due not just to the “battle for the land, for the space, but for control over time.” Since the launch of Nhandeflix, problems have arisen. For example, some families decided to buy fiber-optic internet instead of community satellite access — the accelerated timeline and infinite scroll of global platforms have already taken hold in many communities. On the other hand, content storage on memory cards for Nhandeflix has turned out to be a clunky process, requiring frequent upgrades.

To address such concerns, the inter-town committee is re-launching the service. Plus, it is in talks with Intervozes to build a website and even the area’s own data center. “The Guarani are thinking about investing everything they have in a community data center that they will run themselves. In general, all this is a Guarani technological appropriation. They say, we’re not going to let technology destroy our world. We are going to appropriate it so that we can maintain our way of life,” says Ekman.

Nhandeflix is not an entertainment project meant to compete with Netflix. It’s really about autonomy, and what Jerá Guaraní and Kesse call “technologies of sufficiency,” technological tools that nurture other value systems beyond the “excess that sickens,” uncontrolled accumulation and consumerist escape. “We don’t want to live like social media mannequins,” says Jerá Guaraní. “We want to live like the roots in the earth.”

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Every era has imagined its ideal body. Ours, moreover, demands that we achieve it to retain even a minimal sense of worth as individuals. For years now, we have witnessed the return of extreme thinness, the cult of youth and flawless beauty as moral imperatives of our time.

Ozempic, along with other drugs in the GLP-1 family — initially used to treat diabetes and obesity — has become, in less than five years, the symbol of a new body economy. Injectable weight-loss medications, anti-aging treatments, regular doses of Botox, hyaluronic acid or salmon sperm, as well as filters and other image-altering technologies, promise to correct any deviation from the new social norm. Since the pandemic, when health concerns took center stage in everyday life, the discourse has taken on a totalitarian tone, amplified by powerful propaganda machines: social media.

Ozempic is a weight-loss drug, but it is also the symbol of a new era in which the body is understood — even more than in the past, which is saying something — as something perfectable to the point of exhaustion. Beauty, youth and thinness have always been signs of virtue: they convey values such as discipline, self-control, willpower and even purchasing power. In late capitalism, new meanings have been added to these: an acceptable body signals that its owner knows how to manage themselves. Conversely, a tired, wrinkled, overweight body, or one with unconventional contours, is interpreted as a symptom of poor self-management.

The culture of our time has absorbed this shift in the climate. There is no shortage of works that can be interpreted as parables of the culture surrounding Ozempic and similar drugs, even some that were conceived before these drugs became widely popular. For the most part, they are expressionist laments about bodies made ill by their desire for thinness, their fantasies of eternal youth, and the constant impulse to compare themselves with other bodies.

This is the subject of recent films such as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which in 2024 turned anxiety about the passage of time and bodily perfection into raw material for a cruel fable in which a television star fired upon reaching middle age — played by a stunning Demi Moore — tries an experimental drug that creates a younger, smoother and more commercially viable version of herself.

Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man explores similar territory, in which an actor with neurofibromatosis undergoes an experimental treatment to transform his face, eventually taking on the attractive features of actor Sebastian Stan, though losing his facial deformity does nothing to resolve any of his insecurities. Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero stars a teacher at an elite boarding school who turns so-called “mindful eating” — a euphemism for plain and simple deprivation — into a doctrine of austerity and purity. Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, released in theaters after its screening at the Sitges Film Festival, is a body horror reimagining of Cinderella in which the imperative of beauty demands that one undergo atrocious treatments. And The Ugly Ones, a feature film released on Netflix, is a terrifying dystopia where cosmetic surgery becomes mandatory upon reaching adolescence.

Added to this list is Insatiable, an Australian horror film set to hit theaters in late July, in which a medical student obsessed with losing weight discovers a new drug made from human ashes.

Television is also beginning to reflect this unease. The Beauty, a series created by Ryan Murphy, who has always been attuned to the excesses of the present, imagines a sexually transmitted disease that makes infected people physically perfect, though with a rather inconvenient side effect: the virus beautifies first, but then kills. The series has been available on Disney+ for the past few months.

Meanwhile, the exhibition The Cult of Beauty at the CCCB contemporary arts center in Barcelona explores this obsession from a historical perspective. The exhibition offers a journey through the evolution of beauty ideals, the construction of aesthetic standards and the vindication of bodies excluded from the norm. Its central thesis is that art and visual culture have served for centuries to construct and promote these standards, and that today these ideals are being revived on social media, red carpets and other facets of popular culture. Its effects are far from abstract: a radical resurgence of fatphobia and ageism — if they ever truly went away — coupled with aesthetic pressure that falls primarily on women, though men are not exempt either.

“The fear of aging, of fat or of bodily transformation is not a new phenomenon, but today it appears cloaked in new technologies and the language of individual choice that often conceal the power structures that underpin it,” observe curators Júlia Llull and Blanca Arias. Their exhibition reminds us that, throughout art history, beauty has been associated with proportion, harmony and virtue. This equivalence was reinforced with the emergence of Judeo-Christian morality, when beauty ceased to be a mere aesthetic quality and became an indicator of righteousness as well. Meanwhile, ugliness, deformity or difference were seen as signs of disorder, sin or deviance.

That is why it is no coincidence that the figure of the monster has made such a powerful comeback in the contemporary imagination. “At a time when pressure on bodies is intensifying through image culture, body-modification technologies and the notion of body optimization, the monster emerges as the figure that embodies everything the canon seeks to expel,” the curators say.

This is exemplified by Elisasue, the hybrid creature from The Substance — as tender and pathetic as any human — among other recent instances of body horror, a genre that has become fashionable in contemporary horror for good reason: “It’s a subgenre that expresses the anxieties of a culture that demands constant intervention on one’s own flesh to keep it young, productive, thin and desirable.”

In that sense, Ozempic is not so much an anomaly as a sign of the times. “It reveals that the canon stubbornly refuses to disappear,” the curators state. Yet their exhibition also offers a glimmer of optimism, reminding us that no aesthetic dogma lasts forever: “Even if the norm presents itself as natural, immutable or inevitable, it is as fragile as any historical construct. What has been constructed can also be dismantled.”

A very similar conversation is taking place in bookstores. Christopher E. Forth’s monumental book Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life reconstructs the long Western history of aversion to fatness and reminds us that, contrary to certain common assumptions, distrust of the plump body has run through history since classical antiquity, linked to excess, animality, filth, aporophobia and moral suspicion.

However, the author himself — a history professor at the University of Kansas — acknowledges that the phenomenon is reaching new heights today. “Diet, exercise, treatments, and drugs are part of an invisible regimen that has almost become an obligation for the neoliberal subject,” Forth says in an email.

The historian traces the origin of this obsession with the body, which has existed since the dawn of humanity but has intensified in recent decades, to the origins of cinema. “The advent of the cinematic close-up made the face more scrutinizable: its features and flaws were magnified. At the same time, it turned movie stars into new models of health and beauty,” he explains. “With social media filters, we become the stars of our own movies; we can correct our image, look for a moment like an improved version of ourselves, and then try to make our real bodies match that retouched selfie.”

His book finds a contemporary counterpart in a series of titles that view thinness and beauty as battlegrounds marked by social violence. Manual para romper un cuerpo (Manual for Breaking a Body) by Lara Gil draws on the author’s experience with bariatric surgery to debunk the promise that losing weight is enough to fix a life. Cinco lorzas metafísicas (Five Metaphysical Rolls of Fat) by María von Touceda combatively rejects the obligation to correct being overweight. Leticia Sala’s short essay Dame veneno que quiero vivir (Give Me Poison, I Want to Live) delves into the skincare industry (valued at over $150 billion), the fear of aging and the normalization of anti-aging rhetoric. And Las niñas bonitas no pagan dinero (Pretty Girls Don’t Pay), by Clara Nuño, brings that pressure into the realm of fiction, examining beauty standards passed down from mothers to daughters and the damage wrought by exposure to social media from an early age.

These books demonstrate how deeply rooted aesthetic and body-related pressures have become in contemporary Spanish literature, particularly in works written by women. “The body was already present in the work of many earlier female authors. What has changed is that certain bodily experiences, and a woman’s relationship with her own body, are no longer viewed as trivial or lacking in universal relevance,” notes Rosario Villajos, author of La educación física (Physical Education) and winner of the 2023 Biblioteca Breve Prize. Set in the early 1990s, her novel follows Catalina, a teenager navigating that precise moment when a woman loses control over her own body: the moment it begins to be observed, judged and desired by others.

Women who were teenagers in the 1990s grew up, Villajos recalls, with a demanding ideal of thinness. Today, aesthetic pressure is amplified by even more powerful channels. “In the past, the beauty ideal reached us via magazines, television or advertising; now, it comes through a screen that never turns off. Back then, the ideal was nearly impossible to attain; now, there seems to be an added obligation to pursue it. We live in an era where we are told that if we aren’t thin, young or attractive, it is because we haven’t tried hard enough,” the writer observes. “Beauty is no longer perceived as something one either has or doesn’t have; it has become an individual responsibility. It is as if failing to be young, thin or attractive today is, above all, a personal failure.”

This culture of self-optimization produces bodies that are considered desirable, but also others that are punished and excluded, especially when they do not conform to accepted norms. This is the context for Gorda sinvergüenza (Shameless Fat Woman), by Aida González Rossi, an essay that addresses fatphobia through the lens of language. Her starting point is the word fat, historically used as an insult, yet she also explores the possibility of inhabiting the word differently: stripping away some of its derogatory weight and transforming it into an identity in its own right, much as others have done with slurs reclaimed by gay and lesbian communities.

González Rossi, however, does not idealize the previous wave of body-diversity discourse embraced by fashion magazines as the supposed end of the longstanding obsession with thinness. The illusion did not last long. “The body-positive discourse, so visible between 2016 and 2021, contains many pitfalls. In the end, what it does is create another beauty standard: you have to be fat in that way, or be a fat woman who loves everything about herself,” she says. “That leads us to think a lot about our appearances. And capitalism has a strong interest in us doing that, which is why this discourse has been so thoroughly absorbed by the system.”

How far will this phenomenon go? The film The End of It, shot in London by Catalan director Maria Martínez Bayona and screened at the Cannes Film Festival, envisions a future where aging is a treatable medical condition and death has become optional. The protagonist is 250 years old; she renews her blood via a machine and has replaced her bones with more durable materials. In this story, the very concept of age has been abolished. “Even though the film is set in the future, we aren’t that far from that reality,” the director says. “Today, there are already mothers and daughters who, almost bizarrely, look the same age. Medicine has achieved things that once sounded like science fiction, and there’s a real debate about what our biological limits are.”

Martínez Bayona wrote the screenplay before Ozempic became mainstream, although these questions had been in the air for a long time. “The idea of finding an elixir of eternal youth is as old as humanity itself, but in the last five or six years, the focus on longevity has intensified greatly. An entire industry is emerging, with gurus like Bryan Johnson, who claims he’s going to live forever.”

Ozempic culture isn’t just a cult of thinness. It is also one that resists any sign of decline or human finitude. “I don’t know if we’ll live to be 250 years old, but I have no doubt that people will try,” says the director.

Her remarks recall, in a far less grotesque form, Kim Kardashian’s famous admission in 2022. Asked what she would do if she were told that eating excrement every morning would make her look younger, she replied: “I might, I just might.” Body horror, as we said, even though there is less and less need to rely on special effects.

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The scene took place nearly half a century ago. It was June 9, 1977, and ABC News was about to broadcast journalist Barbara Walters’s highly anticipated interview with Cuban president Fidel Castro. A family of four, a husband and wife and their two daughters, sat in front of the television in the living room of an apartment in West New York, New Jersey. Before the interview began, and before Castro declared that he had become a communist through studying the political economy of capitalism, or that he would remain in power for as long as the people wanted him there, the newscast opened with images of El Morro, the Malecón, the Capitolio, the sublime city that is Havana.

One of the daughters, Ada Ferrer, a 15-year-old teenager, felt her eyes well up with tears. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you crying?” her parents asked. Ferrer was crying for everything she did not know about herself. She replied: “Because I was born there and I have no memory of that place. What does it mean to be born somewhere and not be able to remember it?”

Nearly all her life since then — through her training as a historian, her books, her Pulitzer Prize, her work — has been a personal and collective search for the Cuban nation.

Ferrer was just 10 months old when her mother carried her in her arms and, without saying goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Poly, whom his father from a previous marriage would not allow to leave the country, embarked on a one-way journey through Mexico that ended in the United States. It was April 1963. Castro’s Revolution was not yet a dying enterprise but a project barely four years old, although Ferrer’s father had already left to settle in New York. He waited for them there.

“My mother left Cuba leaving my brother behind, but always thinking they would be reunited soon, that Poly’s father would change his mind and let him leave. There was also the belief that Fidel might fall and we could return,” says Ferrer. But the mother and son would not see each other again for several years, and not even the letters they exchanged month after month could fill the deep crater that separation carved into the family.

Following a superb essay published in The New Yorker, My Brother’s Keeper, Ferrer this year published Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter, a book in which the historian delves into and explores the search for her past.

“History shapes the heart of many families; it is present in daily life in ways people sometimes do not realize,” she says. “I have always tried to write histories from below, because we all live under the shadow of history. My family cannot be explained unless I place it in the context of the Cuban Revolution, the beginning of exile, and emigration to the United States. My family is made up of all that.”

Question. Why should people read your personal story today? What does it say about Cuba as a nation?

Answer. People tend to talk about Cuba in slogans: you are either for it or against it, who left and who stayed. Everything is reduced to that. But that is not Cuba’s true story; it is in families like ours, who experience the Revolution, exile and migration policies in flesh and blood. Family separation, ordinary people trying to survive, is part of the story but is often left untold. The main issue is not ideology; it is family ties and the human condition. This is not only the story of my family; it could be the story of many people over the past several decades. And in the United States, it is not just the story of Cubans: this is a country that receives people from all over the world. People leave their families behind because they see no other option. It is a very painful, very difficult process. At a time when U.S. politics, and especially the president, speaks of migrants as if they were not human, it is important to tell immigrants’ stories in a deeply human way.

Q. The symbolic arc of the Cuban immigrant experience in the United States can be seen in your own family: your family was welcomed into this country, yet until a few weeks ago one of your nephews was being held at Alligator Alcatraz. How much does that say about the current moment?

A. It is a very different moment. When we arrived in 1963, there was aid, people welcomed you, and now my nephew arrives and is detained. The so‑called Cuban “privilege” has, for the moment, disappeared. They did not repeal the Cuban Adjustment Act, but they are obstructing it; it is frozen. Not only that, the country has changed. The opportunities that existed when I arrived are no longer there. I studied at a very prestigious university and paid almost nothing. There was assistance, more jobs, lower housing costs. Everything has become more difficult.

Q. In your latest book we see Ferrer the person, but also the professional. Is it challenging to tell your own personal story using the techniques and tools of historiography?

A. It was the only way I could do it. One of the main sources was a set of documents I found after my parents died: the letters my brother Poly wrote to my mother after we left. We left on April 29, 1963, and the first letter is dated May 4 — not even a week had passed; it was a letter from a nine‑year‑old with spelling mistakes to his mother who had just left. Those letters kept arriving at our home until 1979. Reading them was one of the hardest things I have ever done. They were my brother’s letters of suffering, and I imagined my mother reading them and feeling that guilt. I would read one or two and then have to stop. They were hard to read, but I also read them as a historian, as if they were archival sources. That took a great deal out of me.

When my brother left during the Mariel crisis [in 1980], my mother and he crossed paths at sea. She went to pick him up in Cuba, but he had already come, and they sent him to one of the camps set up in northern Florida because many people were arriving in Key West and Miami. The documents from that camp are in the National Archives in College Park. So I went and worked in that archive. That is what I know how to do; I have spent more than 30 years going to archives and searching catalogs. I do not think I would have liked to do it any other way.

Q. When did Cuba become a subject of professional interest?

A. It took quite a while. At university I studied English literature; in the 1980s very little Latin American material was taught. In my first year, I wrote an article about women and the Cuban Revolution. After that, I did not write again about Cuba during my university career. I graduated thinking I would become a lawyer, but I worked at a law firm and did not like it. I only knew I was a good student. Later I thought of studying Latin American history with the aim of becoming a journalist. I did a master’s at the University of Texas, then returned to New York and worked as a teacher. I kept studying, completed a PhD in Latin American history and wrote my dissertation on Cuba — on the war of independence and the racial question within those struggles. That became my first book.

Q. Since then, professionally and personally, your life has been a project of reconstructing your memory and your country.

A. Yes, but it is not a very efficient method, because immersing yourself in an archive and reviewing 19th‑century documents does not reconstruct my memory or my parents’ memory. But that is how I began; I plunged into the national archive of Old Havana to work. My first trip to Cuba was in 1990. Since then, I have made more than 30 trips; I went almost every year.

Sometimes, when I was in Cuba, I felt that what I really wanted to do was look at everything and record it all with my eyes so that afterwards I could show the film to my parents. I began to feel that need to understand Cuba, and it all has to do with family separation. Most of my family remained in Cuba. I wanted to understand why some people had left and others had stayed, how different those who stayed were from those who left, how people change within a revolution and how they change in emigration.

Q. How do you think they change?

A. My mother in the United States and my aunt in Cuba remained the same, despite such a long separation. Yes, in my aunt’s house there was a photograph of Fidel Castro with his rifle, while in mine there was a picture of Our Lady of Charity. That was very different, but at the same time the culture was shared: the way they spoke, the coffee in the morning. I wondered how people who were so close to one another had chosen such different things.

I remember that on my first trip to Cuba I took a lot of photographs, and the whole family in Miami came to see them. One of them showed my uncle Gregorio, my father’s oldest brother, a very sharp-tongued man. I remember his sister seeing the photo and saying: “Look at my brother Gregorio, communism has destroyed him.”

That struck me. Twenty-five years had passed, yet there was still this idea that people had not gone on living, that everything was simply a matter of living under communism. But people do go on living, and that was one of the things I saw when I went there: Cuba is not a normal country, but there is life.

Q. You have said your father used to say: “Cuba is shit, but it’s my shit!” Is it yours too?

A. Yes, especially now. I used to have more hope, particularly during the Obama era, with the opening-up. Not anymore. Now Cuba is a total disaster, and I carry that with me; it keeps me awake at night.

Q. Has there ever been a crisis in Cuba’s history comparable to this one?

A. I think of Weyler’s reconcentration [policy]. He was the Spanish governor-general who, during the wars of independence, wanted to prevent Cuban rebels from receiving support from people in the countryside. Those people were driven off their land and concentrated in towns where there was not enough food, housing, or sanitation, and a great many died. I think about that from time to time. But this is the worst moment of the past several decades; it surpasses the Special Period. We have now been living through it for 36 years, and this crisis comes after more than three decades in which people have known that, to survive, they need hard currency. It is a crisis on top of a system that is already deeply deteriorated, which is why it is worse. It has been 30 years of collapse. The country is destroyed.

Q. There now seems to be a certain nostalgia for the Republic in some quarters…

A. Many people feel that nostalgia because it was the period before Fidel and before Batista’s coup, a time of promise. But the understanding of that period is not very deep, because there was a great deal of corruption, and people do not talk about that. People talk about the Constitution of 1940; there were elections with people from all parties, communists, conservatives, and I do not think that those who are talking about the Republic today are necessarily committed to that same spirit of diversity. Since I have always studied race, I do not know whether the people who glorify the Republic understand how much inequality there was. There is inequality now as well; the Revolution did not erase it, and it has worsened over the last 30 years.

Q. Your Pulitzer Prize-winning book Cuba: An American History seems especially relevant amid the tensions that exist today between Havana and Washington. How closely have Cuba’s past and present been tied to the presence of such a nearby empire?

A. You cannot understand the history of Cuba without understanding the history of that relationship. One thing I am seeing more and more on social media is people writing as though the empire did not matter; some even defend the Platt Amendment, which was imposed by the Americans in 1901 as an appendix to Cuba’s first constitution. It gave the United States the right to intervene and prevented Cuba from entering into agreements with third countries. We have reached a point where we know what the word sovereignty means, yet people associate the word sovereignty as though it belonged to Fidel Castro, and so they reject sovereignty.

Q. Recently, The New York Times published your open letter to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, in which you write: “The hour has come. It is time at the very least for a true national dialogue.” What would such a dialogue require, and what would it entail?

A. A dialogue that includes people from here and from there, dissidents, members of the government, people on the left and on the right; one that reflects a plurality of experiences and viewpoints. That is what I want, but I do not think it is possible. People are so attached to their positions that, if the government were to call for such a dialogue, some would refuse to take part, and if the dissidents were to call for it, the government would resist. A national dialogue is something that should have happened in Cuba a very long time ago, but it has not.

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