Jon Lee Anderson
speaker
629 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 24 Mar
Jon Lee Anderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But this time it was that plus no tourists,
And no people.
There was less people everywhere.
And I finally realized, wow, it's true.
The exodus, there is literally less people.
You notice that there are less people.
Every plaza I went to was empty of people.
The old crowded parts of old Havana where, you know, people would get hustled by people.
people selling cigars, girls, people wanting you to go in their restaurants.
There was still a few hustlers there, but now there were indigent old men lying on the street.
And when you got to the famous old colonial plazas, it was a guy with no legs, a couple of old women offering
how shall I put this, sexual favors, sort of grandmotherly aged.
It was miserable.
Yeah, you know, the thing is, for an older generation of Cubans that sort of came of age with the revolution and for a while believed in it, they would put up with the penuries, with the scarcities, because Fidel was still alive, Fidel Castro was still alive, this amazingly charismatic leader telling them
that the reason why they were putting up with scarcities was because of the blockade, as they called the American embargo.
And there was an element of truth to that.
During the Cold War, there was this kind of us and them.
There was a sense of purpose.
But that's been diminishing for years now.
For the United States, Cuba doesn't mean anything anymore.
Showing 541–560 of 629 · page 28 of 32
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