Cold War paquetería: Snail Mail Services Across and Around Cuba’s “Sugar Curtain”, 1963–1969

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, Cuban exiles in the United States devised creative means to send care packages to their relatives and loved ones on the island to alleviate material scarcities. In doing so, they circumvented the spirit, if not always the letter, of a broader US sanctions regime meant to deny material lifelines of any kind to the island's socialist economy. This essay uses promotional materials from and press coverage about this shipment business to illustrate one of the ways the ideological, diplomatic, and material “Sugar Curtain” dividing the “two Cubas” in the wake of the Cuban Revolution was more permeable than many realise. Notwithstanding the unavailability of pertinent Cuban government records, I also draw on the island press and a set of Cuban laws passed in 1968 to illustrate how political apprehensions over the fairly robust flow of parcels in the 1960s did eventually prompt a Cuban government response.