No, coffee no hay. Slightly annoyed, Simone tried another shop, but there was no hay there either. After a few days, he got used to the mantra. But above all, he began to really see those desolate shelves, half-empty or empty, where sometimes only a few handwritten labels—like a kind of tombstone for the fallen—speak of goods that may once have been there, but no longer are: no hay (for some years now the government has ordered the removal of labels for products that no hay, so as not to emphasize the emptiness too much). That answer, no hay, Cubans expect it, and they absorb it with an ascetic, tropical ataraxia: no hay rice, no hay flour, no hay anything—or almost anything. Not to mention pharmacies, where no hay, from being a verdict of fasting, becomes the anguish of not being able to get treatment. Sometimes, like a mirage, there is an entire row of rum bottles or cans of beer. But you can’t cook ropa vieja, nor congrí, with rum. You can, however, forget about lunch. And so it was that Simone Bacci, Spanish-speaking by family tradition and a photographer by vocation, thought of telling the story of no hay through a collection of its visual equivalents, just as peremptory: the languishing shelf, the weeping plate. What you are about to leaf through is the summary of several trips to Cuba, the last in 2024. The story of what is not there: a fine challenge for photography, the art of ça a été—of “that-which-has-been.” Now, the subject of this investigation may seem slender to you: here is the metaphorical representation of a revolutionary country strangled by economic crisis and the American bloqueo. And it is hard to deny that this is the case. The libreta de abastecimiento was introduced in 1963 by the Cuban government to try to guarantee a fair distribution of scarce foodstuffs. Afterward, with Proclamation 3447 of February 7, 1962 (eight months before the missile crisis), U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had ordered an embargo on all trade with the Caribbean island. The libreta established the minimum quantities of food to which Cuban citizens were entitled. For a few decades, it managed to fulfill its task, even with some surprises (squid!). Still, after the collapse of the Soviet world and the proclamation of the Periodo especial en tiempo de paz—in other words, a state of emergency—the era of no hay exploded in all its rampant scarcity. But this is only the skeleton of the story. The story is also made of flesh and blood, of feelings and symbols with which collective life becomes charged when subjected to stress. Simone remembers well the reluctance of many Cubans, and of many shopkeepers, to go beyond the desolate no hay—the reticence to speak of the failure of the revolution, masked by the nostalgia of “with Fidel it was better.” And, conversely, the inventiveness with which many have devised a form of resistance transversal to escasez, the chronic shortage of foodstuffs: a strategy based on word of mouth, now running through social-network channels, in groups called “¿Qué hay?”, where people warn one another—there, in that shop today rice has arrived; there are lentils there; today hay, hurry while it lasts! And of course, they also exchange price information about the new mipymes shops—the privatized ones—where goods, arriving through inscrutable channels, are paid for in dollars at a very steep exchange rate. And the libreta, this little booklet of cheap paper, with typography perhaps deliberately reminiscent of wartime, on whose pages every purchase of the past is meticulously recorded, but where the still-empty boxes guarantee nothing for the future—well, the libreta then becomes a kind of paradoxical flag. There, at the bottom, it is written, established, certified by the state, what we have the right to consume, what we have the right to have as citizens of the revolution—and yet no hay, we do not have it. In short, the libreta embodies a right proclaimed but denied; and is it not from this very dissonance, after all, that the symbols of rebellion are born? And those full shelves, instead, in Cuban libraries, where books make available to everyone a knowledge that nourishes the mind but not the body. And those posters with revolutionary slogans, the face of the guerrillero heroico, which once inflamed the hearts of the ejército de la luz, of the bearded men singing in chorus Qué linda es Cuba—those residues of rhetorical pride that coexist with the calendar of Saint Anthony of the piglet, pork being excluded from the state menu of the libreta… And those empty shelves, where sometimes a solitary packet of salt, an orphaned can of tomatoes, with their handwritten price labels in elegant script—almost as if to compensate for scarcity with dignity—seem like artifacts in the display cases of an archaeological museum; those shelves where the echo of shortage resounds, clumsily filled with inedible consolations like potted flowers or pathetic Christmas garlands; those shelves kept neat and clean in expectation of Godot-goods—are they perhaps the tidy trenches of a paradoxical pride, the metonymies of a people (whom Simone has deliberately left out of his frames) who have seen a promise empty out, but who still carry it in their pocket, in gray cardboard, like an unpaid promissory note, complete with stamps and signatures and regulations on the back: certifications of that hope for a better world so often promised, that longed-for idea of a future of equality and liberty and fraternity and well-being which has warmed the hearts of millions of people, but which—no one knows why—is still no hay, no hay, no hay. MICHELE SMARGIASSI