This Film Used To Be About Rum
We went to Cuba to find out how it intended to pay back its Soviet-era debt to the Czech Republic with booze. It only got stranger from there
Published in
2 min readMar 21, 2018
Okay, here it goes: During the Cold War, Cuba racked up a giant debt with Czechoslovakia. Since then, the Eastern Bloc collapsed, one half of Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic and Cuba stood frozen in time. That big Cold War-era debt survives, however. And so, negotiations have recently begun for Cuba to make good on all the cash it still owes the Czechs.
Its preferred form of payment, according to The Guardian—rum.
One hundred and thirty years’ worth, in fact.
Again—of rum.
That’s a fun story, right? We thought so, too. So we went to Cuba to tell it, and learned that you can’t just make a puff piece in an active military dictatorship.
