Now I can’t get this image out of my head.

No water or electricity, and children begging in streets filled with rubbish – but this is why I won’t leave Cuba
The Guardian | 13 Feb 2026 | Ruaridh Nicoll

Felix Valdés García was nine years old when the revolutionaries came to blow up his trees. It was the verge of the 1970s and his father, Felin, was losing the family farm to Cuba’s 10-year-old communist regime. …

For decades the family had nurtured their 800 hectares of rich loam alongside the meandering Sagua River. Eight couples, all related, worked the fields, while Felix and his sister had fruitful adventures among the royal palms, avocado, mango and magnificent ceiba.

Magnificent ceiba meets magnificent C4.

“The sappers arrived,” Felix writes in his family memoir. “A gang of agile men who opened holes in the roots and placed charges of dynamite. There was a terrible roar and the trees flew into the sky, defying gravity, then fell shuddering with broken branches.”

Poetic, in a way.

“Fir in the hole!”