A powerful account of the decline of the Cuban Revolution, told through the lives of five ordinary Cuban citizens.

Cuba is not the country it used to be. The regime is disintegrating, and unprecedented protest marches are challenging the gerontocratic Communist Party leadership.

Things Fall Apart reveals the decay of this political system through the lives of five ordinary Cuban citizens. Born in the 1970s and 80s, these men and women recount how their lives changed over a tumultuous stretch of thirty-five years after Fidel opened the country to tourism following the fall of the Soviet bloc, then when Raul Castro allowed market forces to operate, thinking it would stop the country's economic slide, and again after President Trump's tightening of the US embargo combined with the pandemic caused the economy to collapse. With warmth and humanity, they describe learning to survive in an environment where a tiny minority has grown rich by local standards, the great majority has been left behind, and inequality has destroyed the very things that used to give meaning to Cubans' lives.

Born out of the first oral history project authorised by the Cuban government in forty years, Professor Elizabeth Dore gathers these stories to illuminate the slow and agonising decline of the Cuban Revolution over the past four decades. For over sixty years the government controlled the historical narrative. In this book, Cubans tell their own stories.