National Aquarium of Cuba

The guide to Havana's National Aquarium of Cuba starts with the tea-colored, nearly empty main tank and works back to the aquarium's 1960 opening as a showcase of research and education. It follows how, by the 1980s, the facility had quietly become one of the world's largest suppliers of live wild dolphins, caught along the Cuban coast and shipped to countries friendly with Havana in deals struck out of public view, rivaled in scale only by the hunts at Taiji. It also follows the aquarium into the present, including the 2022 death of a sea lion named Jocker and the disputed explanations for it. Look past the dolphin-swim tickets still sold at the entrance toward the cracked, mold-streaked tanks further back.