Read quickly, "In Cuba" feels like a set of impressions jotted down by someone newly arrived in an unfamiliar place. The images don't join up neatly. We get a "monstrous god" of sewing tools, a bodkin and thimble, that "broke open till all was out," and a speaker who "saw no paper question it." Then the scene shifts to water "as silver as music" and a town beside a fort, described as "a contingency unsettled in sand." It's hard to say exactly what the opening god stands for, but the language suggests something old, powerful and a little threatening giving way.
The speaker seems more observer than participant, curious and slightly detached. The final lines, where news "signifies little / but to say that something comes," capture a sense of waiting and uncertainty. The mood is dreamy and unsettled, beautiful on the surface but shifting underneath, like the sand the town sits on.