Bücher der Reihe Envisioning Cuba

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality. For others, Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years.

This history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the US occupation focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state.

Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991) collected oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is often viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this, proposing that her work is an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba.

Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.

With almost unprecedented access to Celia Sanchez Manduley's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals.

Vividly recasting Cuba's politics in the 1930s as transnational, Ariel Mae Lambe has produced an unprecendented reimagining of Cuban activism during an era previously regarded as a lengthy, defeated lull.

Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white. In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians played central roles in the development of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, Latino, and Afro-Latino identities and communities.

Analysing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality.

During the violent years of war marking Cuba's final push for independence from Spain, over 3,000 Cuban emigres, men and women, rich and poor, fled to Mexico. But more than a safe haven, Mexico was a key site, Dalia Antonia Muller argues, from which the expatriates helped launch a mobile and politically active Cuban diaspora around the Gulf of Mexico.

Envisioning La Escalera - an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba - in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organised slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century.

From 1895 to 1898, Cuban insurgents fought to free their homeland from Spanish rule. This title offers answers to questions concerning the war. It examines the origin of Spain's genocidal policy of ""reconcentration""; the causes of Spain's military difficulties; and, the condition, effectiveness, and popularity of the Cuban insurgency.

Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962

Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba abolished slavery, fought two wars of independence, and was occupied by the United States before finally becoming an independent republic. Tiffany A. Sippial argues that during this tumultuous era, Cuba's struggle to define itself as a modern nation found focus in the social and sexual anxieties surrounding prostitution and its regulation.

Based on unprecedented research in Cuban, American and European archives, this is an account of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with US policy towards the continent.

Analyzing the crucial period of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1961, this book challenges scholarly views of the revolution's sources, shape, and historical trajectory. It states that revolutionary leaders, while acting under serious constraints, were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideological visions.

Employing resilient and entrepreneurial approaches to audiovisual art in Cuba, this title focuses on what the author calls Street Filmmaking - the production of audiovisual artists who work outside the state film industry - to examine the island's transformation and changing notions of Cuban identity.

In 1812, a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. This title provides an analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts.

Offering an analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, this book looks at the work of three important contemporary Cuban authors: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) and Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2005), who left Cuba, and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba.

A study of the exiled Cuban writers from the 19th century known as los filibusteros who created a body of literature demanding independence from Spain and alliance with or annexation to the US. The transnational culture of writers went hand in hand with economic flow between the countries and was fuelled by belief in a US promise of freedom.

Combining archaeological and historical methods, this is an account of the runaway slaves settlements (""palenques"") that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 to 1850. The author demonstrates how romanticized the communities have become in historical memory.

Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a transition from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. This crucial stage of Cuba's political evolution, often overshadowed by the 1959 revolution, is addressed here, stressing the importance of the mass mobilization of the popular classes.

Tracing the formulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and forms of social and political mobilization in Cuba, de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education and political representation.

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.

Lillian Guerra argues that political violence and competing interpretations of the ""social unity"" proposed by Cuba's revolutionary patriot, Jose Marti, reveal conflicting visions of the nation - visions that differ in their ideological radicalism and in how they cast Cuba's relationship with the United States.

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to US imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, the author traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans.

Presents the environmental history of Cuba since the age of Columbus. This book emphasizes the two processes that have had a dramatic impact on the island's landscape: deforestation and sugar cultivation. It demonstrates how the sugar industry that came to define Cuba - and upon which Cuba depended - also devastated the ecology of the island.