Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize) PDF Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize) PDF Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.

Cuban Cinema

Cuban Cinema PDF Author: Michael Chanan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816634248
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
New chapters express ongoing concerns about freedom of expression, the role of the Havana Film Festival in restoring Havana's central position in Latin American cinema, & the changing audience for Cuban films.

Wizards and Scientists

Wizards and Scientists PDF Author: Stephan Palmié
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383640
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as “modern” as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world’s first truly “modern” locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity’s achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.

From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba

From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba PDF Author: Reinaldo Funes Monzote
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In this award-winning environmental history of Cuba since the age of Columbus, Reinaldo Funes Monzote emphasizes the two processes that have had the most dramatic impact on the island's landscape: deforestation and sugar cultivation. During the first 300 years of Spanish settlement, sugar plantations arose primarily in areas where forests had been cleared by the royal navy, which maintained an interest in management and conservation for the shipbuilding industry. The sugar planters won a decisive victory in 1815, however, when they were allowed to clear extensive forests, without restriction, for cane fields and sugar production. This book is the first to consider Cuba's vital sugar industry through the lens of environmental history. Funes Monzote demonstrates how the industry that came to define Cuba--and upon which Cuba urgently depended--also devastated the ecology of the island. The original Spanish-language edition of the book, published in Mexico in 2004, was awarded the UNESCO Book Prize for Caribbean Thought, Environmental Category. For this first English edition, the author has revised the text throughout and provided new material, including a glossary and a conclusion that summarizes important developments up to the present.

Cuban Memory Wars

Cuban Memory Wars PDF Author: Michael J. Bustamante
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.

Living Ideology in Cuba

Living Ideology in Cuba PDF Author: Katherine Gordy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052616
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A revealing look at the complicated and continual negotiation between the Cuban state and society over the meaning of socialism

Cuban Palimpsests

Cuban Palimpsests PDF Author: Jose Quiroga
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816642144
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Four decades ago, the Cuban revolution captured the world’s attention and imagination. Its impact around the world was as much cultural as geopolitical. Within Cuba, the state developed a strictly defined national and collective memory that led directly from a colonial past to a utopian future, but this narrative came to a halt in the early 1990s. The collapse of Cuba’s sponsor, the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War preceded the so- called “Special Period in Times of Peace,” a euphemistic phrase that masked the genuine anxiety shared by leaders and people about the nation’s future. In Cuban Palimpsests, José Quiroga explores the sites, both physical and imaginative, where memory bears upon Cuba’s collective history in ways that illuminate this extended moment of uncertainty. Crossing geographical, political, and cultural borders, Quiroga moves with ease between Cuba, Miami, and New York. He traces generational shifts within the exile community, contrasts Havana’s cultural richness with its economic impoverishment, follows the cloak-and-dagger narratives of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary spy fiction and film, and documents the world’s ongoing fascination with Cuban culture. From the nostalgic photographs of Walker Evans to the iconic stature of Fidel Castro, from the literary expressions of despair to the beat of Cuban musical rhythms, from the haunting legacy of artist Ana Mendieta to the death of Celia Cruz and the reburial of Che Guevara, Cuban Palimpsests memorializes the ruins of Cuba’s past and offers a powerful meditation on its enigmatic place within the new world order. José Quiroga is professor and department chair of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. He is the author of Understanding Octavio Paz and Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America.

A Nation for All

A Nation for All PDF Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807849224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Argues that racism and antiracism continue to coexist in Cuban nationalism and society despite its fight for freedom, and describes the limitations Afro-Cubans face in job access, education, and political representation.

Culture and the Cuban State

Culture and the Cuban State PDF Author: Yvon Grenier
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498522246
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Culture and the Cuban State examines the politics of culture in communist Cuba. It focuses on cultural policy, censorship, and the political participation of artists, writers and academics such as Tania Bruguera, Jesús Díaz, Rafael Hernández, Kcho, Reynier Leyva Novo, Leonardo Padura, and José Toirac. The cultural field is important for the reproduction of the regime in place, given its pretense and ambition to be eternally “revolutionary” and to lead a genuine “cultural revolution”. Cultural actors must be mobilized and handled with care, given their presumed disposition to speak their mind and to cherish their autonomy. This book argues that cultural actors also seek recognition by the main (for a long time the only) sponsor and patron of the art in Cuba: the “curator state”. The “curator state” is also a “gatekeeper state,” arbitrarily and selectively opening and closing the space for public expression and for access to foreign currencies and the global market. The time when everything was either mandatory or forbidden is over in Cuba. The regime seems to have learned from egregious mistakes that led to a massive exodus of artists, writers and academics. In a country where things change so everything could stay the same, the controlled opening in the cultural field, playing on the actors' ambition and fear, illuminates a broader phenomenon: the evolving rules of the political game in the longest standing dictatorship of the hemisphere.

A Nation for All

A Nation for All PDF Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898767
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.