Cuba in the American Imagination

Cuba in the American Imagination PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807832162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
One of the foremost historians of Cuba analyzes the metaphorical and depictive motifs that have been used to describe Cuba and their political effectiveness as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century.

Cuba in the American Imagination

Cuba in the American Imagination PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807886946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Perez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba.

Cuba

Cuba PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195094817
Category : Cuba
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This overview of Cuban history and politics has been updated and revised to include a new afterword on the current political situation and an expanded guide to selected reference literature.

The Structure of Cuban History

The Structure of Cuban History PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469608863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In this expansive and contemplative history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. argues that the country's memory of the past served to transform its unfinished nineteenth-century liberation project into a twentieth-century revolutionary metaphysics. The ideal of national sovereignty that was anticipated as the outcome of Spain's defeat in 1898 was heavily compromised by the U.S. military intervention that immediately followed. To many Cubans it seemed almost as if the new nation had been overtaken by another country's history. Memory of thwarted independence and aggrievement--of the promise of sovereignty ever receding into the future--contributed to the development in the early republic of a political culture shaped by aspirations to fulfill the nineteenth-century promise of liberation, and it was central to the claim of the revolution of 1959 as the triumph of history. In this capstone book, Perez discerns in the Cuban past the promise that decisively shaped the character of Cuban nationality.

Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination

Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination PDF Author: Kenneth Routon
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813043182
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Despite its hard-nosed emphasis on the demystifying realism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the political imagery of the Cuban revolution--and the state that followed--conjures up its own magical seductions and fantasies of power. In this fascinating account, Kenneth Routon shows how magic practices and political culture are entangled in Cuba in unusual and intimate ways. Routon describes not only how the monumentality of the state arouses magical sensibilities and popular images of its hidden powers, but he also explores the ways in which revolutionary officialdom has, in recent years, tacitly embraced and harnessed vernacular fantasies of power to the national agenda. In his brilliant analysis, popular culture and the state are deeply entangled within a promiscuous field of power, taking turns siphoning the magic of the other in order to embellish their own fantasies of authority, control, and transformation. This study brings anthropology and history together by examining the relationship between ritual and state power in revolutionary Cuba, paying particular attention to the roles of memory and history in the construction and contestation of shared political imaginaries.

The Louis A. Pérez Jr. Cuba Trilogy, Omnibus E-book

The Louis A. Pérez Jr. Cuba Trilogy, Omnibus E-book PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9781469601403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1152

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Book Description
Louis A. Perez Jr. is one of the most influential historians of Cuba. Available for the first time as an Omnibus Ebook edition, this three-volume set brings together three of Perez's most acclaimed works on Cuba and its relations to the United States. This Omnibus Ebook contains: The War of 1898 presents both a critique of the conventional historiography and an alternate history of the war that is informed by Cuban sources. On Becoming Cuban explores the rich cultural ties between Cuba and the United States and reveals their startling influence on the way Cubans see themselves as a people and as a nation. Cuba in the American Imagination describes how for more than two hundred often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island.

Cuban Revolution in America

Cuban Revolution in America PDF Author: Teishan A. Latner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963547X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.

Aerial Imagination in Cuba

Aerial Imagination in Cuba PDF Author: Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429853300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Aerial Imagination in Cuba is a visual, ethnographic, sensorial, and poetic engagement with how Cubans imagine the sky as a medium that allows things to circulate. What do wi-fi antennas, cactuses, pigeons, lottery, and congas have in common? This book offers a series of illustrated ethno-fictional stories to explore various practices and beliefs that have seemingly nothing in common. But if you look at the sky, there is more than meets the eye. By discussing the natural, religious, and human-made visible and invisible aerial infrastructures—or systems of circulation—through short illustrated vignettes, Aerial Imagination in Cuba offers a highly creative way to explore the aerial space in Santiago de Cuba today.

The Cubans

The Cubans PDF Author: Anthony DePalma
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 052552245X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
"[DePalma] renders a Cuba few tourists will ever see . . . You won't forget these people soon, and you are bound to emerge from DePalma's bighearted account with a deeper understanding of a storied island . . . A remarkably revealing glimpse into the world of a muzzled yet irrepressibly ebullient neighbor."--The New York Times Modern Cuba comes alive in a vibrant portrait of a group of families's varied journeys in one community over the last twenty years. Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long. In Guanabacoa, longtime residents prove enterprising in the extreme. Scrounging materials in the black market, Cary Luisa Limonta Ewen has started her own small manufacturing business, a surprising turn for a former ranking member of the Communist Party. Her good friend Lili, a loyal Communist, heads the neighborhood's watchdog revolutionary committee. Artist Arturo Montoto, who had long lived and worked in Mexico, moved back to Cuba when he saw improving conditions but complains like any artist about recognition. In stark contrast, Jorge García lives in Miami and continues to seek justice for the sinking of a tugboat full of refugees, a tragedy that claimed the lives of his son, grandson, and twelve other family members, a massacre for which the government denies any role. In The Cubans, many patriots face one new question: is their loyalty to the revolution, or to their country? As people try to navigate their new reality, Cuba has become an improvised country, an old machine kept running with equal measures of ingenuity and desperation. A new kind of revolutionary spirit thrives beneath the conformity of a half century of totalitarian rule. And over all of this looms the United States, with its unpredictable policies, which warmed towards its neighbor under one administration but whose policies have now taken on a chill reminiscent of the Cold War.

Back Channel to Cuba

Back Channel to Cuba PDF Author: William M. LeoGrande
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
History is being made in U.S.-Cuban relations. Now in paperback and updated to tell the real story behind the stunning December 17, 2014, announcement by President Obama and President Castro of their move to restore full diplomatic relations, this powerful book is essential to understanding ongoing efforts toward normalization in a new era of engagement. Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual conflict and aggression between the United States and Cuba since 1959, Back Channel to Cuba chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh here present a remarkably new and relevant account, describing how, despite the intense political clamor surrounding efforts to improve relations with Havana, negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration since Eisenhower's through secret, back-channel diplomacy. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a new approach, LeoGrande and Kornbluh uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter. They reveal a fifty-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, that provides the historical foundation for the dramatic breakthrough in U.S.-Cuba ties.

On Becoming Cuban

On Becoming Cuban PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469601419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.