Download or read book A Cuban in Paradise written by Antonio J. Guernica and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-12-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1953, Alfonso Candela is a likeable rogue who loves his privileged life in Santiago de Cuba. Unfortunately, Fidel Castro has other plans for him. As the Cuban Revolution takes root and irrevocably tears at the fabric of Alfonsos personal paradise, he and his family attempt to go about their daily lives, despite the mounting threats that surround them. When approached by a rebel who wants their weekend home to help dethrone Batista in the name of democracy, the Candelas are seemingly left with no choice but to comply. His wife, Mirta, befriends Teodora, who channels her interest in her neighbors affairs into revolutionary purpose and tries to recruit Alfonso to join the militia. With their family splintered and in exile, the Candelas must reinvent their lives in an alien land. But when Castro finally opens the gates of Mariel, Alfonso returns, intent on seeking redemption. In this historical saga, the essence of the Cuban Revolution is captured through one familys eyes as they reflect on a life that could have been and the generation that must create a new paradise in exile.

Download or read book The Other Side of Paradise written by Julia Cooke and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

Download or read book Cuba in Revolution written by Miguel A. Faria and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Other Side of Paradise written by Julia Cooke and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santerítrainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

Download or read book ESCAPED FROM PARADISE written by Jose B. Viñas and published by Covenant Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many minds, Cuba is remembered as a paradise; people around the world romanticize the Cuban revolution and even politicians in the US refer to as an example of great social equality and maintain friendly personal relations with Cuban leaders. We witnessed President Obama, an American president, watching baseball games with a dictator that personally ordered the execution by firing squads of thousands of Cubans while on the streets people were arrested by the Cuban security; they promoted travel to Cuba, visiting luxury resorts where they were attended to like royalty by slaves with no other options, they see Cuba as paradise. The exiles remember a paradise Cuba before Castro, their memories blurred by the years the fact that it was not paradise for some, but it was a really wonderful place where people could pursue their dreams. Cuba is like a canary in the mines. If we are not aware that freedom is expensive but fragile, we in the US could lose our ways if we allow fear and safety to be higher than our love for freedom!

Download or read book Promising Paradise written by Rosa Lowinger and published by Wolfsonian-Florida International University. This book was released on 2019 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines how Cubans and Americans encountered one another through tourism and popular culture in the decades before the Cuban Revolution"--

Download or read book Cuban Memory Wars written by Michael J. Bustamante and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Tropical Secrets written by Margarita Engle and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba. As the tropical island begins to work its magic on him, the young refugee befriends a local girl with some painful secrets of her own. Yet even in Cuba, the Nazi darkness is never far away . . .

Download or read book Havana Before Castro written by Peter Moruzzi and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take a trip to the golden age of Havana in this gorgeously illustrated volume of vintage photographs, postcards, brochures, and other ephemera. Featuring hundreds of historic images and cultural artifacts, Havana Before Castro documents how the Cuban capital evolved from a Prohibition Era getaway destination to a heady blend of glittering nightclubs, outrageous cabarets, all-night bars, and backstreet brothels. Here, captured in one amazing book, is the drama, passion, intrigue, and opulence of a legendary city during its heyday—before the Castro regime took over and Americans were banned from travel to this tropical paradise. In chapters covering such topics as Cuban rum and cigars, the world-famous Tropicana Club, and Havana’s association with the mob, author Peter Moruzzi provides essential historical context for the many fascinating and evocative images.

Download or read book This Is Cuba written by Ben Corbett and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With personal stories that depict a people torn between following the directives of their government and finding a way to better their lot, journalist Ben Corbett gives readers the daily life of many considered outlaws by Castro's regime.

Download or read book The Island Called Paradise written by Philip D. Beidler and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal and cultural mediation, Philip D. Beidler’s The Island Called Paradise explores the fascinating ways Cuban history and culture have permeated North American consciousness, and vice versa. In The Island Called Paradise, Philip D. Beidler shares his personal discovery of the vast, rich, and astonishing history of the island of Cuba and the interrelatedness of Cuba and the US. Cuba first entered Beidler’s consciousness in the early 1960s when he watched with mesmerized anxiety the televised reports of the Cuban missile crisis, a conflict that reduced a multifaceted, centuries-old history between North America and Cuba to the stark duotones of Cold War politics. Fifty years later, when Beidler traveled to the US’s island neighbor, he found a Cuba unlike the nation portrayed in truculent political rhetoric or in the easy preconceptions of US popular culture. Instead he found an entrancing people and landscape with deep historical connections to the US and a dazzling culture that overwhelmed his creative spirit. In twelve original essays, Beidler reintroduces to English-speaking readers many of the central figures, both real and literary, of Cuban and Cuban-American history. Meet Cecilia Valdés, the young mixed-race heroine of a 1839 novel that takes readers to the poor streets and sumptuous salons of Spanish colonial Cuba, and Narciso López, a real-life Venezuelan adventurer and filibustero who attempted to foment a Cuban uprising against Spain. Both would have been familiar figures to nineteenth-century Americans. Beidler also visits the twentieth-century lives of “the two Ernestos” (Ernest Hemingway and Che Guevara), and the pop-culture Cuban icon Ricky Ricardo. A country not with one history but multiple layers of history, Cuba becomes a fertile island for Beidler’s exploration. Art, he argues, perpetually crosses walls erected by politics, history, and nationality. At its core, The Island Called Paradise renews and refreshes our knowledge of an older Atlantic world even as we begin to envision a future in which the old bonds between our nations may be restored.

Download or read book Cuba 1952 1959 written by Manuel Márquez-Sterling and published by Kleiopatria Digital Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author Manuel Márquez-Sterling writes about Fidel Castro and his revolution from direct personal experience, as a historian with broad and deep knowledge of 50s Cuba. The author knew and had contact with many of the historical figures in the book's pages. His penetrating analysis of the public and behind-the-scenes events clears the fog and shatters myths to reveal the real story of the Cuban Revolution. The book explains how Castro came to power through the convergence of rabid partisanship, radical student politics, media bias, and venal politicians who placed self interest ahead of preserving democracy. Facing a constitutional crisis, these parties espoused "the end justifies the means," embracing political gangsterism and eschewing negotiations with political opponents- resulting in a power vacuum Castro exploited to seize power. Masterful propaganda cast Castro as pro-democracy hero, avoiding scrutiny of his plans for a totalitarian state under his control.

Download or read book Conversations with Cuba written by C. Peter Ripley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-time Cuba watcher discusses his love affair with this proud, passionate, troubled nation, from his romanticized high school observances of Castro's revolution to his five illegal trips to the nation between 1991 and 1997.

Download or read book The Cuban Affair written by Nelson DeMille and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mac has left his life of danger and adventure behind him. But when Carlos, a hotshot lawyer heavily involved with anti-Castro groups, approaches Mac for a ten-day fishing tournament in Cuba - to be accompanied by a covert mission and a sizable paycheck - Mac's interest is piqued. Mac understands that if he accepts this job, he'll either walk away rich - or not at all.

Download or read book A Miracle in Paradise written by Carolina Garcia-aguilera and published by Avon. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sister Lupe Solano investigates a religious order in Miami, which claims its statue of the Virgin will weep real tears on Cuban independence day. The reason? The Virgin will be grieving the separation of families. No sooner does Sister Lupe start her inquiry, than bodies pile up.

Download or read book Broken Paradise written by Cecilia Samartin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-02-19 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of "The Kite Runner," this shimmering literary debut traces thepath of two cousins--one who left Cuba at the brink of revolution and the onewho stayed behind.

Download or read book Waiting For Snow In Havana written by Carlos Eire and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.