Download or read book A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution written by Steve Cushion and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized labor in the 1950s -- A crisis of productivity -- The employers' offensive -- Workers take stock -- Responses to state terror -- Two strikes -- Last days of Batista -- The first year of the new Cuba -- Conclusion: what was the role of organized labor in the Cuban insurrection?

Download or read book A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution written by Steve Cushion and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized labor in the 1950s -- A crisis of productivity -- The employers' offensive -- Workers take stock -- Responses to state terror -- Two strikes -- Last days of Batista -- The first year of the new Cuba -- Conclusion: what was the role of organized labor in the Cuban insurrection?

Download or read book Back Channel to Cuba written by William M. LeoGrande and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution written by Steve Cushion and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America written by Dirk Kruijt and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cuban revolution served as a rallying cry to people across Latin America and the Caribbean. The revolutionary regime has provided vital support to the rest of the region, offering everything from medical and development assistance to training and advice on guerrilla warfare. Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America is the first oral history of Cuba’s liberation struggle. Drawing on a vast array of original testimonies, Dirk Kruijt looks at the role of both veterans and the post-Revolution fidelista generation in shaping Cuba and the Americas. Featuring the testimonies of over sixty Cuban officials and former combatants, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America offers unique insight into a nation which, in spite of its small size and notional pariah status, remains one of the most influential countries in the Americas.

Download or read book Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination written by Kenneth Routon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered written by Samuel Farber and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing the crucial period of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1961, Samuel Farber challenges dominant scholarly and popular views of the revolution's sources, shape, and historical trajectory. Unlike many observers, who treat Cuba's revolutionary leaders as having merely reacted to U.S. policies or domestic socioeconomic conditions, Farber shows that revolutionary leaders, while acting under serious constraints, were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideological visions, although not necessarily according to a master plan. Exploring how historical conflicts between U.S. and Cuban interests colored the reactions of both nations' leaders after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, Farber argues that the structure of Cuba's economy and politics in the first half of the twentieth century made the island ripe for radical social and economic change, and the ascendant Soviet Union was on hand to provide early assistance. Taking advantage of recently declassified U.S. and Soviet documents as well as biographical and narrative literature from Cuba, Farber focuses on three key years to explain how the Cuban rebellion rapidly evolved from a multiclass, antidictatorial movement into a full-fledged social revolution.

Download or read book Cuba Winner of the Pulitzer Prize written by Ada Ferrer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 ambitious chronicle written for an era that demands a new reckoning with the island's past. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History reveals 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 influence of the United States on Cuba and 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. 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. --

Download or read book Leadership in the Cuban Revolution written by Antoni Kapcia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most conventional readings of the Cuban Revolution have seemed mesmerised by the personality and role of Fidel Castro, often missing a deeper political understanding of the Revolution's underlying structures, bases of popular loyalty and ethos of participation. In this ground-breaking work, Antoni Kapcia focuses instead on a wider cast of characters. Along with the more obvious, albeit often misunderstood, contributions from Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, Kapcia looks at the many others who, over the decades, have been involved in decision-making and have often made a significant difference. He interprets their various roles within a wider process of nation-building, demonstrating that Cuba has undergone an unusual, if not unique, process of change. Essential reading for anyone interested in Cuba's history and its future.

Download or read book Gangsterismo written by Jack Colhoun and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangsterismo is an extraordinary accomplishment, the most comprehensive history yet of the clash of epic forces over several decades in Cuba. It is a chronicle that touches upon deep and ongoing themes in the history of the Americas, and more specifically of the United States government, Cuba before and after the revolution, and the criminal networks known as the Mafia. The result of 18 years’ research at national archives and presidential libraries in Kansas, Maryland, Texas, and Massachusetts, here is the story of the making and unmaking of a gangster state in Cuba. In the early 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky sowed the seeds of gangsterismo when he won Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista’s support for a mutually beneficial arrangement: the North American Mafia were to share the profits from a future colony of casinos, hotels, and nightclubs with Batista, his inner circle, and senior Cuban Army and police officers. In return, Cuban authorities allowed the Mafia to operate its establishments without interference. Over the next twenty-five years, a gangster state took root in Cuba as Batista, other corrupt Cuban politicians, and senior Cuban army and police officers got rich. All was going swimmingly until a handful of revolutionaries upended the neat arrangement: and the CIA, Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and the Mafia joined forces to attempt the overthrow of Castro. Gangsterismo is unique in the literature on Cuba, and establishes for the first time the integral, extensive role of mobsters in the Cuban exile movement. The narrative unfolds against a broader historical backdrop of which it was a part: the confrontation between the United States and the Cuban revolution, which turned Cuba into one of the most perilous battlegrounds of the Cold War. ……………………………… “The anti-communist hysteria generated by the Cold War frequently unhinged the policy judgments of US government officials in many areas, but nowhere so completely as in our relations with Cuba. This conclusion is inescapable as Gangsterismo brilliantly unravels the bizarre tale of the Mafia army the Kennedy brothers recruited in their manic determination to rid Cuba of Castro, that vexing, seemingly indomitable Communist.” —Martin J. Sherwin, co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize (together with Kai Bird) for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer “What is shocking is not what is new, but how much that is old – already on the record in presidential and other archives, CIA and FBI files, memoirs and histories – in Jack Colhoun’s Gangsterismo. Drawing on the National Security Archives, papers and books, public and private, he damningly documents the pathetic, incompetent and sometimes comic, but always inappropriate and anti-democratic, attempts by the CIA and/or its confederates, working in tandem with members of the mob, to assassinate Castro and overthrow the Cuban revolution.” —Victor S. Navasky, publisher emeritus, The Nation; professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism “Gangsterismo is an invaluable addition to our background knowledge about that small island nation that has incurred so much devotion and ire from U.S. Americans. Books about Cuba abound, but this one lays bare an often forgotten pre-revolutionary history of U.S.-based organized crime, and subsequent hidden U.S. government covert action. Colhoun has done his homework. This is a must-read.” —Margaret Randall, author of To Change the World: My Years in Cuba “Few aspects of Cuba-U.S. relations have so doggedly resisted serious inquiry as the subject of organized crime in Cuba. Much of what we know has reached us by way of popular culture, principally through film and fiction, to which the subject of the underworld in the tropics so aptly lends itself. Colhoun represents a breakthrough: serious scholarship on a serious subject. He casts light upon one of the darkest recesses of a dark history, calling attention to the convergence of interests between the underworld of criminal activity and nether world of covert operations – and reveals in the process that film and fiction have actually only scratched the surface of a sordid story.” —Louis A. Pérez, Jr.editor, Cuba Journal; professor of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Download or read book A Contemporary Cuba Reader written by Philip Brenner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that explore a wide range of topics related to Cuban politics, economics, foreign policy, social transformation, and culture in the post-Soviet era.

Download or read book Soviet Cuba written by César Aguilera and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet Cuba tells the story of the Cuban Revolution from a completely new perspective, exposing the secret and deeply underestimated relationship between the Castro brothers and the Cuban Communist Party (PCC-PSP). In order to unravel these long-hidden connections, the author goes all the way back to the beginning of the story of communism in Cuba, outlining the origins of the PCC-PSP. He also reveals, for the first time in Cuban historiography, that the party had two faces. Within it, two parallel organizations coexisted: a traditional political party and a covert Central Nucleus of Soviet intelligence (CNSI). Despite being closely related, these two organizations often had markedly divergent objectives that would play out in radically different ways within the Cuban context. Each time this occurred, it was always the objectives of the hidden CNSI that prevailed, even if this came at the price of huge political mistakes. Missteps that included an unholy alliance with the tyrant Batista between 1938 and 1944, which ultimately cost the PCC-PSP dearly in terms of popular support and credibility, especially towards the end of the 1940s. On the other hand, and no doubt as a consequence of the intelligence work developed by the CNSI from 1925 onwards, the Cuban communists were able to count on an extraordinary list of agents and operatives embedded within the political, educational, cultural, repressive and military establishment of the Cuban republic. Ultimately, this enabled the CNSI to use Fidel Castro as a Trojan horse, the lead protagonist in an agrarian and nationalistic revolt. However, as the author shockingly reveals, Castro proved to nothing more than a puppet - a figurehead who was controlled (and used) by the CNSI. In order for this to come to fruition, however, it was necessary to keep the relationship between the CNSI and the Castro brothers a secret - one that has lasted until the publication of this book.

Download or read book We Are Cuba written by Helen Yaffe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary account of the Cuban people’s struggle for survival in a post-Soviet world In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, this book tells for the first time the remarkable story of how Cuba survived while the rest of the Soviet bloc crumbled. Yaffe shows how Cuba has been gradually introducing select market reforms. While the government claims that these are necessary to sustain its socialist system, many others believe they herald a return to capitalism. Examining key domestic initiatives including the creation of one of the world’s leading biotechnological industries, its energy revolution, and medical internationalism alongside recent economic reforms, Yaffe shows why the revolution will continue post-Castro. This is a fresh, compelling account of Cuba’s socialist revolution and the challenges it faces today.

Download or read book Frank Pais written by Jose Alvarez and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though Fidel Castro founded the "26 of July" movement, this book shows that the organizing throughout Cuba fell on the shoulders of an underground leader named Frank Pais, who was also responsible for the survival of the incipient guerrilla force led by Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Pais became not only the National Chief of Action-as portrayed in the official publications-but the top leader of the M-26-7's National Directorate. The antagonism between Castro and Pais may have been the reason for his mysterious death when he was only 22 years of age. This is the true story of his life and legacy. At this crucial time, when historians are trying to arrive at the revolution's final balance, a book like this is essential to read before reaching an impartial verdict.

Download or read book Havana Nocturne written by T. J. English and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern-day Havana, the remnants of the glamorous past are everywhere—old hotel-casinos, vintage American cars & flickering neon signs speak of a bygone era that is widely familiar & often romanticized, but little understood. In Havana Nocturne, T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution & international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana & the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution. As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky & Charles "Lucky" Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government & in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion. Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels & casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women & gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara & others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government & its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory. Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana—including interviews with the era's key survivors—Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob—featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr & Albert Anastasia—& Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana—& how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the revolution.

Download or read book Revolutionary Horizons written by Abigail McEwen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the trajectories of two pioneering artist groups, this groundbreaking book explores the development of abstract art, and its political stakes, in 1950s Cuba.

Download or read book A Companion to U S Foreign Relations written by Christopher R. W. Dietrich and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 1518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the entire range of the history of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial period to the beginning of the 21st century. A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations is an authoritative guide to past and present scholarship on the history of American diplomacy and foreign relations from its seventeenth century origins to the modern day. This two-volume reference work presents a collection of historiographical essays by prominent scholars. The essays explore three centuries of America’s global interactions and the ways U.S. foreign policies have been analyzed and interpreted over time. Scholars offer fresh perspectives on the history of U.S. foreign relations; analyze the causes, influences, and consequences of major foreign policy decisions; and address contemporary debates surrounding the practice of American power. The Companion covers a wide variety of methodologies, integrating political, military, economic, social and cultural history to explore the ideas and events that shaped U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations and continue to influence national identity. The essays discuss topics such as the links between U.S. foreign relations and the study of ideology, race, gender, and religion; Native American history, expansion, and imperialism; industrialization and modernization; domestic and international politics; and the United States’ role in decolonization, globalization, and the Cold War. A comprehensive approach to understanding the history, influences, and drivers of U.S. foreign relation, this indispensable resource: Examines significant foreign policy events and their subsequent interpretations Places key figures and policies in their historical, national, and international contexts Provides background on recent and current debates in U.S. foreign policy Explores the historiography and primary sources for each topic Covers the development of diverse themes and methodologies in histories of U.S. foreign policy Offering scholars, teachers, and students unmatched chronological breadth and analytical depth, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of America’s interactions with the world.