Download or read book Havana Boxing Club written by and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boxing is one of the most popular sports in Cuba and its fighters are recognized the world over for their skills and finesse. The Cuban national team holds more Olympic medals in the sport than any other country, making the nation a hotbed of emerging global champions. State-sanctioned and promoted since the revolution, amateur boxing's potential for fame and relative wealth makes it a beacon for impoverished youth yearning for a better life. Shot all across the Republic of Cuba,Havana Boxing Clubdocuments amateur boxing schools and the aspiring, determined boys studying the sweet science. Compiled over the course of eight years, French photographer Thierry Le Goues spent countless hours in the complex network of training facilities that abound in the island nation, developing relationships with the coaches and their young progeny, following the rise and fall of countless talents and wannabes. The resulting images are of young fighters struggling, sweating, and fighting to overcome anything thrown in their way--inside the ring and out. Le Goues' luscious tritone black and white photographs depict rigorous training camps, boxing rings erected in the streets of small villages in the Cuban countryside, the lows of these young boxers struggling with abject poverty and crushing defeat, and the ultimate highs of rising up victorious over all obstacles and challengers. The pure instinct to survive against overwhelming odds and to realize their dreams of boxing on the national team is both startling and beautiful.Havana Boxing Clubcaptures the sport's arresting beauty and unrelenting brutality.
Download or read book Boxing for Cuba written by Guillermo Vicente Vidal and published by Fulcrum Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1961, fearing the communist rule of Fidel Castro, Guillermo Vicente Vidal's family sent him to America through Operation Peter Pan. He arrived in Colorado and was sent to an orphanage with his brothers, and his family reunited four years later. Fifty years later, he served as Denver's mayor. This is his story of overcoming incredible odds.
Download or read book Boxing in Havana written by Dominick Sheldon and published by . This book was released on 2018-12 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Photographic portfolio of amateur boxing in Havana Cuba by Dominick Sheldon.
Download or read book Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba written by Tom Gjelten and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.
Download or read book Prizefighting and Civilization written by David C. LaFevor and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940, historian David C. LaFevor traces the history of pugilism in Mexico and Cuba from its controversial beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through its exponential rise in popularity during the early twentieth century. A divisive subculture that was both a profitable blood sport and a contentious public spectacle, boxing provides a unique vantage point from which LaFevor examines the deeper historical evolution of national identity, everyday normative concepts of masculinity and race, and an expanding and democratizing public sphere in both Mexico and Cuba, the United States’ closest Latin American neighbors. Prizefighting and Civilization explores the processes by which boxing—once considered an outlandish purveyor of low culture—evolved into a nationalized pillar of popular culture, a point of pride that transcends gender, race, and class.
Download or read book A Cuban Boxer s Journey written by Brin-Jonathan Butler and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY OF CUBAN BOXER AND POLITICAL PARIAH GUILLERMO RIGONDEAUX'S HARROWING DECISION TO DEFECT IN HOPES OF REAPING THE REWARDS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM "What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?" This was the question posed by legendary boxer Teofilo Stevenson in the 1970s, crowned by many as the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, in response to an offer of five million dollars to leave his island to fight Ali. But not all Cubans have come to the same conclusion, let alone with such apparent ease. Guillermo Rigondeaux, two-time Olympic champion and heir to Stevenson's throne, sacrificed everything he had in his home country—his wife, his son, his government-subsidized car and house, as well as universal reverence among his fellow citizens—to try to make it in the mecca of big-money boxing, the United States of America. But has the chance to make good in America been worth the loss of his national identity and the love of his countrymen? And to what extent has he been corrupted by the promise of untold riches? In A Cuban Boxer's Journey, author, filmmaker, and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler chronicles the fascinating and tumultuous career of Rigondeaux—moody, driven, and almost mythically talented––as he attempts to capture the elusive and often punishing American dream. See how this athlete's most daunting challenge becomes how he can survive the complex forces outside of the ring.
Download or read book In the Red Corner written by John Duncan and published by Random House (UK). This book was released on 1999-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professional boxing has been illegal in Cuba since 1961, so it was no surprise that Felix Savon, Cuba's double Olympic heavyweight champion, had to turn down the $25 million purse offered by Don King to fight Mike Tyson. John Duncan wanted to make the fight happen and so he quit his then job as sports writer for the "Guardian and left for Cuba. His plan was to cut a deal with Cuban boxing authorities to make this fight happen. His account of the year spent in the maelstrom of Havana's heat and bureaucracy is intercut with often poignant portraits of some of Cuba's most famous boxers.
Download or read book The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba written by Chanel Cleeton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the end of the nineteenth century, three revolutionary women fight for freedom in ... Chanel Cleeton's ... novel inspired by real-life events and the true story of a legendary Cuban woman--Evangelina Cisneros--who changed the course of history"--
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 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.
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 Havana Hardball written by César Brioso and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 1947, the most memorable season in the history of the Cuban League finished with a dramatic series win by Almendares against its rival, Habana. As the celebration spread through the streets of Havana and across Cuba, the Brooklyn Dodgers were beginning spring training on the island. One of the Dodgers' minor league players was Jackie Robinson. He was on the verge of making his major-league debut in the United States, an event that would fundamentally change sports--and America. To avoid harassment from the white crowds in Florida during this critical preseason, the Dodgers relocated their spring training to Cuba, where black and white teammates had played side by side since 1900. It was also during this time that Major League Baseball was trying its hardest to bring the "outlaw" Cuban League under the control of organized baseball. As the Cubans fought to stay independent, Robinson worked to earn a roster spot on the Dodgers in the face of discrimination from his future teammates. Havana Hardball captures the excitement of the Cuban League's greatest pennant race and the anticipation of the looming challenge to MLB's color barrier. Illuminating one of the sport's most pivotal seasons, veteran journalist César Brioso brings together a rich mix of worlds as the heyday of Latino baseball converged with one of the most socially meaningful events in U.S. history.
Download or read book Boxing Cuba written by Charles Schumann and published by Hirmer Verlag GmbH. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boxing is the top popular sport in Cuba and part of its cultural identity. The martial arts, often represented as warlike in form, acquire here an unexpected elegance, speed and technical perfection. This publication reflects the Cuban love of sport, from youth work in the back yards of Havana to the preparations for the Olympic Games. At the same time it tells the story of this fascinating world sport. Cuba's pride in its boxers and its sports tradition remains unbroken. Boxing schools and national boxing idols happily granted the photographer Katharina Alt access to their training facilities and private homes in order to record life in and around the sport and the contests. The photos provide an impressive record of the arduous preparations for a fight and continue until the boxers are saved by the gong in the final round. The text by author and journalist Michael Schleicher is divided into twelve rounds and shows how the sport has changed since Antiquity. Motifs, aesthetics and boxing language occur today in art and culture and are thus an omnipresent witness to the fact that "Boxing is life itself", according to Joyce Carol Oates.
Download or read book On Becoming Cuban written by Louis A. Pérez Jr. and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Havana World Series written by José Latour and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “dark, rich, and satisfying” novel of mobsters, baseball, and 1950s Cuba (Entertainment Weekly). It is the fall of 1958 and all of Cuba is riveted to the World Series—the New York Yankees are playing the Milwaukee Braves, and the infamous Meyer Lansky’s gambling empire is raking in millions in bets. But rival mob boss Joe Bonnano, working with a team of Cuba’s boldest and most ingenious criminals, plans to hijack Lanksy’s fortune. The heist goes off brilliantly—until Bonnano’s point man is shot dead. As Lansky’s man in the police department investigates the case, he is caught up in a colorful and dangerous world of gangsters, misfits, and double-crosses . . . “A lively, entertaining read.” —Publishers Weekly “The characters are fascinating, the story compelling . . . You couldn’t ask for more.” —Orlando Sentinel “Suspenseful . . . captures the sights, sounds, smells and rhythms of Havana.” —The Miami Herald
Download or read book Next Year in Havana written by Chanel Cleeton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK "A beautiful novel that's full of forbidden passions, family secrets and a lot of courage and sacrifice."--Reese Witherspoon After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary... Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.
Download or read book The Occupation of Havana written by Elena A. Schneider and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years' War in North America. The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.
