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 Cuba before Castro written by Jorge J. E. Gracia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although much has been written about Cuba after Castro, relatively little has been written about Cuba before Castro. The political reality of Castro’s Revolution has created a historical void about this period, paying insufficient attention to an important century before 1959. Cuba has become a political punching bag, between supporters and critics of Castro and the Revolution, making it difficult to understand real life in Cuba because of the disproportionate preoccupation with, and monopoly of, the political reality on the island. In spite of some attempts, it continues to be easier and perceived as more pressing, to write about politics rather than the reality that Cubans experienced in their daily lives— their sufferings and celebrations, successes and failures, lives and deaths, and beliefs and disbeliefs. Going for and against the avalanche of information about the political authenticity in and out of Cuba, most Cubans have tended to forget that Cuba is much larger than the perceived reality after Castro’s Revolution. Too many have failed to remember the Cubans who have lived and worked in Cuba in the century before an important period of Cuban history where the nation was forged. Indeed, even limited attention reveals a rich and sophisticated society that calls for study. In this book Jorge J.E. Gracia approaches this situation by telling true stories about some members of his family (Doctor Ignacio Gracia, Maruca Otero, the Marques de Arguelles, and many others) who lived during a culturally rich century before Castro. He hopes to entice historians, academics, tourists and others, to pursue a balanced exploration of the island by telling part of their stories. This enterprise is neither history nor fiction, but memories written by a Cuban who left Cuba when he was eighteen years old and has become a distinguished philosopher in the United States.

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 2021-09-07 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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 247 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 The Americano written by Aran Shetterly and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2007-08-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why do I fight here in this land so foreign to my own? Why did I come here far from my home and family?...Is it because I seek adventure? No...I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others." —William Morgan, in a letter to Herbert Matthews at the New York Times When William Morgan was twenty-two years old, he was working as a high school janitor in Toledo Ohio. Seven years later, in 1958, he walked into a Rebel camp in the Cuban Jungle to join the revolutionaries in their fight to overthrow the corrupt Cuban president, Fulgencio Batista. They were wary of the broad-shouldered, blond-haired, blue-eyed americano but Morgan's dedication and passion, his military skill and charisma, led him to become a chief comandante in Castro's army—he was the only foreigner to hold such a rank, with the exception of Che Guevera. Vicious battles in the jungles were followed by victorious revelry in the cities. Morgan married a Cuban beauty. He single-handedly thwarted the Dominican Republic's attempt to overthrow Castro. And he was chosen to work with Castro and other high ranking Rebels to improve the quality of life for all people. This man who had lived under the radar in America was now a Cuban hero on the watch lists of several governments, all of whom wondered whose side he was really on. It all ended in 1961, when, at age thirty-two, Morgan was executed by firing squad, at the hands of Fidel Castro. Journalist Aran Shetterly takes us back to an era when democracy could have flourished in Cuba. He interviewed Morgan's friends and family and former Cuban Rebels, and examined FBI and CIA documents in search of the truth. What emerged was the true story of a young man who had never fit in but finally found his place in the world by fighting another country's war.

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 Cuba written by Richard Gott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough examination of the history of the controversial island country looks at little-known aspects of its past, from its pre-Columbian origins to the fate of its native peoples, complete with up-to-date information on Cuba's place in a post-Soviet world.

Download or read book Key to the New World written by Luis Martínez-Fernández and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction International Latino Book Awards, First Place, Best History Book (English) Scholarly and popular attention tends to focus heavily on Cuba’s recent history. Key to the New World is the first comprehensive history of early colonial Cuba written in English, and fills the gap in our knowledge of the island before 1700.

Download or read book Fifty Years of Revolution written by Soraya Castro and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty Years of Revolution features contributions from an international group of leading scholars. This unique volume adopts a nonpartisan attitude, a departure from this topic's generally divisive nature.

Download or read book Cuban Revelations written by Marc Frank and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cuban Revelations, Marc Frank offers a first-hand account of daily life in Cuba at the turn of the twenty-first century, the start of a new and dramatic epoch for islanders and the Cuban diaspora. A U.S.-born journalist who has called Havana home for almost a quarter century, Frank observed in person the best days of the revolution, the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the great depression of the 1990s, the stepping aside of Fidel Castro, and the reforms now being devised by his brother. Examining the effects of U.S. policy toward Cuba, Frank analyzes why Cuba has entered an extraordinary, irreversible period of change and considers what the island's future holds. The enormous social engineering project taking place today under Raúl's leadership is fraught with many dangers, and Cuban Revelations follows the new leader's efforts to overcome bureaucratic resistance and the fears of a populace that stand in his way. In addition, Frank offers a colorful chronicle of his travels across the island's many and varied provinces, sharing candid interviews with people from all walks of life. He takes the reader outside the capital to reveal how ordinary Cubans live and what they are thinking and feeling as fifty-year-old social and economic taboos are broken. He shares his honest and unbiased observations on extraordinary positive developments in social matters, like healthcare and education, as well as on the inefficiencies in the Cuban economy.

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 I Was Cuba written by Ramiro Fernández and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, this work takes a look at Cuban history seen through the collection of Ramiro Fernandez, the world's largest archive of Cuban photos and ephemera.

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 Cuba s Revolutionary World written by Jonathan C. Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. As Jonathan Brown shows in this capacious history of the Cuban Revolution, Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world. Cuba’s Revolutionary World examines in forensic detail how the turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenant Che Guevara sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Castro’s provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anticommunists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro’s regime. The unrest fomented by Cuban-trained leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America’s military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964; a decade later, military juntas governed most Latin American states. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America bring about its tragic opposite.

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 International Migration in Cuba written by Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors at the beginning of the colonial period, Cuba has been hugely influenced by international migration. Between 1791 and 1810, for instance, many French people migrated to Cuba in the wake of the purchase of Louisiana by the United States and turmoil in Saint-Domingue. Between 1847 and 1874, Cuba was the main recipient of Chinese indentured laborers in Latin America. During the nineteenth century as a whole, more Spanish people migrated to Cuba than anywhere else in the Americas, and hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken to the island. The first decades of the twentieth century saw large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers from various societies arrive in Cuba. And since the revolution of 1959, a continuous outflow of Cubans toward many countries has taken place—with lasting consequences. In this book, the most comprehensive study of international migration in Cuba ever undertaken, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez aims to elucidate the forces that have shaped international migration and the involvement of the migrants in transnational social fields since the beginning of the colonial period. Drawing on Fernand Braudel’s concept of longue durée, transnational studies, perspectives on power, and other theoretical frameworks, the author places her analysis in a much wider historical and theoretical perspective than has previously been applied to the study of international migration in Cuba, making this a work of substantial interest to social scientists as well as historians.

Download or read book Cuba What Everyone Needs to Know written by Julia E Sweig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009-06-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America's fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro's larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic group in Florida, and the exile community is so powerful that every American president has kowtowed to it. But what do most Americans really know about Cuba itself? In Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Julia Sweig, one of America's leading experts on Cuba and Latin America, presents a concise and remarkably accessible portrait of the small island nation's unique place on the world stage over the past fifty years. Yet it is authoritative as well. Following a scene-setting introduction that describes the dynamics unleashed since summer 2006 when Fidel Castro transferred provisional power to his brother Raul, the book looks backward toward Cuba's history since the Spanish American War before shifting to more recent times. Focusing equally on Cuba's role in world affairs and its own social and political transformations, Sweig divides the book chronologically into the pre-Fidel era, the period between the 1959 revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War era, and-finally-the looming post-Fidel era. Informative, pithy, and lucidly written, it will serve as the best compact reference on Cuba's internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community.