Download or read book Cuba Represent written by Sujatha Fernandes and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The government has allowed vocal criticism of its policies to be expressed within the arts.
Download or read book Cuba Represent written by Sujatha Fernandes and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cuba something curious has happened over the past fifteen years. The government has allowed vocal criticism of its policies to be expressed within the arts. Filmmakers, rappers, and visual and performance artists have addressed sensitive issues including bureaucracy, racial and gender discrimination, emigration, and alienation. How can this vibrant body of work be reconciled with the standard representations of a repressive, authoritarian cultural apparatus? In Cuba Represent! Sujatha Fernandes—a scholar and musician who has performed in Cuba—answers that question. Combining textual analyses of films, rap songs, and visual artworks; ethnographic material collected in Cuba; and insights into the nation’s history and political economy, Fernandes details the new forms of engagement with official institutions that have opened up as a result of changing relationships between state and society in the post-Soviet period. She demonstrates that in a moment of extreme hardship and uncertainty, the Cuban state has moved to a more permeable model of power. Artists and other members of the public are collaborating with government actors to partially incorporate critical cultural expressions into official discourse. The Cuban leadership has come to recognize the benefits of supporting artists: rappers offer a link to increasingly frustrated black youth in Cuba; visual artists are an important source of international prestige and hard currency; and films help unify Cubans through community discourse about the nation. Cuba Represent! reveals that part of the socialist government’s resilience stems from its ability to absorb oppositional ideas and values.
Download or read book Dreaming in Cuban written by Cristina García and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post
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 Cuban Republic and Jos Mart written by Mauricio Augusto Font and published by Bildner Western Hemisphere Studies. This book was released on 2006 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jose Marti contributed greatly to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain with words as well as revolutionary action. Although he died before the formation of an independent republic, he has since been hailed as a heroic martyr inspiring Cuban republican traditions.
Download or read book Cuba written by Rex A. Hudson and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2002 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Describes and analyzes the economic, national security, political, and social systems and institutions of Cuba."--Amazon.com viewed Jan. 4, 2021.
Download or read book The Cuban Hustle written by Sujatha Fernandes and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Cuban Hustle, Sujatha Fernandes explores the multitudinous ways artists, activists, and ordinary Cubans have hustled to survive and express themselves in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Whether circulating information on flash drives as a substitute for the internet or building homemade antennas to listen to Miami’s hip hop radio stations, Cubans improvise alternative strategies and workarounds to contend with ongoing isolation. Throughout these essays, Fernandes examines the emergence of dynamic youth cultures and social movements as Cuba grappled with economic collapse, new digital technologies, the normalization of diplomatic ties with the United States during the Obama administration, and the regression of US-Cuban relations in the Trump era. From reflections on feminism, new Cuban cinema, and public art to urban slums, the Afro-Cuban movement, and rumba and hip hop, Fernandes reveals Cuba to be a world of vibrant cultures grounded in an ethos of invention and everyday hustle.
Download or read book The Myth of Jos Mart written by Lillian Guerra and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a period of history rocked by four armed movements, Lillian Guerra traces the origins of Cubans' struggles to determine the meaning of their identity and the character of the state, from Cuba's last war of independence in 1895 to the consolidation of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in 1921. Guerra argues that political violence and competing interpretations of the "social unity" proposed by Cuba's revolutionary patriot, Jose Marti, reveal conflicting visions of the nation--visions that differ in their ideological radicalism and in how they cast Cuba's relationship with the United States. As Guerra explains, some nationalists supported incorporating foreign investment and values, while others sought social change through the application of an authoritarian model of electoral politics; still others sought a democratic government with social and economic justice. But for all factions, the image of Marti became the principal means by which Cubans attacked, policed, and discredited one another to preserve their own vision over others'. Guerra's examination demonstrates how competing historical memories and battles for control of a weak state explain why polarity, rather than consensus on the idea of the "nation" and the character of the Cuban state, came to define Cuban politics throughout the twentieth century.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Cuba during the U S Occupation 1898 1902 written by Marial Iglesias Utset and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-05-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this cultural history of Cuba during the United States' brief but influential occupation from 1898 to 1902--a key transitional period following the Spanish-American War--Marial Iglesias Utset sheds light on the complex set of pressures that guided the formation and production of a burgeoning Cuban nationalism. Drawing on archival and published sources, Iglesias illustrates the process by which Cubans maintained and created their own culturally relevant national symbols in the face of the U.S. occupation. Tracing Cuba's efforts to modernize in conjunction with plans by U.S. officials to shape the process, Iglesias analyzes, among other things, the influence of the English language on Spanish usage; the imposition of North American holidays, such as Thanksgiving, in place of traditional Cuban celebrations; the transformation of Havana into a new metropolis; and the development of patriotic symbols, including the Cuban flag, songs, monuments, and ceremonies. Iglesias argues that the Cuban response to U.S. imperialism, though largely critical, indeed involved elements of reliance, accommodation, and welcome. Above all, Iglesias argues, Cubans engaged the Americans on multiple levels, and her work demonstrates how their ambiguous responses to the U.S. occupation shaped the cultural transformation that gave rise to a new Cuban nationalism.
Download or read book Beyond Cuban Waters written by Paul Ryer and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-first century Cuba is a cultural stew. Tommy Hilfiger and socialism. Nike products and poverty in Africa. The New York Yankees and the meaning of "blackness." The quest for American consumer goods and the struggle in Africa for political and cultural independence inform the daily life of Cubans at every cultural level, as anthropologist Paul Ryer argues in Beyond Cuban Waters. Focusing on the everyday world of ordinary Cubans, this book examines Cuban understandings of the world and of Cuba's place in it, especially as illuminated by two contrasting notions: "La Yuma," a distinctly Cuban concept of the American experience, and "África," the ideological understanding of that continent's experience. Ryer takes us into the homes of Cuban families, out to the streets and nightlife of bustling cities, and on boat journeys that reach beyond the typical destinations, all to better understand the nature of the cultural life of a nation. This pursuit of Western status symbols represents a uniquely Cuban experience, set apart from other cultures pursuing the same things. In the Cuban case, this represents neither an acceptance nor rejection of the American cultural influence, but rather a co-opting or "Yumanizing" of these influences.
Download or read book Cuba written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Insurgent Cuba written by Ada Ferrer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.
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.
Download or read book Outside the Revolution Everything written by Tom Astley and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the often fraught political landscape of Cuba, a constant need to define and redefine the ‘space’ of national identity has long pervaded all manner of discourse. In its assumed role as the last bastion of resistance against the hegemonic forces of ‘globalisation’ (‘Americanisation’), the Revolution of 1959 is often made an all-encompassing indicator of ‘authentic’ Cuban identity. However, political recalcitrance, economic stagnation and the ever-present lure of the States has left generations of young Cubans questioning the ability of the Revolution to represent a contemporary Cuban identity. A growing number of what may broadly be classified as ‘alternative musicians’ are utilising a re-established and redefined left-wing voice - one that recontextualises notions of what constitutes ‘el pueblo’ (‘the people’) - precisely as a critique of the anachronisms of the Revolution. This book examines briefly the work of three such artists - punk band Porno Para Ricardo, rapper Eskuadrón Patriota, and singer-songwriter Pedro Luis Ferrer - to provide examples of such reclamations of a left wing voice within Cuba. Redefinitions of ‘the people’ pan-nationally, along cultural and social, rather than exclusive nationalisitic lines; attempts to reclaim the means of cultural production from an overbearing and censoring hegemony; narratives of Cuban history and geography that seek to augment the often rigidly defined space of ‘official Cubanness’ by recognising cultural difference (often made tacit in the unifying rhetoric of the revolution), yet appealing to the notion of social equality, are all constituent parts of this ‘new’ new left in Cuba. As yet another evental tipping point – the death of Fidel Castro – comes ever closer, yet potentially less traumatic, this book outlines a less epochal, and more measured reinterpretation of established symbols of Cuban identity; one that can maintain its localness whilst engaging in global politics and cultural flows.
Download or read book The Cinema of Cuba written by Ann Marie Stock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Cuba is opening up to the rest of the world. Its colonial past and the Communist revolution have left a lasting imprint on society, yet there is a tangible sense of rapid change which is reflected in the island's national cinema. New screen technologies and digital distribution media have supported the efficacy and global reach of Cuban filmmakers whose work, somewhat in lieu of adequate distribution and traditional screening facilities in Cuba itself, is often disseminated via 'flash' (USB memory sticks).Channelling an energetic DIY attitude through grassroots movements and ad-hoc resourcefulness, the new filmmakers of Cuba have inspired the editors of this book to embrace their contagious enthusiasm through essays on authentic Cuban cinema. Whilst the book provides a comprehensive overview of the history behind current practices, it also moves beyond this to examine key case studies as well as 'snapshots' of individuals working within the industry today. Chapters celebrate the shared creativity as well as diversity of Cuban cinema, including both productions of the Cuban Film Institute's (ICAIC) as well as those from the industry margins. The films discussed demonstrate a driving cinematic force through social criticism, the emphasis of debate and historical change through film, reassessments of gender relations, the use of new technologies and much more.
Download or read book Cuba written by Adrian H. Hearn and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Cuba’s centralized system for providing basic social services began to erode in the early 1990s, Christian and Afro-Cuban religious groups took on new social and political responsibilities. They began to work openly with state institutions on projects such as the promotion of Afro-Cuban heritage to encourage tourism, and community welfare initiatives to confront drug use, prostitution, and housing decay. In this rich ethnography, the anthropologist Adrian H. Hearn provides a detailed, on-the-ground analysis of how the Cuban state and local religious groups collaborate on community development projects and work with the many foreign development agencies operating in Cuba. Hearn argues that the growing number of collaborations between state and non-state actors has begun to consolidate the foundations of a civil society in Cuba. While conducting research, Hearn lived for one year each in two Santería temple-houses: one located in Old Havana and the other in Santiago de Cuba. During those stays he conducted numerous interviews: with the historian of Havana and the conservationist of Santiago de Cuba (officials roughly equivalent to mayors in the United States), acclaimed writers, influential leaders of Afro-Cuban religions, and many citizens involved in community development initiatives. Hearn draws on those interviews, his participant observation in the temple-houses, case studies, and archival research to convey the daily life experiences and motivations of religious practitioners, development workers, and politicians. Using the concept of social capital, he explains the state’s desire to incorporate tightly knit religious groups into its community development projects, and he illuminates a fundamental challenge facing Cuba’s religious communities: how to maintain their spiritual integrity and internal solidarity while participating in state-directed projects.
Download or read book The new Man in Cuba written by Ana Serra and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cuban Revolution not only changed the political regime of the island nation, it also transformed Cuban cultural identity. Che Guevara coined the idea of the "New Man" to represent the unique revolutionary identity that all Cubans were called to take on. In the speeches of the era, the "New Man" adopted different guises according to the political campaign of the day: the literacy worker, the committed intellectual, the hardworking "New Woman," or the heroic sugarcane cutter, among others. Tracing the rise and fall of the "New Man," Ana Serra examines political speeches and award-winning novels that constructed this new Identity during the formative years of the Castro regime. Serra argues that during the early revolutionary period, writers helped create the identity of the "New Man" while simultaneously criticizing its problematic aspects. Although the writers professed unconditional support for the revolution, their texts contained prophetic insights into the conflicts that the new identity would generate.
