Download or read book Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away written by David Powell and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florida Historical Society Samuel Proctor Award Rare accounts of Cuban migration in the words of the exiles themselves Bringing together an unprecedented number of extensive personal stories, this book shares the triumphs and heartbreaking moments experienced by some of the first Cubans to come to the United States after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away is a moving look inside fifteen years of migration that changed the two countries and transformed the lives of the people who found themselves separated from their homeland. David Powell presents interviews with refugees who left Cuba between 1959 and the 1962 Missile Crisis, as well as those who embarked on the Freedom Flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During these years more than 600,000 Cubans migrated to the US, some by way of other countries and many arriving in Miami with only a few clothes and pocket money. In their own words, exiles describe why they left the island, how they prepared for departure, what situations they faced when they arrived in the US, and how they integrated into American life. Offering historical background that illuminates this pivotal period in the context of the Cold War, Powell shows how the US government’s Cuban refugee assistance program had far-reaching effects on refugee policy, bilingual education, and child welfare programs. The testimonies in this book include new information about low-cost “Cuban Loans” that enabled young exiles to attend US colleges, preparing many to be builders and leaders in their adopted country today. A powerful portrayal of the initial effects of a revolution that began a new era in Cuba’s relationship with the world, this book preserves rare accounts of the motivations and struggles of early Cuban exiles in the words of the emigres themselves, adding gripping detail to the history of the modern Cuban diaspora. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away written by David Powell and published by . This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together an unprecedented number of extensive personal stories, this book shares the triumphs and heartbreaking moments experienced by some of the first Cubans to come to the United States after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.
Download or read book 90 Miles to Havana written by Enrique Flores-Galbis and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Julian's parents make the heartbreaking decision to send him and his two brothers away from Cuba to Miami via the Pedro Pan operation, the boys are thrust into a new world where bullies run rampant and it's not always clear how best to protect themselves. 90 Miles to Havana is a 2011 Pura Belpre Honor Book for Narrative and a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Download or read book Fleeing Castro written by Victor Andres Triay and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first complete and comprehensive work on these important, unique programs. . . . An interesting, humane, yet tragic component of the post-1959 Cuban experience and the Cold War in general."--Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Amherst College "The ordeal began [for the children] when their parents told them they had to travel alone and that they had to keep the upcoming trip a secret. The most powerful parts of the book are their accounts. . . . Through interviews with many of the participants—the children and their parents, the coordinators of the airlift, those in the underground in Cuba and the Catholic sponsors in the United States—Triay attempts to answer many of the questions the exodus raised."--Miami Herald A stirring account of the covert effort to smuggle Cuban children into the United States in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's rise to power, Fleeing Castro brings to light the humanitarian program designed to care for the children once they arrived and the hardship and suffering endured by the families who took part in Operation Pedro Pan. From late 1960 until the October 1962 missile crisis, 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children left their homeland, the small island suddenly at the center of the Cold War struggle. Their parents, unable to obtain visas to leave Cuba, believed a short separation would be preferable to subjecting their offspring to Castro's totalitarian Marxist state. For the children, the exodus began a prolonged and tragic ordeal--some didn’t see their parents again for years; a few never did. Until now, this chapter of the Cuban Revolution has been relatively obscure. Initially the result of an effort by James Baker, headmaster of an American school in Cuba who worked closely with the anti-Castro underground, Pedro Pan quickly came to involve the Catholic Church in Miami and, in particular, Father Bryan Walsh, who established the Cuban Children's Program, the nationwide organization that cared for those children without relatives or friends in the United States--almost half of them. The latter program, in effect until 1981, was the first to allot federal money to private agencies for child care, an action with far-reaching repercussions for U.S. social policy. Victor Andres Triay traces this story from its political and social origins in Cuba, setting it in the context of the Cold War and describing the roles of the organizations involved in Cuba and in the United States. Making use of extensive interviews with Baker, Walsh, and influential underground figures, as well as personal letters that document the fears and dreams of both the parents and the children, Triay presents this history of Pedro Pan--the largest child refugee movement ever in the Western Hemisphere--with the drama of an international thriller and the pathos of a heartbreaking family drama.
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 Voices from Mariel written by José Manuel García and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between April and September 1980, more than 125,000 Cuban refugees fled their homeland, seeking freedom from Fidel Castro's dictatorship. They departed in boats from the port of Mariel and braved the dangerous 90-mile journey across the Straits of Florida. Told in the words of the immigrants themselves, the stories in Voices from Mariel offer an up-close view of this international crisis, the largest oversea mass migration in Latin American history. Former refugees describe what it was like to gather among thousands of dissidents on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy in Cuba, where the movement first began. They were abused by the masses who protested them as they made their way to the Mariel harbor, before they were finally permitted to leave the country by Castro in an attempt to disperse the civil unrest. They waited interminably for boats in oppressive heat, squalor, and desperation at the crowded tent camp known as "El Mosquito." They embarked on vessels overloaded with too many passengers and battled harrowing storms on their journeys across the open ocean. Author Jose Manuel Garcia, who emigrated on the Mariel boatlift as a teenager, describes the events that led to the exodus and explains why so many Cubans wanted to leave the island. The shockingly high numbers of refugees who came through immigration centers in Key West, Miami, and other parts of the United States was a message--loud and clear--to the world of the people's discontent with Castro’s government and the unfulfilled promises of the Cuban Revolution. Based on the award-winning documentary of the same name, Voices from Mariel features the experiences of marielitos from all walks of life. These are stories of disappointed dreams, love for family and country, and hope for a better future. This book illuminates a powerful moment in history that will continue to be felt in Cuba and the United States for generations to come.
Download or read book Indigenous Passages to Cuba 1515 1900 written by Jason M. Yaremko and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Portrays the vitality and dynamism of indigenous actors in what is arguably one of the most foundational and central zones in the making of modern world history: the Caribbean.”—Maximilian C. Forte, author of Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs “Brings together historical analysis and the compelling stories of individuals and families that labored in the island economies of the Caribbean.”—Cynthia Radding, coeditor of Borderlands in World History, 1700–1914 During the colonial period, thousands of North American native peoples traveled to Cuba independently as traders, diplomats, missionary candidates, immigrants, or refugees; others were forcibly transported as captives, slaves, indentured laborers, or prisoners of war. Over the half millennium after Spanish contact, Cuba also served as the principal destination and residence of peoples as diverse as the Yucatec Mayas of Mexico; the Calusa, Timucua, Creek, and Seminole peoples of Florida; and the Apache and Puebloan cultures of the northern provinces of New Spain. Many settled in pueblos or villages in Cuba that endured and evolved into the nineteenth century as urban centers, later populated by indigenous and immigrant Amerindian descendants and even their mestizo, or mixed-blood, progeny. In this first comprehensive history of the Amerindian diaspora in Cuba, Jason Yaremko presents the dynamics of indigenous movements and migrations from several regions of North America from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. In addition to detailing the various motives influencing aboriginal migratory processes, Yaremko uses these case studies to argue that Amerindians—whether voluntary or involuntary migrants—become diasporic through common experiences of dispossession, displacement, and alienation within Cuban colonial society. Yet, far from being merely passive victims acted upon, he argues that indigenous peoples were cognizant agents still capable of exercising power and influence to act in the interests of their communities. His narrative of their multifaceted and dynamic experiences of survival, adaptation, resistance, and negotiation within Cuban colonial society adds deeply to the history of transculturation in Cuba, and to our understanding of indigenous peoples, migration, and diaspora in the wider Caribbean world.
Download or read book Finding Manana written by Mirta Ojito and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finding Mañana is a vibrant, moving memoir of one family's life in Cuba and their wrenching departure. Mirta Ojito was born in Havana and raised there until the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift brought her to Miami, one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees. Now a reporter for The New York Times, Ojito goes back to reckon with her past and to find the people who set this exodus in motion and brought her to her new home. She tells their stories and hers in superb and poignant detail-chronicling both individual lives and a major historical event. Growing up, Ojito was eager to excel and fit in, but her parents'—and eventually her own—incomplete devotion to the revolution held her back. As a schoolgirl, she yearned to join Castro's Young Pioneers, but as a teenager in the 1970s, when she understood the darker side of the Cuban revolution and learned more about life in el norte from relatives living abroad, she began to wonder if she and her parents would be safer and happier elsewhere. By the time Castro announced that he was opening Cuba's borders for those who wanted to leave, she was ready to go; her parents were more than ready: They had been waiting for this opportunity since they married, twenty years before. Finding Mañana gives us Ojito's own story, with all of the determination and intelligence—and the will to confront darkness—that carried her through the boatlift and made her a prizewinning journalist. Putting her reporting skills to work on the events closest to her heart, she finds the boatlift's key players twenty-five years later, from the exiles who negotiated with Castro to the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Mañana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Strait. Finding Mañana is the engrossing and enduring story of a family caught in the midst of the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba s Children written by Deborah Shnookal and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth examination of one of the most controversial episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations sheds new light on the program that airlifted 14,000 unaccompanied children to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Operation Pedro Pan is often remembered within the U.S. as an urgent “rescue” mission, but Deborah Shnookal points out that a multitude of complex factors drove the exodus, including Cold War propaganda and the Catholic Church’s opposition to the island’s new government. Shnookal illustrates how and why Cold War scare tactics were so effective in setting the airlift in motion, focusing on their context: the rapid and profound social changes unleashed by the 1959 Revolution, including the mobilization of 100,000 Cuban teenagers in the 1961 national literacy campaign. Other reforms made by the revolutionary government affected women, education, religious schools, and relations within the family and between the races. Shnookal exposes how, in its effort to undermine support for the revolution, the U.S. government manipulated the aspirations and insecurities of more affluent Cubans. She traces the parallel stories of the young “Pedro Pans” separated from their families—in some cases indefinitely—in what is often regarded in Cuba as a mass “kidnapping” and the children who stayed and joined the literacy brigades. These divergent journeys reveal many underlying issues in the historically fraught relationship between the U.S. and Cuba and much about the profound social revolution that took place on the island after 1959. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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 A Planet for Rent written by Yoss and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most successful and controversial Cuban Science Fiction writer of all time, Yoss (aka José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) is known for his acerbic portraits of the island under Communism. In his bestselling A Planet for Rent, Yoss pays homage to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and 334 by Thomas M. Disch. A critique of Cuba in the nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, A Planet for Rent marks the debut in English of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice. Praise for Yoss “One of the most prestigious science fiction authors of the island.” —On Cuba Magazine "A gifted and daring writer." —David Iaconangelo "José Miguel Sánchez [Yoss] is Cuba’s most decorated science fiction author, who has cultivated the most prestige for this genre in the mainstream, and the only person of all the Island’s residents who lives by his pen.” —Cuenta Regresiva Born José Miguel Sánchez Gómez, Yoss assumed his pen name in 1988, when he won the Premio David Award in the science fiction category for Timshel. Together with his peculiar pseudonym, the author's aesthetic of an impentinent rocker has allowed him to stand out amongst his fellow Cuban writers. Earning a degree in Biology in 1991, he went on to graduate from the first ever course on Narrative Techniques at the Onelio Jorge Cardoso Center of Literary Training, in the year 1999. Today, Yoss writes both realistic and science fiction works. Alongside these novels, the author produces essays, Praise for, and compilations, and actively promotes the Cuban science fiction literary workshops, Espiral and Espacio Abierto. When he isn’t translating, David Frye teaches Latin American culture and society at the University of Michigan. Translations include First New Chronicle and Good Government by Guaman Poma de Ayala (Peru, 1615); The Mangy Parrot by José Joaquín Fernandez de Lizardi (Mexico, 1816), for which he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America by Ángel Rama (Uruguay, 1982), and several Cuban and Spanish novels and poems.
Download or read book Ninety Percent of Everything written by Rose George and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the workings and dangers of freight shipping, the author sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore to present an eye-opening glimpse into an overlooked world filled with suspect practices, dubious operators, and pirates.
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 The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution written by Anna Clayfield and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extensively researched book, Anna Clayfield challenges contemporary Western views on the militarization of Cuba. She argues that, while the pervasiveness of armed forces in revolutionary Cuba is hard to refute, it is the guerrilla legacy, ethos, and image—“guerrillerismo”—that has helped the Cuban revolutionary project survive. The veneration of the guerrilla fighter has been crucial to the political culture’s underdog mentality. Analyzing official discourse, including newspapers, history textbooks, army training manuals, the writings of Che Guevara, and the speeches of Fidel Castro, Clayfield examines how the Cuban government has promoted guerrilla motifs. After 1959, the revolutionary leadership relied on this discourse to shape a new political culture. During the implementation of Soviet-style management in the late 1960s and 1970s, Cuba underwent profound structural changes, but the beliefs and values that underpinned the Revolution—and that were linked to the guerrilla ethos—were still upheld. Clayfield traces the shifting ideologies that circulated in Cuba during the 1980s to show how this rhetorical strategy helped prevent the proliferation of a siege mentality. The guerrilla code became a recourse Cuban leadership used to steel the population through the 1990s Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while the outside world perceived the changes that took place during Raúl Castro’s tenure to be signs the Revolution’s socialist model was fading, Clayfield proves guerrillerismo remained an important anchor for the new regime. By weaving the guerrilla ethos into the fabric of Cuban identity, the government has garnered legitimacy for the political authority of former guerrilleros, even decades after the end of armed conflicts. The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution chronicles how guerrilla rhetoric has allowed the Revolution to adapt and transform over time while appearing to remain true to its founding principles. It also raises the question of just how long this discourse can sustain the Revolution when its leaders are no longer veterans of the sierra, those guerrillas who participated in the armed struggle that brought them to power so many years ago.
Download or read book Granny D written by Doris Haddock and published by Villard. This book was released on 2001-06-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There's a cancer, and it's killing our democracy. A poor man has to sell his soul to get elected. I cry for this country." On February 29, 2000, ninety-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock completed her 3,200-mile, fourteen-month walk from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. She walked through 105-degree deserts and blinding blizzards, despite arthritis and emphysema. Along her way, her remarkable speeches — rich with wisdom, love, and political insight — transformed individuals and communities and jump-started a full-blown movement. She became a national heroine. On her journey, Haddock kept a diary — tracking the progress of her walk and recalling events in her life and the insights that have given her. Granny D celebrates an exuberant life of love, activism, and adventure — from writing one-woman feminist plays in the 1930s to stopping nuclear testing near an Eskimo fishing village in 1960 to Haddock’s current crusade. Threaded throughout is the spirit of her beloved hometown of Dublin/Peterborough, New Hampshire — Thornton Wilder’s inspirations for Grovers Croner in Out Town — a quintessentially American center of New England pluck, Yankee ingenuity and can-do attitude. Told in Doris Haddock’s distinct and unforgettable voice, Granny D will move, amuse, and inspire readers of all ages with its clarion message that one person can indeed make a difference.
Download or read book The Full Cupboard of Life written by Alexander McCall Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 5 Fans around the world adore the best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. Still engaged to the estimable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Ramotswe understands that she should not put too much pressure on him, as he has other concerns, especially a hair-raising request from the ever persuasive Mma Potokwane, matron of the orphan farm. Besides Mma Ramotswe herself has weighty matters on her mind. She has been approached by a wealthy lady to check up on several suitors. Are these men interested in the lady or just her money? This may be a difficult case, but it's just the kind of problem Mma Ramotswe likes and she is, as we know, a very intuitive lady.
Download or read book Journey Back Into The Vault written by Mario Cartaya and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey Back into the Vault: In Search of My Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints invites you to travel with me back to the land of my birth for the first time in fifty-six years in order to reclaim my forgotten Cuban childhood memories, original identity, and once-promised destiny. Come with me as I search for the now faded footprints I once left behind in the homes, school, and playgrounds of the first nine years of my life; help me honor the grandparents, uncles, and aunts I never saw again at their final resting place; and meet family members I never knew I had. Laugh, sigh, and cry with me during the many unforeseen experiences, astonishing events, and serendipitous moments that would forever change my life. Enjoy the improbable story of a courageous journey aimed at breaching the subconscious vault I once built to store the difficult memories of a childhood usurped, destiny denied, and loving family forever separated by geopolitical events. This is the story of those psychological forces that help define us, the power of enduring hope, and how by achieving purity of heart, reconciliation, and a soul at rest, we can evolve into better versions of ourselves—a universal message of love and enlightenment that can only begin with each individual’s search for self-actualization and inner peace.
