Download or read book Back Channel to Cuba written by William M. LeoGrande and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History is being made in U.S.-Cuban relations. Now in paperback and updated to tell the real story behind the stunning December 17, 2014, announcement by President Obama and President Castro of their move to restore full diplomatic relations, this powerful book is essential to understanding ongoing efforts toward normalization in a new era of engagement. Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual conflict and aggression between the United States and Cuba since 1959, Back Channel to Cuba chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh here present a remarkably new and relevant account, describing how, despite the intense political clamor surrounding efforts to improve relations with Havana, negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration since Eisenhower's through secret, back-channel diplomacy. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a new approach, LeoGrande and Kornbluh uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter. They reveal a fifty-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, that provides the historical foundation for the dramatic breakthrough in U.S.-Cuba ties.

Download or read book An Island Called Home written by Ruth Behar and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish-speaking Jews thought Cuba was supposed to be a mere layover on the journey to the United States when they arrived in the island country in the 1920s. They even called it “Hotel Cuba.” But then the years passed, and the many Jews who came there from Turkey, Poland, and war-torn Europe stayed in Cuba. The beloved island ceased to be a hotel, and Cuba eventually became “home.” But after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the majority of the Jews opposed his communist regime and left in a mass exodus. Though they remade their lives in the United States, they mourned the loss of the Jewish community they had built on the island. As a child of five, Ruth Behar was caught up in the Jewish exodus from Cuba. Growing up in the United States, she wondered about the Jews who stayed behind. Who were they and why had they stayed? What traces were left of the Jewish presence, of the cemeteries, synagogues, and Torahs? Who was taking care of this legacy? What Jewish memories had managed to survive the years of revolutionary atheism? An Island Called Home is the story of Behar’s journey back to the island to find answers to these questions. Unlike the exotic image projected by the American media, Behar uncovers a side of Cuban Jews that is poignant and personal. Her moving vignettes of the individuals she meets are coupled with the sensitive photographs of Havana-based photographer Humberto Mayol, who traveled with her. Together, Behar’s poetic and compassionate prose and Mayol’s shadowy and riveting photographs create an unforgettable portrait of a community that many have seen though few have understood. This book is the first to show both the vitality and the heartbreak that lie behind the project of keeping alive the flame of Jewish memory in Cuba.

Download or read book Cuba Information Manual written by Michael Anthony Bellows and published by Kettle Pub.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guide to Cuba that helps U.S. citizens make intelligent choices about traveling to Cuba with or without the required permit from the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Provides tips from a veteran Cuba traveler. How to get there, where to stay, how to get around, changing money,dangers and annoyances, avoiding the Revolutionary police, political issues, about the communist government, unique Cuban laws, and social customs. Includes maps, an extensive reference section, illustrations, and color photos. Sanctioned by the Center for Cuban Studies in N.Y.C. Reviews available on Amazon.com.

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 Back to Cuba written by Elio F. Beltran and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2003-06-11 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xlibris, the leading print-on-demand self-publishing services provider, announced today the release of a new special edition of Back to Cuba: The Return of the Butterflies, an engaging book written by multi-awarded authored Elio F. Beltran. The text tells a story that evolves around real personalities of the process including a brief revealing encounter with the then student leader Fidel Castro. Readers will meet Michael, the protagonist chosen by the author for this true story that in itself goes beyond an apparent fictional novel to become not only the love story that it is, but brings fresh insight into the contemporary history of Cuba in spite of the fact that, as the author have said, he has not intended to write neither a political nor a history book. He nonetheless develops into the life within the process, as a participant first, including peripheral accounts of guerilla warfare, and his life as an exiled artist in the United States. After forty-two years of his exile, he reaches a poignant decision of going back to Cuba to witness the dramatic changes of places and people that he can barely recognize after all the years. His exploits will also give readers provocative insight about the contemporary dilemma of the Cuban exile community as well as the challenges confronting the new US government of Barack Obama. With the recent developments on both the United States and Cuba, Back to Cuba: The Return of the Butterflies is easily the most timely book to read. In light of policy changes from both nations, this book clearly defines how much has changed.

Download or read book Escape from Castro s Cuba written by Tim Wendel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a 2021 Top Thriller by Alta Journal ​2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist in Action/Adventure Fiction 2021 Professional Achievement Award, Johns Hopkins University faculty Finalist for the 2021 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year In this visionary sequel to Castro’s Curveball, the former Washington Senators Minor League catcher has returned to Havana with a small role in a movie being filmed on location. Billy Bryan soon realizes that this place and his past remain as star-crossed as when he played winter ball in the Cuban capital decades before. Against his better judgment, Billy becomes entangled in a scheme to spirit a top baseball prospect off the island. This pits him against his old friend Fidel Castro. Despite being in his final days, the dictator remains a dangerous adversary, as does the Cuban sports machine and the Mexican crime syndicates that now direct baseball talent toward the U.S. Major Leagues. In Escape from Castro’s Cuba, Billy must once again navigate the crosscurrents of the so-called City of Columns: a place where the sunsets from the Hotel Nacional along the Malecón breakwater are as beautiful as ever, but where the alleyways in Old Havana still fan out, crooked and broken, like an old catcher’s fingers.

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 To Return to Cuba written by Lorenzo F. Gonzalez and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To Return to Cuba" is the riveting true story of the author's experiences as a teenager during the Cuban Revolution. He shares rare, first-hand accounts of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis from his point of view as a Cuban revolutionary soldier, and personal experiences with Fidel Castro at the University of Havana. As a Cuban student studying in Hungary, his views of the revolution evolve, forcing him to attempt a harrowing escape from Castro, Cuba and Communism.

Download or read book Return to Cuba written by Herbert Lionel Matthews and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Restrictions on Travel to Cuba written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Treasury and General Government and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Return to Havana written by Maurice Halperin and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devastating losses of economic support from the Eastern bloc after the advent of Perestroika were weakening an already shaky system. Hope for a productive socialist Cuba, so apparent in the sixties, had disappeared

Download or read book Son of Havana written by Luis Tiant and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir by the mustachioed baseball pitcher who went playing rocky, trash-ridden fields in Castro’s Cuba to becoming a Boston Red Sox legend. Luis Tiant is one of the most charismatic and accomplished players in Boston Red Sox and Major League Baseball history. With a barrel-chested physique and a Fu Manchu mustache, Tiant may not have looked like the lean, sculpted aces he usually played against, but nobody was a tougher competitor on the diamond, and few were as successful. There may be no more qualified twentieth-century pitcher not yet enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His big-league dreams came at a price: racism in the Deep South and the Boston suburbs, and nearly fifteen years separated from a family held captive in Castro’s Cuba. But baseball also delivered World Series stardom and a heroic return to his island home after close to a half-century of forced exile. The man whose name—“El Tiante” —became a Fenway Park battle cry has never fully shared his tale in his own words, until now. In Son of Havana, Tiant puts his heart on his sleeve and describes his road from torn-up fields in Havana to the pristine lawns of major league ballparks. Readers will share Tiant’s pride when appeals by a pair of US senators to baseball-fanatic Castro secure freedom for Luis’s parents to fly to Boston and witness the 1975 World Series glory of their child. And readers will join the big-league ballplayers for their spring 2016 exhibition game in Havana, when Tiant—a living link to the earliest, scariest days of the Castro regime—threw out the first pitch.

Download or read book Bridges to Cuba written by Ruth Behar and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cuban and Cuban-American scholars, writers, and artists celebrate the possibility of overcoming divisions of politics and hate

Download or read book Is it Time to Lift the Ban on Travel to Cuba written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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.