Download or read book The Power of Race in Cuba written by Danielle Pilar Clealand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Power of Race in Cuba, Danielle Pilar Clealand analyzes racial ideologies that negate the existence of racism and their effect on racial progress and activism through the lens of Cuba. Since 1959, Fidel Castro and the Cuban government have married socialism and the ideal of racial harmony to create a formidable ideology that is an integral part of Cubans' sense of identity and their perceptions of race and racism in their country. While the combination of socialism and a colorblind racial ideology is particular to Cuba, strategies that paint a picture of equality of opportunity and deflect the importance of race are not particular to the island's ideology and can be found throughout the world, and in the Americas, in particular. By promoting an anti-discrimination ethos, diminishing class differences at the onset of the revolution, and declaring the end of racism, Castro was able to unite belief in the revolution to belief in the erasure of racism. The ideology is bolstered by rhetoric that discourages racial affirmation. The second part of the book examines public opinion on race in Cuba, particularly among black Cubans. It examines how black Cubans have indeed embraced the dominant nationalist ideology that eschews racial affirmation, but also continue to create spaces for black consciousness that challenge this ideology. The Power of Race in Cuba gives a nuanced portrait of black identity in Cuba and through survey data, interviews with formal organizers, hip hop artists, draws from the many black spaces, both formal and informal to highlight what black consciousness looks like in Cuba.
Download or read book Race in Cuba written by Esteban Morales Domínguez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Dominguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Morales Dominguez surveys the major advancements in race relations that occurred as a result of the revolution, but does not ignore continuing signs of inequality and discrimination. Instead, he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.
Download or read book Race to Revolution written by Gerald Horne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North. Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, and the relative freedom they achieved helped bring down Jim Crow in the United States, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core. Based on extensive research in Havana, Madrid, London, and throughout the U.S., Race to Revolution delves deep into the historical record, bringing to life the experiences of slaves and slave traders, abolitionists and sailors, politicians and poor farmers. It illuminates the complex web of interaction and infl uence that shaped the lives of many generations as they struggled over questions of race, property, and political power in both Cuba and 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 435 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 A Nation for All written by Alejandro de la Fuente and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.
Download or read book Antiracism in Cuba written by Devyn Spence Benson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs frequently negated their efforts by reproducing racist images and idioms in revolutionary propaganda, cartoons, and school materials. Building on nineteenth-century discourses that imagined Cuba as a raceless space, revolutionary leaders embraced a narrow definition of blackness, often seeming to suggest that Afro-Cubans had to discard their blackness to join the revolution. This was and remains a false dichotomy for many Cubans of color, Benson demonstrates. While some Afro-Cubans agreed with the revolution's sentiments about racial transcendence--"not blacks, not whites, only Cubans--others found ways to use state rhetoric to demand additional reforms. Still others, finding a revolution that disavowed blackness unsettling and paternalistic, fought to insert black history and African culture into revolutionary nationalisms. Despite such efforts by Afro-Cubans and radical government-sponsored integration programs, racism has persisted throughout the revolution in subtle but lasting ways.
Download or read book Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba written by Mark Q. Sawyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the triumphs and failures of the Castro regime in the area of race relations. It places the Cuban revolution in a comparative and international framework and challenges arguments that the regime eliminated racial inequality or that it was profoundly racist. Through interviews, historical materials, and survey research, it provides a balanced view. The book maintains that Cuba has not been a racial democracy as some have argued. However, it also argues that Cuba has done more than any other society to eliminate racial inequality. The contemporary outlook of the book demonstrates how much of Cuban racial ideology was unchanged by the revolution. Thus, the current implementation of market reforms and in particular tourism has exacerbated racial inequalities. Finally, it holds that despite these shortcomings, the regime remains popular among blacks because they perceive their alternatives of the US and the Miami Exile community to be far worse.
Download or read book Afro Cuban Voices written by Pedro Pérez Sarduy and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the forewords: "At a time when Cuba is undergoing immense economic and social changes, race becomes a kind of cultural litmus test for the national identity. . . . This anthology illustrates fully that it is possible to be both revolutionary and black in Cuba."—Manning Marable, Columbia University "The authors of Afro-Cuban Voices, also key actors in the new, unfolding dialogue about race in Cuba, make a seminal contribution through a forthright critique of ‘racial blind spots’ in official history and present-day racial discrimination."—James Early, director of cultural studies and communication, Smithsonian Institution From the series editor: "A courageous attempt to deal head-on with the issue of race in Cuba today. . . . Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs [seek to] put a human face on this debate, and do so well. The book will be received with relief by some and with frustration by others. Controversial it will undoubtedly be, since—as with most things Cuban—strong emotions are a given assumption. It will be an admirable beginning for the series and, it is hoped, will spark a much-needed debate in the United States on many aspects of the ‘Cuban question.’ It is about time."—John M. Kirk Based on the vivid firsthand testimony of prominent Afro-Cubans who live in Cuba, this book of interviews looks at ways that race affects daily life on the island. While celebrating their racial and national identity, the collected voices express an urgent need to end the silences and distortions of history in both pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba. The 14 people interviewed—of different generations and from different geographic areas of Cuba—come from the arts, the media, industry, academia, and medicine. They include a doctor who calls for joint U.S.-Cuban studies on high blood pressure and a craftsman who makes the batá drums used in Yoruba worship ceremonies. All responded to four controversial questions: What is it like to be black in Cuba? How has the revolution made a difference? To what extent is that difference true today? What can be done? Exposing the contradictions of both racial stereotyping and cultural assimilation, their eloquent answers make the case that the issue of race in Cuba, no matter how hard to define, will not be ignored. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk
Download or read book Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality written by Bonnie A. Lucero and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most paradoxical aspects of Cuban history is the coexistence of national myths of racial harmony with lived experiences of racial inequality. Here a historian addresses this issue by examining the ways soldiers and politicians coded their discussions of race in ideas of masculinity during Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuban insurgents, the author shows, rarely mentioned race outright. Instead, they often expressed their attitudes toward racial hierarchy through distinctly gendered language—revolutionary masculinity. By examining the relationship between historical experiences of race and discourses of masculinity, Lucero advances understandings about how racial exclusion functioned in a supposedly raceless society. Revolutionary masculinity, she shows, outwardly reinforced the centrality of color blindness to Cuban ideals of manhood at the same time as it perpetuated exclusion of Cubans of African descent from positions of authority.
Download or read book The Racial Politics of Division written by Monika Gosin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Racial Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami media between African Americans, "white" Cubans, and "black" Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. Monika Gosin challenges exclusionary arguments pitting these groups against one another and depicts instead the nuanced ways in which identities have been constructed, negotiated, rejected, and reclaimed in the context of Miami's historical multiethnic tensions. Focusing on ideas of "legitimacy," Gosin argues that dominant race-making ideologies of the white establishment regarding "worthy citizenship" and national belonging shape inter-minority conflict as groups negotiate their precarious positioning within the nation. Rejecting oversimplified and divisive racial politics, The Racial Politics of Division portrays the lived experiences of African Americans, white Cubans, and Afro-Cubans as disrupters in the binary frames of worth-citizenship narratives. Foregrounding the oft-neglected voices of Afro-Cubans, Gosin posits new narratives regarding racial positioning and notions of solidarity in Miami. By looking back to interethnic conflict that foreshadowed current demographic and social trends, she provides us with lessons for current debates surrounding immigration, interethnic relations, and national belonging. Gosin also shows us that despite these new demographic realities, white racial power continues to reproduce itself by requiring complicity of racialized groups in exchange for a tenuous claim on US citizenship.
Download or read book Breaking the Chains Forging the Nation written by Aisha Finch and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban studies, the volume examines, for the first time, the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and traces them into the early decades of the twentieth. Matt Childs, Manuel Barcia, Gloria García, and Reynaldo Ortíz-Minayo explore the transformation of Cuba’s nineteenth-century sugar regime and the ways in which African-descended people responded to these new realities, while Barbara Danzie León and Matthew Pettway examine the intellectual and artistic work that captured the politics of this period. Aisha Finch, Ada Ferrer, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Jacqueline Grant, and Joseph Dorsey consider new ways to think about the categories of resistance and agency, the gendered investments of traditional resistance histories, and the continuities of struggle that erupted over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. In the final section of the book, Fannie Rushing, Aline Helg, Melina Pappademos, and Takkara Brunson delve into Cuba’s early nationhood and its fraught racial history. Isabel Hernández Campos and W. F. Santiago-Valles conclude the book with reflections on the process of history and commemoration in Cuba. Together, the contributors rethink the ways in which African-descended Cubans battled racial violence, created pathways to citizenship and humanity, and exercised claims on the nation state. Utilizing rare primary documents on the Afro-Cuban communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation explores how black resistance to exploitative systems played a central role in the making of the Cuban nation.
Download or read book Red Racisms written by I. Law and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes racism in Communist and post-Communist contexts, examining the 'Red' promise of an end to racism and the racial logics at work in the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, Cuba and China, placing these in the context of global racialization.
Download or read book People s Power written by Peter Roman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing primarily on the municipal level but also presenting material on the national and provincial elected bodies and the newer people's councils and workers' parliaments, Roman (behavioral and social sciences, City U. of New York) offers a theoretical, historical, and contemporary analysis. He finds theoretical foundations in Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin and historical precedents in the Paris Commune, the 1905 and 1917 Soviets, and the Soviet Union before and after Stalin. His coverage extends from the various experiments after the triumph of the revolution in 1959 through effects of the 1992 Constitution and election law, to the present. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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 Dancing with the Revolution written by Elizabeth B. Schwall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.
Download or read book Suspect Freedoms written by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Cubans migrated to New York City to organize and protest against Spanish colonial rule. While revolutionary wars raged in Cuba, expatriates envisioned, dissected, and redefined meanings of independence and nationhood. An underlying element was the concept of Cubanidad, a shared sense of what it meant to be Cuban. Deeply influenced by discussions of slavery, freedom, masculinity, and United States imperialism, the question of what and who constituted “being Cuban” remained in flux and often, suspect. The first book to explore Cuban racial and sexual politics in New York during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Suspect Freedoms chronicles the largely unexamined and often forgotten history of more than a hundred years of Cuban exile, migration, diaspora, and community formation. Nancy Raquel Mirabal delves into the rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to write what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an “unthinkable history.” Situating this pivotal era within larger theoretical discussions of potential, future, visibility, and belonging, Mirabal shows how these transformations complicated meanings of territoriality, gender, race, power, and labor. She argues that slavery, nation, and the fear that Cuba would become “another Haiti” were critical in the making of early diasporic Cubanidades, and documents how, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Afro-Cubans were authors of their own experiences; organizing movements, publishing texts, and establishing important political, revolutionary, and social clubs. Meticulously documented and deftly crafted, Suspect Freedoms unravels a nuanced and vital history.
Download or read book Between Race and Empire written by Lisa Brock and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven essays examine the number of ways that African Americans and Cubans have influenced each other, showing how music, poetry, literature, and sports became the means by which the two peoples of color were able to express their uniqueness and develop their parallel race consciousness.
