Download or read book The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba written by Par Kumaraswami and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the social functions of literature from the perspective of policymakers, writers, readers and residents in contemporary Cuba. It provides a new perspective on post-59 Cuban literature that underlines how cultural policy has made literature a hybrid activity between elite and mass culture, with inherent social, rather than aesthetic or political, value. Whilst many traditional studies of Cuban literature assume either its subjugation to politics and ideology or, conversely, its role in resisting political discourse via a rather naïve notion of artistic freedom, this project explores the varied, dynamic and multiple ways in which literature works in Cuban society: as a catalyst for identity construction aimed at consensus and belonging, but also as an instrument of self-differentiation and self-definition, even in the more recent context of a more market-oriented system. The study reviews policy from 1959 to the present, and presents contemporary case studies exploring the social functions of literature for writers, readers and ordinary Havana residents.
Download or read book Revolutionary Cuba written by Luis Martínez-Fernández and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in more than three decades to offer a complete and chronological history of revolutionary Cuba, including the years of rebellion that led to the revolution. Beginning with Batista’s coup in 1952, which catalyzed the rebels, and bringing the reader to the present-day transformations initiated by Raúl Castro, Luis Martínez-Fernández provides a balanced interpretive synthesis of the major topics of contemporary Cuban history. Expertly weaving the myriad historic, social, and political forces that shaped the island nation during this period, Martínez-Fernández examines the circumstances that allowed the revolution to consolidate in the early 1960s, the Soviet influence throughout the latter part of the Cold War, and the struggle to survive the catastrophic Special Period of the 1990s after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. He tackles the island’s chronic dependence on sugar production, which started with the plantations centuries ago and continues to shape culture and society. He analyzes the revolutionary pendulum that continues to swing between idealism and pragmatism, focusing on its effects on the everyday lives of the Cuban people, and—bucking established trends in Cuban scholarship—Martínez-Fernández systematically integrates the Cuban diaspora into the larger discourse of the revolution. Concise, well written, and accessible, this book is an indispensable survey of the history and themes of the socialist revolution that forever changed Cuba and the world.
Download or read book Inside the Revolution written by Mona Rosendahl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first ethnographic study of life in Cuba to emerge in over twenty years, Inside the Revolution offers a rare, close view of how socialist ideology translates into everyday experience in one Cuban municipality. Mona Rosendahl draws on eighteen months of fieldwork, in a municipality she calls by the fictional name Palmera, to present a vivid account of the lives and thoughts of residents, many of whom have lived inside the revolution for more than thirty-five years. In Palmera, support for the socialist program remains strong. Rosendahl attributes continuing loyalty to four conditions: improvements in the standard of living from 1959 to 1990, the uniformity and omnipresence of political communications from the government, a historical emphasis on local participation in the revolution, and the consistency of revolutionary ideals with traditional machista expectations and practices. Through an analysis of ideology and practice in contemporary Cuba, Rosendahl documents how its citizens support the present political system, and how reciprocal economics between households and ideas about gender both reinforce and challenge that system. Rosendahl also explains how those who oppose state socialism resist participation in society through inaction or withdrawal.
Download or read book Handbook on Cuban History Literature and the Arts written by Mauricio A. Font and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2016. If scholarship on Cuban studies after the 1959 revolution focused on the historical and cultural aspects of the construction of a socialist order, the post-1989 crisis of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe raised questions about the island’s state as a socialist model. The scholarly gaze gradually began to focus on possibilities for alternative transformations at various levels of social life rather than on the deepening of traditional twentieth-century state socialism. This volume explores the newly emergent themes and debates about Cuban society and history.
Download or read book The Evolution and Significance of the Cuban Revolution written by Charles McKelvey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book interprets the Cuban revolutionary movement from 1868 to 1959 as a continuous process that sought political independence and social and economic transformation of colonial and neocolonial structures. Cuba is a symbol of hope for the Third World. The Cuban Revolution took power from a national elite subordinate to foreign capital, and placed it in the hands of the people; and it subsequently developed alternative structures of popular democracy that have functioned to keep delegates of the people in power. While Cuba has persisted, the peoples of the Third World, knocked down by the neoliberal project, have found social movement and political life, a renewal that is especially evident in Latin America and the Non-Aligned Movement. At the same time, the capitalist world-economy increasingly reveals its unsustainability, and the global elite demonstrate its incapacity to respond to a multifaceted and sustained global crisis. These dynamics establish conditions for popular democratic socialist revolutions in the North.
Download or read book Cuban Revolution in America written by Teishan A. Latner and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.
Download or read book Heroes Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba 1946 1958 written by Lillian Guerra and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading scholar sheds light on the experiences of ordinary Cubans in the unseating of the dictator Fulgencio Batista In this important and timely volume, one of today’s foremost experts on Cuban history and politics fills a significant gap in the literature, illuminating how Cuba’s electoral democracy underwent a tumultuous transformation into a military dictatorship. Lillian Guerra draws on her years of research in newly opened archives and on personal interviews to shed light on the men and women of Cuba who participated in mass mobilization and civic activism to establish social movements in their quest for social and racial justice and for more accountable leadership. Driven by a sense of duty toward la patria (the fatherland) and their dedication to heroism and martyrdom, these citizens built a powerful underground revolutionary culture that shaped and witnessed the overthrow of Batista in the late 1950s. Beautifully illustrated with archival photographs, this volume is a stunning addition to Latin American history and politics.
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 Cuba s Revolutionary World written by Jonathan C. Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Castro’s democratic reform movement veered off course, a revolution that seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America brought about its tragic opposite. Jonathan C. Brown examines in forensic detail how the turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the century’s most transformative events.
Download or read book A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba written by Antoni Kapcia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few island nations have stirred the soul like Cuba. From Hemingway's intoxicating Havana to Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club, outsiders have persistently been fascinated by Cuba for its music (jazz to rumba), its rich literature, its art and dance (danzón to mambo) and perhaps above all for its bold experiment of a socialist revolution in action. Antoni Kapcia shows how the thaw in relations between Cuba and the USA now makes a fresh appraisal of the country and its modern history essential. He authoritatively explores the 'essence' of the Cuban revolution, revealing it to be a maverick phenomenon tied not so much to socialism or Communism for their own sakes but instead to an idealistic vision of postcolonial nationalism. Reassessing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the author examines the central personalities: not just the famous trio of Che Guevara, Fidel and Raúl Castro in shaping the ideas of the revolution but, still further back, the visionary ideology of José Martí. Kapcia's book reflects on the future of the revolution as aúl nd his government began to cede power to a new generation.
Download or read book Vida Clandestina written by Enrique Oltuski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2002-11-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vida Clandestina is the first U.S. publication of the dramatic memoir of an important Cuban revolutionary who led a dangerous double life from 1952 to1959. Educated at University of Miami, then a high-ranking manager and engineer for Shell Oil, Enrique Oltuski was also a leader in the urban guerilla 26th of July Movement in Havana and Santa Clara, risking his life to join forces with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and working at the highest level of the Cuban government in the forty-three years since.
Download or read book Literary culture in Cuba written by Par Kumaraswami and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings an original and innovative approach to a much-misunderstood aspect of the Cuban Revolution: the place of literature and the creation of a literary culture. Based on over 100 interviews with a wide range of actors involved in the structures and processes that produce, regulate, promote and consume literature on the island, the book breaks new ground by going beyond the conventional approach (the study of individual authors and texts) and by going beyond the canon of texts known outside Cuba. It thus presents a historical analysis of the evolution of literary culture from 1959 to the present, as well as a series of more detailed case studies (on writing workshops, the Havana Book Festival and the publishing infrastructure) which reveal how this culture is created in contemporary Cuba. It thus contributes a new and complex vision of revolutionary Cuban culture which is as detailed as it is comprehensive.
Download or read book To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture written by Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in painstaking research, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture revisits the circumstances which led to the arts being embraced at the heart of the Cuban Revolution. Introducing the main protagonists to the debate, this previously untold story follows the polemical twists and turns that ensued in the volatile atmosphere of the 1960s and ’70s. The picture that emerges is of a struggle for dominance between Soviet-derived approaches and a uniquely Cuban response to the arts under socialism. The latter tendency, which eventually won out, was based on the principles of Marxist humanism. As such, this book foregrounds emancipatory understandings of culture. To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture takes its title from a slogan – devised by artists and writers at a meeting in October 1960 and adopted by the First National Congress of Writers and Artists the following August – which sought to highlight the intrinsic importance of culture to the Revolution. Departing from popular top-down conceptions of Cuban policy-formation, this book establishes the close involvement of the Cuban people in cultural processes and the contribution of Cuba’s artists and writers to the policy and praxis of the Revolution. Ample space is dedicated to discussions that remain hugely pertinent to those working in the cultural field, such as the relationship between art and ideology, engagement and autonomy, form and content. As the capitalist world struggles to articulate the value of the arts in anything other than economic terms, this book provides us with an entirely different way of thinking about culture and the policies underlying it.
Download or read book Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959 written by Samuel Farber and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Frequent insights, stimulating historical comparisons, and command of the data relating to Cuba’s economic and social performance.” —Foreign Affairs Uncritically lauded by the left and impulsively denounced by the right, the Cuban Revolution is almost universally viewed one dimensionally. In this book, Samuel Farber, one of its most informed left-wing critics, provides a much-needed critical assessment of the Revolution’s impact and legacy. “The Cuban story twists and turns as we speak, so thank goodness for scholars such as Samuel Farber, an unapologetic Marxist whose knowledge of Cuban affairs is unrivalled . . . In this excellent, necessary book, Farber takes stock of fifty years of revolutionary control by recognizing achievements but lambasting authoritarianism.” —Latin American Review of Books “A courageous and formidable balance-sheet of the Cuban Revolution, including a sobering analysis of a draconian ‘reform’ program that will only deepen the gulf between revolutionary slogans and the actual life of the people.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
Download or read book Music and Revolution written by Robin D. Moore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation A history of Cuban music during the Castro regime (1950s to the present.
Download or read book Cuba s Forgotten Decade written by Emily J. Kirk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s have largely been overlooked in scholarly studies of the Cuban Revolution, or, at the very least, dismissed simply as a period of “Sovietization” characterized by widespread bureaucratization, institutionalization, and adherence to Soviet orthodoxy. Consequently, scant research exists that examines the major changes that took place across the decade and their role in determining the course of the Revolution. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the 1970s which challenges prevailing interpretations. Drawing from multidisciplinary perspectives and exploring a range of areas—including politics, international relations, culture, education, and healthcare—its contributing authors demonstrate that the decade was a time of intense transformation which proved pivotal to the development of the Revolution. Indeed, many of the ideas, approaches, policies, and legislation developed and tested during the 1970s maintain a very visible legacy in contemporary Cuba. In highlighting the complexity of the 1970s, this volume ultimately aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the Cuban Revolution and how it chooses to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book My Life With Che written by Hilda Gadea and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He stayed to talk that day for some time. Eventually Lucila left the room. Then we turned to more personal matters, the disagreement completely forgotten. I confessed that I had been deeply moved by what he had written in the book' Che Guevara's first wife, Hilda Gadea, was with him during a tumultuous period in his life, the period which turned him from an intellectual theorist to a dedicated revolutionist. After 5 years of marriage and the birth of their daughter, Hildita, Hilda Gadea paints an intimate and extraordinary portrait of this legendary figure; one who is a romantic wanderer, a philosopher and doting suitor and father. Ernesto Guevara and Hilda Gadea met in Guatemala as members of the political-exile community. Later they were forced to flee Mexico, where their friendship grew stronger and where, stimulated by the intelligence and knowledge of Hilda, Che's vista's broadened and his convictions hardened. Hilda's account of their life together in Mexico is filled with joy but at times is terribly strained. They found it difficult to make a living and Che suffered from severe asthmatic attacks. Nevertheless the excitement of involvement with the Castros and other Cuban refugees infuses every page. Gradually the character of this great leader is revealed by the woman who knew him best, providing a vital key to acomprehension of Che's legendary qualities.
