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Photographs of the art, culture, and everyday life of Cuba taken from 2005-2015.
Scenes from Havana to Santiago Through an abundance of dynamic photographs, Portraits of Cuba depicts the experiences of Cubans of different ages and walks of life who are navigating the challenges and changes transforming the island today. From the vintage colonial architecture and potholed streets of Havana to the farms and winding highways of the countryside, images by documentary photographer Daniel Duncan capture daily life across the nation. Expert commentary by Marcela Vásquez-León and Dereka Rushbrook describes the history of el bloqueo, the economic embargo imposed by the U.S. government in 1960. The book also features selections from interviews with Cubans who highlight how the island residents continue to invent, adapt, and persevere in the face of this and other complicated circumstances. Duncan's photographs represent many aspects of the arts, religion, politics, public messaging, agriculture, and the economy in contemporary Cuba. Despite issues such as limited natural resources, dependence on imports, climate change and rising sea levels, and the departure of many of its young people, the island has emerged as an innovative player in addressing today's global problems. The authors note how the advances made by Cuba's sustainable farmers, scientists, medical teams, and literacy campaigns are models throughout the developing world. Portraits of Cuba celebrates the ingenuity, solidarity, and deep-rooted resilience of the Cuban people, illustrating how they are creating their own form of democracy in the long shadow of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the 60-year blockade.
An author and photographer recalls her long exile's journey from the shores of Cuba to an American citizen in this memoir of the Cuban-American experience.
“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
"Beaches, architecture, Carnival, nightlife, scuba diving, music, nature preserves, museums, restaurants, hotels, rum"--Cover.
The extraordinary account of the Cuban people’s struggle for survival in a post-Soviet world In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, this book tells for the first time the remarkable story of how Cuba survived while the rest of the Soviet bloc crumbled. Yaffe shows how Cuba has been gradually introducing select market reforms. While the government claims that these are necessary to sustain its socialist system, many others believe they herald a return to capitalism. Examining key domestic initiatives including the creation of one of the world’s leading biotechnological industries, its energy revolution, and medical internationalism alongside recent economic reforms, Yaffe shows why the revolution will continue post-Castro. This is a fresh, compelling account of Cuba’s socialist revolution and the challenges it faces today.
Firmat discusses his life as a boy born in Cuba but raised in America, in an exiled family living in the constant expectation of Castro's fall--a situation that caused conflicting emotions that he had to deal with in his later years.
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.
Gregory Weeks's Embracing Autonomy departs from other general treatments of Latin American-US relations not by putting US policy aside but by bringing in the Latin American and global contexts more closely and thus avoiding the incomplete picture provided by a narrow focus solely on the policies of the United States. The core of autonomy for Latin America from the United States is seen in new, deeper, and more numerous relationships that do not include the United States. The book is not a study of rebellion against the United States, or even a critique of US policy. Instead, it is an examination of the major shifts that have taken place in the region in recent decades and how they have shaped Latin American-US relations. Weeks's book provides a clearer understanding of where Latin America stands vis-à-vis the United States in the early twenty-first century. In doing so, we gain a better sense of the trajectory of Latin American-US relations and how they develop in turbulent times.
The Cuban revolution served as a rallying cry to people across Latin America and the Caribbean. The revolutionary regime has provided vital support to the rest of the region, offering everything from medical and development assistance to training and advice on guerrilla warfare. Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America is the first oral history of Cuba’s liberation struggle. Drawing on a vast array of original testimonies, Dirk Kruijt looks at the role of both veterans and the post-Revolution fidelista generation in shaping Cuba and the Americas. Featuring the testimonies of over sixty Cuban officials and former combatants, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America offers unique insight into a nation which, in spite of its small size and notional pariah status, remains one of the most influential countries in the Americas.