Books in the Envisioning Cuba series

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality. For others, Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years.

This history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the US occupation focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state.

"Centers on the life of Juan Nepomuceno Prieto (c. 1773-c. 1835), a member of the West African Yoraubaa people enslaved and taken to Havana during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. ... Situating Prieto's story within the context of colonial Cuba, Henry B. Lovejoy illuminates the vast process by which thousands of Yoraubaa speakers were forced into life-and-death struggles in a strange land"--

Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white. In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians played central roles in the development of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, Latino, and Afro-Latino identities and communities.

Analysing 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.

Envisioning La Escalera - an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba - in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organised slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century.

Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962

Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba abolished slavery, fought two wars of independence, and was occupied by the United States before finally becoming an independent republic. Tiffany A. Sippial argues that during this tumultuous era, Cuba's struggle to define itself as a modern nation found focus in the social and sexual anxieties surrounding prostitution and its regulation.

Analyzing the crucial period of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1961, this book challenges scholarly views of the revolution's sources, shape, and historical trajectory. It states that revolutionary leaders, while acting under serious constraints, were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideological visions.

Employing resilient and entrepreneurial approaches to audiovisual art in Cuba, this title focuses on what the author calls Street Filmmaking - the production of audiovisual artists who work outside the state film industry - to examine the island's transformation and changing notions of Cuban identity.

In 1812, a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. This title provides an analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts.

Offering an analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, this book looks at the work of three important contemporary Cuban authors: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) and Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2005), who left Cuba, and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba.

Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a transition from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. This crucial stage of Cuba's political evolution, often overshadowed by the 1959 revolution, is addressed here, stressing the importance of the mass mobilization of the popular classes.

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to US imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, the author traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans.

Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory

While it was not until 1871 that slavery in Cuba was finally abolished, African-descended people had high hopes for legal, social, and economic advancement as the republican period started. This analyses the racial politics and culture of black civic and political activists during the Cuban Republic.