Havana Before Castro

Havana Before Castro
Author: Peter Moruzzi
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2008-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 142360993X

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.

Back Channel to Cuba

Back Channel to Cuba
Author: William M. LeoGrande
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2015-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469626616

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.

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know
Author: Julia E Sweig
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2009-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 019974081X

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.

The Other Side of Paradise

The Other Side of Paradise
Author: Julia Cooke
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1580055311

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501154575

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.

Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959

Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959
Author: Samuel Farber
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2011-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608461661

“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

I Was Cuba

I Was Cuba
Author: Ramiro Fernández
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2007-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780811860536

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, this work takes a look at Cuban history seen through the collection of Ramiro Fernandez, the world's largest archive of Cuban photos and ephemera.

Cuba in My Pocket

Cuba in My Pocket
Author: Adrianna Cuevas
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0374314683

By the author of 2021 Pura Belpré Honor Book The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez, a sweeping, emotional middle grade historical novel about a twelve-year-old boy who leaves his family in Cuba to immigrate to the U.S. by himself, based on the author's family history. “I don’t remember. Tell me everything, Pepito. Tell me about Cuba.” When the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 solidifies Castro’s power in Cuba, twelve-year-old Cumba’s family makes the difficult decision to send him to Florida alone. Faced with the prospect of living in another country by himself, Cumba tries to remember the sound of his father’s clarinet, the smell of his mother’s lavender perfume. Life in the United States presents a whole new set of challenges. Lost in a sea of English speakers, Cumba has to navigate a new city, a new school, and new freedom all on his own. With each day, Cumba feels more confident in his new surroundings, but he continues to wonder: Will his family ever be whole again? Or will they remain just out of reach, ninety miles across the sea? A Kirkus Best Children's Book of the Year "...Cuevas’ latest is a triumph of the heart...A compassionate, emotionally astute portrait of a young Cuban in exile." —Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW "Cuevas’ intense and immersive account of a Cuban boy’s experience after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion brings a specific point in history alive." —Booklist, STARRED REVIEW "Cuevas packs this sophomore novel with palpable emotions and themes of friendship, love, longing, and trauma, attentively conveying tumultuous historical events from the lens of one young refugee." — Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Cuba, the United States, and the Culture of the Transnational Left, 1933-1970

Cuba, the United States, and the Culture of the Transnational Left, 1933-1970
Author: John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107083087

This book examines the ways in which Cuba's revolutions of 1933 and 1959 became touchstones for border-crossing endeavors of radical politics and cultural experimentation over the mid-twentieth century. It argues that new networks of solidarity building between US and Cuban allies also brought with them perils and pitfalls that could not be separated from the longer history of US empire in Cuba. As US and Cuban subjects struggled together towards common aspirations of racial and gender equality, fairer distribution of wealth, and anti-imperialism, they created a unique index of cultural work that widens our understanding of the transition between hemispheric modernism and postmodernism. Canvassing poetry, music, journalism, photographs, and other cultural expressions around themes of revolution, this book seeks new understanding of how race, gender, and nationhood could shift in meaning and materialization when traveling across the Florida Straits.

Cuba 1952-1959

Cuba 1952-1959
Author: Manuel Márquez-Sterling
Publisher: Kleiopatria Digital Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2009
Genre: Cuba
ISBN: 0615318568

Author Manuel Márquez-Sterling writes about Fidel Castro and his revolution from direct personal experience, as a historian with broad and deep knowledge of 50s Cuba. The author knew and had contact with many of the historical figures in the book's pages. His penetrating analysis of the public and behind-the-scenes events clears the fog and shatters myths to reveal the real story of the Cuban Revolution. The book explains how Castro came to power through the convergence of rabid partisanship, radical student politics, media bias, and venal politicians who placed self interest ahead of preserving democracy. Facing a constitutional crisis, these parties espoused "the end justifies the means," embracing political gangsterism and eschewing negotiations with political opponents- resulting in a power vacuum Castro exploited to seize power. Masterful propaganda cast Castro as pro-democracy hero, avoiding scrutiny of his plans for a totalitarian state under his control.