Cubans, an Epic Journey

Cubans, an Epic Journey
Author: Sam Verdeja
Publisher: Reedy Press LLC
Total Pages: 801
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 1935806203

This book is a collection of more than thirty essays by renowned scholars, historians, journalists, and media professionals that portray the experience of Cubans exiled in the United States and other countries in the last sixty years.

Pitching Around Fidel

Pitching Around Fidel
Author: S.L. Price
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0060934921

In an artful pastiche of observation, personal narrative, interviews, and investigative reporting, S.L. Price, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, describes sports and athletes in today's Cuba. On his journeys to the island, Price finds a country that celebrates sports like no other and a regime that uses games as both symbol and weapon in its dying revolution. He finds Olympic and world champion boxers, track stars, volleyball and baseball players, but he also finds that with Castro's revolution staggering beneath the weight of a great depression, Cuba's famed sports system is imploding. Athletes are defecting by plane and raft. Superstars bike to games and legends like boxer Teofilo Stevenson are forced to lost themselves in a bottle of rum. Beyond an examination of sports in the hothouse of revolution, Pitching Around Fidel presents a vibrant and realistic portrait of Cuba today, complete with sex-happy tourists, blackouts, Fidel's famous former lover, and a black-power fugitive wanted in the U.S. for murder and hijacking. At once a biting travelogue and a meditation on sports in both America and Cuba, Pitching Around Fidel is a valuable document about a time and place that is close to fading away.

Travels in Cuba

Travels in Cuba
Author: Marie-Louise Gay
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1773063480

Even for an experienced traveler like Charlie, Cuba is a place unlike any he has visited before — an island full of surprises, secrets and puzzling contradictions. When Charlie’s artist mother is invited to visit a school in Cuba, the whole family goes along on the trip. But the island they discover is a far cry from the all-inclusive resorts that Charlie has heard his friends talk about. Charlie has never visited a country as strange and puzzling as Cuba — a country where he often feels like a time traveler. Where Havana’s grand Hotel Nacional sits next to buildings that seem to be crumbling before his very eyes. Where the streets are filled with empty storefronts and packs of wild dogs, but where flowers and sherbet-colored houses may lie around the next corner, and music is everywhere. Where there are many different kinds of walls — from Havana’s famous sea wall to the invisible ones that seem aimed at keeping tourists and locals apart. Then the family heads “off the beaten track,” traveling by hot, dusty bus to Viñales, where Charlie makes friends with Lázaro, who often flies from Miami to visit his Cuban relatives. The boys ride a horse bareback, find a secret cache of rifles inside a little green mountain and go swimming with small albino fish in an underground cave. A rent-a-wreck takes the family into the countryside, where they find an abandoned hotel inhabited by goats, and a modern resort filled with tourists. And as he goes from one strange and marvelous escapade to another, Charlie finds that his expectations about a place and its people are overturned again and again. Key Text Features illustrations Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.6 Describe how a narrator's or speaker's point of view influences how events are described.

Lonely Planet Cuba

Lonely Planet Cuba
Author: Conner Gorry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2004
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781740591201

Reviews the history, geography, and culture of Cuba, describes tourist attractions in each region, and recommends hotels and restaurants.

Martina the Beautiful Cockroach

Martina the Beautiful Cockroach
Author: Carmen Agra Deedy
Publisher: Holiday House
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1682631419

The beautiful Martina Josefina Catalina Cucaracha doesn't know coffee beans about love and marriage, so when suitors come calling, what is she to do? Luckily, she has her Cuban family to help! While some of the Cucarachas offer Martina gifts to make her more attractive, only Abuela, her grandmother, gives her some useful advice: spill coffee on his shoes to see how he handles anger. At first, Martina is skeptical of her Abuela's suggestion, but when suitor after suitor fails the Coffee Test, she wonders if a little green cockroach can ever find true love. After reading this award-winning retelling of the Cuban folktale, readers will never look at a cockroach the same way again. Carmen Agra Deedy delivers a delightfully inventive Cuban twist on the beloved Martina folktale, complete with a dash of café Cubano.

Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away

Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away
Author: David Powell
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 168340341X

Florida Historical Society Samuel Proctor Award Rare accounts of Cuban migration in the words of the exiles themselves Bringing together an unprecedented number of extensive personal stories, this book shares the triumphs and heartbreaking moments experienced by some of the first Cubans to come to the United States after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away is a moving look inside fifteen years of migration that changed the two countries and transformed the lives of the people who found themselves separated from their homeland. David Powell presents interviews with refugees who left Cuba between 1959 and the 1962 Missile Crisis, as well as those who embarked on the Freedom Flights of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During these years more than 600,000 Cubans migrated to the US, some by way of other countries and many arriving in Miami with only a few clothes and pocket money. In their own words, exiles describe why they left the island, how they prepared for departure, what situations they faced when they arrived in the US, and how they integrated into American life. Offering historical background that illuminates this pivotal period in the context of the Cold War, Powell shows how the US government’s Cuban refugee assistance program had far-reaching effects on refugee policy, bilingual education, and child welfare programs. The testimonies in this book include new information about low-cost “Cuban Loans” that enabled young exiles to attend US colleges, preparing many to be builders and leaders in their adopted country today. A powerful portrayal of the initial effects of a revolution that began a new era in Cuba’s relationship with the world, this book preserves rare accounts of the motivations and struggles of early Cuban exiles in the words of the emigres themselves, adding gripping detail to the history of the modern Cuban diaspora. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Waiting For Snow In Havana

Waiting For Snow In Havana
Author: Carlos Eire
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2012-12-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 147110835X

A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Che Guevara's Face

Che Guevara's Face
Author: Danielle Smith-Llera
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2016-08
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0756554403

"Discusses the iconic photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda"--

Letters from Cuba

Letters from Cuba
Author: Ruth Behar
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0525516492

Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, where she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.