Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958
Author: Lillian Guerra
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 030023533X

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.

Visions of Power in Cuba

Visions of Power in Cuba
Author: Lillian Guerra
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807835633

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 Gue

Cuban Revolution in America

Cuban Revolution in America
Author: Teishan A. Latner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 146963547X

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.

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality
Author: Bonnie A. Lucero
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826360106

One of the most paradoxical aspects of Cuban history is the coexistence of national myths of racial harmony with lived experiences of racial inequality. Here a historian addresses this issue by examining the ways soldiers and politicians coded their discussions of race in ideas of masculinity during Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuban insurgents, the author shows, rarely mentioned race outright. Instead, they often expressed their attitudes toward racial hierarchy through distinctly gendered language—revolutionary masculinity. By examining the relationship between historical experiences of race and discourses of masculinity, Lucero advances understandings about how racial exclusion functioned in a supposedly raceless society. Revolutionary masculinity, she shows, outwardly reinforced the centrality of color blindness to Cuban ideals of manhood at the same time as it perpetuated exclusion of Cubans of African descent from positions of authority.

We Are Cuba!

We Are Cuba!
Author: Helen Yaffe
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2020-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245513

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.

Antiracism in Cuba

Antiracism in Cuba
Author: Devyn Spence Benson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 146962673X

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.

Close But No Cigar

Close But No Cigar
Author: Stephen Purvis
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781474605069

WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 2017 'In its tragic absurdity, Close But No Cigar reads like a Graham Greene story, with a cast of characters to make Hemingway proud' Daily Telegraph For over a decade Stephen Purvis had been a pillar of Havana's expat community, one of many foreign businessmen investing in Cuba's crawl from Cold War communism towards modernity. But for reasons unknown to him he was also under State Security's microscope. One morning during the height of President Raúl Castro's purges in 2012, while his family slept, the unmarked Ladas of State Security arrived at his home and he was taken away into the absurd and brutal world of Cuban justice. In this engrossing memoir, Purvis recounts his fifteen-month ordeal. Accused at first of selling state secrets, he is taken to the notorious interrogation centre Villa Marista, where he endures brutal conditions designed by the KGB and Stasi to break the bodies and minds of spies and political prisoners, and resists the paranoia and incompetence of his jailers. Later, held in a maximum-security prison, he finds himself surrounded by a motley crew of convicts: people-smugglers and drug-runners together with a handful of confused businessmen also awaiting formal charges. From his arrest to his farcical secret trial and sudden release, Purvis exposes the madness of modern Cuba with wit, grit and a sharp eye for character. As tourists flock to Havana to marvel at a city frozen in time, he shows that despite reforms and international reconciliation the Castro regime remains a corrupt, dictatorial relic. Close But No Cigar is part thriller, part comedy and part morality tale, but most of all a true story that takes the reader into a dark side of a sunny place that remains an enigma.

The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico

The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico
Author: Jill Leslie McKeever Furst
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300072600

A richly illustrated look at basic Precolumbian beliefs among ancient Mesoamerican peoples about life and death, body and soul. Drawing on linguistic, ethnographic, and iconographic sources, art historian Jill McKeever Furst argues that the Mexica turned not to mental or linguistic constructions for verifying ideas about the soul, but to what they experienced through the senses. 32 illustrations.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958

Heroes, Martyrs, and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958
Author: Lillian Guerra
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300175531

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Introduction. A History That Dare Not Be Told: Political Culture and the Making of Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958 -- 1 Cuba on the Verge: Martyrdom, Political Culture, and Civic Activism, 1946-1951 -- 2 El Último Aldabonazo: Fulgencio Batista's "Revolution" and Renewed Struggle for a Democratic Cuba, 1952-1953 -- 3 Los Muchachos del Moncada: Civic Mobilization and Democracy's Last Stand, 1953-1954 -- 4 Civic Activism and the Legitimation of Armed Struggle Against Batista, 1955-1956 -- 5 Complicit Communists, Student Commandos, Fidelistas, and Civil War, 1956-1957 -- 6 Clandestinos, Guerrillas, and the Making of a Messiah in the Sierra Maestra, 1957-1958 -- Epilogue. Revolutionary Cuba: December 1958 and Beyond -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

The People's Armies

The People's Armies
Author: Richard Cobb
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 790
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300027281

The 'People's Armies' of eighteenth-century France were an instrument of the Reign of Terror. Civilian rather than military armies, they were created to obtain food and military equipment from the reluctant and frequently anti-revolutionary rural populace in order to supply the towns and the soldiers fighting on the frontiers. Composed of urban, highly politicized 'sans-culottes', they interacted with rural villages in a way that reflected the age-old conflict between town and country. This classic book by the famed historian Richard Cobb describes the clash between the swaggering, insubordinate 'sans-culottes' and the crafty villagers and in so doing, provides important insighyts into aspects of the social and administrative history of the French Revolution. 'The People's Armies' was first published in France in 1961 and has now been translated into English by Marianne Elliott. This book was Cobb's first major work and is still generally regarded as his most important contribution to French history.It illustrates all those characteristics that have come to be seen as typical of Cobb's distinctive historical style: the concern with local colour and variation, the vignettes that evoke in vivid detail all the hues of daily life at the time of the French Revolution, and, most of all, the sound basis of detailed and wide-ranging research.The book has had a profound influence on the study of the French Revolution and is still unsurpassed as a history of an important institution of the period of Revolutionary government in France. Richard Cobb was professor of modern European history at Oxford University.