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Anticipation of the Past

Louis A. Jr. Pérez

in The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past

This chapter looks at the role of the past in the Cuban “present”. The past was everywhere, in education and at home, celebrated in song and art, drama and fiction. The past was a living history. So ... More

This chapter looks at the role of the past in the Cuban “present”. The past was everywhere, in education and at home, celebrated in song and art, drama and fiction. The past was a living history. So much had happened in such a small space of time. Almost everywhere in Cuba, memory passed for history or served as a representation of history. Narratives of memory developed into one of the principal sources of historical knowledge: retellings. This gave history an emotional charge. Memory served as a means to integrate Cubans in a historically informed conception of nation. Cubans all through the first half of the twentieth century lived with and within their history.Less

Introduction: Race and Revolution in Cuba

Devyn Spence Benson

in Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution

This Introduction outlines the central questions and arguments of this book: How do ideas about racial difference, racist stereotypes, and racially-discriminatory practices persist, survive, and ... More

This Introduction outlines the central questions and arguments of this book: How do ideas about racial difference, racist stereotypes, and racially-discriminatory practices persist, survive, and reproduce themselves despite significant state efforts to generate social and racial equality. In what ways can racism and equality exist together? And, how have people of African descent challenged, participated in, and negotiated such processes? This chapter also situates the 1959 revolution’s racial politics within over a hundred years of Afro-Cuban history from the wars of independence, to the abolition of slavery, and the inclusion and exclusion of people of African descent in the Cuban republic. The Introduction ends with an anecdote about what it meant for the author, an African American woman from the southern part of the United States, to do field work in Cuba and how her experience reveal the similarities and differences between the US and Cuban racial identification systems.Less

Intimate Adversaries, Possible Friends

William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh

in Back Channel To Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

This chapter looks at the more recent efforts of Barack Obama and the Cuban president Raúl Castro to establish dialogue and engage in more amicable relations between their two countries. More ... More

This chapter looks at the more recent efforts of Barack Obama and the Cuban president Raúl Castro to establish dialogue and engage in more amicable relations between their two countries. More broadly, it seeks to puzzle out the underlying complexities that continue to impede progress in U.S.-Cuban relations. After all, beneath the complex knot of conflict between Cuba and the United States lies a rich vein of mutual concerns, shared culture, and common humanity. Across half a century, their turbulent relations have been marked by the interplay of interests in conflict and interests in common. Yet, for more than fifty years Cuba and the United States have not been able to consummate a reconciliation. The chapter explores the reasons as to why this is so, and presents ten lessons from the past to further improve relations for the future.Less

Memory, Revolution, and Homophobia

Carrie Hamilton

in Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory

This chapter begins with an analysis of the pavonato debates and then explores the relationship between memory, revolution, and homophobia in Cuba. It is argued here that the history of early ... More

This chapter begins with an analysis of the pavonato debates and then explores the relationship between memory, revolution, and homophobia in Cuba. It is argued here that the history of early revolutionary homophobia has been neither forgotten, as suggested by some commentators, nor overcome, as is implicit in more official versions of Cuban history. Considering the recollections of narrators of different sexualities, generations, and genders, this chapter attempts to locate traces of trauma as well as some evidence of amnesia and silence. However, the memory of revolutionary homophobia in the interviews is best understood as fractured—a metaphor that emphasizes both the impact of history on memory and the uneven transmission of difficult memories across generations.Less

ImagiNations from a History of Space to a History of Movement: Cuba between Island-World and World of Islands

Ottmar Ette

in Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature

This chapter provides a postnational perspective on Cuban history, culture, and its literature, from the moment of its invention until the Castro era. Many of our theories and epistemologies are ... More

This chapter provides a postnational perspective on Cuban history, culture, and its literature, from the moment of its invention until the Castro era. Many of our theories and epistemologies are informed by spatial and static views that keep us from recognizing the highly dynamic developments and processes at their base. As an alternative, Ette appeals to a transition from history informed by spatiality to a history shaped by movement. By examining the first examples of early modern cartography, Ette argues that Cuba had been perceived from the moment of discovery as a potential global island. Furthermore, the author cites prime examples of Cuban literature, among them the works of José Martí, that follow a logic of inclusion, not one of exclusion, based on a theory of global relationality. Given the fact that Cuban literature has been written on all continents—mostly in Spanish, but also on a translingual level in the respective languages of the countries of exile—the idea of Cuba as a global island could become part of a trans-areal archipelago, one built upon the foundation of symmetrical relations that develop a relational logic in accordance with the ongoing process of globalization.Less

James J. O'kelly at Jiguaní (1873)

in Cuba's Wild East: A Literary Geography of Oriente

This chapter describes how James J. O'Kelly fulfilled his instructions, meeting Carlos Manuel de Céspedes just outside the town of Jiguaní. It also addresses The Mambi-Land. In addition, it explains ... More

This chapter describes how James J. O'Kelly fulfilled his instructions, meeting Carlos Manuel de Céspedes just outside the town of Jiguaní. It also addresses The Mambi-Land. In addition, it explains Fidel Castro's extraordinary sense of the resonances of Cuban history. It deals with the early seventeenth-century context of Espejo de paciencia. It then pays attention to the 1830s and Cuban criollismo to O'Kelly and the second half of the nineteenth century. An account of the difficulties and dangers encountered and overcome by O'Kelly to the Mambi-Land is presented. It suggests that the bell which Céspedes had struck at La Demajagua in 1868 has been re-installed in 1968, just in time to see Castro's speech.Less

Constitutionalism and Civil Society

Timothy Hyde

in Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959

This introductory chapter explores the reciprocations of architecture and political circumstances in order to examine how architecture is incorporated within the developing course of civil society. ... More

This introductory chapter explores the reciprocations of architecture and political circumstances in order to examine how architecture is incorporated within the developing course of civil society. It discusses the formal and informal mechanisms that organize changes among citizens and between citizens and the state. It examines the mechanisms that are themselves perpetuated through institutions and customs in order to manage the frictions and the desires of a body politic. It explores how architecture made its appearance in civil society. It argues that constitutionalism offered principles of exchange, circulation, and transmission necessary for their disciplinary constructions of elements and processes in civil society. It emphasizes that constitutionalism was the medium through which architecture made its appearance in Cuba’s history.Less

The Tomb That Is the Almendares River

Sherry Johnson

in Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution

This chapter discusses the hurricane of June 1791 and how it came at a critical juncture in Cuban history. Lingering over western Cuba for several days, the hurricane was the cause of a flood that ... More

This chapter discusses the hurricane of June 1791 and how it came at a critical juncture in Cuban history. Lingering over western Cuba for several days, the hurricane was the cause of a flood that claimed over 3,000 lives, drowned over 11,000 head of cattle, and caused incalculable property damage. It also marked the region's entry into its fifth—and possibly its worst—decade of environmental crisis. The crisis in Cuba was exacerbated because a new and inexperienced monarch, Charles IV, sat on the Spanish throne. The new king was ill-equipped to deal with matters of government, and his policies vacillated from one extreme to another. Within the maelstrom of Spanish court politics, he promoted a rival faction that for fifteen years had been alienated from the center of power.Less

Introduction

Reinaldo Funes Monzote

in From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492

This book investigates the impact of the sugar industry on Cuban forests from around 1600 to the mid-1920s. More specifically, it explores the link between sugar plantations and deforestation in Cuba ... More

This book investigates the impact of the sugar industry on Cuban forests from around 1600 to the mid-1920s. More specifically, it explores the link between sugar plantations and deforestation in Cuba during this period. Drawing on the concept of physico-natural regions as a spatial frame of reference, the book examines how sugar cultivation in Cuba led to the disappearance of forests on the island. In assessing the environmental impact of the sugar industry, it considers other aspects, including the system that governed the supply of lumber for shipbuilding until the end of the eighteenth century, the establishment of a modern forestry administration, and the efforts of legislators and others to raise awareness about the environmental and economic consequences of deforestation. The book also considers how Cuba's socioeconomic evolution and dominant ideologies have shaped attitudes toward the environment, as well as the role of forests in the formation of the Cuban nation. In a sense, it is a tribute to the central place occupied by forests in Cuban history while highlighting the dangers of wanton exploitation of natural resources.Less