Batur-Vanderlippe,Pinar (Author) and Feagin,Joe R. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1999
Published:
Stamford, CT: JAI Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
394 p, Includes Enid Logan's "El apóstol y el comandante en jefe: dialectics of racial discourse and racial practice in cuba, 1890-1999" and Mimi Sheller's "Resistance and struggle: The 'Haytian fear': racial projects and competing reactions to the first Black republic"
"The rise of the Afro-Cuban musical genre commonly known as son is representative
of Cuban society’s ability to affirm through art its primary cultural influences: Europe and Africa. Despite the successful transculturation within the music, however, the events surrounding the creation and acceptance of son reiterate the struggle between Cuban elites and the masses to define lo cubano. In this essay, I will show how the social and political conditions under which son became a representation of popular culture in Cuba served as a catalyst for the affirmation
of Cuba’s African roots, despite attempts on the part of the elite to exclude Afro-Cubans from establishing any connection to Cuban national identity." --The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
159 p, Discusses the importance of the role played by the Caribbean mother in her Latina daughters' negotiation of a hybrid identity as seen through the works of Julia Álvarez, Cristina García, and Esmeralda Santiago
7 p., The 2008-09 balance of payments crisis and a succession of errors in economic policies have resulted in new monetary and financial complications in the Cuban economy, to be added to the costs and distortions of currency duality.
Index number: AMR 25/007/2012, 18 p., Criticism of the government is not tolerated in Cuba, and it is routinely punished with arbitrary and short-term detentions, intimidation, harassment, and politically motivated criminal prosecutions. Amnesty International makes recommendations to the Cuban government aimed at ensuring greater respect for the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly, and movement.
Index number: AMR 25/005/2010, 35 p., In Cuba the state has a virtual monopoly of press and broadcast media and tight restrictions apply to the internet. Anyone who expresses views critical of the government runs the risk of harassment, arbitrary detention, and criminal prosecution. With dozens of prisoners of conscience continuing to serve long prison sentences in Cuba for exercising freedom of expression, Amnesty International calls on the authorities to stop the harassment and intimidation of dissidents, release prisoners of conscience, amend repressive legislation, and enable greater exchange of information through the internet and other media. Tables.
In Apr 2009, shortly after taking office, Pres Barack Obama signaled that he was open to a new dialogue with Cuba. At remarks delivered at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the President said that the US seeks a new beginning with Cuba. Earlier that year, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had welcomed an offer for talks from Cuban President Raul Castro, who took over duties from his ailing brother Fidel Castro in 2006 and subsequently was elected president by the Cuban National Assembly in 2008. Castro reportedly said that he was willing "discuss anything" with the US Government. Here, the US-Cuba policy is discussed. Adapted from the source document.
'Environmental justice' refers to the human right to a healthy and safe environment, a fair share of natural resources, access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making. Some analysts have argued that environmental justice is undermined by the political economy of capitalism. This paper builds on this analysis by evaluating the environmental justice situation in Cuba, a country where there is little capitalist influence. Evidence is based on participant observation and interviews in Cuba, as well as secondary quantitative data. The research findings suggest that Cuba fares relatively well in terms of environmental justice, but still faces a number of challenges regarding the quality of its environment and some aspects of the environmental decision-making process. However, many of its ongoing problems can be attributed to global capitalist pressures.
Beszterczey,Dora (Author), Fernandez,Damian J. (Author), and Gomez,Andy S. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
Aug 2010
Published:
Washington, DC: Latin America Initiative at Brookings
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
5 p., Last year, President Obama delivered the first step in his promise to reach out to the Cuban people and support their desire for freedom and self-determination. Premised on the belief that Cuban Americans are the best ambassadors for freedom in Cuba, the Obama administration lifted restrictions on travel and remittances by Cuban Americans; however, if US policy is to be truly forward looking it must further expand its focus from the Castro government to the well-being of the Cuban people. Tables.
Examines the voting behavior of Cubans and non-Cuban Hispanics in two Florida counties. The group position thesis holds that status inequalities and perceived discrimination yield out-group hostilities that can influence political behavior. In Miami, where Cubans are dominant, we expect non-Cuban Latinos to report greater pan-Latino competition and that anti-Cuban attitudes will influence non-Cuban Hispanic voting. In Tampa, where non-Cuban Latinos live in communities where Cubans are not dominant, we expect lower levels of perceived competition and Cuban-related attitudes to be inconsequential to the vote. The results confirm that power relations in the local arena constitute an important influence on the political behavior of Latino immigrants.
Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
After Soviet aid and trade ended Cuba was forced to reintegrate into the capitalist world economy. Needing hard currency, the government transformed the diaspora into a dollar attaining strategy, by facilitating and tacitly encouraging remittance-sending. Ordinary Cubans themselves wanted remittances to finance a lifestyle they could not otherwise afford. Despite their shared interest in remittances, the government increasingly appropriated remittances at recipients' expense.
Initiatives in the field of sexology and sex education in prerevolutionary Cuba are barely known, as continuity between those experiences and the work carried out during the years following the 1959 revolution have not been researched. The founding of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), however, must be considered the product of a long process of political maturity on the part of Cuban women during the first half of the twentieth century, and in the broader context of the FMC, the developments in the fields of sexology and sex education over the past fifty years also must be considered. Drawing on FMC archival holdings, this article sets out a periodization of the four main stages of the revolutionary period of institutionalizing sex education in Cuba, as well as its main challenges.
Reforms proposed at the Sixth Communist Party Congress represent a new, third phase of social policy in post-revolutionary Cuba. This new stage has the potential to strengthen social equity in Cuba, improve the socio-economic situation of disparate social groups, and overcome the old limitations of social policy. Yet it could also increase inequality, and at least in the short term, its predicted impacts will be contradictory and ambivalent.
To many in the West, the League of Nations was to establish political peace between nations. To the Cuban sugar-producing elite of the 1920s and 1930s, however, the League was an important socioeconomic institution used to augment many of Cuba's first modern state institutions. This article explores how and why Cuban delegates were the principals behind the 1937 International Sugar Agreement.
Don Fitz explains why quality health care does not have to be based on unending expansion of expensive medical technology. Adapted from the source document.
Demonstrate how the priority of education in Cuban social policy, from its outset after the 1959 revolution, has privileged women. Statistics chart the rapid increase in educational level and attainment over the decades and the high degree of feminization of higher education and thus the skilled labor force; and today Cuba ranks among the countries with the highest indicators in the United Nations' Millennium Goals with respect to education and gender equity.
Cubans are wildly optimistic about the transformations that will occur once the United States lifts its long-standing embargo on Cuba. Overlooked in these discussions, however, is how Cuba's health-care industry may be harmed by any serious easing of trade and travel restrictions between the two countries.
The urban and territorial changes caused by tourism are well-studied topics in contemporary scientific literature. This article uses an integrative approach that lies between the scientific traditions in urban geography and the geography of tourism to present a case study of a socialist city. Tourism is a strategic economic activity in Cuba, and the country's most popular sun and sand tourist destination is Varadero. At first consideration, its tourism model is not very different from those of other areas in the region (Dominican Republic, Riviera Maya, etc.), but the uniqueness of the Cuban government and emphasis on planning introduce several distinguishing features. The combined analysis of the development of tourism in the city and the recent history of territorial planning leads to conclusions regarding the role of tourism in urban development, which has resulted in the creation of a dual-city model, and the role land planning is playing.
53 p., Since 1996, Congress has appropriated 205 million dollars to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State (State) to support democracy assistance for Cuba. Because of Cuban government restrictions, conditions in Cuba pose security risks to the implementing partners -- primarily nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) -- and subpartners that provide US assistance. GAO (1) identified current assistance, implementing partners, subpartners, and beneficiaries; (2) reviewed USAID's and State's efforts to implement the program in accordance with US laws and regulations and to address program risks; and (3) examined USAID's and State's monitoring of the use of program funds. Tables, Figures, Appendixes.
200 p., For Cuba's supporters, health is the most commonly cited evidence of the socialist system's success. Even critics often concede that this is the country's saving grace. Cuba's health statistics are indeed extraordinary. This small island outperforms virtually all of its neighboring countries and all countries of the same level of economic development. Some of its health statistics rival wealthy industrialized countries. Moreover, these health outcomes have resulted against all odds. This study of the Cuban health system finds that the country possesses an unusually high level of popular participation and cooperation in the implementation of health policy. This has been achieved with the help of a longstanding government that prioritizes public health, and has enough political influence to compel the rest of the community to do the same. On the other hand, popular participation in decision-making regarding health policy is minimal, which contrasts with the image of popular participation often promoted. Political elites design and impose health policy, allowing little room for other health sector groups to meaningfully contribute to or protest official decisions. This is a problem because aspects of health care that are important to those who use the system or work within it can be neglected if they do not fit within official priorities. The country's preventive arrangements, its collective prioritization of key health areas, the improvements in public access to health services through the expansion of health facilities and the provision of free universal care are among the accomplishments that set it apart. The sustainability and progress of these achievements, however, must involve open recognition and public discussion of weaker aspects of the health system.
This article discusses different views about sustainable development, emphasizing -- on the basis of a survey conducted in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba -- the role of rural women in food production and natural resource management, the strength of the rural women's movement in the conquest of rights, and the decisive participation of women in defining proposals for public policies that guarantee gender equality in rural areas. A brief comparative analysis leads us to conclude that the development model in the three countries still prioritizes the male figure in relation to land tenure, access to credit and purchase of equipment or other material resources, it is suggested that both in Cuba, a socialist country, and in Mexico and Brazil, capitalist counties, the assumptions of social policies directed to rural female workers should take into account the basic needs of rural women to guarantee a more humane and sustainable development. Adapted from the source document.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
320 p., While most writing on Cuba seeks to analyse the island's socialist experiment from the perspective of either its internal dynamics or international relations, this book attempts to understand the revolutionary process as part of a counter-current against neoliberal globalisation. Now that neoliberalism is in crisis, Cuba's promotion of socialist values is finding a renewed relevance.
Campaigning in 2007, Barack Obama promised to end restrictions on remittances and family travel to Cuba, resume "people-to-people" contracts, and engage Cuba on issues of mutual interest. As President, Obama has declared his desire to forge a new "equal partnership" with Latin America. Two months later, the 39th General Assembly of the Organization of American States voted to repeal the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba fro its ranks.
Lopez-Levy,Arturo (Author) and Lopez,Lilla R. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Washington, DC: New American Foundation
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
19 p., Explores the historic reform process currently underway in Cuba. It looks first at the political context in which the VI Cuban Communist Party Congress took place, including the Cuban government's decision to release a significant number of political prisoners as part of a new dialogue with the Cuban Catholic Church. It then analyzes Cuba's nascent processes of economic reform and political liberalization. To conclude, it discusses the challenges and opportunities these processes pose for U.S policy toward Cuba.
With stark income inequalities rooted in its dual currency economy, Cuba is taxing down high and unearned incomes, while trying to raise national productivity and official salaries through performance-related pay and labor restructuring. Such measures are portrayed as an abandonment of socialism, but in Cuba are discussed in terms of historic socialist debates about distribution and the balance of moral and material incentives at work, in a society still characterized by common ownership, social protection, and collective debate.
Case studies demonstrate how countries in the same region can develop health care policies that represent different biomedical and sociocultural outcomes. For example, Cuba's policies result in the lowest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the Caribbean, whereas Belize experiences the second highest rates.
Discusses the importance of education for any nation and for Cuba in particular, examining its political, pedagogical and sociological foundations, and portraying its accomplishments over the last 50 years. The principles underlying the educational policy of the Cuban government are explained, as they underpin the mission of the National Education System (NES) to carry forward educational work in the country.
A range of economic dimensions is examined, including trade in goods and services (notably tourism), direct foreign investment, international migration, and development assistance. Following a brief review of the evolving relationship from 1959 to 1990, the nature of the economic relationship between Canada and Cuba is analyzed in more detail for the 1990 to 2009 era.
5 p., During most of the last half century, discussions aimed at normalizing relations with Cuba have been rare and mainly unproductive. Due to Obama's optimism for political change toward Cuba during his presidential campaign, there was considerable hope that policy would be altered in a more constructive direction, but after a year, it is argued that "change" in Latin America policy has been more in reverse than in fast-forward. Tables.
Romeu,Rafael (Author), Perez-Lopez,Jorge F. (Author), Mesa-Lago,Carmelo (Author), and Perales,Jose Raul (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
July 2011
Published:
Washington, DC: Latin American Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
91 p., This publication examines the contemporary state of Cuba's economy at a time of great transformation. Using econometric and other macroeconomic analysis tools, its authors have taken advantage of the recent availability of official economic statistics to offer new insights into longstanding questions about Cuba's economic behavior. Tables, Figures, References.
Argues that the bedrock of U.S. policy is an ideology of benevolent domination. Created at the time of the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt captured this ideology perfectly in 1907 when he explained, "I am seeking the very minimum of interference necessary to make them good," and it is seen today in the 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. Adapted from the source document.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
230 p., For almost five decades, the United States has maintained a comprehensive economic embargo on Cuba. U.S.-based travel to the island is severely restricted, and most financial and commercial transactions with Cuba are illegal for U.S. citizens. In the 1990s the United States tightened the embargo further, seeking to promote change in Cuba by depriving the Castro government of hard currency revenues. And yet the stalemate remains. This book argues that the embargo has not been particularly effective in achieving its primary goal. The United States has not only been unable to stifle the flow of foreign investment into Cuba but has actually contributed to the recovery of the Cuban economy, particularly from the deep recession it entered following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
39 p., Restrictions on travel to Cuba have been a key and often contentious component in US efforts to isolate Cuba's communist government since the early 1960s. Under the George W. Bush Administration, restrictions on travel and on private remittances to Cuba were tightened. Congress took action in March 2009 by including two provisions in the FY2009 omnibus appropriations measure (P.L. 111-8) that eased restrictions on family travel and travel related to marketing and sale of agricultural and medical goods to Cuba -- Subsequently, in April 2009, President Obama announced that his Administration would go further and allow unlimited family travel and remittances. Tables.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "The Quest for the Cuban Christ, the most recent work of Miguel A. De La Torre, is an exceptionally concise exploration of the ways in which Cubans have both conceived and perceived religion in general and Jesus Christ in particular, over the last five centuries. Specifically, the author examines religion and spirituality from the point of view of both subaltern and dominant groups throughout the history of Cuba. The real focus, however, is on the role of faith in the formation of the identity of Cubans resident and in exile that have been historically subordinated to the interests of hegemonic powers like Spain, the United States, and successive Cuban (including revolutionary) governments." (Jason M. Yaremko, H-LatAm [October, 2003]))
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
178 p., By acknowledging that competing national identities, perceptions, and ideas play a major role in foreign policies, Perceptions of Cuba makes a significant contribution to our understanding of international relations. Contents: The exceptionalist and the Cuban other -- The independent international citizen and the other Cuba -- Exploring Cuba policy in tandem.
Although discussions of race disappeared from Cuban literature after the revolution of 1959, they reappeared as a result of Cuba's difficult economic situation in the 1980's
"Recent examination of the content of Third World tourism marketing still lacks discussion concerning context. In this paper, an analysis of brochures representing different Third World countries reveals distinct patterns of marketing images occurring across these destinations. Postcolonial theory is used as a critical, contextual perspective to interpret these patterns. Three Third World tourism ‘Un’ myths are discussed: the myth of the unchanged, the myth of the unrestrained, and the myth of the uncivilized. It is shown that the representations surrounding these myths replicate colonial forms of discourse, emphasizing certain binaries between the First and Third Worlds and maintaining broader geopolitical power structures." (authors)
"While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the 'foreign' cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as 'native ethnographers' will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography." (author)
"This work reports on two brief polls recently taken in Cuba and of Santo Domingo. The results in both cases show the need to continue the searching for traditional Spanish language romances in the Americas which have been scantly investigated." (Dialnet)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
399 p, Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
398 p, "Análisis y reflexión acerca de los factores que contribuyeron a la supresión de la esclavitud en el Caribe español en general y, en particular, en Cuba, en torno a la cual están dedicados la mayoría de los textos presentados." (Publisher)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
710 p, Examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba, and Haiti"
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the 18th century Caribbean.
Discusses the poetry of Afro-Cuban writer Nancy Morejón, focusing on her poetry collection, Paisaje célebre (Fundarte, 1993). Compares the book to her previous work, and discusses the political and social influences that shaped it. Notes that this book marks an important stage in Morejón's poetry, in that it celebrates a new and different country and voice - one of indepedence and freedom.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
221 p, In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hispanic Caribbean was fundamentally a plantation economy dominated mainly by the world sugar market. The politics were shaped by revolutions, political coups, wars, and elections, resulting in an end of Spanish power, independent states, and the domination of the region by the United States. These developments led to changes in social values. The author follows these developments throughout the main Hispanic islands and provides a fascinating picture of a region in turmoil.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
449 p, During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The men responsible included, from Cuba, Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl; from Argentina, Che Guevara; from the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo; and from Haiti, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
505 p., During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The men responsible included, from Cuba, Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl; from Argentina, Che Guevara; from the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo; and from Haiti, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.
Reviews several books on Cuban history before 1959. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898-1934, by César Ayala; Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, by Ada Ferrer; Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, by Rosalie Schwartz.;
Discusses the emergence of an Afro-Cuban aesthetic. Notes the major contributions of Cuban writers Félix Tanco, Antonio Zambrana, Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Barnet, and others to the literary movement. Remarks that these authors give us a view of Latin American history from "below the deck of a slave ship" - a view that is very different from the traditional one.;
This study examines the identity categories of gender and race in the Cuban context of the first thirty years of the Revolution and focuses on black and mulata women, in which both categories converge. In this work I analyze the literary discourse of the Afro-Cuban female poets between the 1960s and 1980s and discern the role of self-representation that each of these poets constructs within the framework of "being black" or "mulata" woman. Also, since gender and race are redefined by the dominant power, this project analyzes the political hegemonic discourse of the period in relation to race and gender, and illuminates its role in preserving racial stereotypes as well as the patriarchal normatives of gender.
344 p., Explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals--from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families--established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations.
275 p., Racial ideology in Cuba, which negates the importance and effects of race and a racial hierarchy, gained significant legitimacy at the start of the Cuban Revolution due to increased levels of equality and the initial commitment by the Revolution to eradicate racism and racial discrimination. Racism was declared to be solved and race was subsequently erased from the public script two years after its triumph in 1959. This project determines (1) how the ideology of racial harmony and Cuban socialism join to create a racial ideology that often succeeds in reducing the salience of race for Cubans, particularly among the revolution's supporters (2) how this racial ideology affects identity formation, racial consciousness and racial attitudes among blacks as it interacts with visible racial disparities and (3) the trajectory that black politics has taken in Cuba.
327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
207 p., Explores the expression of Afro-Cuban identity and its illustration by Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution. It answers two questions. First, how does Afro-Cuban artistic expression of Afro-Cuban reality change from the 1970s to the 1990s? and second, how can we reread works from Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution in light of the ideological disconnects between Revolution, racial discourse, and artistic expression? To answer these questions the author looks to a diverse group of Afro-Cuban artists who produced groundbreaking works during the 1970s and 1990s. Beginning with Nancy Morejón as an example of a well-known literary figure in Afro-Cuban arts, the dissertation delves deeper into the evolution of Afro-Cuban aesthetics with the cinematic works of Nicolas Guillen Landrian in the 1960s, Sara Gómez and Sergio Giral in the 1970s and finally Gloria Rolando in the 1990s. These are all artists whose work has previously never been considered in concert, but together, their works engage in an interesting dialogue and provide a collective answer to the research questions on which this project is based.
453 p., Offers an anthropological interpretation of cultural discourses about the body found in literature, visual narratives and archival sources throughout 19th century in Spanish colonial Havana. These discourses show a pressing concern with the "manners" of bodies, the ways they moved, how they occupied space, and how they managed sensations and emotions to negotiate power and prestige in the highly stratified Havana's society. Concerns for the manners of the body became the discursive domain of the rising planter and intellectual elite of Cuban creoles. They often expressed these concerns in normalizing terms such as "good manners," "good taste," and "tone." Argues that these and other highly embodied, interlocking moral, sensory, affective and aesthetic categories such as nobility, respect or " sabor " became focal indexes of the social status of individuals in colonial society.
282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
311 p., Focuses on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. Argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation.
237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
251 p., Chapters: African and Afro-Cuban factors in the structure of Lydia Cabrera's black short stories -- The characters : gods, animals, humans, supernatural beings and objects -- The theme of the waters.
321 p., Locates contemporary articulations of afrofeminismo in manifold modes of cultural production including literature, music, visual displays of the body, and digital media. Examines the development of afrofeminismo in relation to colonial sexual violence in sugar-based economies to explain how colonial dynamics inflect ideologies of blanqueamiento/embranquecimento (racial whitening) and pseudo-scientific racial determinism. In this context, the author addresses representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the mulata (mulatto woman) in Caribbean and Brazilian cultural discourse.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., Describes how black Cubans experience racism on two levels. Cuban racism might result in less access for black Cubans to their group's resources, including protection within Cuban enclaves from society-wide discrimination. In society at large, black Cubans are below white Cubans on every socioeconomic indicator. Rejected by their white co-ethnics, black Cubans are welcomed by other groups of African descent. Many hold similar political views as African Americans. Identifying with African Americans neither negatively affects social mobility nor leads to a rejection of mainstream values and norms.
667 p., The author locates New Orleans as a cultural and cartographic heart linking the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America into what she calls Américas du Golfe. The author traces flows of cultures and citizens(hips) through New Orleans and across national borders: physically, culturally, economically, visually, linguistically, and musically, challenging traditional nation-based scholarly frameworks, and reorienting New Orleans as a Gulf, rather than American, city.
380 p., This work brings an anti-colonial reading to the production and maintenance of racial logic in Cuban schooling, through conversations with, and surveys of Cuban teachers, as well as through analyses of secondary and primary documents. The study undertaken seeks to contribute to the limited existent research on race relations in Cuba, with a research focus on the Cuban educational context. Teasing and staking out a middle ground between the blinding and often hollow pro-Cuba fanaticism and the deafening anti-Cuban rhetoric from the left and right respectively, this project seeks a more nuanced, complete and dialogical understanding of race and race relations in Cuba, with a specific focus on the educational context. This work investigates and explicates an apparent contradiction inherent in teachers' work and discourse on the island, revealing a flawed and complex form of Cuban anti-racism.
500 p., Explains the rise of a culture of racial silence in a time of heightening racial exclusion in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Employing a case study of Cienfuegos, a port city on the south-central coast of the island, the author examines gendered articulations of inequality among Cuban separatists between the outbreak of the war of independence in 1895 and the inauguration of the Cuban republic in 1902. It is argued that Cuban struggles for political power in the wake of the American military intervention (1898) and military occupation (1899-1902) fundamentally transformed separatist visions of citizenship, increasingly restricting its boundaries along racial lines.
Discusses how ephemeral artifacts of daily material culture, such as marquillas -- the colorful lithographed papers that were used to wrap bundles of cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba -- partook of the symbolization of emergent forms of racialized governability towards the end of slavery on the island.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Projected Date: 0812
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
364 p., Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership.
211 p., Explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative 19th century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab , by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura , by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato , by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo , by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous.
280 p., Examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. Argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
251 p., Explores how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés (also known as Plácido) appropriated Hispanic literature to inscribe an African descendant subjectivity in 19th century proto-nationalist Cuban discourse. Revises Mary Louise Pratt's notion of "intercultural texts" and Angel Rama's "literary transculturation", proposing "transculturated colonial literature" to trace the contradictions, re-significations, silences and shifts in the aesthetic and ideological function of Manzano and Plácido's texts. As such, 19th century Afro-Cuban literature is analyzed as an active space of negotiation and exchange disputing racial and religious hierarchies to inscribe an Afro-Cuban religio-cultural subject. The author concludes that both Manzano and Plácido disrupted the aesthetic and ideological norms of the colonial status quo by producing the first instance of literary transculturation in Cuba.
