An essay on the gendered aspects of war and revolution in Cuba and Nicaragua. According to the author, militarized violence in these states was hierarchical and ultimately created alternative privileged masculinities despite revolutionary movements' ideological commitments to equality. Details related to racial and gender binaries are also presented.
Batrell,Ricardo (Author) and Sanders,Mark A. (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
240 p., In 1896, an illiterate, fifteen-year-old Afro-Cuban field hand joined the rebel army fighting for Cuba's independence. Though poor and uneducated, Ricardo Batrell believed in the promise of Cuba Libre, the vision of a democratic and egalitarian nation that inspired the Cuban War of Independence. After the war ended in 1898, Batrell taught himself to read and write and published a memoir of his wartime experiences,
[Assata Shakur]'s comments highlight the long and continuing relationship between African Americans and Cuba. Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet had actively supported Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain over a century ago. After the revolutionaries seized power in 1959, [Fidel Castro] made a powerful impression among African Americans by staying in Harlem during his first visit to the United Nations. Castro's famous September, 1960 meeting with Malcolm X, to the great consternation of the U.S. government, reinforced the solidarity felt by progressive black Americans toward the revolutionary government.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
CD, Album, Snowboy has crafted his own distinct rhythmic identity using a mixture of three rhythms that make a kind of big groove sound on four congas. It comes from a style of bata [sacred Afro-Cuban] drumming called chachalokafun, rumba, and mozambique.
