Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2014) 276pp. IsBN: 9781-583-644-51Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-RitchieThis book pursues connections. In 1959, the US-backed regime in Cuba was overthrown in a remarkable revolutionary coup. At the same moment, a powerful Civil Rights Movement was gearing up to destroy Jim Crow racism in the US. While most scholars agree on these events' significance, few pursue their historical conjuncture. Race to Revolution's key objective is to explain how 'these interlinked processes' (p. 27) destroyed US legal inequality and American influence in Cuba. This ambitious agenda results in a sweeping transnational narrative that should inspire students, provoke scholars and intrigue general readers.Gerald Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston, is a prolific scholar. His university webpage lists 15 book publications since 2001. Professor Horne's research focuses upon the transformative roles of workers and intellectuals of African descent, especially in colonial and anti-colonial struggles on the global stage. This book places him within an African American radical tradition in which Cuba was vital to liberation in the US from abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney and Henry Highland Garnet, to intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston, Rayford Logan and Langston Hughes, to communists such as James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, William Patterson and Angela Davis.Race to Revolution examines 'U.S.-Cuban relations in the bitter context of slavery and Jim Crow', with a focus 'on the words and deeds of U.S. Negroes - and their "white" counterparts' (p. 8). One prominent activity was cross-border travel by Americans to Cuba and Cubans to the mainland, including runaway slaves, anti-colonial rebels, Confederate refugees, US Negro musicians, American and black Cuban baseball players, missionaries, travellers, soldiers, communists and so forth. The author's key focus, though, is upon broader social and political processes (but strangely not economic; sugar production, marketing and consumption receive scant attention) in which the US, especially Texas and Cuba, fortified African slavery in Cuba, while Jim Crow attained a 'more muscular presence' in Florida and Cuba after 1898 (p. 21). Push-back by African Americans opposed to Jim Crow and lynching as well as black communists in Cuba and the US meant that the 'concentrated racism of Jim Crow was being assailed from both sides of the straits, shortening its shelf life' (p. 23).Because Race to Revolution does not critically engage the historiography on Cuban slavery, colonialism/anti-colonialism and revolution, Jim Crew, and so forth it is sometimes hard to pin down the overall argument. We are provided with a general narrative on extensive cross-border movements mainly from the 1820s through the 1950s le
{"title":"Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow","authors":"J. Kerr-Ritchie","doi":"10.1093/jahist/jav605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav605","url":null,"abstract":"Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2014) 276pp. IsBN: 9781-583-644-51Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-RitchieThis book pursues connections. In 1959, the US-backed regime in Cuba was overthrown in a remarkable revolutionary coup. At the same moment, a powerful Civil Rights Movement was gearing up to destroy Jim Crow racism in the US. While most scholars agree on these events' significance, few pursue their historical conjuncture. Race to Revolution's key objective is to explain how 'these interlinked processes' (p. 27) destroyed US legal inequality and American influence in Cuba. This ambitious agenda results in a sweeping transnational narrative that should inspire students, provoke scholars and intrigue general readers.Gerald Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston, is a prolific scholar. His university webpage lists 15 book publications since 2001. Professor Horne's research focuses upon the transformative roles of workers and intellectuals of African descent, especially in colonial and anti-colonial struggles on the global stage. This book places him within an African American radical tradition in which Cuba was vital to liberation in the US from abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney and Henry Highland Garnet, to intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston, Rayford Logan and Langston Hughes, to communists such as James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, William Patterson and Angela Davis.Race to Revolution examines 'U.S.-Cuban relations in the bitter context of slavery and Jim Crow', with a focus 'on the words and deeds of U.S. Negroes - and their \"white\" counterparts' (p. 8). One prominent activity was cross-border travel by Americans to Cuba and Cubans to the mainland, including runaway slaves, anti-colonial rebels, Confederate refugees, US Negro musicians, American and black Cuban baseball players, missionaries, travellers, soldiers, communists and so forth. The author's key focus, though, is upon broader social and political processes (but strangely not economic; sugar production, marketing and consumption receive scant attention) in which the US, especially Texas and Cuba, fortified African slavery in Cuba, while Jim Crow attained a 'more muscular presence' in Florida and Cuba after 1898 (p. 21). Push-back by African Americans opposed to Jim Crow and lynching as well as black communists in Cuba and the US meant that the 'concentrated racism of Jim Crow was being assailed from both sides of the straits, shortening its shelf life' (p. 23).Because Race to Revolution does not critically engage the historiography on Cuban slavery, colonialism/anti-colonialism and revolution, Jim Crew, and so forth it is sometimes hard to pin down the overall argument. We are provided with a general narrative on extensive cross-border movements mainly from the 1820s through the 1950s le","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124038672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-04-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0074
J. Baer
Evaristo Collazo was a humble man with a tenacious spirit. Photographs show him in his forties with a receding hairline and a great moustache. He is dressed in a three-piece suit with a cravat, holding a Bible in his right hand. His back is straight and his eyes stare outward, looking like a man with a purpose. He had left the Cuban Catholic Church, joining first the Episcopalians, then the Baptists and finally, the Presbyterian Church in 1890. He found a home in the Reformed theology and structure of the Presbyterian Church as an alternative to the hierarchical constraints many Cubans felt with the Catholic Church that served more faithfully the Spanish king than the people of Cuba. He desired to see his homeland free from the Spanish monarchy and served in the War of Independence from 1895 to 1898. Evaristo Collazo also advocated for Cuban leadership in the Presbyterian Church in Cuba, at times coming into conflict with the American missionaries who wanted to retain control. The origin of the Presbyterian Church in Cuba, however, did not begin with the American missionaries who descended on Cuba during the US occupation from 1898 until 1902. Instead, it was a Cuban, Collazo, who requested Presbyterian missionaries, and then asked to be ordained by them in order to lead the church he had established. This Cuban-ness-evangelical and nationalist-was something Presbyterians in Cuba shared with other Protestant denominations in adapting Protestant theology to the needs of Cuban society as nationalists who advocated for reform and social justice. This relationship between Cuban and American Protestants is significant because it afforded Cubans opportunities to blunt US hegemony, permit Cuban leadership and placate Cuban pride. These ties continue to this day and present an important dynamic as US-Cuban relations continue to evolve.In the years leading up to a new war of independence, Cubans increasingly found US Protestant denominations in Cuba to be supportive of rebel goals. Then, when the United States took over the conflict and occupied the island, increasing numbers of US Protestant missionaries arrived. Most studies of Cuba in this period focus on the military occupation, the political foundation of the republic and the importance of US business interests. American and Cuban Protestants were involved in all these aspects but are seldom studied in depth. Richard Gott (2004) suggests that a horde of US missionaries descended on the island at the turn of the twentieth century and helped impose a US-based structure on the island's evangelicals. Histories of Cuba by North American and European scholars and writers describe the importation of US institutions and values in the period of occupation and the early Republic. Luis A. Perez (1995: 63) states, 'Almost immediately, the small Cuban ministry was overwhelmed and displaced by a vast influx of North American missionaries of all denominations'. He identifies several Cubans who became Protestants wh
埃瓦里斯托·科拉佐是一个有着顽强精神的谦卑人。照片显示他四十多岁，发际线向后退去，留着胡子。他穿着三件套西装，打着领带，右手拿着一本《圣经》。他的背挺直，眼睛盯着外面，看起来像一个有目的的人。他离开了古巴天主教会，先是加入圣公会，然后是浸信会，最后在1890年加入了长老会。他在改革宗神学和长老会的结构中找到了一个家，作为许多古巴人对天主教会的等级限制的替代，天主教会比古巴人民更忠实地为西班牙国王服务。他渴望看到自己的祖国从西班牙君主统治下解放出来，并在1895年至1898年的独立战争中服役。埃瓦里斯托·科拉佐还主张古巴长老会的古巴领导地位，有时与想要保持控制权的美国传教士发生冲突。然而，古巴长老会的起源并非始于1898年至1902年美国占领期间来到古巴的美国传教士。相反，是古巴人科拉佐(Collazo)请求长老会传教士，然后要求他们任命他为圣职，以便领导他所建立的教会。这种古巴主义——福音派和民族主义者——是古巴长老会与其他新教教派共同的东西，他们将新教神学适应古巴社会的需要，作为民族主义者，他们倡导改革和社会正义。古巴和美国新教徒之间的这种关系意义重大，因为它为古巴人提供了削弱美国霸权、允许古巴领导和安抚古巴自豪感的机会。这些关系一直持续到今天，并随着美古关系的不断发展而呈现出重要的动态。在一场新的独立战争爆发前的几年里，古巴人越来越多地发现，在古巴的美国新教教派支持叛军的目标。然后，当美国接管冲突并占领该岛时，越来越多的美国新教传教士到达。这一时期对古巴的研究大多集中在军事占领、共和国的政治基础和美国商业利益的重要性上。美国和古巴的新教徒参与了所有这些方面，但很少深入研究。理查德·戈特(Richard Gott, 2004)认为，一群美国传教士在20世纪之交来到该岛，并帮助将一种基于美国的结构强加给该岛的福音派。北美和欧洲学者和作家的《古巴史》描述了在占领时期和共和国早期美国制度和价值观的输入。Luis a . Perez(1995: 63)说:“几乎立刻，小小的古巴教会就被大量涌入的北美各教派传教士所淹没和取代。”他指出，有几个古巴人在流亡美国期间成为了新教徒。然而，他的霸权主题使他低估了古巴精神的重要性，他使这些早期的新教徒成为统治北美的工具，尽管有几个古巴人站在他们的新教教派和传教士面前。Jason M. Yaremko(2000)详细介绍了古巴东部的浸信会教徒和卫理公会教徒，以解释20世纪20年代和30年代古巴牧师和美国传教士之间的紧张关系。然而，Evaristo Collazo的例子表明，教会组织的差异给古巴长老会带来了更大的灵活性，古巴新教徒不堪重负和沮丧的印象现在可以更加微妙了。从一开始就存在着合作、服从和抵抗的混合。本研究使用的资料来自古巴马坦萨斯新教神学院(Seminario Evangelico Teologico)的档案和图书馆，在美国无法获得，主要有三点。…
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Pub Date : 2016-04-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0109
Salim Lamrani
Developing a welfare system that protects the most vulnerable groups in society, as well as proactive policies designed to achieve equal rights for all, has long been a priority of the Cuban Revolution. Cuban women, discriminated against and relegated to a lower status before 1959, have benefited from measures adopted by the government of Fidel Castro to integrate the political, economic and social life of the country, achieve emancipation and obtain full citizenship.
{"title":"Women in Cuba: The Emancipatory Revolution","authors":"Salim Lamrani","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0109","url":null,"abstract":"Developing a welfare system that protects the most vulnerable groups in society, as well as proactive policies designed to achieve equal rights for all, has long been a priority of the Cuban Revolution. Cuban women, discriminated against and relegated to a lower status before 1959, have benefited from measures adopted by the government of Fidel Castro to integrate the political, economic and social life of the country, achieve emancipation and obtain full citizenship.","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123250352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-07-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0212
Nataka Moore, Tiffany McDowell, M. Watson, Caridad Morales Nussa
Nataka (First Author): my reflections on my cuban AncestryMy great grandfather was born in Cuba during the time of Cuba's independence from Spain in 1899. He was born to a Black Cuban mother and an African American father who arrived as an American volunteer from South Carolina. In his very early years, my great grandfather was raised by his mother in Cuba. Around the age of 5, he came to live in the US and settled in South Carolina with his paternal grandparents. The circumstances that made him leave Cuba are unknown but through a look at the lives of Black Cuban woman after Cuba's independence, any number of issues could have been likely, including an early death of his mother. My great grandfather was an absentee father in the life of my grandfather, so there was not much information passed down about him. Even so, as a genealogist and psychologist, I became very interested in tracking down what I could learn from my great grandfather's life and the events surrounding his birth during the independence movement in Cuba.During my search, I came across a book in an antique store in Chicago that was published in 1899 called Neely's Photographs: Panoramic views of Cuba, Porto Rico, Manila and The Philippines by Frank Tennyson Neely. The book contains well over 75 images of the Spanish-American war with a substantial focus of the book covering Cuba. At the bottom of the photos, the author made captions that often explained the context of the pictures by telling the reader who was in the picture and/or where the picture was taken. However, at times the caption would be reflective of the author's personal opinions about the people in the pictures. What became significant for me about this book was my reaction to the images and the captions of these with Black Cubans. White Cubans in the book are referred to as Cubans, whereas Black Cubans are referred to as Negroes. To me this reflected that Neely, a person with an etic perspective, saw Black Cubans as not being citizens of Cuba nor as contributors to the fabric of Cuban society. My question is this: if they are neither citizens nor contributors to Cuban society, then for Neely what were they?For one photo, an image of Black Cubans gathering in Havana on a Sunday, in their best clothes dancing likely to the rhythms that have contributed to music and dance across the world, he provided commentary that answered my question. In this photo, he stated, 'Negroes are children of the fun and sun.' I see several problems with this statement: (1) the photo captured adults engaging in a social affair, (2) the adults are being infantilised as they are called children, (3) they are referred to as Negroes and not Cubans, and (4) the comment was patronising and likely reflects the overall lack of respect for the human rights of Black people during this period. While I intellectually knew that Cuba's history with slavery and racism was very similar to that of the US, I was not ready to go through another version of t
{"title":"Talking about Race in Cuba: Four Trans-Atlantic African Diaspora Women Share Their Experience","authors":"Nataka Moore, Tiffany McDowell, M. Watson, Caridad Morales Nussa","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0212","url":null,"abstract":"Nataka (First Author): my reflections on my cuban AncestryMy great grandfather was born in Cuba during the time of Cuba's independence from Spain in 1899. He was born to a Black Cuban mother and an African American father who arrived as an American volunteer from South Carolina. In his very early years, my great grandfather was raised by his mother in Cuba. Around the age of 5, he came to live in the US and settled in South Carolina with his paternal grandparents. The circumstances that made him leave Cuba are unknown but through a look at the lives of Black Cuban woman after Cuba's independence, any number of issues could have been likely, including an early death of his mother. My great grandfather was an absentee father in the life of my grandfather, so there was not much information passed down about him. Even so, as a genealogist and psychologist, I became very interested in tracking down what I could learn from my great grandfather's life and the events surrounding his birth during the independence movement in Cuba.During my search, I came across a book in an antique store in Chicago that was published in 1899 called Neely's Photographs: Panoramic views of Cuba, Porto Rico, Manila and The Philippines by Frank Tennyson Neely. The book contains well over 75 images of the Spanish-American war with a substantial focus of the book covering Cuba. At the bottom of the photos, the author made captions that often explained the context of the pictures by telling the reader who was in the picture and/or where the picture was taken. However, at times the caption would be reflective of the author's personal opinions about the people in the pictures. What became significant for me about this book was my reaction to the images and the captions of these with Black Cubans. White Cubans in the book are referred to as Cubans, whereas Black Cubans are referred to as Negroes. To me this reflected that Neely, a person with an etic perspective, saw Black Cubans as not being citizens of Cuba nor as contributors to the fabric of Cuban society. My question is this: if they are neither citizens nor contributors to Cuban society, then for Neely what were they?For one photo, an image of Black Cubans gathering in Havana on a Sunday, in their best clothes dancing likely to the rhythms that have contributed to music and dance across the world, he provided commentary that answered my question. In this photo, he stated, 'Negroes are children of the fun and sun.' I see several problems with this statement: (1) the photo captured adults engaging in a social affair, (2) the adults are being infantilised as they are called children, (3) they are referred to as Negroes and not Cubans, and (4) the comment was patronising and likely reflects the overall lack of respect for the human rights of Black people during this period. While I intellectually knew that Cuba's history with slavery and racism was very similar to that of the US, I was not ready to go through another version of t","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126893688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-07-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0200
Paul Ryer
'Americans', Joan Didion writes, reporting on an incredulous, baffled critique of US society by the Cuban exile enclave in Miami, are 'a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turn[s]' (Didion 1987: 78). Similarly within the Republic of Cuba itself; hardly a day seems to pass in Havana without some story of intrigue and machination, whether over the death of Che, the delayed arrival of the monthly egg ration or as a quite possibly related explanation of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by mobsters and CIA stooges. Indeed, so many putative conspiracies surround Cuba, on either side of the Straits of Florida, that these theories must not be considered simply in terms of their internal logic or stated objectives. Nor are they a simple, unmediated consequence of a certain state socialist political system: the Cuban conspiracy genre demands attention precisely for its un-remarked ubiquity on and off the island. After defining the term and focusing mainly on conspiracy theory within the Republic, I will argue that narratives of conspiracion are morality tales, always presented as passionate, principled opposition to imperial machinations, from the colonial margin. Unlike scholars who focus on conspiracy theory as a late modern Cold War phenomena (Marcus 1999), I also argue that, in the Cuban context at least, these are part of a much longer historically and culturally grounded pattern.Distinguishing conspiraciesWhat is a 'conspiracy theory', and how is it distinct from a rumour, or indeed, from other explanatory frameworks such as witchcraft? First identified as a distinct genre by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Hofstadter 1965), conspiratorial accounts of hidden, nefarious machinations are heard in many everyday contexts in the world today (e.g., Briggs 2004; Boyer 2006; Johnson 2013). Unlike witchcraft beliefs, however, narrative accounts which assert some sort of conspiracy characteristically deploy technical facts and scientific principles to buttress their veracity. In that sense, one might well consider conspiracy theory a highly modernist genre. Note that in trying to make sense of a paranoid style, it is all too easy to look for function, or truth value. Academic studies of rumour encounter this difficulty and furthermore tend to reify their analytical unit - in these cases, the 'rumour' (Lienhardt 1975; Turner 1993; Stewart and Strathern 2004), at times even subsuming conspiracy theory as a subset of rumour. While any term must be treated heuristically, I argue that these two terms only partially overlap: some years ago, Havana went into mourning, falsely believing that Pedrito Calvo, a superstar of Cuban salsa, had died in a fire. And on numerous occasions over the years, rumours regarding Fidel Castro's death - a preferred prank in Miami and Havana both - have garnered attention in
{"title":"The Maine, the Romney and the Threads of Conspiracy in Cuba","authors":"Paul Ryer","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0200","url":null,"abstract":"'Americans', Joan Didion writes, reporting on an incredulous, baffled critique of US society by the Cuban exile enclave in Miami, are 'a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turn[s]' (Didion 1987: 78). Similarly within the Republic of Cuba itself; hardly a day seems to pass in Havana without some story of intrigue and machination, whether over the death of Che, the delayed arrival of the monthly egg ration or as a quite possibly related explanation of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by mobsters and CIA stooges. Indeed, so many putative conspiracies surround Cuba, on either side of the Straits of Florida, that these theories must not be considered simply in terms of their internal logic or stated objectives. Nor are they a simple, unmediated consequence of a certain state socialist political system: the Cuban conspiracy genre demands attention precisely for its un-remarked ubiquity on and off the island. After defining the term and focusing mainly on conspiracy theory within the Republic, I will argue that narratives of conspiracion are morality tales, always presented as passionate, principled opposition to imperial machinations, from the colonial margin. Unlike scholars who focus on conspiracy theory as a late modern Cold War phenomena (Marcus 1999), I also argue that, in the Cuban context at least, these are part of a much longer historically and culturally grounded pattern.Distinguishing conspiraciesWhat is a 'conspiracy theory', and how is it distinct from a rumour, or indeed, from other explanatory frameworks such as witchcraft? First identified as a distinct genre by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Hofstadter 1965), conspiratorial accounts of hidden, nefarious machinations are heard in many everyday contexts in the world today (e.g., Briggs 2004; Boyer 2006; Johnson 2013). Unlike witchcraft beliefs, however, narrative accounts which assert some sort of conspiracy characteristically deploy technical facts and scientific principles to buttress their veracity. In that sense, one might well consider conspiracy theory a highly modernist genre. Note that in trying to make sense of a paranoid style, it is all too easy to look for function, or truth value. Academic studies of rumour encounter this difficulty and furthermore tend to reify their analytical unit - in these cases, the 'rumour' (Lienhardt 1975; Turner 1993; Stewart and Strathern 2004), at times even subsuming conspiracy theory as a subset of rumour. While any term must be treated heuristically, I argue that these two terms only partially overlap: some years ago, Havana went into mourning, falsely believing that Pedrito Calvo, a superstar of Cuban salsa, had died in a fire. And on numerous occasions over the years, rumours regarding Fidel Castro's death - a preferred prank in Miami and Havana both - have garnered attention in","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128111691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s","authors":"J. Wilkey","doi":"10.5860/choice.185311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185311","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116295120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-07-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0142
Carlos Oliva Campos, G. Prevost
introductionOn 17 December 2014, the presidents of Cuba and the US, Raul Castro and Barack Obama, announced simultaneously to the world the decision of an exchange of prisoners releasing the three Cuban intelligence operatives still in jail in American prisons - Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino and Antonio Guerrero - and the subcontractor Alan Gross, imprisoned in the island. Together with Gross, a CIA agent of Cuban origin was also released, and an agreement was reached to set free certain opponents of the Cuban government. The unexpected news that exceeded the expectations of millions of people around the world was the decision to re-establish the bilateral diplomatic relations broken for more than 50 years. We are referring to a historical bilateral conflict centred on the denial of the right of Cuba to be sovereign and independent, based on geopolitical criteria and security reasons of the US, which occurred with the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. This was an event that carried the contradictions to extremes because of the socialist definition of the Cuban process and the inclusion of the former Soviet Union in the conflict between the two countries. It is a history of revolutionary Cuba that includes the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs; the execution of terrorist acts by the CIA and anti-Cuban organisations established in the south of Florida that have caused thousands of victims being dead and wounded; the greatest nuclear war threat ever lived by humanity in October 1962 and an economic, financial and trade blockade that has caused billions of dollars of losses to the Cuban economy.1The potential change in relations between the US and Cuba must be understood in the context of how Cuba's relations with Latin America have evolved over the course of the last 25 years since the demise of the socialist bloc.2 In 2009, a milestone was reached when Cuba and El Salvador, following the election of Mauricio Funes to the Salvadorian presidency, re-established full diplomatic relations. It meant that for the first time since soon after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba had full diplomatic relations with all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It will be argued in this article that the range of Cuba's diplomatic relations in the hemisphere has played an important role in the decision by the Obama administration to be the final country in the region to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba. As will be discussed later, the unfolding of the Summits of the Americas process has apparently been at least partially responsible for the change in US policy. At both the 2009 summit in Trinidad and the 2012 summit in Colombia, Latin American leaders strongly urged the Obama administration to end its decade-long embargo on the island and more importantly, at the 2012 meeting indicated that their participation at the scheduled summit in Panama in 2015 would be contingent upon Cuba being invited. Since the inauguration of the proc
{"title":"Cuba in the Western Hemisphere: What Has Changed?","authors":"Carlos Oliva Campos, G. Prevost","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0142","url":null,"abstract":"introductionOn 17 December 2014, the presidents of Cuba and the US, Raul Castro and Barack Obama, announced simultaneously to the world the decision of an exchange of prisoners releasing the three Cuban intelligence operatives still in jail in American prisons - Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino and Antonio Guerrero - and the subcontractor Alan Gross, imprisoned in the island. Together with Gross, a CIA agent of Cuban origin was also released, and an agreement was reached to set free certain opponents of the Cuban government. The unexpected news that exceeded the expectations of millions of people around the world was the decision to re-establish the bilateral diplomatic relations broken for more than 50 years. We are referring to a historical bilateral conflict centred on the denial of the right of Cuba to be sovereign and independent, based on geopolitical criteria and security reasons of the US, which occurred with the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. This was an event that carried the contradictions to extremes because of the socialist definition of the Cuban process and the inclusion of the former Soviet Union in the conflict between the two countries. It is a history of revolutionary Cuba that includes the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs; the execution of terrorist acts by the CIA and anti-Cuban organisations established in the south of Florida that have caused thousands of victims being dead and wounded; the greatest nuclear war threat ever lived by humanity in October 1962 and an economic, financial and trade blockade that has caused billions of dollars of losses to the Cuban economy.1The potential change in relations between the US and Cuba must be understood in the context of how Cuba's relations with Latin America have evolved over the course of the last 25 years since the demise of the socialist bloc.2 In 2009, a milestone was reached when Cuba and El Salvador, following the election of Mauricio Funes to the Salvadorian presidency, re-established full diplomatic relations. It meant that for the first time since soon after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba had full diplomatic relations with all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It will be argued in this article that the range of Cuba's diplomatic relations in the hemisphere has played an important role in the decision by the Obama administration to be the final country in the region to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba. As will be discussed later, the unfolding of the Summits of the Americas process has apparently been at least partially responsible for the change in US policy. At both the 2009 summit in Trinidad and the 2012 summit in Colombia, Latin American leaders strongly urged the Obama administration to end its decade-long embargo on the island and more importantly, at the 2012 meeting indicated that their participation at the scheduled summit in Panama in 2015 would be contingent upon Cuba being invited. Since the inauguration of the proc","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127555420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-07-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0164
Jorge Renato Ibarra Guitart, Gastón A. Fernández
IntroductionBarrington Moore's classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy advances the thesis that the democratic path to modernisation depends on the strategic role played by the bourgeoisie in a country's development, asserting that 'no bourgeoisie, no democracy' (Moore 1967). According to Moore, the strategic role of the bourgeois class results from its detachment from feudal class relations to transform the nature of property relations, the state and society. In Antonio Gramsci's analysis of the capitalist state in Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture (Gramsci 1971), public intellectuals play a crucial role in legitimising bourgeois democracy by formulating political doctrines and ideologies that analyse the crisis and contradictions of capitalism, by creating awareness of the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole in the political system and by obtaining consensus of the popular classes for bourgeois rule. This article examines the political thought and career of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza, a prominent public intellectual and politician of the Republic (1901-58) whose career exemplifies the pursuit of hegemony based on moral and intellectual arguments for the Constitutions of 1901 and 1940 and resistance to the Platt Amendment.The Cuban bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century was in a precarious position to play a strategic political role. Its nationalist credentials were threatened by its dependent 'comprador' status functioning as intermediaries for foreign capital in Cuba (McGillivray 2009: 63-86). Within the Cuban bourgeoisie, the sectors most dependent on foreign capital and markets, notably the sugar plantation and mill owners and those relying on trade and imports, were seldom an obstacle to US expansion. The Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not gain significance in the domestic market until the Great Depression and the Second World War when US imports decreased and US owners of sugar mills were pressured out of the sugar industry and banking under the regulatory policies of populist governments (Dominguez 1978). However, few industries created in this period were able to survive foreign competition. In 1954, craft production still figured prominently in the Cuban economy, with 45.1 per cent of all factories having fewer than five workers. According to Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, 'Domestic industries were far from being able to cover domestic demand for the production of each of its branches, thus creating a deficit that would be satisfied by imports' (Ibarra 1995: 63). In general, the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not lend a nationalist character to the economy. The legitimation function was complicated further by the neocolonial relations of the country with the US, reflected in the Platt Amendment and US geopolitical demands on Cuba in order for it to be accepted into the emerging American global empire.1 The Cuban bourgeoisie after independence had to address these contradictions to claim the
巴林顿·摩尔(barrington Moore)的经典著作《独裁与民主的社会起源》(Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy)提出，通往现代化的民主道路取决于资产阶级在一个国家发展中所扮演的战略角色，并断言“没有资产阶级，就没有民主”(Moore 1967)。摩尔认为，资产阶级的战略作用是由于它脱离了封建阶级关系，改变了财产关系、国家和社会的性质。在安东尼奥·葛兰西(Antonio Gramsci)在《知识分子与文化组织》(Gramsci 1971)中对资本主义国家的分析中，公共知识分子通过制定政治理论和意识形态来分析资本主义的危机和矛盾，通过在政治体系中建立资产阶级作为一个整体的长期利益意识，以及通过获得大众阶级对资产阶级统治的共识，在使资产阶级民主合法化方面发挥着至关重要的作用。本文考察了科斯梅·德拉·托雷恩特·佩拉扎的政治思想和职业生涯，这位杰出的公共知识分子和共和国政治家(1901-58)的职业生涯是追求霸权的典范，他基于对1901年和1940年宪法的道德和知识论证以及对普拉特修正案的抵制。古巴资产阶级在二十世纪之交处于不稳定的地位，无法发挥战略性的政治作用。作为外国资本在古巴的中介，其依赖的“买办”地位威胁了它的民族主义信誉(McGillivray 2009: 63-86)。在古巴资产阶级内部，最依赖外国资本和市场的部门，特别是甘蔗种植园和磨坊主以及那些依赖贸易和进口的部门，很少成为美国扩张的障碍。直到大萧条和第二次世界大战，当美国进口减少，美国糖厂所有者在民粹主义政府的监管政策下被迫退出制糖业和银行业时，古巴工业资产阶级才在国内市场上获得了重要地位(Dominguez 1978)。然而，在这一时期创建的行业很少能够在外国竞争中生存下来。1954年，手工业生产在古巴经济中仍然占有重要地位，45.1%的工厂工人少于5人。根据Jorge Ibarra Cuesta的说法，“国内工业远远不能满足国内对其每个分支生产的需求，因此造成了可以通过进口来满足的赤字”(Ibarra 1995: 63)。总的来说，古巴工业资产阶级并没有给经济注入民族主义的色彩。古巴与美国的新殖民主义关系，反映在《普拉特修正案》(Platt Amendment)和美国为使古巴被纳入新兴的美国全球帝国而对古巴提出的地缘政治要求中，使其合法化功能进一步复杂化独立后的古巴资产阶级必须解决这些矛盾，以主张其统治的合法性。因此，对于资产阶级民主的霸权来说，由公共知识分子组成的这个阶级的战略部门必须逐渐意识到其长期的阶级利益，并制定一项民族主义计划，以吸引广泛的社会阶级联盟。霸权取决于制定这样一种民族主义的政治和经济发展战略的能力，动员国家权力为古巴的资本家和劳工从岛上的单一糖业中获得更有利的条件，使经济多样化，并根据普拉特修正案抵制外国对该岛内政的干预。历史学家和政治学家指出，托里ente y Peraza的重要性，他是共和国的主要公共知识分子，一方面，他是具有改革思想的民族主义者，批评普拉特修正案及其对古巴政治的影响，他的职业生涯致力于废除该修正案，另一方面，他是1906年至1909年美国占领古巴期间的政治危机中的杰出人物，以及威胁民主合法性的Gerardo Machado和Fulgencio Batista政权。…
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Pub Date : 2015-07-01DOI: 10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0236
K. Iyengar
As Cuba and the US approach normalised relations, the moment manifests with a presence that most US citizens have not experienced for decades. For most North Americans, the current shift is a complete turn from relations begun at the inception of the Cuban Revolution. In truth, this shift mirrors the work that the Venceremos Brigade has been realising for decades. I found the Venceremos Brigade among the weeds of the American Left, modelling a distinct and positive form of US-Cuban relations amidst a political context hostile to Cuba. Born from fraught relations, the Brigade has persisted throughout the period defined by negative relations and demonstrates how a productive politics can emerge from a politics of hostility: when mutual interests are involved. The current relational shift offers a new vantage point from which to reconsider US-Cuban relations - offering a space to explore the Venceremos Brigade.The Venceremos Brigade was a political education project founded in 1969 by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with officials of the Republic of Cuba. The Brigade continues to travel to Cuba today, and to date has sent more than 9,000 activists to the island (Sale 1973). Those who have participated in the Brigade have done so to demonstrate support for the Cuban Revolution/Government, foster socio-economic growth in the country, develop political and social consciousness, and learn about Cuba. 'Brigadistas' have traditionally demonstrated support and helped to foster growth on the island by participating in national sugar harvests or housing projects, all the while learning from the Cuban Revolution. Today, brigadistas continue to travel to Cuba and work on the island while learning of its politics and culture.Having begun ten years after the 1959 culmination of the Cuban Revolution, this long-standing North American project of support for Cuba should be known. The group's participants embody a recurring trend from the course of US history: North Americans negotiate the contradictions of the US's proffered patriotism that simultaneously allows for institutionally marginalising certain subgroups of citizens. The Brigade's participants demonstrate this historical tendency through their collective, demograph diversity - they represent a broad scope of the US along the dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. There is little written on the Venceremos Brigade within the pertinent historiographies - neither in the history of US-Cuban relations nor in the history of the New Left. The story's importance and relevance become increasingly apparent as our present moment asks us to rethink our orientation towards Cuba.The age into which the Brigade was born was one dominated by a fundamentally anti-Cuban narrative. The narrative was historically constructed, having begun long before 1959, and the story has only marginally changed since the culmination of Cuba's communist revolution. Looking to Cuban-America
{"title":"The Venceremos Brigade: North Americans in Cuba since 1969","authors":"K. Iyengar","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0236","url":null,"abstract":"As Cuba and the US approach normalised relations, the moment manifests with a presence that most US citizens have not experienced for decades. For most North Americans, the current shift is a complete turn from relations begun at the inception of the Cuban Revolution. In truth, this shift mirrors the work that the Venceremos Brigade has been realising for decades. I found the Venceremos Brigade among the weeds of the American Left, modelling a distinct and positive form of US-Cuban relations amidst a political context hostile to Cuba. Born from fraught relations, the Brigade has persisted throughout the period defined by negative relations and demonstrates how a productive politics can emerge from a politics of hostility: when mutual interests are involved. The current relational shift offers a new vantage point from which to reconsider US-Cuban relations - offering a space to explore the Venceremos Brigade.The Venceremos Brigade was a political education project founded in 1969 by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with officials of the Republic of Cuba. The Brigade continues to travel to Cuba today, and to date has sent more than 9,000 activists to the island (Sale 1973). Those who have participated in the Brigade have done so to demonstrate support for the Cuban Revolution/Government, foster socio-economic growth in the country, develop political and social consciousness, and learn about Cuba. 'Brigadistas' have traditionally demonstrated support and helped to foster growth on the island by participating in national sugar harvests or housing projects, all the while learning from the Cuban Revolution. Today, brigadistas continue to travel to Cuba and work on the island while learning of its politics and culture.Having begun ten years after the 1959 culmination of the Cuban Revolution, this long-standing North American project of support for Cuba should be known. The group's participants embody a recurring trend from the course of US history: North Americans negotiate the contradictions of the US's proffered patriotism that simultaneously allows for institutionally marginalising certain subgroups of citizens. The Brigade's participants demonstrate this historical tendency through their collective, demograph diversity - they represent a broad scope of the US along the dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. There is little written on the Venceremos Brigade within the pertinent historiographies - neither in the history of US-Cuban relations nor in the history of the New Left. The story's importance and relevance become increasingly apparent as our present moment asks us to rethink our orientation towards Cuba.The age into which the Brigade was born was one dominated by a fundamentally anti-Cuban narrative. The narrative was historically constructed, having begun long before 1959, and the story has only marginally changed since the culmination of Cuba's communist revolution. Looking to Cuban-America","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115228856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Diana Espirito santo, Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015) cloth 338pp. IsBN: 9780813060781Kristine Juncker, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santeria (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014) cloth 216pp. IsBN: 9780813049700If you thought that religious practices in Cuba were more or less the same as in the rest of Central and South America, these two books published by University Press of Florida quickly dispel these misapprehensions.Although Cuba's most widespread religion is Christianity, primarily Roman Catholicism, in some cases it has been greatly reshaped by syncretism. As is widely known, the most popular of these syncretic religions is Santeria, which combines the Yoruba religion of the African slaves with Catholicism and some Native American elements. It includes the worship of the Orisha - head guardians - and religious beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people who inhabited what is now Southern Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea Coast. These are combined with elements of Roman Catholicism. Arriving as slaves in the Caribbean, Santerians preserved the elements of their religion by equating each Orisha of their traditional religions with a corresponding Christian Saint. However, as well as the syncretic religions, what is less widely known is a widespread adherence to a form of communicating with the spirit world known as espiritismo.Diana Espirito Santo's book Developing the Dead, first, takes this on with a confidence which is based on extensive fieldwork among espiritistas and their patrons in Havana, and she makes the compelling espiritistas that Spiritist practices are basically a project of developing the self. Diana's name in itself is interesting, meaning Holy Spirit, and I presume that this is not a nom de plume. But, for me, the project of developing the self is a concept that is not an easy one to grasp. However, Diana, assistant professor of social anthropology at the Institute of Sociology, Pontifical, Universidad Catolica de Chile, has taken on the subject with confidence and puts the whole topic with great ease into the political framework of Cuba, right from the early days of the revolution, through the desperate days of Cuba's break with the Soviet Union after its break-up, right to the present day. I found explaining this political background to be extremely useful, especially how, initially, all forms of religion were frowned upon by the socialist government, principally because the Catholic Church in Cuba colluded with the US in smuggling out children from the island so that they would not be con- taminated by a form of politics that did not sit well with the larger neighbour.This is a fascinating topic, with probably as many different forms of this practice as there are practitioners. The author argues cogently that when mediums cultivate relationships between the living and th
戴安娜·埃斯皮里图·桑托，《发展死者:古巴灵魂中的媒介和自我》(佛罗里达州盖恩斯维尔:佛罗里达大学出版社，2015年)，338页。克里斯汀·容克，非裔古巴宗教艺术:Espiritismo和Santeria文化传承的流行表达(Gainesville, FL:佛罗里达大学出版社，2014)布216页。如果你认为古巴的宗教习俗与中美洲和南美洲的其他地方或多或少是一样的，佛罗里达大学出版社出版的这两本书很快消除了这些误解。虽然古巴最广泛的宗教是基督教，主要是罗马天主教，但在某些情况下，它已经被融合大大重塑。众所周知，这些融合宗教中最流行的是桑特里亚，它将非洲奴隶的约鲁巴宗教与天主教和一些美洲原住民元素结合在一起。它包括对奥里沙(Orisha)的崇拜，以及居住在现在的尼日利亚南部、塞内加尔和几内亚海岸的约鲁巴人(Yoruba)和班图人(Bantu)的宗教信仰。这些都与罗马天主教的元素相结合。作为奴隶来到加勒比海地区，桑特教徒通过将他们传统宗教中的每个奥瑞莎等同于一个相应的基督教圣人来保留他们的宗教元素。然而，除了融合宗教之外，鲜为人知的是，他们普遍坚持一种与精神世界交流的形式，即所谓的精神世界。戴安娜·埃斯皮里图·桑托的书《发展死者》首先以一种自信的态度阐述了这一点，这种自信是建立在对哈瓦那的灵媒和他们的赞助人进行广泛的实地调查的基础上的，她让令人信服的灵媒们相信，灵媒的实践基本上是一个发展自我的项目。戴安娜的名字本身就很有趣，意思是圣灵，我想这不是笔名。但是，对我来说，发展自我是一个不容易理解的概念。然而，智利天主教大学(universsidad Catolica de Chile)社会学研究所的社会人类学助理教授戴安娜(Diana)自信地接受了这一主题，并将整个主题轻松地置于古巴的政治框架中，从革命初期开始，到古巴解体后与苏联决裂的绝望日子，一直到今天。我发现解释这种政治背景非常有用，尤其是最初，所有形式的宗教都受到社会主义政府的反对，主要是因为古巴的天主教会与美国勾结，从岛上走私儿童，这样他们就不会受到政治形式的污染，而这种政治形式与更大的邻国不相容。这是一个令人着迷的话题，可能有多少实践者，就有多少种不同的实践形式。作者颇有说服力地指出，当灵媒培养生者和死者之间的关系时，他们会发展、感知、做梦，并与多个灵魂(muertos)建立联系，通过这样做，扩展了自我的边界。当然，这是一个西方读者(可能还有大部分东方读者)难以接受的概念，我向佛罗里达大学出版社(University Press Of Florida)出版了这两本书致敬。我自己从来没有经历过这样的事情，对我来说，整个研究都有一种超现实主义的气息，当作者带我们走过她苦心描述的各个步骤时，我们会感到震惊和兴奋，一个西方学者被允许参与并学习这些实践。例如，作者平静地叙述道，我了解到我的精神戒戒线包括一个虔诚的年轻修女的精神，她戴着一条长链，上面有十字架，脖子上挂着一串木制的念珠，她属于加尔默罗会的某个修会，还有一个年长的男人，一个女院长，一个伊比利亚吉普赛女人，她非常独立和诱人;一位身着传统民俗服装出现在灵媒面前的匈牙利妇女;一位能干的犹太会计或办报员，通常穿着黑色西装，提着公文包，戴着一顶特殊的装饰帽，让人联想到中东;衣衫褴褛的修道士、朝圣者或旅行传教士之类的人。．．．
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