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America's secret war in the Caribbean during the Cold War is revealed as never before in this riveting story of the machinations and blunders of superpowers, and the daring of the mavericks who took them on. During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis, while the United States and the USSR acted out the world's rising tensions in its island nations. Meanwhile the leaders of these nations - the charismatic Fidel Castro, and his mysterious brother Raúl; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement and torture - had ambitions of the...
With essays on U.S. history ranging from the American Revolution to the dawn of the twenty-first century, Contested Democracy illuminates struggles waged over freedom and citizenship throughout the American past. Guided by a commitment to democratic citizenship and responsible scholarship, the contributors to this volume insist that rigorous engagement with history is essential to a vital democracy, particularly amid the current erosion of human rights and civil liberties within the United States and abroad. Emphasizing the contradictory ways in which freedom has developed within the United States and in the exercise of American power abroad, these essays probe challenges to American democra...
In the years since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, eleven men have served as president of the United States, arguably the most powerful nation on earth. Yet none of them has been able to effect any significant change in the stalemate between the United States and Cuba, its closest neighbor not to share a land border. Fifty Years of Revolution features contributions from an international Who's Who gallery of leading scholars. The volume adopts a uniquely nonpartisan attitude, a departure from this topic's generally divisive nature. Emerging from a series of meetings, conference panels, and lectures, the book coheres more strongly than the typical essay collection. Organized to analyze--not describe--Cuba’s foreign relations, the work examines sanctions, the embargo, regime change, Guantánamo, the exile community, and more. Drawing from personal experiences as well as recently declassified documents, these essays update, summarize, and explain one of the prickliest political issues in the Western Hemisphere today.
This book analyses the evolving engagement of the United States and Cuba, along with the impact of this relationship on Cuba-CARICOM relations and the Caribbean. Through a Caribbean perspective, the chapters discuss the implications of the U.S.-Cuba relationship economically, institutionally and developmentally. Based on the findings of their research, the authors provide policy recommendations to CARICOM on potential areas for enhancing relations between CARICOM and Cuba, drawing on fieldwork and interviews with policymakers, academics, non-governmental organizations, and regional experts.
Entangled Terrains: Empire, Identity, and Memories of Guantánamo explores the challenges and conflicts of life in the transnational spaces between Cuba and the United States by examining the lived experiences of Alberto Jones, a first-generation black Cuban who worked at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Asa McKercher and Catherine Krull take readers on a journey through Jones’s life as he crossed the entangled political, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries, both in Cuba and living as a black Cuban in central Florida. McKercher and Krull argue that Jones’s story encapsulates the reality of recent Caribbean and Cuban experiences as they deconstruct the events of his life to reveal the broader cultural and social implications of identity, boundaries, and belonging throughout Caribbean and Cuban history.
This intimate, revisionist portrait of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world, is “sure to become the standard on Castro’s early life” (Publishers Weekly). Until now, biographers have treated Castro’s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don’t like or don’t understand. Young Castro challenges us to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hothead to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. In this “gripping and edifying narrative…Hansen brings imposing research and no...
This book explores how Cuba’s famously successful and inclusive education system has formed young Cubans’ political, social, and moral identities in a country transfigured by new inequalities and moral compromises made in the name of survival. The author examines this educational experience from the perspective of those who grew up in the years of economic crisis following the fall of the Soviet Union, charting their ideals, their frustrations and their struggle to reconcile revolutionary rhetoric with twenty-first century reality.
La propuesta literaria siguiente constituye una contribución a nuestra savia histórica. Gracias a su contenido comprenderemos mejor el pasado reciente de Cuba. Estamos ante la síntesis de un período convulso (1899-1959) cuya impronta abonó copiosamente el tejido nacional. Usted, estimado lector, podrá disfrutar de un texto complementado con documentos e ilustraciones, todas estas fuentes resultan idóneas para construir un escenario ya vivido.
Spanning the history of the island from pre-Columbian times to the present, this highly acclaimed survey examines Cuba's political and economic development within the context of its international relations and continuing struggle for self-determination. The dualism that emerged in Cuban ideology--between liberal constructs of patria and radical formulations of nationality--is fully investigated as a source of both national tension and competing notions of liberty, equality, and justice. Author Louis A. Pérez, Jr., integrates local and provincial developments with issues of class, race, and gender to give students a full and fascinating account of Cuba's history, focusing on its struggle for nationality.
This book brings together a broad spectrum of authors, both from inside and from outside Cuba, who describe the development of Cuba's scientific system from the colonial period to the present. It is a unique documentation of the self-organizing power of a local scientific community engaged in scientific research on an international level. The first part includes several contributions that reconstruct the different stages of the history of physics in Cuba, from its beginnings in the late colonial era to the present. The second part comprises testimonies of Cuban physicists, who offer lively insights from the perspective of the actors themselves. The third part presents a series of testimonies...