History / Caribbean & West Indies / Cuba

Explains the Nuts-and-Bolts of Collective Indoctrination and Political Integration Programs and the Resulting Cultural Changes

The Preminent Journal for Scholarly Work on Contemporary Cuba

In this special issue, Cuban Studies 48 explores Afro-Cuban issues.

A Highly Nuanced Look at the Public Works Campaign of Gerardo Machado

More than one million Cubans, representing thirty percent of the country’s labor force, currently comprise the non-state sector. This development represents a crucial structural reform implemented by Raul Castro. Yet, little has been published about the demographic makeup of this group. Based on eighty in-depth interviews recently conducted in Cuba, this book offers fascinating insights into today’s Cuban economy from the non-state sector, while also reflecting on its potential for development and the obstacles it faces.

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.

Cuban Studies 45 features two special dossiers: the first discusses the history and workings of the the Cuban constitution and the need to revisit it along with civil and political rights; the second offers new perspectives on the history of health, medicine, and disease in Cuba, and views race as a factor in both infant mortality and tuberculosis from the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Additional essays discuss culture through poetry, higher education reform, the narratives of Lordes Casal, and filmmaker Jesœs Diaz as an ‘unintentional deviationst.’ History is discussed vis-a-vis the radio politics of young Eddy Chibas, the slave abolitionist rhetoric of the Countess of Merlin, and the creole appropriation of Afro-Cuban dance and music to create sabor during the late nineteenth century.

This is an invaluable comprehensive guide to the archival holdings and manuscript collections located in depositories throughout Cuba.

Rebecca J. Scott explores the dynamics of Cuban emancipation, arguing that slavery was not simply abolished by the metropolitan power of Spain or abandoned because of economic contradictions. Instead, she explains, slave emancipation was a prolonged, gradual and conflictive process unfolding through a series of social, legal, and economic transformations.

Conquering Nature, the only book-length analysis of the environmental situation in Cuba after four decades of socialist rule, is based on extensive examination of secondary sources and informed by the study of development and environmental trends in former socialist countries as well as in the developing world.

Winner of the 2002 Warren Dean Memorial Award from Environmentl History of Latin America.

In 1872, there were more than 300,000 slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though the Spanish government had passed a law for gradual abolition in 1870, slaveowners, particularly in Cuba, clung tenaciously to their slaves as unfree labor was at the core of the colonial economies. Nonetheless, people throughout the Spanish empire fought to abolish slavery, including the Antillean and Spanish liberals and republicans who founded the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1865. This book is an extensive study of the origins of the Abolitionist Society and its role in the destruction of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery and the reshaping of colonial politics.

In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.

Perez shows how U.S. armed intervention in Cuba in 1898 and subsequent military occupation revitalized elements of the colonial system that would serve U.S. imperialist interests during Cuba’s independence.

A compelling portrayal of U.S.-Cuban relations during the Batista and Castro regimes, and the major events leading to the cessation of diplomatic ties between the nations, as told by former Ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal.Bonsal also offers insights into future relations between the two countries.