Cuba and the Politics of Passion


Book Description

Cuban politics has long been remarkable for its passionate intensity, and yet few scholars have explored the effect of emotions on political attitudes and action in Cuba or elsewhere. This book thus offers an important new approach by bringing feelings back into the study of politics and showing how the politics of passion and affection have interacted to shape Cuban history throughout the twentieth century. Damián Fernández characterizes the politics of passion as the pursuit of a moral absolute for the nation as a whole. While such a pursuit rallied the Cuban people around charismatic leaders such as Fidel Castro, Fernández finds that it also set the stage for disaffection and disconnection when the grand goal never fully materialized. At the same time, he reveals how the politics of affection-taking care of family and friends outside the formal structures of government-has paradoxically both undermined state regimes and helped them remain in power by creating an informal survival network that provides what the state cannot or will not.




Sexual Revolutions in Cuba


Book Description

Chronicling the history of sexuality in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, this book frames the relationship between passion and politics in the revolution's wider history and argues that the Cuban revolutionary regime intervened in the sexual lives of Cubans in a variety of ways and transformed key areas of Cuban life, including the family, reproduction, sexual values, and sexual relationships. Drawing from a major oral history project--the “Memories of the Revolution” oral history project conducted by a team of British and Cuban researchers (Hamilton was one of the British researchers on the team) between 2003 and 2007--Hamilton explores the experiences and perceptions of sexuality among Cubans across generations and social groups. She contextualizes the oral histories within an array of archival and secondary sources, relating them to issues of race, class, and gender, as well as to social, economic, and political change. Organized thematically, the volume opens with a historical overview that points out that after 1959 revolutionary values continued to coexist with pre-revolutionary ideologies in a potent and often contradictory mix. Succeeding chapters examine discourse on love, romance, and passion on both personal and national levels; male and female homosexuality; sexual repression; and changing gender roles and service to the revolution. Hamilton explores conflicting notions of Cuba as a site of desire on the one hand, and as a place of intense sexual repression, especially with regard to homosexuality, on the other. She identifies many ways in which revolutionary policy affected sexual behavior, including changes to policy and laws, mass education programs, leaders' pronouncements on the relationship between good revolutionaries and private life, and the provision of incentives to encourage certain forms of sexual union and repressive measures to discourage and punish others. Hamilton argues that sexual politics were central to the construction of a new revolutionary society.




Fifty Years of Revolution


Book Description

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.




The Politics of Passion


Book Description

The Politics of Passion is the first comprehensive collection of the writing and art of Dr Norman Bethune. A Canadian medical pioneer and a communist, Bethune gained fame during the 1930s while serving in the Spanish Civil War and participating in China's struggle against Japanese invasion. This book sheds light on the man, the artist, and the revolutionary. It uncovers new historical material relating to several controversies surrounding Bethune. A remarkable document obtained from the Communist International Archives in Moscow, for instance, discusses why Bethune was sent home in disgrace from the Spanish Civil War. It refers to a mysterious Swedish woman, Kajsa von Rothman, who was Bethune's lover and who was believed by left-wing Spanish authorities to be politically suspect. This collection of Bethune's writings and art reveals that politics preoccupied him only during the last four years of his life. Earlier, his passionate nature found expression in medical and surgical innovation, as well as in painting, sketching, photography, writing - from poetry and short stories to letters, radio broadcasts, and plays - and public speaking. The Politics of Passion reveals the many sides of Bethune's identity, exploring not only the life of a revolutionary doctor, but of an intense and compassionate artist.




The Politics of Passion


Book Description

The Politics of Passion centers on an old institution among the Afro-Surinamese working class in which women have multiple sexual relationships with both men and women. These women reject marriage because of the bonds of dependency it fosters, preferring to create their own families of kin, lovers, and children. Gloria Wekker analyzes this phenomenon, known as mati work, as she vividly describes the lives of Afro-Surinamese women. She gives an account of women's sexuality that is not limited to either heterosexuality or same-sex sexuality. Her work offers new perspectives on black women's sexuality, the lives of Caribbean women, transnational gay and lesbian movements, and an Afro-Surinamese tradition that challenges conventional Western notions of marriage, gender, and sexuality. By foregrounding the voices of Afro-Surinamese women, Wekker illuminates these women's daily lives in light of the changes occurring in Surinamese society. She also considers the historical, religious, psychological, economic, linguistic, cultural, and political elements that have shaped their lives. The book concludes with stories of women who have migrated to the Netherlands, where they have created new, vibrant mati communities.




Youth and the Cuban Revolution


Book Description

Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba is a new history of the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, exploring how youth came to play such an important role in the 1960s on this Caribbean island. Certainly, youth culture and politics worldwide were in the ascendant in that decade, but in this pioneering and thought-provoking work Anne Luke explains how the unique circumstances of the newly developing socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth which becomes one of the factors that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day. By examining how youth was constructed and constituted within revolutionary discourse, policy, and the lived experience of young Cubans in the 1960s, Luke examines the conflicted (but ultimately successful) development of a revolutionary youth culture. She explores the fault lines along which the notion of youth was created—between the internal and the external, between discourse and the everyday, between politics and culture. Luke looks at how in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution a young leadership—Fidel, Raúl and Che—were complemented by a group of new protagonists from Cuba’s young generation. These could be literacy teachers, party members, militia members, teachers, singers, poets… all aiming to define and shape the Cuban Revolution. Together young Cubans took part in defining what it meant to be young, socialist and Cuban in this effervescent decade. The picture that emerges is one in which neither youth politics nor youth culture can alone help to explain the first decade of the Revolution; rather through the sometimes conflicted intersection of both there emerged a generation constantly to be renewed—a youth in Revolution.




Cuba


Book Description

With unpredented access to Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, Cuba: A Lifetime of Passion looks at the present-day reality of the Cuban Revolution and its uncertain post-Castro future, and the conflicts that have engulfed Cuba fro the past six decades. The Cuban Revolution took place before many Cubans today were even born. But what is the legacy of this historical movement? What will happen to the government and to the island nation's citizens after the Castro brothers are no longer in power? Through a series of revealing sequences shot in Cuba and the United States, as well as interviews with individuals who fall on all sides of htis issue: pro-Castro Communists and oppositionists in Cuba, US Department State personnel, academics, and Cubanss "stranded in exile" in Miami, this thought-provoking documentary considers Cuba's past and future, and the legacy of a revolutionary regime that has been in power for 57 years. 54:54 minutes




Cuban Revelations


Book Description

In Cuban Revelations, Marc Frank offers a first-hand account of daily life in Cuba at the turn of the twenty-first century, the start of a new and dramatic epoch for islanders and the Cuban diaspora. A U.S.-born journalist who has called Havana home for almost a quarter century, Frank observed in person the best days of the revolution, the fall of the Soviet Bloc, the great depression of the 1990s, the stepping aside of Fidel Castro, and the reforms now being devised by his brother. Examining the effects of U.S. policy toward Cuba, Frank analyzes why Cuba has entered an extraordinary, irreversible period of change and considers what the island's future holds. The enormous social engineering project taking place today under Raúl's leadership is fraught with many dangers, and Cuban Revelations follows the new leader's efforts to overcome bureaucratic resistance and the fears of a populace that stand in his way. In addition, Frank offers a colorful chronicle of his travels across the island's many and varied provinces, sharing candid interviews with people from all walks of life. He takes the reader outside the capital to reveal how ordinary Cubans live and what they are thinking and feeling as fifty-year-old social and economic taboos are broken. He shares his honest and unbiased observations on extraordinary positive developments in social matters, like healthcare and education, as well as on the inefficiencies in the Cuban economy.




When We Left Cuba


Book Description

Instant New York Times bestseller! In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life—and heart—to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of The Last Train to Key West and Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Beautiful. Daring. Deadly. The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez—her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost. As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own. When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future—but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything—not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart...




Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America


Book Description

The Cuban revolution served as a rallying cry to people across Latin America and the Caribbean. The revolutionary regime has provided vital support to the rest of the region, offering everything from medical and development assistance to training and advice on guerrilla warfare. Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America is the first oral history of Cuba’s liberation struggle. Drawing on a vast array of original testimonies, Dirk Kruijt looks at the role of both veterans and the post-Revolution fidelista generation in shaping Cuba and the Americas. Featuring the testimonies of over sixty Cuban officials and former combatants, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America offers unique insight into a nation which, in spite of its small size and notional pariah status, remains one of the most influential countries in the Americas.