A widow ventures to the tropical paradise of Cuba for a vacation with her niece. Reunited with a former friend of her husband's, her heart gets involved. Will she get a second chance at love? Diane and her niece, Janie, have been traveling together, saving political figures, solving crimes and capturing spies for the last couple of years. Now they are going on a tropical vacation in Cuba. Diane will be confronting her past and Janie is coming along for the ride.
In "Where Trade Winds Meet," Muriel Victorine Russell is a determined young woman working in her family's cigar factory, where she balances her responsibilities with her aspirations for independence and adventure. She is proud of contributing to her Conch family's prosperity while managing the daily operations of the factory. She longs for a life of travel and adventure. However, the vibrant life of 1912 Key West, where the bustling streets and the scent of the sea evoke a sense of possibility, has a firm hold on her with its long history family traditions. William, a young man from a prominent British Bahamian family, shares a deep connection with Muriel. They have a chance meeting on a trolley and instantly connect. Both have a strong connection to their own family heritage. Muriel is also passionate about having their own identities and dreams. As the story unfolds, the tension between their responsibilities and their desires becomes palpable, culminating in William getting captured by pirates and Muriel's childhood betrothed, feeling betrayed, who will do anything to stop them getting together. Ultimately, we hope that their love will help them navigate the complexities of their lives and their hearts' compass will guide them through the tumultuous waters of their era.
Join Martha Maria Darby as she travels around the country in search of the four men who may have all the answers. She’s attempting to find out what actually happened to her papa David Winchester Darby, in the Fall of 1893. Was he mauled to death by a Grizzly bear in the mountains of western Massachusetts as they’ve been told, or, as she was told by a strange, smelly little man from Saddle Ball Mountain four years later, was he shot in the back of his head, near his hunting cabin up in the mountains. Martha uses the five W’s – Who; What; Where; When; and Why, in her pursuit of the truth. Martha’s Dilemma is written in the Epistolary style, using diary entries and letters to and from home. As you read of her adventures, you’ll feel as though you’ve been by her side for the entire journey . . . and you’ll be stunned by what she discovers.
LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.
A stunning portrait of the complicated woman who becomes Ernest Hemingway's fourth wife, tracing her adventures before she meets Ernest, exploring the tumultuous years of their marriage, and evoking her merry widowhood as she shapes Hemingway's literary legacy. Mary Welsh, a celebrated wartime journalist during the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, meets Ernest Hemingway in May 1944. He becomes so infatuated with Mary that he asks her to marry him the third time they meet—although they are married to other people. Eventually, she succumbs to Ernest's campaign, and in the last days of the war joined him at his estate in Cuba. Through Mary's eyes, we see Ernest Hemingway in a fresh light. Their turbulent marriage survives his cruelty and abuse, perhaps because of their sexual compatibility and her essential contribution to his writing. She reads and types his work each day—and makes plot suggestions. She becomes crucial to his work and he depends upon her critical reading of his work to know if he has it right. We watch the Hemingways as they travel to the ski country of the Dolomites, commute to Harry's Bar in Venice; attend bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid; go on safari in Kenya in the thick of the Mau Mau Rebellion; and fish the blue waters of the gulf stream off Cuba in Ernest's beloved boat Pilar. We see Ernest fall in love with a teenaged Italian countess and wonder at Mary's tolerance of the affair. We witness Ernest's sad decline and Mary's efforts to avoid the stigma of suicide by claiming his death was an accident. In the years following Ernest's death, Mary devotes herself to his literary legacy, negotiating with Castro to reclaim Ernest's manuscripts from Cuba, publishing one-third of his work posthumously. She supervises Carlos Baker's biography of Ernest, sues A. E. Hotchner to try and prevent him from telling the story of Ernest's mental decline, and spends years writing her memoir in her penthouse overlooking the New York skyline. Her story is one of an opinionated woman who smokes Camels, drinks gin, swears like a man, sings like Edith Piaf, loves passionately, and experiments with gender fluidity in her extraordinary life with Ernest. This true story reads like a novel—and the reader will be hard pressed not to fall for Mary.
What constitutes the common good in American public education? This volume explores the ongoing debate between those who expect schools to cultivate citizens through personal, moral, and social development, as well as to bind diverse groups into one nation, and a new generation of school reformers intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems by equipping students with marketable skills.
Discusses one of the major currents leading to the fall of communism. Falk examines the intellectual dissident movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the late 1960s through to 1989. In spite of its historic significance, no other comprehensive survey has appeared on the subject. In addition to the huge list of written sources from samizdat works to recent essays, Falks sources include interviews with many personalities of those events as well as videos and films (including Oscar winners).
This volume traces the developments in Cuba following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent definitive demise of state socialism. Topics covered include: the reasons for the persistence of 'the Cuban model,' and an examination of the interaction between elite and non-elite actors, as well as between domestic and international forces.
In Agrarian History of the Cuban Revolution, the Brazilian historian Joana Salém Vasconcelos presents in clear language the complicated challenge of overcoming the condition of Latin America’s underdevelopment through a revolutionary process. Based on diverse historical sources, she demonstrates why the sugar plantation economic structure in Cuba was not entirely changed by the 1959 Revolution. The author narrates in detail the three dimensions of Cuban agrarian transformation during the decisive 1960s — the land tenure system, the crop regime, and the labour regime —, and its social and political actors. She explains the paths and detours of Cuban agrarian policies, contextualized in a labour-intensive economy that needs desperately to increase productivity and, at the same time, promised widely to emancipate workers from labour exploitation. Cuban agrarian and economic contradictions are well-synthetized with the concept of Peripheral Socialism.
For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.
