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Author: Judith Bettelheim
Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work describes how, in Brazil, Catholic priests and the colonial government as early as 1573 allowed and encouraged the African slaves to celebrate Epiphany and the Festival of the Three Kings.
Author: Thomas D. Boswell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780865981164
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Russell Maddicks
Publisher: Bravo Limited
Published: 2016-07-01
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 1857338464
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCuba is a land of contradictions that is easy to enjoy but difficult for first-time visitors to decipher. The largest island in the Caribbean, it is a tropical paradise that Christopher Columbus called "the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen." It is famous for the romantic charm of its crumbling colonial cities, the beauty of its white sand beaches, and its irresistible Afro-Cuban dance beats. But it is also a land of shortages and tight government control, which has been in a sixty-year political standoff with its superpower neighbor, the USA. The homegrown version of single-party socialism created by Fidel Castro has kept Cuba in a Cold War time warp that only now is beginning to change. As travel restrictions are relaxed US tourists can once again visit the island. Greater flexibility toward private enterprise is opening it up to boutique hotels and high-quality home-based restaurants. There is a boom in special-interest tourism for cyclists, hikers, birdwatchers, and scuba divers, while foreign entrepreneurs are eagerly exploring investment opportunities. Culture Smart! Cuba will take you beyond the usual descriptions of Havana nightlife, vintage cars, and hand-rolled cigars and give you an insider's view of an island that is teetering on the brink of historic change. It offers insights into Cuba's fascinating history, national icons, unique food, vibrant cultural scene, and world-renowned music. Practical tips help business travelers gain an edge on the competition. But most of all, this book aims to show you how best to break the ice and get a better understanding of the infinitely resourceful Cuban people, who despite severe hardships and shortages over many years remain optimistic and fiercely proud of their heritage and culture.
Author: Claudia Lightfoot
Publisher: Signal Books
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9781902669328
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn exploration of Havana's history and its paradoxes: a city where architectural treasures survive among the crumbling tenements; where a vibrant street life takes place amidst shortages; and where revolutionary politics, machismo and a thriving black market co-exist.
Author: Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780813925424
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArising in the heyday of the music recently made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity. Through poetry, this movement was the first serious attempt on the part of mostly white Cuban intellectuals to produce a national literature that incorporated elements from the Afro-Cuban traditions of lower-class urban blacks. One of its main objectives was to project an image of Cuban identity as a harmonious process of fusion between black and white people and cultures. The notion of a unified nation without racial conflicts and the idea of a mulatto Cuban culture and identity continue to play a prominent role in the Cuban imagination. The first book-length treatment of the poetry of this movement, Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification. At the same time it reveals a process of literary transculturation by which the dominant literature of European origins was radically transformed through the incorporation of formal principles from Afro-Cuban dance and music forms. To make his case, Miguel Arnedo-G mez establishes the nature of the movement s connections to Cuban blacks during this time, analyzes the poetry's links with the represented cultures on the basis of anthropological and ethnographic research, and explores the thought of leading figures of the movement, tying their discourse to specific sociocultural factors in Cuba at the time. Relating the poetry to music and dance, he further illuminates the interplay of power and culture in a social context. Essential for understanding Cuban nationalism and race relations today, Writing Rumba will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience not only in regional, cultural, and anthropological fields but also in the fields of music, dance, and literature.
Author: Stephan Palmié
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2002-03-19
Total Pages: 413
ISBN-13: 0822383640
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as “modern” as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world’s first truly “modern” locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity’s achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.
Author: Alejo Carpentier
Publisher:
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 351
ISBN-13: 9780374521981
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA biographical novel of Victor Hugues' change from entrepreneur to revolutionary presents a detailed picture of Caribbean life during the French Revolution
Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2012-09-01
Total Pages: 602
ISBN-13: 1469601419
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.
Author: Jorge Duany
Publisher: University of Florida Press
Published: 2021-03-09
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9781683402091
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPicturing Cuba explores the evolution of Cuban visual art and its links to cubanía, or Cuban cultural identity. Featuring artwork from the Spanish colonial, republican, and postrevolutionary periods of Cuban history, as well as the contemporary diaspora, these richly illustrated essays trace the creation of Cuban art through shifting political, social, and cultural circumstances. Contributors examine colonial-era lithographs of Cuba?s landscape, architecture, people, and customs that portrayed the island as an exotic, tropical location. They show how the avant-garde painters of the vanguardia, or Havana School, wrestled with the significance of the island?s African and indigenous roots, and they also highlight subversive photography that depicts the harsh realities of life after the Cuban Revolution. They explore art created by the first generation of postrevolutionary exiles, which reflects a new identity?lo cubanoamericano, Cuban-Americanness?and expresses the sense of displacement experienced by Cubans who resettled in another country. A concluding chapter evaluates contemporary attitudes toward collecting and exhibiting post-revolutionary Cuban art in the United States. Encompassing works by Cubans on the island, in exile, and born in America, this volume delves into defining moments in Cuban art across three centuries, offering a kaleidoscopic view of the island?s people, culture, and history. Contributors: Anelys Alvarez | Lynnette M. F. Bosch | María A. Cabrera Arús | Iliana Cepero | Ramón Cernuda | Emilio Cueto | Carol Damian | Victor Deupi | Jorge Duany | Alison Fraunhar | Andrea O?Reilly Herrera | Jean-François Lejeune | Abigail McEwen | Ricardo Pau-Llosa | E. Carmen Ramos
Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-01-11
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 1469631318
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLouis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration. Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.
