"Quirky, unpredictable, often hilarious, Infante's book tells us much about the effect of the Cuban revolution on Cuban literature." - Publishers Weekly With bitter irony, the author tells a story sadly repeated during this century. A dictatorship that silences the intellectuals, a regime that lies and kills, and a propaganda war that has yet to end. One of the best compilations of documents on recent Cuban history.
This book not only relates the defining moments of the Cuban Revolution – such as the Moncada Barracks attack, the assault on Batista’s Presidential Palace, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis – but also lesser-known events like the “War Against the Bandits”; the overseas adventures of Che Guevara in the Congo and Bolivia; Fidel Castro’s possible prior knowledge of and involvement in JFK’s assassination; Cuba’s “silent war against the environment”; and ongoing foreign intelligence operations. The book contains information most readers and academicians may not be familiar with and utilizes major tomes as sources that have only been published in Spanish and so are not widely available to international audiences outside of Spain and Latin America. It will enlighten readers about the realities of the Cuban Revolution – its purported achievements as well as its definite shortcomings; its impact on world events in the last seven decades; and correct the record where needed – enhancing the fount of knowledge for further research by social scientists, historians, and political scientists.
Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.
With Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, he maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which nationalism and other institutions of power struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Achy Obejas, Sonia Rivera-Valdés, and Reinaldo Arenas, Gay Cuban Nation shows ultimately that the specter of homosexuality is always lurking in the shadows of nationalist discourse.
The book is a comparative history of twentieth-century Cuban campesinos in two regions in Cuba marked by extreme differences in race, gender, and land tenure: Oriente and Escambray. It explores the ways these differences articulated with state formation from the pre-revolutionary period of 1934-1959 and then 1959-1974 and seeks to explain why campesinos in Escambray, having been active in the insurrection against Batista, later turned to stage a massive counter-revolution against the government headed by Fidel Castro. Although campesinos in both regions had been equally ignored by pre-1959 governments for different reasons, they developed two distinct understandings of what the role of the state should be in response to political neglect. Rich archival sources—many of which have not been accessed previously—document the unique shape of land struggles in each region in the 1930s through the 1950s. The author argues that because of the way race and gender and a collectivist land tenure tradition in Oriente mapped nicely onto the goals of the 1959 Revolution, Oriente became a kind of revolutionary showcase. In Escambray, on the other hand, a construct of white masculinity, tied to private property ownership, directly contravened the goals of the Revolution, which fueled the counter-revolution and also led to brutal state repression in the area.
Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City engages in alternative ways of reading foreign visual representations of Havana through analysis of advertising images, documentary films, and photographic texts. It explores key narratives relating to the projection of different Havana imaginaries and focuses on a range of themes including: pre-revolutionary Cuba; the dream of revolution; and the metaphor of the city “frozen-in-time.” The book also synthesizes contemporary debates regarding the notion of Havana as a real and imagined city space and fleshes out its theoretical insights with a series of stand-alone, important case studies linked to the representation of the Cuban capital in the Western imaginary. The interpretations in the book bring into focus a range of critical historical moments in Cuban history (including the Cuban Revolution and the “Special Period”) and consider the ways in which they have been projected in advertising, documentary film and photography outside the island.
Drawing on extensive research in the Spanish National Archive, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola examines the role played by the censorship apparatus of Franco's Spain in bringing about the Latin American literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. He reveals the negotiations and behind-the-scenes maneuvering among those involved in the Spanish publishing industry. Converging interests made strange bedfellows of the often left-wing authors and the staid officials appointed to stand guard over Francoist morality and to defend the supposed purity of Castilian Spanish. Between these two uneasily allied groups circulated larger-than-life real-world characters like the Barcelona publisher Carlos Barral and the all-powerful literary agent Carmen Balcells. The author details the fascinating story of how novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, and Manuel Puig achieved publication in Spain, and in doing so reached a worldwide market. This colorful account underpins a compelling claim that even the most innovative and aesthetically challenging literature has its roots in the economics of the book trade, as well as the institutions of government and the exigencies of everyday politics and ideology.
In a unique analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, Eduardo Gonzalez looks closely at the work of three of the most important contemporary Cuban authors to write in the post-1959 diaspora: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929@-2005), who left Cuba for good in 1965 and established himself in London; Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931@-2005), who settled in the United States; and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba. Through the positive experiences of exile and wandering that appear in their work, these three writers exhibit what Gonzalez calls "Romantic authorship," a deep connection to the Romantic spirit of irony and complex sublimity crafted in literature by Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Gonzalez's view, a writer becomes a belated Romantic by dint of exile adopted creatively with comic or tragic irony. Gonzalez weaves into his analysis related cinematic elements of myth, folktale, and the grotesque that appear in the work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodovar. Placing the three Cuban writers in conversation with artists and thinkers from British and American literature, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cinema, Gonzlez ultimately provides a space in which Cuba and its literature, inside and outside its borders, are deprovincialized.
"We the Cubans" by Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera is a catchy and accurate portrait of the essence of Cuban identity. The significance of being an Island; the inescapable relationship between history, society, and politics; the mix of races, religions, and cultures are analyzed here—not from an academic or traditional perspective, but from a more personal approach.
