Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Pinera: is a seminal book that fills a major gap in Cuban and Latin American literary criticism. In addition to being the most comprehensive study to date of the life and work of Virgilio Pinera, this is the first book in English on this major twentieth-century Cuban author. In this study Thomas F. Anderson draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and diverse critical writings, bringing new insights into how Pinera's works responded to key literary influences as well as events in his life and in Cuban political and cultural history.
This encyclopedia is the result of a highly selective enterprise that provides a careful selection of key topics in essays written by top scholars in their fields. Comprehensive and in-depth coverage of a limited number of countries, regions and themes is provided. The essays not only feature statistical and factual information but significant interpretation of those facts and figures. The chapters on themes and topics are both analytic and interpretative and deal with the most important topics relevant to higher education everywhere. More than a compendium of facts and figures the encyclop.
Forty-six essays, presented by avowedly anti-Castro editors and gathered mostly from US journals and books of the past couple decades, are organized into five sections devoted to the history, economy, society, military, and polity of Cuba. Some of the specific topics treated include: Cuban and Soviet relations; decentralization, local government, and participation; economic policies and strategies for the 1990s; the politics of sports; political and military relations; and forecasting institutional changes after Castro. In addition, two appendices present a chronology of the Cuban revolution from 1959 to 1998 and biographical essays on 19 revolutionary leaders. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Alejo Carpentier was one of the greatest Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, as well as a musicologist, journalist, cultural promoter, and diplomat. His fictional world issues from an encyclopedic knowledge of the history, art, music, and literature of Latin America and Europe. Carpentier’s novels and stories are the enabling discourse of today’s Latin American narrative, and his interpretation of Latin American history has been among the most influential. Carpentier was the first to provide a comprehensive view of Caribbean history that centered on the contribution of Africans, above and beyond the differences created by European cultures and languages. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, first published in 1977 and updated for this edition, covers the life and works of the great Cuban novelist, offering a new perspective on the relationship between the two. González Echevarría offers detailed readings of the works La música en Cuba, The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps, and Explosion in a Cathedral. In a new concluding chapter, he takes up Carpentier’s last years, his relationship with the Cuban revolutionary regime, and his last two novels, El arpa y la sombra and La consagración de la primavera, in which Carpentier reviewed his life and career.
The 1920s saw the birth of the tango, the "jazz craze," bohemian Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, and the primitivists. It was a time of fundamental change in the music of nearly all Western countries, including Cuba. Significant concessions to blue-collar and non-Western aesthetics began on a massive scale, making artistic expression more democratic.In Cuba, from about 1927 through the late thirties, an Afrocubanophile frenzy seized the public. Strong nationalist sentiments arose at this time, and the country embraced afrocubanismo as a means of expressing such feelings. Black street culture became associated with cubanidad (Cubanness) and a movement to merge once distinct systems of language, religion, and artistic expression into a collective of national identity.Nationalizing Blackness uses the music of the 1920s and 1930s to examine Cuban society as it begins to embrace Afrocuban culture. Moore examines the public debate over "degenerate Africanisms" associated with comparas or carnival bands; similar controversies associated with son music; the history of blackface theater shows; the rise of afrocubanismo in the context of anti-imperialist nationalism and revolution against Gerardo Machado; the history of cabaret rumba; an overview of poetry, painting, and music inspired by Afrocuban street culture; and reactions of the black Cuban middle classes to afrocubanismo. He has collected numerous illustrations of early twentieth-century performers in Havana, many included in this book.Nationalizing Blackness represents one of the first politicized studies of twentieth-century culture in Cuba. It demonstrates how music can function as the center of racial and cultural conflict during the formation of a national identity.
Across a five-hundred-year sweep of history, Willis Knapp Jones surveys the native drama and the Spanish influence upon it in nineteen South American countries, and traces the development of their national theatres to the 1960s. This volume, filled with a fascinating array of information, sparkles with wit while giving the reader a fact-filled course in the history of Spanish American drama that he can get nowhere else. This is the first book in English ever to consider the theatre of all the Spanish American countries. Even in Spanish, the pioneer study that covers the whole field was also written by Jones. Jones sees the history of a nation in the history of its drama. Pre-Columbian Indians, conquistadores, missionary priests, viceroys, dictators, and national heroes form a background of true drama for the main characters here—those who wrote and produced and acted in the make-believe drama of the times. The theatre mirrors the whole life of the community, Jones believes, and thus he offers information about geography, military events, and economics, and follows the politics of state and church through dramatists’ offerings. Examining the plays of a people down the centuries, he shows how the many cultural elements of both Old and New Worlds have been blended into the distinct national characteristics of each of the Spanish American countries. He does full justice to the subject he loves. A lively storyteller, he adds tidbits of spice and laughter, long-buried vignettes of history, tales of politics and drama, stories of high and low life, plots of plays, bits of verse, accounts of dalliance and of hard work, and sad and happy endings of rulers and peons, dramatists, actors, and clowns. A valuable appendix is a selected reading guide, listing the outstanding works of important Spanish American dramatists. A generous bibliography is a useful addition for scholars.
Examines Cuba’s approach to scientific research, and distinguishes it from that of capitalist societies “Cuba's future must, by necessity, be a future of scientists,” Fidel Castro proclaimed in 1960. As Agustín Lage Dávila shows in this pathbreaking book, Cuba has in fact become a global leader in both the generation and application of scientific knowledge—as demonstrated by its ubiquitous production of socially useful products, from vaccines and medicines, to organic food. Speaking from his position as a noted Cuban immunologist, Dr. Lage shows how Cuba achieved such prominence, positing that the training of its scientists, their scientific practices, and their relationships with the Cuban people are intimately connected to the socialist culture that derived from the Cuban Revolution. Lage offers clearly written and easily understood answers to questions critical to the very survival of humanity. Why is culture critical to science? What distinguishes Cuba’s socialist culture from that of capitalist societies? What are the social responsibilities of scientists? How has Cuba made such incredible scientific advances in the face of the brutal and illegal U.S. blockade? How can a country like Cuba earn needed foreign exchange through the sale of its knowledge-intensive products to countries in the Global North while maintaining its ethical, socialist ideals? Lage’s interrogation of these questions will be of interest to scientists and economic planners around the world, to all those struggling for a better world–and, no doubt, even to those corporations competing with Cuba in global markets.
