The International Journal of Cuban Studies最新文献

{"title":"Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow","authors":"J. Kerr-Ritchie","doi":"10.1093/jahist/jav605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav605","url":null,"abstract":"Gerald Horne, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2014) 276pp. IsBN: 9781-583-644-51Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-RitchieThis book pursues connections. In 1959, the US-backed regime in Cuba was overthrown in a remarkable revolutionary coup. At the same moment, a powerful Civil Rights Movement was gearing up to destroy Jim Crow racism in the US. While most scholars agree on these events' significance, few pursue their historical conjuncture. Race to Revolution's key objective is to explain how 'these interlinked processes' (p. 27) destroyed US legal inequality and American influence in Cuba. This ambitious agenda results in a sweeping transnational narrative that should inspire students, provoke scholars and intrigue general readers.Gerald Horne, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston, is a prolific scholar. His university webpage lists 15 book publications since 2001. Professor Horne's research focuses upon the transformative roles of workers and intellectuals of African descent, especially in colonial and anti-colonial struggles on the global stage. This book places him within an African American radical tradition in which Cuba was vital to liberation in the US from abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney and Henry Highland Garnet, to intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston, Rayford Logan and Langston Hughes, to communists such as James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, William Patterson and Angela Davis.Race to Revolution examines 'U.S.-Cuban relations in the bitter context of slavery and Jim Crow', with a focus 'on the words and deeds of U.S. Negroes - and their \"white\" counterparts' (p. 8). One prominent activity was cross-border travel by Americans to Cuba and Cubans to the mainland, including runaway slaves, anti-colonial rebels, Confederate refugees, US Negro musicians, American and black Cuban baseball players, missionaries, travellers, soldiers, communists and so forth. The author's key focus, though, is upon broader social and political processes (but strangely not economic; sugar production, marketing and consumption receive scant attention) in which the US, especially Texas and Cuba, fortified African slavery in Cuba, while Jim Crow attained a 'more muscular presence' in Florida and Cuba after 1898 (p. 21). Push-back by African Americans opposed to Jim Crow and lynching as well as black communists in Cuba and the US meant that the 'concentrated racism of Jim Crow was being assailed from both sides of the straits, shortening its shelf life' (p. 23).Because Race to Revolution does not critically engage the historiography on Cuban slavery, colonialism/anti-colonialism and revolution, Jim Crew, and so forth it is sometimes hard to pin down the overall argument. We are provided with a general narrative on extensive cross-border movements mainly from the 1820s through the 1950s le","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124038672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"God and the Nation: Protestants, Patriotism and Pride in Cuba, 1890-1906","authors":"J. Baer","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0074","url":null,"abstract":"Evaristo Collazo was a humble man with a tenacious spirit. Photographs show him in his forties with a receding hairline and a great moustache. He is dressed in a three-piece suit with a cravat, holding a Bible in his right hand. His back is straight and his eyes stare outward, looking like a man with a purpose. He had left the Cuban Catholic Church, joining first the Episcopalians, then the Baptists and finally, the Presbyterian Church in 1890. He found a home in the Reformed theology and structure of the Presbyterian Church as an alternative to the hierarchical constraints many Cubans felt with the Catholic Church that served more faithfully the Spanish king than the people of Cuba. He desired to see his homeland free from the Spanish monarchy and served in the War of Independence from 1895 to 1898. Evaristo Collazo also advocated for Cuban leadership in the Presbyterian Church in Cuba, at times coming into conflict with the American missionaries who wanted to retain control. The origin of the Presbyterian Church in Cuba, however, did not begin with the American missionaries who descended on Cuba during the US occupation from 1898 until 1902. Instead, it was a Cuban, Collazo, who requested Presbyterian missionaries, and then asked to be ordained by them in order to lead the church he had established. This Cuban-ness-evangelical and nationalist-was something Presbyterians in Cuba shared with other Protestant denominations in adapting Protestant theology to the needs of Cuban society as nationalists who advocated for reform and social justice. This relationship between Cuban and American Protestants is significant because it afforded Cubans opportunities to blunt US hegemony, permit Cuban leadership and placate Cuban pride. These ties continue to this day and present an important dynamic as US-Cuban relations continue to evolve.In the years leading up to a new war of independence, Cubans increasingly found US Protestant denominations in Cuba to be supportive of rebel goals. Then, when the United States took over the conflict and occupied the island, increasing numbers of US Protestant missionaries arrived. Most studies of Cuba in this period focus on the military occupation, the political foundation of the republic and the importance of US business interests. American and Cuban Protestants were involved in all these aspects but are seldom studied in depth. Richard Gott (2004) suggests that a horde of US missionaries descended on the island at the turn of the twentieth century and helped impose a US-based structure on the island's evangelicals. Histories of Cuba by North American and European scholars and writers describe the importation of US institutions and values in the period of occupation and the early Republic. Luis A. Perez (1995: 63) states, 'Almost immediately, the small Cuban ministry was overwhelmed and displaced by a vast influx of North American missionaries of all denominations'. He identifies several Cubans who became Protestants wh","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"196 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134501935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women in Cuba: The Emancipatory Revolution","authors":"Salim Lamrani","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.8.1.0109","url":null,"abstract":"Developing a welfare system that protects the most vulnerable groups in society, as well as proactive policies designed to achieve equal rights for all, has long been a priority of the Cuban Revolution. Cuban women, discriminated against and relegated to a lower status before 1959, have benefited from measures adopted by the government of Fidel Castro to integrate the political, economic and social life of the country, achieve emancipation and obtain full citizenship.","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123250352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Talking about Race in Cuba: Four Trans-Atlantic African Diaspora Women Share Their Experience","authors":"Nataka Moore, Tiffany McDowell, M. Watson, Caridad Morales Nussa","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0212","url":null,"abstract":"Nataka (First Author): my reflections on my cuban AncestryMy great grandfather was born in Cuba during the time of Cuba's independence from Spain in 1899. He was born to a Black Cuban mother and an African American father who arrived as an American volunteer from South Carolina. In his very early years, my great grandfather was raised by his mother in Cuba. Around the age of 5, he came to live in the US and settled in South Carolina with his paternal grandparents. The circumstances that made him leave Cuba are unknown but through a look at the lives of Black Cuban woman after Cuba's independence, any number of issues could have been likely, including an early death of his mother. My great grandfather was an absentee father in the life of my grandfather, so there was not much information passed down about him. Even so, as a genealogist and psychologist, I became very interested in tracking down what I could learn from my great grandfather's life and the events surrounding his birth during the independence movement in Cuba.During my search, I came across a book in an antique store in Chicago that was published in 1899 called Neely's Photographs: Panoramic views of Cuba, Porto Rico, Manila and The Philippines by Frank Tennyson Neely. The book contains well over 75 images of the Spanish-American war with a substantial focus of the book covering Cuba. At the bottom of the photos, the author made captions that often explained the context of the pictures by telling the reader who was in the picture and/or where the picture was taken. However, at times the caption would be reflective of the author's personal opinions about the people in the pictures. What became significant for me about this book was my reaction to the images and the captions of these with Black Cubans. White Cubans in the book are referred to as Cubans, whereas Black Cubans are referred to as Negroes. To me this reflected that Neely, a person with an etic perspective, saw Black Cubans as not being citizens of Cuba nor as contributors to the fabric of Cuban society. My question is this: if they are neither citizens nor contributors to Cuban society, then for Neely what were they?For one photo, an image of Black Cubans gathering in Havana on a Sunday, in their best clothes dancing likely to the rhythms that have contributed to music and dance across the world, he provided commentary that answered my question. In this photo, he stated, 'Negroes are children of the fun and sun.' I see several problems with this statement: (1) the photo captured adults engaging in a social affair, (2) the adults are being infantilised as they are called children, (3) they are referred to as Negroes and not Cubans, and (4) the comment was patronising and likely reflects the overall lack of respect for the human rights of Black people during this period. While I intellectually knew that Cuba's history with slavery and racism was very similar to that of the US, I was not ready to go through another version of t","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126893688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Maine, the Romney and the Threads of Conspiracy in Cuba","authors":"Paul Ryer","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0200","url":null,"abstract":"'Americans', Joan Didion writes, reporting on an incredulous, baffled critique of US society by the Cuban exile enclave in Miami, are 'a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turn[s]' (Didion 1987: 78). Similarly within the Republic of Cuba itself; hardly a day seems to pass in Havana without some story of intrigue and machination, whether over the death of Che, the delayed arrival of the monthly egg ration or as a quite possibly related explanation of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by mobsters and CIA stooges. Indeed, so many putative conspiracies surround Cuba, on either side of the Straits of Florida, that these theories must not be considered simply in terms of their internal logic or stated objectives. Nor are they a simple, unmediated consequence of a certain state socialist political system: the Cuban conspiracy genre demands attention precisely for its un-remarked ubiquity on and off the island. After defining the term and focusing mainly on conspiracy theory within the Republic, I will argue that narratives of conspiracion are morality tales, always presented as passionate, principled opposition to imperial machinations, from the colonial margin. Unlike scholars who focus on conspiracy theory as a late modern Cold War phenomena (Marcus 1999), I also argue that, in the Cuban context at least, these are part of a much longer historically and culturally grounded pattern.Distinguishing conspiraciesWhat is a 'conspiracy theory', and how is it distinct from a rumour, or indeed, from other explanatory frameworks such as witchcraft? First identified as a distinct genre by Richard Hofstadter in his seminal study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Hofstadter 1965), conspiratorial accounts of hidden, nefarious machinations are heard in many everyday contexts in the world today (e.g., Briggs 2004; Boyer 2006; Johnson 2013). Unlike witchcraft beliefs, however, narrative accounts which assert some sort of conspiracy characteristically deploy technical facts and scientific principles to buttress their veracity. In that sense, one might well consider conspiracy theory a highly modernist genre. Note that in trying to make sense of a paranoid style, it is all too easy to look for function, or truth value. Academic studies of rumour encounter this difficulty and furthermore tend to reify their analytical unit - in these cases, the 'rumour' (Lienhardt 1975; Turner 1993; Stewart and Strathern 2004), at times even subsuming conspiracy theory as a subset of rumour. While any term must be treated heuristically, I argue that these two terms only partially overlap: some years ago, Havana went into mourning, falsely believing that Pedrito Calvo, a superstar of Cuban salsa, had died in a fire. And on numerous occasions over the years, rumours regarding Fidel Castro's death - a preferred prank in Miami and Havana both - have garnered attention in","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128111691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dialogic Aspects of the Cuban Novel of the 1990s","authors":"J. Wilkey","doi":"10.5860/choice.185311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185311","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116295120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cuba in the Western Hemisphere: What Has Changed?","authors":"Carlos Oliva Campos, G. Prevost","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0142","url":null,"abstract":"introductionOn 17 December 2014, the presidents of Cuba and the US, Raul Castro and Barack Obama, announced simultaneously to the world the decision of an exchange of prisoners releasing the three Cuban intelligence operatives still in jail in American prisons - Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino and Antonio Guerrero - and the subcontractor Alan Gross, imprisoned in the island. Together with Gross, a CIA agent of Cuban origin was also released, and an agreement was reached to set free certain opponents of the Cuban government. The unexpected news that exceeded the expectations of millions of people around the world was the decision to re-establish the bilateral diplomatic relations broken for more than 50 years. We are referring to a historical bilateral conflict centred on the denial of the right of Cuba to be sovereign and independent, based on geopolitical criteria and security reasons of the US, which occurred with the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. This was an event that carried the contradictions to extremes because of the socialist definition of the Cuban process and the inclusion of the former Soviet Union in the conflict between the two countries. It is a history of revolutionary Cuba that includes the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs; the execution of terrorist acts by the CIA and anti-Cuban organisations established in the south of Florida that have caused thousands of victims being dead and wounded; the greatest nuclear war threat ever lived by humanity in October 1962 and an economic, financial and trade blockade that has caused billions of dollars of losses to the Cuban economy.1The potential change in relations between the US and Cuba must be understood in the context of how Cuba's relations with Latin America have evolved over the course of the last 25 years since the demise of the socialist bloc.2 In 2009, a milestone was reached when Cuba and El Salvador, following the election of Mauricio Funes to the Salvadorian presidency, re-established full diplomatic relations. It meant that for the first time since soon after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba had full diplomatic relations with all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It will be argued in this article that the range of Cuba's diplomatic relations in the hemisphere has played an important role in the decision by the Obama administration to be the final country in the region to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba. As will be discussed later, the unfolding of the Summits of the Americas process has apparently been at least partially responsible for the change in US policy. At both the 2009 summit in Trinidad and the 2012 summit in Colombia, Latin American leaders strongly urged the Obama administration to end its decade-long embargo on the island and more importantly, at the 2012 meeting indicated that their participation at the scheduled summit in Panama in 2015 would be contingent upon Cuba being invited. Since the inauguration of the proc","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127555420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Public Intellectuals and Politics in Cuba: A Case Study of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1872–1956)","authors":"Jorge Renato Ibarra Guitart, Gastón A. Fernández","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0164","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionBarrington Moore's classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy advances the thesis that the democratic path to modernisation depends on the strategic role played by the bourgeoisie in a country's development, asserting that 'no bourgeoisie, no democracy' (Moore 1967). According to Moore, the strategic role of the bourgeois class results from its detachment from feudal class relations to transform the nature of property relations, the state and society. In Antonio Gramsci's analysis of the capitalist state in Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture (Gramsci 1971), public intellectuals play a crucial role in legitimising bourgeois democracy by formulating political doctrines and ideologies that analyse the crisis and contradictions of capitalism, by creating awareness of the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole in the political system and by obtaining consensus of the popular classes for bourgeois rule. This article examines the political thought and career of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza, a prominent public intellectual and politician of the Republic (1901-58) whose career exemplifies the pursuit of hegemony based on moral and intellectual arguments for the Constitutions of 1901 and 1940 and resistance to the Platt Amendment.The Cuban bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century was in a precarious position to play a strategic political role. Its nationalist credentials were threatened by its dependent 'comprador' status functioning as intermediaries for foreign capital in Cuba (McGillivray 2009: 63-86). Within the Cuban bourgeoisie, the sectors most dependent on foreign capital and markets, notably the sugar plantation and mill owners and those relying on trade and imports, were seldom an obstacle to US expansion. The Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not gain significance in the domestic market until the Great Depression and the Second World War when US imports decreased and US owners of sugar mills were pressured out of the sugar industry and banking under the regulatory policies of populist governments (Dominguez 1978). However, few industries created in this period were able to survive foreign competition. In 1954, craft production still figured prominently in the Cuban economy, with 45.1 per cent of all factories having fewer than five workers. According to Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, 'Domestic industries were far from being able to cover domestic demand for the production of each of its branches, thus creating a deficit that would be satisfied by imports' (Ibarra 1995: 63). In general, the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not lend a nationalist character to the economy. The legitimation function was complicated further by the neocolonial relations of the country with the US, reflected in the Platt Amendment and US geopolitical demands on Cuba in order for it to be accepted into the emerging American global empire.1 The Cuban bourgeoisie after independence had to address these contradictions to claim the","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134610122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Venceremos Brigade: North Americans in Cuba since 1969","authors":"K. Iyengar","doi":"10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/INTEJCUBASTUD.7.2.0236","url":null,"abstract":"As Cuba and the US approach normalised relations, the moment manifests with a presence that most US citizens have not experienced for decades. For most North Americans, the current shift is a complete turn from relations begun at the inception of the Cuban Revolution. In truth, this shift mirrors the work that the Venceremos Brigade has been realising for decades. I found the Venceremos Brigade among the weeds of the American Left, modelling a distinct and positive form of US-Cuban relations amidst a political context hostile to Cuba. Born from fraught relations, the Brigade has persisted throughout the period defined by negative relations and demonstrates how a productive politics can emerge from a politics of hostility: when mutual interests are involved. The current relational shift offers a new vantage point from which to reconsider US-Cuban relations - offering a space to explore the Venceremos Brigade.The Venceremos Brigade was a political education project founded in 1969 by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with officials of the Republic of Cuba. The Brigade continues to travel to Cuba today, and to date has sent more than 9,000 activists to the island (Sale 1973). Those who have participated in the Brigade have done so to demonstrate support for the Cuban Revolution/Government, foster socio-economic growth in the country, develop political and social consciousness, and learn about Cuba. 'Brigadistas' have traditionally demonstrated support and helped to foster growth on the island by participating in national sugar harvests or housing projects, all the while learning from the Cuban Revolution. Today, brigadistas continue to travel to Cuba and work on the island while learning of its politics and culture.Having begun ten years after the 1959 culmination of the Cuban Revolution, this long-standing North American project of support for Cuba should be known. The group's participants embody a recurring trend from the course of US history: North Americans negotiate the contradictions of the US's proffered patriotism that simultaneously allows for institutionally marginalising certain subgroups of citizens. The Brigade's participants demonstrate this historical tendency through their collective, demograph diversity - they represent a broad scope of the US along the dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. There is little written on the Venceremos Brigade within the pertinent historiographies - neither in the history of US-Cuban relations nor in the history of the New Left. The story's importance and relevance become increasingly apparent as our present moment asks us to rethink our orientation towards Cuba.The age into which the Brigade was born was one dominated by a fundamentally anti-Cuban narrative. The narrative was historically constructed, having begun long before 1959, and the story has only marginally changed since the culmination of Cuba's communist revolution. Looking to Cuban-America","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115228856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo/Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería","authors":"Paul Barrett","doi":"10.5860/choice.193935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193935","url":null,"abstract":"Diana Espirito santo, Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015) cloth 338pp. IsBN: 9780813060781Kristine Juncker, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santeria (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014) cloth 216pp. IsBN: 9780813049700If you thought that religious practices in Cuba were more or less the same as in the rest of Central and South America, these two books published by University Press of Florida quickly dispel these misapprehensions.Although Cuba's most widespread religion is Christianity, primarily Roman Catholicism, in some cases it has been greatly reshaped by syncretism. As is widely known, the most popular of these syncretic religions is Santeria, which combines the Yoruba religion of the African slaves with Catholicism and some Native American elements. It includes the worship of the Orisha - head guardians - and religious beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people who inhabited what is now Southern Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea Coast. These are combined with elements of Roman Catholicism. Arriving as slaves in the Caribbean, Santerians preserved the elements of their religion by equating each Orisha of their traditional religions with a corresponding Christian Saint. However, as well as the syncretic religions, what is less widely known is a widespread adherence to a form of communicating with the spirit world known as espiritismo.Diana Espirito Santo's book Developing the Dead, first, takes this on with a confidence which is based on extensive fieldwork among espiritistas and their patrons in Havana, and she makes the compelling espiritistas that Spiritist practices are basically a project of developing the self. Diana's name in itself is interesting, meaning Holy Spirit, and I presume that this is not a nom de plume. But, for me, the project of developing the self is a concept that is not an easy one to grasp. However, Diana, assistant professor of social anthropology at the Institute of Sociology, Pontifical, Universidad Catolica de Chile, has taken on the subject with confidence and puts the whole topic with great ease into the political framework of Cuba, right from the early days of the revolution, through the desperate days of Cuba's break with the Soviet Union after its break-up, right to the present day. I found explaining this political background to be extremely useful, especially how, initially, all forms of religion were frowned upon by the socialist government, principally because the Catholic Church in Cuba colluded with the US in smuggling out children from the island so that they would not be con- taminated by a form of politics that did not sit well with the larger neighbour.This is a fascinating topic, with probably as many different forms of this practice as there are practitioners. The author argues cogently that when mediums cultivate relationships between the living and th","PeriodicalId":254309,"journal":{"name":"The International Journal of Cuban Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114539536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}