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While it was not until 1871 that slavery in Cuba was finally abolished, African-descended people had high hopes for legal, social, and economic advancement as the republican period started. InBlack Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, Melina Pappademos analyzes the racial politics and culture of black civic and political activists during the Cuban Republic.The path to equality, Pappademos reveals, was often stymied by successive political and economic crises, patronage politics, and profound racial tensions. In the face of these issues, black political leaders and members of black social clubs developed strategies for expanding their political authority and for winning respectability and socioeconomic resources. Rather than appeal to a monolithic black Cuban identity based on the assumption of shared experience, these black activists, politicians, and public intellectuals consistently recognized the class, cultural, and ideological differences that existed within the black community, thus challenging conventional wisdom about black community formation and anachronistic ideas of racial solidarity. Pappademos illuminates the central, yet often silenced, intellectual and cultural role of black Cubans in the formation of the nation's political structures; in doing so, she shows that black activism was only partially motivated by race.

How does architecture make its appearance in civil society?Constitutional Modernismpursues this challenging question by exploring architecture, planning, and law as cultural forces. Analyzing the complex entanglements between these disciplines in the Cuban Republic, Timothy Hyde reveals how architects joined with other professionals and intellectuals in efforts to establish a stable civil society, from the promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 up until the Cuban Revolution. By arguing that constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones, Hyde offers a new view of architectural modernism as a political and social instrument. He contends that constitutionalism produced a decisive confluence of law and architecture, a means for planning the future of Cuba. The importance of architecture in this process is laid bare by Hyde's thorough scrutiny of a variety of textual, graphical, and physical artifacts. He examines constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments, and other primary materials as acts of design. Read from the perspective of architectural history,Constitutional Modernismdemonstrates how the modernist concepts that developed as an international discourse before the Second World War evolved through interactions with other disciplines into a civil urbanism in Cuba. And read from the perspective of Cuban history, the book explains how not only material products such as buildings and monuments but also the immaterial methods of architecture as a cultural practice produced ideas that had consequential effects on the political circumstances of the nation.

Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of about 11 million, lies less than 100 miles off the U.S. coast. Yet the island's influences on America's cultural imagination are extensive and deeply ingrained. In the engaging and wide-rangingHavana Habit,writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat probes the importance of Havana, and of greater Cuba, in the cultural history of the United States. Through books, advertisements, travel guides, films, and music, he demonstrates the influence of the island on almost two centuries of American life. From John Quincy Adams's comparison of Cuba to an apple ready to drop into America's lap, to the latest episodes in the lives of the \"comiccomandantesand exotic exiles,\" and to such notable Cuban exports as the rumba and the mambo, cigars and mojitos, the Cuba that emerges from these pages is a locale that Cubans and Americans have jointly imagined and inhabited.The Havana Habitdeftly illustrates what makes Cuba, as Pérez Firmat writes, \"so near and yet so foreign.\"

Cuba continues to loom large in U.S. consciousness and politics. Culture and Customs of Cuba is a much-needed resource to give students and other readers an in-depth view of our important island neighbor. Luis, of Cuban descent, provides detailed, clear insight into Cuban culture in its historical context. Religion, customs, economy, media, performing and creative arts, and cinema are some of the many topics discussed. Included in this discussion are contributions of Cubans in exile which Luis considers an inherent part of Cuban culture. Encouraging a wider understanding of Cuba, this volume describes and highlights the cultures and customs of the island. Cuba, as one will learn while reading this book, is an island of many cultural customs that have evolved out of a rich history. Presented in the context of three interrelated periods in Cuban history: the Colonial, the Republic, and Castro's Revolution, this book explores Cuba's dynamic culture. Luis also notes the spread of Cuban culture abroad, where a significant part of the Cuban population has lived since the earl 19th century. Students and others interested in this country will find this book to be extraordinarily helpful and informative.

This article challenges the common notion that Cuban sugar companies controlled the labor and social relations of Haitian immigrant laborers fully and without challenge during the first half of the 20th century. It begins by showing the way that Cuban newspapers and sugar company administrators projected an image of Haitians as a homogenous group of powerless, culturally isolated cane cutters who were separated from other groups through an idealized labor hierarchy. Then it details Haitians’ laboring lives on Cuban sugar plantations to demonstrate three things. First, that Haitians participated in other aspects of sugar production, including skilled positions within centrales. Second, that cane cutters themselves were divided by their skill levels and (in)formal hierarchies. Third, that Haitians worked alongside individuals of other nationalities in both sugar fields and the mills where cane was processed. The essay ends by analyzing Haitians’ attempts to carve out autonomy in their work and leisure hours by exerting control over their labor and creating various types of commercial and social networks with individuals of other nationalities on plantations.

[...]at the end of the book Alvarez includes an Appendix with four interviews of Cuban writers in which each author discusses his/her perception of culture in revolutionary Cuba. Cabrera Infante also adds his own elucidating comments about important Cuban writers and poets, and the political persecution that he faced while living in Cuba. [...]the theme of post-revolutionary Cuba as a phantom in the life of Cabrera Infante connected to his anti-Castro political view. Among the topics discussed, the most interesting one would be the one discussed in the last chapter about AIDS in Sarduy' s last novel written by Justo and Eleonor Ulloa. Besides being very informative, wellwritten, and not overcrowded with unnecessary literary theory, the chapter gives an important overview of the last days of Sarduy's sickness, how he coped with his emotional feelings and the stress of his illness, and how everything he was living through and facing at that time was portrayed by him in his last novel. [...]I want to add that, in one way or another, all of the books reviewed in this essay challenge the reader's perception of contemporary Cuban literature.

ROBERT WHITNEY STATES his case at the outset: During the period under study, 1920-1940, mass mobilization, revolution, economic crisis, and the threat of US intervention obliged Cuban politicians to come to terms with the popular social classes, the clases populares. The force of popular sectors was such that established oligarchic mechanisms of social and political control no longer functioned. The issue then was how \"the masses\" were to be incorporated into the political process. After eight years of corporatist Machado rule, the masses exploded into social revolution in summer 1933, after which Cuba was a different country. Between 1934 and 1940 a new consensus based on authoritarian and reformist principles emerged, whereby the new and modern state should intervene in society to modernize the country, a process culminating with the 1940 Constitution. Following seven years of behind-the-scenes control, overseeing a transition from military to constitutional democracy, Batista became president of Cuba, cementing Cuba's transition away from oligarchic rule. The analysis leads to an ambivalence with regard to Batista. On the one hand, we see a Batista who can maneuver to keep rivals Grau and the Autenticos as well as the US at bay. On the other, we have the Batista state which redistributes wealth as part of social policy -- the redistributionist demagoguery of Cuban populism accompanied by real, if modest, reforms; recognition of labour unions; and restrictions on foreign capitalists who no longer can act with the impunity of pre-1933. The 1940 Constitution represented a political arrangement that reflected a new balance of power, to which foreign capitalists would have to adapt. The error of historians, [Robert Whitney] claims, is to view Batista as counterrevolutionary because of 1959, without observing the populist base of 1937-40 and the reasons why Cuba became a formal democracy in 1940. Under Batista, for the first time in Cuban history, segments of the popular classes were incorporated into the public domain organized by the state, as under Roosevelt in the US and Cardenas in Mexico. Batista was both American ally and populist nationalist. Yet, the consensus of 1940 proved fragile; the state structure was too weak and crumbled, and the post-1940 years would be witness to the growing widespread feeling that corrupt politicians cynically betrayed and manipulated popular sentiments.