Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana's secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government's attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba's high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny. In vivid, succinct reporting, educational anthropologist Denise Blum now shares her findings regarding this overlooked aspect of the Castro legacy. Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro's educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Exploring pioneering pedagogy, the notion of civic education, and the rural components of the program, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values brims with surprising findings about one of the most intriguing social experiments in recent history.

Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba is a new history of the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, exploring how youth came to play such an important role in the 1960s on this Caribbean island. Certainly, youth culture and politics worldwide were in the ascendant in that decade, but in this pioneering and thought-provoking work Anne Luke explains how the unique circumstances of the newly developing socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth which becomes one of the factors that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day. By examining how youth was constructed and constituted within revolutionary discourse, policy, and the lived experience of young Cubans in the 1960s, Luke examines the conflicted (but ultimately successful) development of a revolutionary youth culture. She explores the fault lines along which the notion of youth was created—between the internal and the external, between discourse and the everyday, between politics and culture. Luke looks at how in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution a young leadership—Fidel, Raúl and Che—were complemented by a group of new protagonists from Cuba’s young generation. These could be literacy teachers, party members, militia members, teachers, singers, poets… all aiming to define and shape the Cuban Revolution. Together young Cubans took part in defining what it meant to be young, socialist and Cuban in this effervescent decade. The picture that emerges is one in which neither youth politics nor youth culture can alone help to explain the first decade of the Revolution; rather through the sometimes conflicted intersection of both there emerged a generation constantly to be renewed—a youth in Revolution.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana's secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government's attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba's high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny. In vivid, succinct reporting, educational anthropologist Denise Blum now shares her findings regarding this overlooked aspect of the Castro legacy. Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro's educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Exploring pioneering pedagogy, the notion of civic education, and the rural components of the program, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values brims with surprising findings about one of the most intriguing social experiments in recent history.

Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962

The extraordinary account of the Cuban people’s struggle for survival in a post-Soviet world In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, this book tells for the first time the remarkable story of how Cuba survived while the rest of the Soviet bloc crumbled. Yaffe shows how Cuba has been gradually introducing select market reforms. While the government claims that these are necessary to sustain its socialist system, many others believe they herald a return to capitalism. Examining key domestic initiatives including the creation of one of the world’s leading biotechnological industries, its energy revolution, and medical internationalism alongside recent economic reforms, Yaffe shows why the revolution will continue post-Castro. This is a fresh, compelling account of Cuba’s socialist revolution and the challenges it faces today.

In Cuba something curious has happened over the past fifteen years. The government has allowed vocal criticism of its policies to be expressed within the arts. Filmmakers, rappers, and visual and performance artists have addressed sensitive issues including bureaucracy, racial and gender discrimination, emigration, and alienation. How can this vibrant body of work be reconciled with the standard representations of a repressive, authoritarian cultural apparatus? In Cuba Represent! Sujatha Fernandes—a scholar and musician who has performed in Cuba—answers that question. Combining textual analyses of films, rap songs, and visual artworks; ethnographic material collected in Cuba; and insights into the nation’s history and political economy, Fernandes details the new forms of engagement with official institutions that have opened up as a result of changing relationships between state and society in the post-Soviet period. She demonstrates that in a moment of extreme hardship and uncertainty, the Cuban state has moved to a more permeable model of power. Artists and other members of the public are collaborating with government actors to partially incorporate critical cultural expressions into official discourse. The Cuban leadership has come to recognize the benefits of supporting artists: rappers offer a link to increasingly frustrated black youth in Cuba; visual artists are an important source of international prestige and hard currency; and films help unify Cubans through community discourse about the nation. Cuba Represent! reveals that part of the socialist government’s resilience stems from its ability to absorb oppositional ideas and values.

Most conventional readings of the Cuban Revolution have seemed mesmerised by the personality and role of Fidel Castro, often missing a deeper political understanding of the Revolution’s underlying structures, bases of popular loyalty and ethos of participation. In this ground-breaking work, Antoni Kapcia focuses instead on a wider cast of characters. Along with the more obvious, albeit often misunderstood, contributions from Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, Kapcia looks at the many others who, over the decades, have been involved in decision-making and have often made a significant difference. He interprets their various roles within a wider process of nation-building, demonstrating that Cuba has undergone an unusual, if not unique, process of change. Essential reading for anyone interested in Cuba's history and its future.

In this firsthand account by a historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, we meet men and women who led the urban underground in the fight against the brutal U.S.-backed tyranny in the 1950s. Together with their comrades-in-arms in the Rebel Army, they not only overthrew the dictatorship. Their revolutionary actions and example worldwide changed the history of the 20th century-and the century to come. "Biographical sketches of major political figures during the 1950s, as well as photographs, are important additions to the text…. Recommended."-Choice "Narrated by [someone] who not only participated in the founding of the revolutionary movement that came to power in 1959 but also … formed part of the leadership of that revolutionary movement…. [C]ontains more than one hundred pages of important documents, other first-person accounts, and photographs…. [P]rovides scholars of Cuba a wealth of information with which to stimulate further research … will also be of value for students and the general public interested in contemporary Latin America."-Hispanic American Historical Review "A historical display with vivid commentary to provide an insider's explanation."- CounterpoisePrefaces by Mary-Alice Waters, Eliades Acosta Matos, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, 28-page photo section, documents, maps, epilogue, chronological notes, glossary, index.

Rebel Literacy is a look at Cuba's National Literacy Campaign of 1961 in historical and global contexts. The Cuban Revolution cannot be understood without a careful study of Cuba's prior struggles for national sovereignty. Similarly, an understanding of Cuba's National Literacy Campaign demands an inquiry into the historical currents of popular movements in Cuba to make education a right for all. The scope of this book, though, does not end with 1961 and is not limited to Cuba and its historical relations with Spain, the United States, and the former Soviet Union. Nearly 50 years after the Year of Education in Cuba, the Literacy Campaign's legacy is evident throughout Latin America and the 'Third World.' A world-wide movement today continues against neoliberalism and for a more humane and democratic global political economy. It is spreading literacy for critical global citizenship, and Cuba's National Literacy Campaign is a part of the foundation making this global movement possible. The author collected about 100 testimonies of participants in the Campaign, and many of their stories and perspectives are highlighted in one of the chapters. Theirs are the stories of perhaps the world's greatest educational accomplishment of the 20th Century, and critical educators of the 21st Century must not overlook the arduous and fruitful work that ordinary Cubans, many in their youth, contributed toward a nationalism and internationalism of emancipation.

"Trutie's photographs, most of them never before seen, capture everything - the Revolution's soldiers and firing squads, President John F. Kennedy's 1962 address in Miami to Cuban exiles, and Brigade 2506, the liberation army that sought to overthrow Castro. These images vividly document the inner life of a revolution with candid images of rebels dining together, jeeps moving through rustic, muddy camps, and Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara walking side by side in a reflective moment. Trutie's camera also sees the tragic side of revolutionary activity - burning sugar mills, jungle hospitals, and corpses with pockets turned inside out, lying in open graves. These raw, unfiltered photos, combined with the narrative text of Teo A. Babun and noted Cuban-American historian Victor Triay, offer a one-of-a-kind, intimate eyewitness account of the Cuban Revolution as it unfolded."--BOOK JACKET.