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.

In this cultural history of Cuba during the United States' brief but influential occupation from 1898 to 1902--a key transitional period following the Spanish-American War--Marial Iglesias Utset sheds light on the complex set of pressures that guided the formation and production of a burgeoning Cuban nationalism. Drawing on archival and published sources, Iglesias illustrates the process by which Cubans maintained and created their own culturally relevant national symbols in the face of the U.S. occupation. Tracing Cuba's efforts to modernize in conjunction with plans by U.S. officials to shape the process, Iglesias analyzes, among other things, the influence of the English language on Spanish usage; the imposition of North American holidays, such as Thanksgiving, in place of traditional Cuban celebrations; the transformation of Havana into a new metropolis; and the development of patriotic symbols, including the Cuban flag, songs, monuments, and ceremonies. Iglesias argues that the Cuban response to U.S. imperialism, though largely critical, indeed involved elements of reliance, accommodation, and welcome. Above all, Iglesias argues, Cubans engaged the Americans on multiple levels, and her work demonstrates how their ambiguous responses to the U.S. occupation shaped the cultural transformation that gave rise to a new Cuban nationalism.

Culture and the Cuban State examines the politics of culture in communist Cuba. It focuses on cultural policy, censorship, and the political participation of artists, writers and academics such as Tania Bruguera, Jesús Díaz, Rafael Hernández, Kcho, Reynier Leyva Novo, Leonardo Padura, and José Toirac. The cultural field is important for the reproduction of the regime in place, given its pretense and ambition to be eternally “revolutionary” and to lead a genuine “cultural revolution”. Cultural actors must be mobilized and handled with care, given their presumed disposition to speak their mind and to cherish their autonomy. This book argues that cultural actors also seek recognition by the main (for a long time the only) sponsor and patron of the art in Cuba: the “curator state”. The “curator state” is also a “gatekeeper state,” arbitrarily and selectively opening and closing the space for public expression and for access to foreign currencies and the global market. The time when everything was either mandatory or forbidden is over in Cuba. The regime seems to have learned from egregious mistakes that led to a massive exodus of artists, writers and academics. In a country where things change so everything could stay the same, the controlled opening in the cultural field, playing on the actors' ambition and fear, illuminates a broader phenomenon: the evolving rules of the political game in the longest standing dictatorship of the hemisphere.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.

With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.

Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists, and historians. Combining songs, poetry, fiction, journalism, political speeches, and many other types of documents, this revised and updated second edition of The Cuba Reader contains over twenty new selections that explore the changes and continuities in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped down from power in 2006. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.

"An excellent study of political culture, emphasizing cultural and normative resistance to revolutionary values, norms, and goals. Challenges much of the scholarship that maintained that revolution permanently transformed Cuba's traditional culture, and finds that 'most Cuban workers rejected many of the revolutionary requirements of the Castro government' (p. 184). Highly recommended"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

"This volume argues that recent technological developments are reconfiguring the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres of Cuba's Revolutionary project in unprecedented ways"--

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.

This book examines the ways in which Cuba's revolutions of 1933 and 1959 became touchstones for border-crossing endeavors of radical politics and cultural experimentation over the mid-twentieth century. It argues that new networks of solidarity building between US and Cuban allies also brought with them perils and pitfalls that could not be separated from the longer history of US empire in Cuba. As US and Cuban subjects struggled together towards common aspirations of racial and gender equality, fairer distribution of wealth, and anti-imperialism, they created a unique index of cultural work that widens our understanding of the transition between hemispheric modernism and postmodernism. Canvassing poetry, music, journalism, photographs, and other cultural expressions around themes of revolution, this book seeks new understanding of how race, gender, and nationhood could shift in meaning and materialization when traveling across the Florida Straits.