USA Today "New and Noteworthy" • One of The Washington Post's "10 Books to Read—and Gift—in December" "Fascinating." —Forbes Fidel Castro is dead. Donald Trump was elected president. And to most outsiders, the fate of Cuba has never seemed more uncertain. Yet those who look close enough may recognize that signs of the next revolution are etched in plain view. This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime—a two-year assignment in Havana. For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition. Beyond the classic cars, salsa, and cigars lies a country in which black markets are ubiquitous, free speech is restricted, privacy is curtailed, sanctions wreak havoc, and an almost Kafka-esque goo of Soviet-style bureaucracy still slows the gears of an economy desperate to move forward. But life in Cuba is indeed changing, as satellite dishes and internet hotspots dot the landscape and more Americans want in. Still, it’s not so simple. The old sentries on both sides of the Florida Straits remain at their posts, fists clenched and guarding against the specter of a Cold War that never quite ended, despite the death of Fidel and the hand-over of the presidency to a man whose last name isn’t Castro. And now, a crisis is brewing. In This Is Cuba, Ariosto looks at Cuba from the inside-out over the course of nine years, endeavoring to expose clues for what’s in store for the island as it undergoes its biggest change in more than half a century.

In Only a Few Blocks to Cuba, Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city’s development and shaping its future as a global metropolis. When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisis it was ill-equipped to handle and sought to have the federal government solve what local politicians clearly viewed as a Cold War geopolitical problem. In response, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and their successors, provided an unprecedented level of federal largesse and freedom of transit to these refugees. The changes to the city this investment wrought were as impactful and permanent as they were unintended. What was meant to be a short-term geopolitical stratagem instead became a new reality in South Florida. A growing and increasingly powerful Cuban community contested their place in Miami and navigated challenges like bilingualism, internal political disputes, socioeconomic polarization, and ongoing struggles and negotiations with Washington and Havana in the decades that followed. This contested process, argues Mauricio Castro, not only transformed South Florida, but American foreign policy and the calculus of national politics. Castro uses extensive archival research in local and national sources to demonstrate that the Cuban diaspora and Cold War refugee policy made South Florida a key space to understanding the shifting landscape of the late twentieth century. In this way, Miami serves as an example of both the lived effects of defense spending in urban spaces and of how local communities can shape national politics and international relations. American politics, foreign relations, immigration policy, and urban development all intersected on the streets of Miami.

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice. Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called "unanimous support" for a revolution whose "moral power" defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new Cuba that policed most forms of dissent. Devoted revolutionaries who resisted disastrous economic policies, exposed post-1959 racism, and challenged gender norms set by Cuba's one-party state increasingly found themselves marginalized, silenced, or jailed. Using previously unexplored sources, Guerra focuses on the lived experiences of citizens, including peasants, intellectuals, former prostitutes, black activists, and filmmakers, as they struggled to author their own scripts of revolution by resisting repression, defying state-imposed boundaries, and working for anti-imperial redemption in a truly free Cuba.

The Caribbean stands out in the popular imagination as a 'place without history', a place which has somehow eluded modernity. Haiti is envisioned as being trapped in an endless cycle of violence and instability, Cuba as a 1950s time warp, Jamaicans as ganja-smoking Rastafarians, while numerous pristine, anonymous islands are simply peaceful idylls. The notion of 'getting away from it all' lures countless visitors, offering the possibility of total disconnect for the world-weary. In On the Move Alejandra Bronfman argues that in fact the opposite is true; the Caribbean is, and has always been, deeply engaged with the wider world. From drugs and tourism to international political struggles, these islands form an integral part of world history and of the present, and are themselves in a constant state of economic and social flux in the face of global transformations.

Writer and photographer Molly Mandell portrays 25 Cuban 'makers': creative craftsmen and women with a mission and a lot of passion. They share a striking and admirable do-it-yourself mentality: because Cubans didn't have access to imported goods for a long time, they learned how to make things work with whatever few products were around. This book is an ode to the resilience, the creativity and the self-reliance that have become a necessary way of life for most Cubans. It aims to capture the soul of the people of a country in times of change and transition. Therefore Made in Cuba is not only a source of inspiration for creatives, but also a personal guide to the country, offering a look inside the everyday lives of its people, at a unique moment in time. AUTHOR: Molly Mandell lived and worked in the United States when she started travelling to Cuba. On her countless trips she developed relationships with journalists and scholars but most importantly, with Cuban citizens. Molly is currently based in Copenhagen, where she works as an editor and art director at Kinfolk. SELLING POINT: * Writer and photographer Molly Mandell portrays 25 Cuban craftsmen and woman with a mission, a lot of passion, and a striking and admirable do-it-yourself mentality 120 colour images

There are few international relationships as intimate, as passionate-and as dysfunctional-as that of the United States and Cuba. In The Cuba Wars, Cuba expert Daniel Erikson draws on extensive visits and conversations with both Cuban government officials and opposition leaders-plus key players in Washington and Florida-to offer an unmatched portrait of a small country with outsized importance to Americans and American policy.

Gustavo P?rez Firmat arrived in America with his family at the age of eleven. Victims of CastroÍs revolution, the P?rez family put their life on hold, waiting for CastroÍs fall. Each Christmas, along with other Cuban families in the neighborhood, they celebrated with the cry, ñNext year in Cuba.î Growing up in the Dade County school system, and graduating from college in Florida, P?rez Firmat was insulated from America by the nurturing sights and sounds of Little Havana. It wasnÍt until he left home to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan that he realized, as the Cuba of his birth receded farther into the past, he had become no longer wholly Cubano, but increasingly a man of two heritages and two countries. In a searing memoir of a family torn apart by exile, P?rez Firmat chronicles the painful search for roots that has come to dominate his adult life. With one brother beset by personal problems and another embracing the very revolution that drove their family out of Cuba, Gustavo realized that the words ñNext Year in Cuba,î had, for him, taken on a hollow ring. Now, married to an American woman, and father to two children who are Cuban in name only, P?rez Firmat has finally come to acknowledge his need to celebrate his love of Cuba, while embracing the America he has come to love.

Late in his life, former president Lyndon B. Johnson told a reporter that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy. Johnson thought Cuban president Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson said, Kennedy was running “a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean,” giving Castro reason to retaliate. Murder, Inc., tells the story of the CIA’s assassination operations under Kennedy up to his own assassination and beyond. James H. Johnston was a lawyer for the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, which investigated and first reported on the Castro assassination plots and their relation to Kennedy’s murder. Johnston examines how the CIA steered the Warren Commission and later investigations away from connecting its own assassination operations to Kennedy’s murder. He also looks at the effect this strategy had on the Warren Commission’s conclusions that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy. Sourced from in-depth research into the “secret files” declassified by the JFK Records Act and now stored in the National Archives and Records Administration, Murder, Inc. is the first book to narrate in detail the CIA’s plots against Castro and to delve into the question of why retaliation by Castro against Kennedy was not investigated.

The Rough Guide to Cuba is the ultimate guide to the home of sun, salsa and rum From down town Trinidad to small-town street parties, the section introduces the best Cuba has to offer. This revised 6th edition contains ... The guide is full of informed descriptions and accurate listings of the best bars, restaurants and music venues to be seen at, from the lively city of Havana to the seaside resorts of Cayo Coco and Guardalavaca. This guide also takes a detailed look at the country's turbulent history,sport, music and wildlife, and comes complete with new maps and plans for every area. The Rough Guide to Cuba's is like having a local friend plan your trip!

An anthology by Cuban and Cuban-American writers, artists, and scholars celebrating a new era of restored relations between Cuba and the U.S.