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She's been kidnapped and beaten, lives under surveillance, and can only get online—in disguise—at tourist hotspots. She's a blogger, she's a Cuban, and she's a worldwide sensation. Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life. For these simple acts of truth-telling her life is one of constant threat. But she continues on, refusing to be silenced—a living response to all who have ceased to believe in a future for Cuba.
A wide-ranging examination of the ways digital technologies are impacting Cuba’s Revolutionary project The triumph of the Cuban Revolution gave the Communist Party a monopoly over both politics and the mass media. However, with the subsequent global proliferation of new information and communication technologies, Cuban citizens have become active participants in the worldwide digital revolution. While the Cuban internet has long been characterized by censorship, high costs, slow speeds, and limited access, this volume argues that since 2013, technological developments have allowed for a fundamental reconfiguration of the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres of the Revolutionar...
In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El País, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El País (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it is a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar’s eye for complexity with a journalist’s hunger for the facts.
As American-Cuban relations begin to warm, tourists are rushing to discover the throwback tropical paradise just eighty miles off of the American coast. But even as diplomatic relations are changing and the country opens up to the Western world, Cuba remains a rare and fascinating place. Cuba: A Cultural History tells the story of Cuba’s history through an exploration of its rich and vibrant culture. Rather than offer a timeline of Cuban history or a traditional genre-by-genre history of Cuban culture, Alan West-Durán invites readers to enter Cuban history from the perspective of the island’s uniquely creative cultural forms. He traces the restless island as it ebbs and flows with the p...
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist: A “superb story collection” about America and Cuba, escape and return, and history and hope (Los Angeles Times). Longlisted for The Story Prize One of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of the Year In “Superman,” several possible story lines emerge about a 1950s Havana sex-show superstar who disappeared as soon as the revolution triumphed. “North/South” portrays a migrant family trying to cope with separation and the eventual disintegration of blood ties. “The Cola of Oblivion” follows a young woman who returns to Cuba and inadvertently uncorks a history of accommodation and betrayal among the family members who stayed behind dur...
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.
How did Cuba's long-established sugar trade result in the development of an agriculture that benefited consumers abroad at the dire expense of Cubans at home? In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island's cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. In the dynamic between the two, dependency on food imports—a signal feature of the Cuban economy—was set in place. Cuban efforts to diversify the economy through expanded rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as sugar growers were on the U.S. market. U.S. growers prepared...
This volume examines the role and representation of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the media with particular emphasis on the United States. It highlights contemporary work that focuses on changing meanings of racial and ethnic identity as they are represented in the media; television and film, digital and print media are under examination. Through fourteen innovative and interdisciplinary case studies written by a team of internationally based contributors, the volume identifies ways in which ethnic, racial, and national identities have been produced, reproduced, stereotyped, and contested. It showcases new emerging theoretical approaches in the field, and pays particular attention to the role of race, ethnicity, and national identity, along with communal and transnational allegiances, in the making of identities in the media. The topics of the chapters range from immigrant newspapers and gangster cinema to ethnic stand-up comedy and the use of ‘race’ in advertising.
This volume examines theoretical and comparative perspectives on civil society activism under authoritarian constraints to offer a better understanding of its relationship with regime change. Rejecting a normative approach, the authors focus on the whole range of civic activism under authoritarianism.
Nearly half a century after his death, Ernesto “Che” Guevara remains a compelling and controversial figure. He was an original social theorist, and many of his writings attest to an innovative interpretation of various concepts and commitments central to Marxist thought. This is one of the first works to comprehensively consider his contribution to social and political theory for a student audience. Firstly, the book provides thorough and reliable accounts of the key theses, concepts and commitments that give Che Guevara’s theoretical, and political, orientation its distinctive character. It addresses Guevara’s views on topics such as work, morality in socialism, egalitarianism, pref...