How the mosquito (man) liberated Cuba

Disease is a more efficient killer of armies than man, but military historians tend not to dwell on this fact, for fear of relegating human volition to a secondary role in the outcome of wars. Thus, studies of the Cuban War of Independence from 1895 to 1898 tell of thrilling machete charges and awe-inspiring battleships, but pay insufficient attention to the insects and microbes that really killed the Spanish army and prepared the ground for the liberation of Cuba. This essay argues that the mosquito and yellow fever did most of the work of freeing Cuba from Spanish military occupation. It also tells how the theory of a Cuban physician, Carlos Finlay, helped to liberate the island from yellow fever following the American occupation in 1898. In this way the essay unites two sundered histories that belong together, and then goes on to explain why the medical community ignored Finlay for almost 20 years, just time enough to allow Cubans to found a new nation.     

‘Ending the hegemonic presumption’? Recent writings on US–Cuban relations*

For over fifty years relations between the United States and Cuba have been antagonistic, with each side blaming the other for the continuing impasse. This Caribbean Cold War has seen an unsuccessful armed invasion of Cuba (popularly known as the Bay of Pigs invasion), the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR (the ‘Cuban missile crisis’), and an intensifying series of measures by the US government to reverse the Cuban social and political revolution of the 1960s. Since the early nineteenth century Washington has sought to control Cuba; and the US conditions for relaxing its pressure on present‐day Cuba continue this tradition, itself part of a broader ideology (often short‐handed as the Monroe Doctrine) which sees the western hemisphere as America's legitimate and exclusive ‘sphere of interest’. This article examines a number of recent works dealing both with the US–Cuban relationship, placing this relationship in historical and geopolitical contexts, and with the impact on Cuban society of the economic crisis of the 1990s caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.     

Kennedy's international legacy,fifty years on

This article explores historical assessments of the foreign policy of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated fifty years ago. It traces the evolution of JFK historiography from the uncritical so‐called ‘Camelot’ school to harsh revisionist critiques in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to the current ‘third wave’ of scholarship. The article focuses in particular on new work concerning JFK's handling of the Berlin and Cuba superpower crises, his role in expanding the United States’ involvement in Vietnam (and whether blame for this war can be assigned to him) and larger questions about his approach to the danger of nuclear holocaust and the possibility of defusing Cold War tensions. The conclusion to the article examines his various peace‐seeking initiatives in the months following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suggests that Kennedy may have been turning towards a more critical view of American Cold War politics when he was killed in Dallas in November 1963.     

From Salvation and Impurity to Renunciation: Pilgrim Representations and Cuban Women's Militant Roles

How have the representations of the cinema of political pilgrimage turned the stereotype of Cuban women into one of political sacrifice, that is to say, woman as saviour figure and woman as figure of renunciation? How have political stereotypes defined the kind of behaviour by women that could be part of Communist society? Starting from these questions, this article discusses the beginnings of the imaginary of militant Cuban women and its connections to the revolutionary Cuban imaginary: a symbolical register negotiated between the political Other and Self, that is, between the revolutionary institutions and the Left intellectual sympathisers who from its inception have visited the Cuban Revolution and have been its political and ideological guests. Specifically, I analyse three films of this cinema of political pilgrimage (Realengo 18, Cuba 58', Soy Cuba) as some of the founding productions of the Cuban revolutionary imaginary.     

Material and cultural consumption in Cuba: new reference groups in the new millennium

Reference groups serve as markers for citizen-consumers to determine tastes and preferences about work and material and cultural consumption. These groups have evolved slowly in socialist Cuba, mostly during the post-Soviet era. This paper examines the symbolism, roles, and meanings of three such groups: the Cuban Diaspora, Cuban Gen-Yers or Millennials (survivors), and entrepreneurs. A combination of these groups is changing values about a new consumption taking hold across the island and offers insight into material and cultural consumption.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

Time to Grow Up? Canadian Understandings of Revolutionary Cuba to the Missile Crisis of 1962

The Cuban missile crisis was a moment during the Cold War when rhetoric, brinkmanship, and politics intersected with notions of masculinity, empire and colonization to nearly disastrous ends. The crisis occurred at a moment of transition in Canada in which Canadians were profoundly concerned over the state of Canadian–Cuban relations and Canada’s place in the world. This article examines how previous understandings and preconceptions of “Cuba”—such as feminized and infantilized images of Cuban leader Fidel Castro in political cartoons and editorials in newspapers – influenced how Canadians understood the crisis, their nation and how the Canadian government should interact with other powers. While both negative and positive images of Castro and Cuba were present in Canadian public discussion, Canadians utilized the same imagery to argue that their government should act in its own best interests after the missile crisis.     

Museums in revolution: changing national narratives in revolutionary Cuba between 1959 and 1990

This paper explores the function and role of museums in revolutionary Cuba between 1959 and 1990. Drawing on a variety of hitherto unexplored archives and interviews with bureaucrats of the Cuban heritage field, the paper argues that there is a close relation between museum production, the prevailing narration of nation, internal power struggles within the regime and the changing relation with the USSR. Museums were considered primary tools for historical production and politico-ideological socialisation. These were two fundamental issues for communist regimes, concerned with fixing cultural identity and affirming historical continuity. The paper focuses on the case of the Museum of the Revolution to argue that Cuban museums changed in conjunction with the increasing crypto-colonial relations of subordination to the USSR. In the first, humanist and Universalist phase, museums served to expand culture and spread a nationalist-revolutionary narrative of nation. The second period after 1975 witnessed the institutionalisation and Sovietisation of Cuban museums. This involved their transformation into a device to instil a nationwide homogeneous class-based Marxist–Leninist narrative adapted to Cuba from the Soviet model. This ideological closure of museum production contributed to the ideological and identity-building objectives of the regime.     

Revolutionary archaeology in Cuba

The Revolution of 1959 brought forth changes in the mission, theoretical orientation, and organization of archaeology in Cuba and created a role for, and constraints on, the profession that are unique in the Western Hemisphere. This paper draws upon examples from substantive field and laboratory research to examine the methods and theoretical perspectives of Cuban archaeology since the Revolution, focusing on the period from 1962 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Archaeological practice during the Revolutionary period in Cuba has reflected the aims of the Revolutionary government, the influence of Soviet archaeology, the legacy of pre-Revolutionary approaches in North American archaeology, and the Cuban sense ofpatria.     

对新中国成立后毛泽东战争与和平思想及实践的几点辨析、概述和思考

毛泽东是伟大的思想家、理论家、政治家、军事家、战略家,他关于战争与和平的思想内容十分丰富,其中许多深刻的基本理论(例如有关战争的根源;提高警惕,准备打仗;热爱和平,不怕战争;努力加强国防建设;常规战争与核战争;世界大战是否可以避免;美帝国主义要称霸全球;帝国主义的两重性;要利用世界各种矛盾;坚持和平共处五项原则;支持各国人民反对帝国主义的战争;结成最广泛的统一战线;弱国、小国能够打败强国、大国;第三世界团结起来,等等)今天无疑仍然适用,对这些思想和实践进行总结和继承,既有助于加深对邓小平理论和“三个代表”重要思想关于战争与和平思想的理解,又有助于遵循正确的战略和策略,争取到一个较长时间的国际和平环境和良好的周边环境,全面建设小康社会。     

Remembrance as a Tool for Reflecting a National Identity: A Cuban Punk Approach

This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to assess the use of memory as a tool for reflecting fragments of a national identity which is both quotidian and contemporary. This singular case study is chosen not for their pertinence within Cuban culture, or even within Cuban alternative music, but rather as an exemplar of the assertion that popular music, rather than changing identities, often reflects aspects of identity and how they manifest in the everyday. Porno Para Ricardo are one such point of reflection. However, their remembrances often stray into areas too traumatic or politically admonished to be ‘remembered’ as part of a more rigid revolutionary history. By remembering the cultural (and thus, vicariously, the political) legacy of the Soviet Union within Cuba, and by re-personalising (or personifying) the traumas of mass generational exodus experiences in the early 90s, Porno Para Ricardo both augment the space of collective Cuban memory, and thus identity, but also attempt to reconnect the slabs of Cuban history often cleaved into evental epochs after which a ‘new way of being’ is constructed, as a means to better make sense of, and better reflect, contemporary Cuban identity.     

JFK and the future of global leadership

On 10 June 1963 President John F. Kennedy gave a speech that changed the world. His commencement speech at American University helped to spur the signing of a world‐changing agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States—the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This episode of peacemaking is remarkable for two reasons. First, it arguably helped to save the world, since the nuclear confrontation at that stage of the Cold War was not a ‘stable balance of terror’, as sometimes described, but rather a highly unstable situation that was prone to accidents, misjudgements and potential disasters. Second, this was an episode of statesmanship in which presidential leadership played a crucial role. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy understood that he bore sole responsibility on the US side to find a way back from the brink of nuclear war. He used the ‘peace speech’ to create a novel kind of peace diplomacy, and worked together with his counterpart, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to pull the superpowers back from this precarious brink.     

Museum Collections and Archaic Era Vertebrate Faunal Remains from Cuba

ABSTRACT

Museum collections are an underutilised source of environmental archaeological data. Curated collections often contain faunal and floral remains that can be analysed using new methods and to address various research questions. For example, the broad patterns of Archaic or preceramic subsistence adaptations are not well known for the Caribbean region, and for Cuba in particular, due to the ecological variability among the islands and limited, quantified faunal data from radiocarbon-dated sites. To address these issues, we present quantified vertebrate faunal data and new radiocarbon dates from museum-curated collections from three Cuban sites. Las Obas, La Vega del Palmar, and Los Caracoles are Archaic, dating between roughly 350 BC to AD 630, although Vega del Palmar contains Pre-Arawak Pottery Horizon ceramics. The three assemblages include a diversity of taxa from several habitats, including various species of hutia (Capromyidae). The taxonomy of these rodents varies among the sites as do the proportions of other taxa. In addition to abundant hutia, the sites' occupants exploited an array of fish, birds, reptiles and other mammals, including manatee. We compare the sites faunal assemblages and discuss their ecological significance as well as their place in Cuban prehistory.     

Breaking the Ice: A Burgeoning Post-colonial Debate on France's Historical Amnesia and Contemporary ‘Soul Searching’

This article revisits the reception given to the Cuban Revolution by the French New Left in the 1960s. It does so by describing the dominant currents of the French New Left and the various attractions that the Revolution held for it throughout the decade. The article argues that the reasons for the New Left's continuing interest in Cuba changed during the 1960s in ways that mimicked Cuba's own development. In addition, the article argues that two key concepts dominated the New Left's interest in Cuba. The first was the issue of the Third World, which Cuba represented, whereas the second was the question of the intellectual. The eventual distancing of the French New Left from Cuba was compounded by failure to find a resolution to these definitions.     

Cuba's Cinematic Élan Vital: Cubanidad and Cubanía as Citizenship and Sentiment

This article focuses on the current shifts in expressions of Cuban national identity by considering the articulations of cubanidad and cubanía in recent documentary films from Cuba's Muestra joven. Rather than suggesting a disappearance or deterioration of national identity, these three examples of contemporary Cuban cinema evidence a more fluid, sentiment-based articulation of Cubanness that can be considered the island's élan vital. This analysis of representations of the ongoing transformation of Cuba deploys theories and terms conceptualised by Georg Sorenson in The Transformation of the State: Beyond the Myth of Retreat (2004) in order to posit how cubanidad is aligned with the modes of citizenship (the official), which is a sense of Cubanness defined by a rationality that may be imposed, while cubanía is affined with a sentiment fuelled by intuition (the personal). Thus we propose that just as the Muestra joven embodies the current vacillation and movement of Cuban cinema between citizenship and sentiment, so deMoler (Muestra 2004), Model Town (Muestra 2007) and La Época, el Encanto y Fin de Siglo (Muestra 2000) indicate a process of reinterpretation and rupture in a context of flux instead of rigidity.     

Research Publications by Raymond E. Crist

As metropolitan Miami's population has experienced a radical change in its ethnic composition since Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba in 1959, it has become a second homeland for the United States Cuban-American population. This article documents the ethnic change that has taken place in Miami during the past three decades. As evidence of the emergence of Miami as a homeland in absentia the following topics are discussed: the growth and dispersion of the city's Cubans, Miami as a magnet for Cubans living elsewhere in the U.S., the Hispanic economic enclave that has developed in Miami, the emergence of Cubans as a major political force, the development ofmunicipios in exile in Miami, and the possibilities of the return to Cuba by Cuban Americans if the current communist government were to fall in their island of origin.     

西班牙佛朗哥政府与美古间的秘密接触(1963-1967)

美国与革命后的古巴是意识形态严重对立的一对邻国。自1961年1月断交起,两国政府经常在公开场合表达对对方的敌意。但是,在双方敌意的背后却存在着美古间的秘密接触,特别是在古巴导弹危机爆发后的5年间。在此期间,真正获得美古两国政府信任、促成双方对话的是西班牙佛朗哥政府。西班牙与美古间长期维持的特殊关系,西班牙外交官高超的外交技巧,西班牙在经济腾飞后想要恢复帝国荣光的强烈心愿,是西班牙成功地充当美古中间人的重要原因。这一案例体现出前宗主国在前殖民地国家对外交往中所扮演的特殊角色。     

An Army of Educators: Gender,Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

The conventional scholarly narrative of gender in post‐revolutionary Cuba is that the revolutionary government prevented the emergence of an expressly feminist movement by addressing women's basic needs and simultaneously eliminating autonomous space for female organising. Recent scholarship has increasingly considered women's participation in revolutions in order to understand women's roles in post‐revolutionary societies. Looking beyond armed insurrection for instances of female participation in revolution, this article considers women's roles in the Cuban Literacy Campaign. An analysis of the testimonies of female former volunteer teachers and of the official rhetoric and content of the campaign suggests that the broader narrative of cooption, while certainly accurate overall, threatens to obscure instances in which women did challenge traditional gender norms in meaningful ways. This paper argues that the Cuban Literacy Campaign and the participation of women in that campaign significantly impacted Cuban patriarchal culture at a crucial moment of consolidation for the revolutionary regime. In other words, though the male‐led revolution did not give women the space to organise against patriarchy, by actively participating in the revolution, women did help change the nature of Cuban patriarchy.     

Women and children,war and peace: political agency in time of conflict

The four books under review focus on different aspects of war and conflict, but they all make it clear that women and children are more than their victims. They can be, and often are, active participants in all dimensions of conflict, from taking up arms to working for peace. While all four books paint an appropriately grim picture of war and its impact, there is also some optimism to be found in the resilience shown by women and children as they face the brutality of war and often actively seek to work for peace. Three of the books examine women's involvement in conflict, war, peace and peacemaking, and the aftermath of these events, albeit in very different ways—although all view women as active participants in the process rather than as victims. The fourth book included in this article, Children and global conflict, is not only relevant to the discussion, but also provides another important lens through which we can examine issues of conflict, war and peace. This review article provides insight into the contrition made to the field by these recent books individually, as well as when considered as parts of a whole.     

Reading the Cuban revolution from Bogotá, 1957–62

This article traces the evolution of Colombian responses to the early Cuban revolution. For the governing Liberal Party in particular, developments in Cuba only gradually came to be read in terms of the Cold War. Instead, Colombians primarily interpreted the revolution through the lens of their own recent post-authoritarian transition, as well as a commitment to inter-American diplomacy. Using Colombian, US, and UK government as well as press sources, the article challenges recent historiography on the Cold War in Latin America, to demonstrate how the Cold War was but one reading of Latin American politics in the era of the Cuban revolution.