Cuban Miami on the Air: Narratives of Cubanía

Radio has been a fundamental aspect of Cuban culture on and off the island since the first broadcast in Havana in 1922. When Cubans fled the island after the revolution of 1959 for the USA, particularly Miami, radio quickly became a vital medium for navigating a new country and for consolidating a Cuban exile identity. Politically, radio in Miami has been an effective means for articulating hardline exile politics. But with generational turnover and increasingly moderate stances on Cuba by more recent arrivals and US-born Cuban Americans, how is radio changing? How are narratives of what constitutes cubanía – Cubanness – shifting in an increasingly diverse Cuban Miami? This article takes up these questions through an examination of an immensely popular morning program that aired in 2009 in southern Florida called the Enrique y Joe Show. I examine how the Enrique y Joe Show, produced and performed by US-born Cuban Americans, utilized a form of irreverent Cuban humor called choteo to represent and satirize the hardline Cuban exile politics that have been dominant on Miami's radio waves for decades. Ultimately, their performances deploy choteo to articulate Cuban American identity divorced from a particular political orthodoxy. The coda reflects on changes in Miami's radio landscape since 2009.     

An Introduction to Navajo Sacred Places

This study provides a socioeconomic profile of the Cuban American population. As a means of reference, Cuban Americans are compared: (1) to the entire Hispanic population and (2) to the total population of the United States. In addition, Cubans living in Miami, Florida are compared to those living in Union City-West New York, New Jersey. Together, these two urban concentrations comprise approximately 75% of the entire Cuban American population. Although the latest wave of 130,000 immigrants from Mariel, Cuba are not included in the data used in this study, generalizations are made regarding their characteristics and probable impact on Miami, based on available preliminary information     

The model of ethnic democracy: Response to Danel

This is a response to Adam Danel's critique of my model of ethnic democracy. Danel argues that the model fails as an ideal type and as a comparative tool because ethnic democracy does not exist anywhere. I show, however, that there are indeed quite a few cases of ethnic democracy, although some are partial and some historical, including Estonia, Latvia, Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1972, Macedonia from 1991 to 2001, interwar Poland, Slovakia, and Malaysia. Danel does not address the real functions of the model as a theory of the emergence and stability of ethnic democracy and as a conceptual scheme for the comparative study of ethnic democracies. The theory accounts for the developments of ethnic democracy in these states and for the conditions for its success and failure. Danel also tries to show that Israel is a Western liberal democracy by overstressing its liberal traits and the non-liberal characteristics of Western democracies. I argue that Israel's ideology, design, policies, and practices as the homeland of the Jewish people, most of whom are not its citizens, and as the “property” of the Israeli-Jewish majority, means that it has a second-rate ethnic democracy and as a state and society does not qualify as Western.     

Jewish Metropolitan Homelands

This article establishes three criteria for the identification of an ethnic homeland. First, the ethnic group in question must recognize that a particular area has a special significance for itself; it must feel "at home" in such an area. Second, the American public in general must recognize that a particular area holds special significance for a particular group. Third, the imprint of the ethnic group in question should be visible on the landscape. The article then argues that three metropolitan areas in the United States are ethnic Jewish homelands: the New York metropolitan area, with the Lower East Side as its historical heart; South Florida, with Miami Beach as its historical heart; and southern California, with Boyle Heights as its historical heart. In each of the three cases, the historical heart is no longer the principal area of Jewish settlement in the metropolitan area.     

Six decades of ethnic minority population change in China

ABSTRACT

China’s 55 non-Han ethnic minority groups were at least in part politically and institutionally ‘invented’ by China’s ethnic classification project, and also through the effects of the system of continuous population census. This paper investigates population change of the non-Han ethnic minorities (NHEMs) over the past six decades. The number of NHEMs as a whole tripled from 1953 to 2010. However, growth has differed among individual groups and in different time periods. The population of some groups has fluctuated while that of others has grown steadily, regardless of the size of the groups. As a whole, since 2000 the growth rate of NHEMs has been lower than that of the Han Chinese, and the population of 13 NHEM groups has begun to decline. A growing number of people belonging to ethnic minorities have switched their ethnic identities to Han. This has especially been the case for NHEM youth. The change in ethnic minority populations has been influenced by dynamic interactions among demographic factors, ethnic identification as well as political, economic and policy changes.     

Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

EPIDEMICS AND CONTAINMENT: Cuba and the HIV/AIDS epidemic

The Cuban response to a new and little understood disease, HIV/AIDS, was swift. A ban on imported blood was followed by mass testing of HIV antibodies, beginning with Cubans who had travelled abroad. In 1986, a sanatorium – ‘Los Cocos’ – was opened to treat Cuban soldiers who had returned with AIDS from Angola. Soon after, Cubans who had never left the country began testing HIV positive, most of whom were gay and bisexual. ‘Los Cocos’ was neither a hospital nor a prison. The campus was large, and duplex apartments and sports areas were built. The director, Dr Jorge Perez Avila, an infectious disease expert, stepped in as the Dr Fauci of Cuba. His goal was to continue his research on AIDS while simultaneously ensuring that the sanatorium formed a safe refuge for patients while awaiting antivirus medicines. Through his work, Dr Perez managed to transform the sanatorium into a place where sex and sexual differences were accepted, and where a gay community could emerge to produce theatre, arts and sex education for Cuba's public schools. In 1994, the sanatorium became a voluntary institution and many of the patients opted to remain.     

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.     

Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.     

Between nation and state: `fractured' regionalism among Palestinian-Arabs in Israel

Theories of nationalism have often overlooked variations in ethnic spatial settings, and have too easily subsumed nation and state. But nationalism surfaces in a variety of dynamic forms, such as among homeland ethnic minorities `trapped' within states controlled by others. In such cases `ethnoregional' identities often emerge, combining ethnonational and civic bases of identity with attachment and confinement to specific places or territories. Ethnoregional movements denote spatial and political entities which mobilise for rights, resources and political restructuring within their states. This is the case in the Israeli Jewish `ethnocracy', where an oppressed Palestinian-Arab minority resides in stable but confined enclaves which make up an Arab `fractured' region. The spatial, socioeconomic and political characteristics of the Arab struggle in Israel provide early signs for the emergence of an ethnoregional movement. This movement is creating a new collective identity, situated between Palestinian nation and Jewish nation-state. The ethnoregional interpretation challenges existing accounts which perceive the minority as either politicising or radicalising, and points to a likely Arab struggle for autonomy, equality and the de-Zionisation of Israel. Arab mobilisation also resembles other ethno-regional movements, whose persistent struggles expose embedded contradictions in the global `nation-state' order.     

Estonian Swedish Ethnic Survival – Examples from Nuckö in the Interwar Period

Abstract

A long-term perspective is important in studies of ethnic groups and their opportunities for survival. This case study deals with the Swedish population in Nuckö (Noarootsi), Estonia, during the interwar period. Even though the Swedish population declined as a whole, some villages succeeded in maintaining their Swedish affiliation. Settlement patterns and varying opportunities to own land are important factors behind these differences. The Estonian–Swedish cultural awakening in the interwar period made it easier for people to show their Swedish ethnic identity more openly. Inhabitants in villages that already at the end of the nineteenth century had a large proportion of Estonians in their population, reacted more positively to the state's request that people change their surname as part of the assimilation policy of the 1930s. Even though people in some villages chose to register a change in ethnic status, a change of surname, and even changed their use of language, they may nonetheless have remained committed to their former Swedish ethnicity on a private level. It is crucial to combine different kinds of data, such as church records, censuses and interviews, in order to illustrate the complexities of ethnic identity from a variety of different angles.     

Who is the rogue? Discourse,power and spatial politics in post-war Sri Lanka

This article analyses ethnic antagonisms and related political discourses in Sri Lanka after the ceasefire agreement in 2002 using the Derridean notion of vouyou (rogue) and Agamben's concept of state of exception. In all three ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, we can observe discourses on ethnicity, space and territories that create fictions of ethnic homogeneity and purity based on a social construct of the ethnic other as “rogue”. Roguishness is linked with issues of territorial control, political justice and virtual or real “rogue states”. It is also pertinent in the justification of violence and the differentiation of just(ified) and unjust(ified), roguish violence and the rivalry over sovereignty. I will argue that these “rogue others” are needed to legitimize a state of exception where force stands out-of-the-law, but needs to be justified as being within the law, since the state of exception is part of a project leading to an ideal state-to-come. This ideal state-to-come to is to be a “pure” state-to-come, in the form of the “pure” Singhalese–Buddhist state, the Tamil homeland, and more recently, the Muslim homeland as expression of distinct Muslimness. Derrida argues that identifying “rogues” is rationalizing and covering deeper rooted fears. In Sri Lanka, the rogue rationale reveals deeper lying anxieties that link security with ethnic homogeneity and the ethnic self and insecurity with multi-ethnicity and the ethnic other. The ethnic other is a force preventing the (ethnically) pure state-to-come to come into being.     

The New Mexico-Centered Hispano Homeland

Like mexicano for Mexican, Hispano is a gender-neutral term that has been used increasingly since the 1960s as a substitute for the more cumbersome Spanish American. In their New Mexico-centered homeland, Hispanos adjusted to the natural environment, stamped it with their culture, and from both the natural environment and the cultural landscape created a sense of place or a homeland identity. The word in Spanish that comes closest to capturing the Hispanos' concept of their homeland is patria, which means fatherland.     

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.     

Lobbying after 9/11: Policy Regime Emergence and Interest Group Mobilization

Does the emergence of a new boundary‐spanning policy regime shift the focus of well‐established organized interests, or does it mobilize new ones? In this article, I show that interest groups with a presence in Washington before 9/11 rapidly—but temporarily—shift their attention to the homeland security issues. Established groups' entrenchment in antecedent subsystems appears to buffer against widespread policy disruption and interest upheaval. However, a new set of previously latent groups opportunistically mobilizes after the regime is institutionalized. Newly mobilized groups replace those that retreat back to the regime's antecedent subsystems. Though the policy regime fails to resolve the jurisdictional turf conflicts that triggered its creation, the institutionalization of homeland security generates its own original, distinct government demand for lobbying. Interests that previously had no business in Washington before 9/11 took advantage of the new opportunities the regime offered without supplanting interests established long before the Department of Homeland Security and its congressional committees existed.     

Normalizing US–Cuba relations: escaping the shackles of the past

President Barack Obama explained his historic reversal of half a century of US antagonism towards Cuba as necessary because of the failure of the policy of hostility pursued by his ten predecessors. But the old policy's failure was not new, and thus was not, in itself, an adequate explanation for the dramatic shift. This article uses theories of agenda‐setting, policy failure and policy change to explain the persistence of the US policy of hostility from 1959 to 2014 and the policy change announced by President Barack Obama in December 2014. Four structural factors account for the continuity in policy and, as a result of gradual changes in those factors, the eventual policy shift. They are: the security threat Cuba posed to the United States during the Cold War; the political influence of the Cuban American community; the diplomatic cost to Washington, especially in Latin America, of maintaining the status quo; and domestic changes under way in Cuba.     

Nation-Building and the Linguistic Situation in Upper Silesia

Language became the basis of nation-building in Central Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the same period Czech, German and Polish nationalists had contested Upper Silesia as a multilingual region before the nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland took over this role. In the first half of the twentieth century, this land was divided and redivided among these nation-states. Each change entailed an alteration in language policies aimed at ennationalising Upper Silesia's inhabitants into one nation or another. Standard national language being the yardstick of nationality, the local non-standard language forms were earmarked for eradication because they could spur further emergence of Upper Silesia's ethnic groups or serve as a springboard for new nationalism(s). The Central European strain of ethnic nationalism steeped in language clashed with other loci of identity such as religion, the monarch or state. Sometimes this helped ethnic groups to survive despite ennationalising pressure exerted by the established nation-states. Officially, during the communist period, Warsaw managed to homogenise Upper Silesia into an indistinguishable part of the Polish nation-states. After 1989 it proved an illusion, as Upper Silesia seems to be the most ethnically and nationally diversified region in post-communist Poland.     

Geographic Aspects of Population Aging in the Russian Federation

An American demographer specializing in the former USSR and Russia examines the demographic aspects of aging and the age structure of Russia's population across its regions, covering urban versus rural areas, and ethnic homelands versus non-ethnic (Russian) regions. The paper also assesses the implications of aging for Russia's pension and electoral systems, by examining regional differences in the real value of pensions and the emergence of a rather durable, conservative "red belt" strongly correlated with older, more agrarian, and rural populations. A final section examines the future of aging in Russia using recent population projections by Goskomstat Rossii demographers. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J10, J11, J14. 10 figures, 2 tables, 39 references.     

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.     

Australia and the rise of India

Australia is at risk of being left behind by the pace of India's emergence as a regional and global power and its lack of engagement with India during this emergence. The Rudd Labor government is developing a framework which may make Australia a significant partner with India. There is the potential for a thoroughgoing engagement of interests and ideals in proposals Australia has put forward in three areas. Australia's vision of an Asia Pacific Community, with cooperation as its habitual operating principle, and with a membership that includes India and the USA as well as China and Japan, fills a multilateral gap. Secondly, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament may provide a global framework assisting the development of Australian and Indian initiatives in the controlling and winding back of nuclear proliferation. Thirdly, Australia's national carbon pollution reduction program is intended to demonstrate international leadership and engagement in climate change, and opens the prospect for Australia of a substantial bilateral partnership with India (and others) to advance common interests around climate change. Australia, while emphasising its close relationship with the USA, is preparing to live in a region where the USA will, over time, be less influential as its relative power declines. As other great powers rise, Australia can actively pursue a hedging strategy to diversify its dependencies, and develop a much deeper engagement with that other emerging Asian giant.