Cuban Cultural Heritage

by Pablo Alonso González

Author	: Pablo Alonso González
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 0
Release	: 2018
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 9780813056630

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Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso Gonz lez illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes. Unveiling the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso Gonz lez delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key issues such as Cuba's cultural and political relationships with Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third World countries; the complexities of Cuba's status as a postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed look at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist states.

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

by Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate

Author	: Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate
Publisher	: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages	: 214
Release	: 2005-11-16
Genre	: Literary Criticism
ISBN	: 0807876283

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Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), an upper-class white Cuban intellectual, spent many years traveling through Cuba collecting oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is commonly viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who initiated the study of Afro-Cubans and the concept of transculturation. Here, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this perspective, proposing that Cabrera's work offers an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba articulated by Ortiz and others. Rodriguez-Mangual examines Cabrera's ethnographic essays and short stories in context. By blurring fact and fiction, anthropology and literature, Cabrera defied the scientific discourse used by other anthropologists. She wrote of Afro-Cubans not as objects but as subjects, and in her writings, whiteness, instead of blackness, is gazed upon as the "other." As Rodriguez-Mangual demonstrates, Cabrera rewrote the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, calling into question the empirical basis of anthropology and placing Afro-Cuban contributions at the center of the literature that describes the Cuban nation and its national identity.

Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

by Ada Ferrer

Author	: Ada Ferrer
Publisher	: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages	: 436
Release	: 2021-09-07
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1501154575

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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.

Art in Cuba

by

Author	:
Publisher	: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages	: 0
Release	: 2022-02-01
Genre	: Art
ISBN	: 2080265938

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A panoramic exploration of Cuba's extraordinary art world, including exclusive interviews with thirty-five of the island's most influential artists and photography by Camillo Guevara. Retracing the vibrant history of Cuban art from 1900 onwards, this book provides an overview of Cuban cultural and artistic development across a number of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installations, and the visual arts. Together, long-time friends and authors Gilbert Brownstone and Camillo Guevara visited and interviewed Cuba's thirty-five most important and internationally acclaimed visual artists, who talk openly about their education, influences, and the role of art in Cuba. Art has always been at the heart of the Cuban cultural identity, and the island is home to major artists across the spectrum of artistic disciplines. Yet while culture thrived both in the provinces and in Havana throughout the twentieth century, it was with the advent of the revolution and rise of Fidel Castro that free education and widespread access to the arts became top priorities, giving the underprivileged access to the artistic realm that had once been a domain of the elite. Both an invitation into the world of the dynamic Caribbean island and an overview of the Cuban artistic heritage, this book is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in contemporary art and culture.

Soviet Influence on Cuban Culture, 1961–1987

by Isabel Story

Author	: Isabel Story
Publisher	: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages	: 247
Release	: 2019-12-04
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1498580122

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This book examines the ways in which the Cuban-Soviet relationship was expressed in the cultural sphere between 1961 and 1987. It specifically focuses on the theater and the visual arts to analyze the ways in which the culture became a means of asserting the Cuban Revolution’s independence.

Cuban Festivals

by Judith Bettelheim

Author	: Judith Bettelheim
Publisher	: Markus Wiener Publishers
Total Pages	: 254
Release	: 2001
Genre	: Performing Arts
ISBN	:

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This work describes how, in Brazil, Catholic priests and the colonial government as early as 1573 allowed and encouraged the African slaves to celebrate Epiphany and the Festival of the Three Kings.

Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina García

Author	: Cristina García
Publisher	: Ballantine Books
Total Pages	: 274
Release	: 2011-06-08
Genre	: Fiction
ISBN	: 0307798003

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“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post

The Light Inside

by David H. Brown

Author	: David H. Brown
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 467
Release	: 2019-08-15
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1000008185

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Originally published in 2003, The Light Inside is a ground-breaking study of an Afro-Cuban secret society, its sacred arts, and their role in modern Cuban cultural history. Enslaved Africans and creoles developed the Abakuá Society, a system of men’s fraternal lodges, in urban Cuba beginnings in 1836. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the country, the book’s novel approach builds on close readings of dazzling Abakuá altars, chalk-drawn signs, and hooded masquerades. It looks at the art history of Abakuá altars, not only tracing changing styles but also how they evolve through cycles of tradition and renovation. The Light Inside reflects the essence of the artists’ creativity and experience: through adornment, altars project the powerful spirituality of Abakuá practice, an aesthetic strategy. The book also traces a biography of Abakuá objects – their shifting forms and meanings – as they participated in successive periods of Cuban cultural history. The book constructs close rhetorical and visual analyses of changing representations of the Abakuá, spanning nineteenth-century arts and letters, modern ethnographic texts, museum displays, paintings, and late twentieth century commercial kitsch. This interdisciplinary work combines art history, African Diaspora, cultural studies and cultural anthropology with Latin American.

Cuban Cultural Heritage

by Pablo Alonso González

Author	: Pablo Alonso González
Publisher	: University Press of Florida
Total Pages	: 308
Release	: 2023-01-23
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 0813072697

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The role of cultural heritage and museums in constructing national identity in postcolonial Cuba During Fidel Castro's rule, Cuban revolutionaries coopted and reinterpreted the previous bourgeois national narrative of Cuba, aligning it with revolutionary ideology through the use of heritage and public symbols. By changing uses of the past in the present, they were able to shift ideologies, power relations, epistemological conceptions, and economic contexts into the Cuba we know today. Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes. Unveiling the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso González delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key issues such as Cuba's cultural and political relationships with Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third World countries; the complexities of Cuba's status as a postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed look at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist states. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.