The name "Salicornietum perennis" ("sensu lato") and global nomenclatural issues

This chapter closely examines the development of Cuban migrant communities in three Mexican cities: Veracruz, Merida, Mexico City and compares them to Cuban communities established in the United States. Examining migratory patterns, economy, politics, race, culture and interstate and cross regional connections, this chapter posits that shifting our focus away from the United States and centering on Mexico allows us to truly appreciate the breadth and scope of the nineteenth-century Cuban Diaspora.

Blogs have become a communicative alternative for Cuban civil society in recent years. Cuban communities, inside and outside the island, are characterized by substantial ideological differences and economic gaps that highlight the challenges for consensus building and collective action in the country’s politics. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), however, are gradually facilitating the creation of spaces outside the control of the state for the exchange of ideas about the present and future of the nation. Through content analysis and qualitative interpretation, we undertake a case study of the most renowned Cuban blog, ‘Generación Y’, to evaluate users’ participation, the content they generate for the site, and the nature of debates taking place within it. Our findings show that while this blog opens an unprecedented opportunity for Cubans to engage in relatively unrestricted political dialogue, its users tend to favour expressive participation and antagonistic exchanges over the rational deliberations associated with traditional conceptualizations of the notion of the public sphere.

The relationship between political efficacy and self-rated health: An analysis of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban subgroups compared to non-Latinx whites in the United States

It is frequently noted that Cubans living in Miami are successful because they benefit from the formation of an enclave economy. Using the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata, this study broadens the examination beyond Miami to address the question of why Cubans living elsewhere have higher earnings than those in Miami. Specifically, I address the question of whether there is a relationship between Cuban ethnic enclave participation and Cuban income. Findings indicate that Cubans in Miami have the lowest personal income. Cubans living in areas with the lowest Cuban populations have the highest incomes. These findings are evidence against the enclave economy hypothesis.

Cuban-Americans are beginning to understand their long-standing roots and traditions in the United States that reach back over a century prior to 1959. This is the first book-length confirmation of those beginnings, and its places the Cuban hero and revolutionary thinker Jose Marti within the political and socioeconomic realities of the Cuban communities in the United States of that era. By clarifying Marti’s relationship with those communities, Gerald E. Poyo provides a detailed portrait of the exile centers and their role in the growth and consolidation of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism. Poyo differentiates between the development of nationalist sentiment among liberal elites and popular groups and reveals how these distinct strains influenced the thought and conduct of Marti and the successful Cuban revolution of the 1890s.

While many scholars have examined the idea of consumption preferences, also known as taste, in capitalist contexts, they have not explored how taste manifests in socialist or communist societies. In this case study, we query the ways in which two Cuban communities express taste through food choices and consumption patterns. We find that identity influences preferences less than the prevailing discourse around Cuban cuisine suggests. In addition, patterns among subjects’ responses speak to the ways in which local custom and larger structural forces intersect in respondents' lives. Instead of simply reflecting the notion of class differentiation through consumption, our subjects reveal the significance of gender roles and individual relationships to food production in their discussions of preferences. Thus, this study demonstrates that, while food preferences appear in this resource-constrained context, taste and actuality do not always align.

Cet article aborde les principales phases de la migration cubaine vers les Etats-Unis au XXème siècle, spécialement après 1959, et retrace ses origines historiques au XIXème siècle. L’auteur insiste sur l’évolution des caractéristiques socio-économiques des émigrés ainsi que sur leur répartition spatiale aux Etats-Unis. Il montre que les émigrés sont devenus, au cours des quatre dernières décennies, de plus en plus représentatifs de la société cubaine, du point de vue des revenus, de l’emploi et de l’instruction, mais pas en ce qui concerne la race ou la couleur et la région d’origine : ils sont prioritairement blancs et urbains. La seconde partie de cet essai analyse les différences et similitudes entre le mode d’incorporation des Cubains à Miami, West New York-Union City, San Juan et d’autres villes. En particulier, l’auteur estime que c’est une erreur que de considérer l’enclave ethnique de Miami comme un modèle de l’expérience de tous les Cubains en exil. La dernière partie du travail examine brièvement le profil socioéconomique de la population cubaine aux Etats-Unis pour conclure que les images stéréotypées de son succès au plan matériel ne trouve guère confirmation dans la recherche académique. Au contraire, les cubain-américains font face à plusieurs défis communs à d’autres immigrants récents aux Etats-Unis et ailleurs. Parmi ces défis, il y a la question de l’identité culturelle hybride, laquelle maintient des liaisons transnationales entre le pays natal et le pays d’adoption.

The building of bridges between Cuba and the US has been ongoing for a long time, not least by artists. Reconciliation work preceding the commencement of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US encompasses, for example, novelist Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997), and King of Cuba (2013). I argue that these novels take on the task of lessening polarizations with the aspiration of furthering reconciliation processes through concentrating on the divisiveness between families and politics within the Cuban communities, focusing on the island Cubans and the US Cuban diaspora. García writes conflict to end conflict and this is, I claim, her strongest contribution to the reconciliation processes. In the last part of the article I briefly discuss how I use the concept of translation to theorize the relationship between fiction and reality.

Reviewed by: U. S. Protestant Missions in Cuba. From Independence to Castro Jeffrey Cox Jason M. Yaremko, U. S. Protestant Missions in Cuba. From Independence to Castro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000) In some parts of the world Christian missionaries arrived before the political and commercial invasions of the imperial powers. In Cuba, American missionaries conducted their ecclesiastical invasion on the heels of the military intervention known in America as the Spanish-American War. Jason Yaremko’s study of Methodist, Baptist and Quaker missionaries in eastern Cuba is a sustained unmasking of the ongoing imperial nature of this particular mission enterprise in the first half of the twentieth century. Eastern Cuba had been neglected by Spanish imperial rulers and the closely allied Roman Catholic Church alike. In the early twentieth century it became the site of large scale economic exploitation by American agricultural corporations, who controlled more than 2/3 of Cuba’s sugar production by the early 1920s. American missionaries in this region came from diverse denominational backgrounds, ranging from the avowed segregationists of the Southern Methodist Church to the egalitarian pacifists of the orthodox branch of Quakerism. They shared, however, a mental outlook rooted in small town and small city America at a time of growing self-confidence and enthusiasm for overseas influence, especially in relationship to the Caribbean. It is not surprising to discover from Yaremko’s work that missionaries were comfortable with both large and small scale capitalism, tolerant of racial and class stratification, prone to Anglo-American stereotypes about the work habits and moral character of the “Latin” races, sympathetic to employers and governing officials as long as they avoided outrageous brutality, and extremely hostile to the Roman Catholic Church. Yaremko documents the extent to which missionary relationships went beyond mere sympathy with exploitative corporations such as United Fruit, and extended to a client patron relationship between mission and corporation. Some missionaries even became employers and investors on their own, leading to highly publicized and embarrassing scandals within the missions. The documentation of entanglements between the religious, economic, military and political dimensions of imperialism is always worthwhile, especially in the case of missionaries who frequently denied that they were imperialists. Something is missing from Yaremko’s analysis, however. It is clear from his story that many Cuban congregations were composed of very poor people, many of them Afro-Cuban. In the logic of Yaremko’s argument, these poor Protestants were active collaborators in their own oppression. At one point he even summarizes the motives of those missionaries who worked hard to recruit Haitian and Jamaican migrants workers as “making more reliable laborers.” These particular missionaries were not liberation theologians committed to the interests of the poor, and they were no doubt entirely incapable of even imagining what United Fruit or Coca Cola would look like if transformed into worker-owned cooperatives. The missionary relationship to the people of Cuba, however, was a complex one that can hardly be summarized as a desire to turn them into reliable cogs in the machinery of global capitalism. Missionaries were genuinely committed to “Cubanization” of their churches, and some of them participated in experiments to promote self-government at considerable risk to their own highly-esteemed professional prerogatives. Some missionaries were people of considerable importance in the Cuban communities that they fostered, promoted, and nurtured; others showed genuine concern for the spiritual and physical well-being of their very poor neighbors. Yaremko mentions frequently the contradictions between the missionary commitment to American cultural imperialism and their self-professed love and concern for the people of Cuba, but consistently dismisses the latter as inconsequential. After reading this book no one could doubt that there were large elements of sheer hypocrisy in the failure of missionaries to live up to their own principles, but the contradictions that he identifies deserve a more sustained treatment if we are to understand the relationship between religion and empire. Jeffrey Cox University of Iowa Copyright © 2001, Jeffrey Cox and The Johns Hopkins University Press

THIS PAPER RETHINKS the concept of diaspara by focusing on the theoretical and historical applications of the term. From early uses in jewish contexts to more recent reconceptualizations of African peoples in the Americas, the term diaspora refers to dispersal and recreation of cultures and identities (Cohen 1997). By paying close attention to the historical processes involved in re-establishing African identities in the Americas, this work challenges static notions of diaspora in terms of the flux of peoples, cultural production, and political movements between the African diaspora and “home” cultures.

Of all the major ethnic groups making up metropolitan Miami's population, Cubans have pride of place, not only because of their demographic dominance, but also because they played a pivotal role in the area's economic and social transformation. However, beginning in the 1980s, things took a rather different turn for the Cuban population of the United States. By 2010, its average income had descended below that of other Latin American groups and its poverty rate exceeded by a significant margin the national average. This chapter discusses how the Cuban population of Miami became divided into two distinct blocs: older Cubans, the creators of the business enclave and their American-born children, on the one hand, and Mariel and post-Mariel arrivals and their offspring, on the other. Like all urban phenomena, this bifurcation had a spatial dimension. This bifurcation also took place silently and without major confrontations between the two Cuban communities.

The Cuban Communities in the U.S., 1900-1958

Does exposure to a mass migration event cause citizens to vote against incumbents? I offer an answer to this question by studying one of the largest acute periods of migration in the US, the case of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift during which roughly 125,000 Cubans fled to South Florida. I estimate the change in support for Republican presidential candidates in Miami using the synthetic control method and fixed effects regressions with a panel of county-level and archival precinct-level election results. I find that, while Miami voters dramatically increased their support of the Republican candidate in 1980, this shift was not a local consequence of the Boatlift. Instead, the evidence suggests that Cuban support for Reagan was not a local Miami response to the Boatlift—it happened in Cuban communities throughout the US—but it was most noticeable in Miami because Miami had the largest Cuban population in the US even before the Boatlift. I also present evidence that this change in Cuban voting may have been specific to Reagan and not a broader shift against incumbents or toward Republicans. These findings suggest that, in this case, direct exposure to migration did not lead citizens to dramatically change their voting behavior.

“Salsa con Afro”: Remembering and Reenacting Afro-Cuban Roots in the Global Cuban and Latin Dance Communities

In late 2014, I received an invitation from MEDICC (Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba), a nonprofit organization founded in 1997 that works to enhance cooperation among the US, Cuban, and global health communities through its programs, to be part of a delegation of 13 editors of various US medical journals to visit Cuba in February 2015. I jumped at the invitation, and it proved to be a busy, educational, and enjoyable 7 days.