Cuban Woman Research Articles

Gendering the revolution: Bohemia, power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, 1960–85

This article presents a gender analysis of power and culture in post-revolutionary Cuba, using Bohemia magazine as a source. It argues that despite the relative paucity of historical research on the subject, gender was integral to the identity, legitimacy and popularity of the Cuban Revolution. This article examines Bohemia as a communicatory tool and a site of dissemination and contestation to demonstrate how the Cuban Revolution both endorsed and criticised the cultural ideals it inherited. Bohemia elucidates a dynamic between grassroots enthusiasm, institutional mobilisation and popular disenchantment, whereby gender discourse functioned to encourage and regulate behaviour. The article first focuses on the construction of national identity through historical narratives in Bohemia, exploring the uses of José Martí and Mariana Grajales to create an ambiguous discourse framing behaviour, both domestically and internationally. It then shifts to the discursive construction of the individual Cuban woman, analysing the multiple contentious identities that existed in this post-revolutionary cultural framework, using this incongruity to evidence fundamental shortcomings in the revolution’s approach. The final section bridges the national and the individual to understand how these discursive frameworks were used to encourage female participation in the workplace, in political organisations and social campaigns. This analysis also highlights that the central dissonance within the revolutionary project’s cultural framework prevented the realisation of gender equality. This article therefore argues that a gender analysis is integral to understanding the nature, legitimacy and longevity of the Cuban Revolution on both a national and international level.

Traveling tropes: Race, reconstruction, and “Southern” redemption in The Story of Evangelina Cisneros

ABSTRACT This essay considers the entanglement of race, gender, and imperialism in U.S. discourse on Evangelina Cisneros, a white Cuban woman imprisoned in a Havana jail during her country’s final War for Independence from Spain (1895–1898). I argue that, an event historically tied to the colony’s abolition of slavery, Cuban Independence in writings about Cisneros becomes discursively imbricated with the reconsolidation of white supremacy in the U.S. South following the Civil War. The study establishes a dialogue between U.S. discourse on the events published in the late 1890s – the articles on the affair that appeared in The New York Journal and the multi-authored book The Story of Evangelina Cisneros (1897) – and Southern white supremacist author Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s Trilogy of Reconstruction (1902–1907) in order to explore the ways in which the Evangelina Cisneros text network mobilizes racial and gender paradigms typically associated with post-Reconstruction Southern “Redeemer” thinking.

Editorial Comment: Minor Asias

Editorial Comment: Minor Asias Sean Metzger September 2017, dusk: a black woman, hair sculpted into a high coronet on her head with an eye mask of caked white powder and a shimmery navy blue, floor-length dress with a high stand collar, entered the inner courtyard of the Pico House, a historical landmark and once the most lavish nineteenth-century hotel in what is now downtown Los Angeles.1 Constructed at the behest of Pío de Jesús Pico, a businessman who was also the last Mexican governor of Alta California, the Pico House is now a historic monument that reminds visitors of the complicated colonial dynamics that shaped the history of the state. It also stands near the site where a group of Chinese migrants had been lynched in 1871 during one of the city’s periods of civil disorder. The building thus marks a crossroads, an intersection where racial politics have eventuated across time. On this particular evening, the woman in question, visual artist and performer María Magdalena Campos-Pons, activated this location as a site of memory.2 However, the historian Pierre Nora, who coined the term lieux de mémoire, tends to privilege the national in his writings, and Campos-Pons shifted consideration away from that rubric. She evoked instead the legacies of the coolie network that once linked California, China, and Cuba. Using a stalk of sugar cane to untangle strips of cobalt-colored cloth bundled together (see the back cover of this issue), she incanted several phrases while engaging in slow, seemingly ritualistic movements. Eventually, Campos-Pons offered several gifts to the audience standing before her. A Cuban woman of Chinese and Nigerian descent, Campos-Pons used cane to evoke the plantation system that brought different sets of her ancestors across the Atlantic or the Pacific respectively to the Americas. Many people in the audience could also point to such conjunctions among their kin, as several of us could trace genealogies to the labor attendant to and surrounding the cultivation of sugar.3 As anthropologist Anna Tsing has written, globalization is a history of social projects that might be traced through the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” that might “give grip to universal aspirations.”4 In this case, the performance referenced the harvesting and shipping of sugary substances [End Page xiii] now and in the past: the manufacture of a global sweet tooth on the backs of African and Asian laborers.5 Campos-Pons complicated the site in which she moved, suggesting how it might have been transected by flows of people and goods that the official narratives of Pico House did not highlight in the colonial archive they detailed. By conducting this performative opening for the “Circles and Circuits II: Contemporary Chinese Caribbean Art” exhibition with an embodied repertoire that supplemented dominant histories, Campos-Pons identified and helped to construct a community that included a number of scholars, artists, patrons, and spectators invested in the residue of cultural contact across and beyond the Antillean archipelago. Indeed, the artwork and those who produced and/or commented on it addressed questions about Chinese flows in and through the Caribbean from a number of different perspectives: insular (analyzing an individual island or a comparison of islands); archipelagic (following Édouard Glissant’s theorization of rélation and its reverberations in his contemporaries as well as more recent turns); diasporic; and hemispheric.6 All of these ways of seeing Campos-Pons’s performance would highlight specific aesthetic, familial, racial, and regional connections that it rendered legible. Nevertheless, despite the utility of all these methodological approaches, something else seemed to emerge from those moments that none of these analytical tools quite captured for me. For example, Campos-Pons’s multiple minoritarian subject positions as Asian and black and Latinx within the context of the places she has lived (Canada, Cuba, and the United States) opened a different mode of conceptualizing cultural contact, one that evokes both nation-states and regions (like the Caribbean or the Western hemisphere) but also exceeds them. Individuals like Campos-Pons might further identify with multiple diasporas that become meaningful in relation to particular conditions. As one illustration, the Chinese elements integrated into...

Nancy MorejónBefore a Mirror, the City by David Frye

baby daughter, and a daughter to her own mother, whose loving care for her bereft daughter typifies the matrilineal strengths of the Sérère culture on the Senegalese coast, where a shipwreck triggered not only personal, but national, grief. Rosemary Haskell Elon University Nancy Morejón Before a Mirror, the City Trans. David Frye. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2020. 111 pages. NANCY MOREJÓN HAS LONG been synonymous with Cuban poetry (see WLT, Summer 2002, Autumn 2019). In this succinct collection of poems, introduced by Juanamaría CordonesCook and beautifully translated by David Frye, Morejón is synonymous with Havana, embodying that dignified and downtrodden, anachronous place blessed with spirit and light; it feeds her soul, inspires her poetry, and breaks our hearts with its struggles and its rubble. Morejón was the first Black Cuban woman poet to publish widely and be accepted as a professional writer, critic, and translator. The twenty-four poems here range over five decades, from some of her earliest collections, Amor, ciudad atribuida (1964) and Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos (1967), and poems from more recent collections, Paisaje Celebre (1993), La Quinta de los Molinos (2000), and Pierrot y la luna (2005). The selection herein reflects the city’s sounds, smells, and textures , in verses devoted to Parque Central in Old Havana, the Quinta de los Molinos, the port, and the emblematic Malecón. Presumably, when she stands before her reflection, we see the city and the city sees her (this city . . . will begin to stalk you / haunting your footsteps). Morejón’s ode to Central Park (“Parque Central, alguna gente”) ends with a battle cry to her fellow countrymen. She describes a park passerby and beseeches him, and us, to “walk slowly and breathe deeply . . . / and give his whole life / with all his fervor / comrades.” In one of her earliest poems, “Love, City Attributed,” from her eponymous second book, the dedication reads: “al lector, compa ñero” (to the reader, comrade), invoking a sense of selflessness and unity demanded and spurred on by the revolutionary times. In the poem she asks repeatedly, “who am i” and then: “does anyone hear the dream from my cursed mouth / who am i talking to.” To this reader’s mind, there’s no doubt about who Morejón is, or to whom she is speaking—she embodies all the elements of the city and the collective experiences of its inhabitants, and Havana and its residents are listening, now in English through these poems in her exquisitely translated voice. Comrades, indeed. Erin Goodman Arlington, Massachusetts C. T. Rwizi Scarlet Odyssey Seattle, Washington. 47North. 2020. 546 pages. AFROFANTASY. It’s a largely unsung literary tradition in the making, one that grapples with the whiteness and westernness of mass-market genre fantasy and is exemplified by recent work by N. K. Jemisin , Marlon James, Rivers Solomon, and the present novel, C. T. Rwizi’s Scarlet Odyssey. In the best tradition of epic fantasy, Scarlet Odyssey is the first in a trilogy, a sprawling tale populated by dozens of characters exploring a complex world while taking on a dramatic, empire-sprawling quest, using magic, wielding swords and spears, and encountering legendary creatures. Historically, fantasy fiction has looked like some version of medieval or early modern Europe. The last three decades, however , have seen an increasing number of fantasy novels set in worlds based on the histories and mythologies of non-Western cultures, so that it’s virtually impossible to name any world culture and not find a fantasy novel based on it, from the Aztecs to, now, the Xhosa and Zulu. Rwizi’s novel is very much in this tradition, taking Swazi cultures, languages, and folktales as the basis for a wonderfully realized secondaryworld fantasy. Not only is Scarlet Odyssey a novel treat in terms of its imagining a world that looks and feels very much like southern Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, but Rwizi also goes beyond the norm to create an incredibly complex magical system that intermingles computer programming, environmental stimuli, a totem system, animal spirits, mecha, and so much more. Rarely does a first-time novel, let alone a firsttime epic fantasy...

Women in Current Cuba: A Balance between Gains Made and Continuing Challenges

In this analysis, it highlights some significant achievements of a diverse character in various areas of women participation in Cuba, but these successes should be assessed through the prism of continuing and stubborn persistence of traditional gender patterns with a specific focus on the female gender. The impact of traditional ideology is strong and its effects are unfavorable, but, on balance, a positive situation prevails. In short, the Cuban woman continues to develop her social participation with her full creative force allowing her to transform herself while striving for the continuance and further development of the achievements and values of her society.

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body. By Melissa Blanco Borelli. Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries. By Marc Gidal.

When music scholars consider the lasting effects of the transatlantic slave trade in Latin America, racial logic often stands out as an organizing principle. Centuries of slave trade resulted in widespread syncretism between Catholicism and West African religious traditions. The related complexity expressed through music (especially polyrhythms) and dance in ritual takes on unique shapes in local culture and popular music. Thus, the logic goes, the more ‘black’ the community, the more interesting the music will be. Two recent monographs provide compelling challenges to this logic through differing disciplinary perspectives—dance scholarship and ethnomusicology—for the Afro-diasporic musical behemoths of Cuba and Brazil. These studies explore the nuances of racial logics of traditions that draw explicitly on orishas/orisas (Yorúbà deities) while also directly confronting the temptation to tell stories with easy answers about the precise meaning of the ‘other’. She is Cuba: A Geneology of the Mulata Body by Melissa Blanco Borelli highlights its adventurous approach to dance and bodies in its title. Blanco Borelli is not a music scholar, so the emphasis on the types of knowledge conveyed through dancing bodies and corporeal theories may at first be jarring to readers of this journal. However, there has been a long tradition of cross-dialogue between dance and vernacular music scholarship in the Americas. Performance studies scholars such as Barbara Browning (Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995)) and Marta Savigliano (Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colo., 1995)) have often been required reading for Latin American music specialists. Like Browning and Savigliano, Blanco Borelli foregrounds embodied ways of knowledge to arrive at a new way of theorizing the importance of the mulata, the iconic and sexualized Cuban woman of mixed race descent, in Cuba’s national identity. As the title indicates, the dancing mulata embodies multiple, contradictory meanings of cubanidad— Cuban-ness—in that nation’s discourse; she is at once a tragic figure in Cuban film and a source of feminine power and pride in Lucumí, Cuba’s syncretic religion that maps worship of Yorúbà deities onto Catholic saints.

Hispanic women in doctoral medical education in 19th century

Abstract Background Women's access to education, and more specifically, to medical studies has been a long and painful conquest for equality. In the 19th century, the number of women who actually went to Hispanic universities was small. Method This is a descriptive historical and documentary study that reviews six doctoral dissertations retrieved from two databases, the Catalogo Completo and Tesis UCM, from the Complutense University of Madrid. Results This study recovers and describes six pioneer doctoral theses defended in nineteenth century by Hispanic women, and it attempts to highlight the early presence of Hispanic women doctors in the field of medical doctoral education as professionals of the highest academic excellence. Specifically, it comments on five medical doctorates and one medical–pharmaceutical doctorate written by three Spanish women, as well as one Colombian, one Argentinean, and one Cuban woman. Conclusions A key conclusion is that Hispanic women have produced six pioneering dissertations of singular importance with a multidisciplinary medical scope covering the topics, such as women education, hygiene, ophthalmology, gynecology, and pharmacology.

Women, Work, and Revolution: A Do-It-Yourself Practice

Through a study of images of women engaged in work both in and outside the home found in the Cuban magazine Mujeres during its initial decade of production, this article examines the magazine’s representations of labor as a means of fostering collective participation and loyalty to the new regime in post-revolutionary Cuba. Mujeres aimed to propagate images of women participating in revolutionary life to engender collective support for the Fidel Castro regime, which simultaneously reinforced and subverted existing gender stereotypes and, in the process, defined the new Cuban woman. In fact, the editors of Mujeres encouraged a do-it-yourself approach to household maintenance and care that prompted readers to embrace self-directed, creative design strategies as a component of their revolutionary activism.

El negro(a) en la pintura y la poesía de Max Jiménez

The theme of Max Jimenez in his painting is mainly black and, above all, the black Cuban woman. Much of his work with this subject occurs between the decades of the thirties and forties of the twentieth century. Jimenez is considered an avant-garde, particularly expressionist, though his work also presents influence of other Vanguards, and is an expression of Latin American identity. In the same period, the black man and black woman as a motif in painting the Cuban avant-garde, it is uncommon as if it is in the case of Max Jimenez, who was not a Cuban national. This near absence of black as the theme of these Cuban artists, is notable for being the black important part of Cuban ethnic and cultural composition.With respect to poetry , Jimenez shows the same identification with Afro-Cuban , similar , at the time, which only shows the great mulatto poet Nicolas Guillen.In the comparison between poetry and painting Jimenez, the black man, especially black woman, is a central theme in his paintings , often tied to the land , often with a strong presence. In his poetry is not an issue that appears frequently because only dedicates three poems, but the place of enunciation and the attitude of the lyric speaker shows identification and involvement with black , black and culture as seen in his painting

Molecular and histological tools to diagnose an imported case of American cutaneous leishmaniasis in Cuba

Leishmaniasis represents a polymorphous group of diseases caused by around 20 different species of Leishmania parasite. Increases in the number of cases of leishmaniasis reported as a consequence of the growth in travel and migration are of concern to epidemiologists and are diagnostically challenging in non-endemic areas. Molecular and histological analyses of a paraffin-embedded skin biopsy were used in parallel to detect Leishmania parasites in a Cuban woman with suspicious lesions arriving in Cuba from Venezuela. Primers based on the 18S fragment of ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA) and heat shock protein 70 genes (hsp70) were used for molecular detection. Histological studies detected the presence of the parasite. A small fragment of Leishmania DNA was amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) targeting the 18S fragment using, for the first time, nucleic acid obtained from paraffin-embedded tissue as a template. Amplification of a larger fragment from the hsp70 gene did not occur. The detection of Leishmania DNA from paraffin-embedded tissue by means of 18S-targeted PCR is a feasible approach to diagnosis. In combination with classical methods such as histology, the molecular detection of the parasite was demonstrated to be useful in confirming Leishmania infection in a traveler.

Cuba Hunger Force

The article examines the role of food fantasy -- induced by scarcity and hunger -- in the 1998 novel by Daína Chaviano -- part of a series entitled The Hidden Havana--El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (The Man, the Female, and the Hunger) which won the prestigious Azorín prize that same year partly due to its personal recounting of a heroic young Cuban woman who – unlike the author herself who fled Cuba in – must live on the island at the cusp of the most pervasive national scarcity since the triumph of the socialist Revolution: the nineties. With a plot meant to awaken the sexual and culinary appetite of any reader, the erotic imagery begins to dissipate as the novel enters the realm of a socio-economic, political, and cultural snare. Amid a visually scrawny and disintegrating society, gastronomical images are peculiarly abundant in literary, cinema topographic, and musical productions written in and about the Cuba of the 1990's. Food – obtaining it, cooking it, consuming it, and digesting it – becomes the sort of incentive a prototypical superhero (or heroine, as in our case) aims to obtain in order to heighten his or her powers – supernatural powers that will allow subsistence in a reality where ‘meat is gold for the poor.’

The Flower of Cuba: Rhetoric, Representation, and Circulation at the Outbreak of the Spanish-American War

Did nineteenth-century newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst manipulate representations of Evangelina Cosío y Cisneros, a young Cuban woman, in order to spark the Spanish-American War? Hearst's arguments for American intervention in Cuba represented a deceptively uncomplicated public opinion, a consensus that only appeared to have been attained through rational deliberation. Situating this event in public spheres studies, this article demonstrates how the Hearst Corporation used representations of Cisneros to disrupt boundaries between political and commercial realms.

Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire. My wonder at the life of Celia Sánchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sánchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Sick Sunflowers, Santeria and Suffering: The Short Stories of Surama Ferrer

AbstractThe collection of twelve short stories published in 1953 by the little-known Cuban woman writer Surama Ferrer has attracted scant critical attention, despite its varied and disturbing content. With elements of the supernatural fused with santeria, the stories relate to the female life cycle in terms of birth, blood, menopause and death. Peppered with violent incidents, they contain shocking events including suicide and infanticide. Family relationships are characterized by fracture, bitterness and hatred, as if blood ties have no relevance. Why are these stories so dark and pessimistic in terms of gender and family relationships? What is the significance of allusions to santeria and the magical powers of the sunflower? This article will attempt to unpick the various themes and devices present in these stories, in an effort to draw conclusions about the stability of family and gender relationships in mid twentieth-century Cuba.ResumenLa colección de doce cuentos publicadas en 1953 por la poca conocida autora cubana Surama Ferrer no ha atraído mucha atención, a pesar de su contenido variado e inquietante. Con elementos de lo sobrenatural fundido con santería, los cuentos se relacionan con el círculo de vida femenina en cuanto al nacimiento, la sangre, la menopausia, y la muerte. Salpicados de episodios violentos, los cuentos contienen aspectos chocantes y bárbaros incluyendo suicidio y infanticidio. Las relaciones familiales se caracterizan por rotura, amargura y odio, como si los enlaces de sangre no contaran para nada. ¿Por qué son tán oscuros y pesimistos estos cuentos en términos de género y relaciones familiales? ¿Qué es el significado de las alusiones a la santería y al poder mágico del girasol? Este artículo intentará analizar sus temas y estrategemas para tirar conclusiones sobre la estabilidad de las relaciones familiares y de género en Cuba a mediados del siglo veinte.

The Cuban Woman's Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State's Gender Ideology, 1950–1976

Soon after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the government led multiple efforts to reconstruct Cuban society. The state's articulation and implementation of new gender politics was central to the massive mobilization of Cubans. During the first twenty-five years of the revolution, politics were constructed through and built upon a familiar and accepted gendered framework in which men held social power. In this process, in which socially reconstructed sexual differences and roles came to serve the needs of the new political agenda, new ideas about womanhood were produced. This article contends that the revolutionary state framed its expectations of Cubans using a familiar gendered language that made possible the popular acceptance of the reconfiguration of traditional gender roles. In order to shed light on the evolution of Cuban women's gender identities under a socialist government, it contrasts Cuban premises of womanhood during the 1950s with postrevolutionary reconfigurations of, sometimes contradictory, notions of womanhood.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton Five years ago, almost to the day, we penned our first "Editors' Note" for the Journal of Women's History. The journal had arrived at the University of Illinois from Ohio State University only a few short months before. We were still overwhelmed by the details, by the daily mechanics, by the enormous intellectual responsibility of what we had taken on, but we were also wide-eyed with energy and excitement as we looked forward to the possibilities and challenges ahead. One of our primary goals, before the boxes from Ohio even arrived, was to enhance the journal's coverage of international, transnational, and global issues by working to enlarge the world of women whose histories the journal worked to make visible. In those early days, this was not always easy. We sometimes had to stretch, pull, and tug—beg and borrow even—to assemble an issue that was geographically and temporally diverse and yet cohered thematically or methodologically. We must say that this issue, which inaugurates our sixth and final year as coeditors, required little stretching or begging and yet it reaches from India to Romania, from Britain to Cuba, and, as importantly, places U.S. women's history in a transnational frame. We have our authors, our patient and generous reviewers, and our Editorial Board to thank for whatever progress we have made on this score over the past five years. This issue opens with a wonderful collection of articles that bring refreshing new perspectives to the study of women and revolution. Jennifer Guglielmo's "Transnational Feminism's Radical Past: Lessons from Italian Immigrant Women Anarchists in Industrializing America," reconstructs the diasporic world of Italian women radicals who struggled for women's emancipation, but not from within modern nation states, whose borders they consistently defied, nor through the conventional avenues of trade unions or cross-class alliances with middle-class women. Their little known story is one of collective direct action, which stretches from Italy, to Brazil and Argentina, to Paterson, New Jersey and New York City. Guglielmo's account challenges us to look to the margins for some of the most "visionary ideas of human liberation," as she reconstructs a powerful history of transnational feminism that is not Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but radical and working class. Jill Massino's "Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania" takes a different approach to women and revolution as it explores gender roles in postrevolutionary, state socialist Romania. Here the concern is not with women confronting the state, but with the state confronting both women and men as it worked to refashion gender roles along socialist lines. Based on a careful reading of propaganda [End Page 7] and legislation and on interviews with Romanian women and men, Massino contends that, contrary to much extant scholarship that argues for women's continued subordination under state socialism, there were significant changes, especially in the gendered dynamics of households. She provides evidence that men participated more fully in household activities, including childcare, but that these shifts were not simply due to the efficacy of propaganda and legislation. Women's increased participation in the labor force often necessitated men's assumption of domestic duties. Johanna I. Moya Fábregas's "The Cuban Woman's Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State's Gender Ideology, 1950–1976," explores a set of questions similar to Massino's, but in the context of revolutionary Cuba, where the state also sought to reconstruct gender politics in order to facilitate women's incorporation into the labor force and into the revolution. But in a world in which women were understood primarily as mothers, wives, and homemakers, the state deployed familiar, patriarchal language in its efforts to reconfigure gender roles. In the end, this language did facilitate the emergence of a New Woman—a caregiver and revolutionary leader—but it also reproduced the very patriarchal structures it sought to undermine. Our second section focuses on passion and sexuality and includes the work of three scholars who use very different kinds of sources to excavate the personal, the passionate, and the erotic. Marilyn Morris leads off with "Negotiating Domesticity...

Spatial analysis of breast and cervical cancer incidence in small geographical areas in Cuba, 1999–2003

According to the data from the National Cancer Registry, breast and cervical cancer are the two most common nonskin cancers in Cuban woman. This study was addressed to describe the geographical variation of their incidence at small area level over the period 1999-2003. For each municipality, standardized incidence ratios were calculated and smoothed using a Poisson-Gamma, Poisson-Lognormal and a Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) model. The covariate 'urbanization level' was included in the Poisson-Lognormal and CAR models. The posterior probability of each municipality's relative risk (RR) exceeding unity was computed. Clusters were confirmed using the spatial scan statistic of Kulldorff. The CAR model provided the best fit for the geographical distribution of breast and cervical cancer in Cuba. For breast cancer, a high-risk region was identified in municipalities of Ciudad de La Habana province (CAR-smoothed RR between 1.21 and 1.26). Cervical cancer exhibited two areas with excess risk in the east and extreme west of the island (CAR-smoothed RR range 1.2-2.01 both areas together). Clusters were confirmed only for cervical cancer (P = 0.001 for the most likely cluster and P = 0.003 for a secondary cluster). In conclusion, the study supports the hypothesis of a spatial variation in risk at small area level essentially for cervical cancer and also for breast cancer that probably reflects the territorial distribution of life style and socioeconomic factors. This is the first attempt to introduce this methodology in the framework of the National Cancer Registry of Cuba and we expect to extend its use to forthcoming analyses.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Latin AmericanistVolume 47, Issue 3-4 p. 97-130 BOOK REVIEWS First published: 28 June 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1557-203X.2004.tb00019.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Basch, Samuel. Recollections of Mexico: The Last Ten Months of Maximilian's Empire. Voekel, Pamela. Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico Kelly [de Escobar], Janet, and Carlos A. Romero. “The United States and Venezuela: Rethinking a Relationship.”Contemporary Inter-American Relations. Rodríguez, Ileana, ed. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Sheinin, David. Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs Gilbert, Joseph M. and Timothy J. Henderson, ed. The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Peter M. Beattie. The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945. Santiago, Silviano. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, ed. Ana Lucia Gazzola, trans. Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican American War Joseph Cotter, 2003. Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico 1880–2002. Stone, Andrea, ed. Heart of Creation: The Mesoamerican World and the Legacy of Linda Schele. Volume47, Issue3-4December 2004Pages 97-130 RelatedInformation

What is Son ?

This is my cathedral, she says in Spanish, sweeping her hands to embrace the tenement rooftop, the wire clotheslines strung overhead from canted, rusting poles, the ponderous arch of tropical night sky. She's Maria Haidi, the Afro Cuban woman who is going to teach these Lutheran pastors and professors and college administrators to dance in Old Havana. From a corner of the roof, a tower and part of the facade of Havana's baroque cathedral a few blocks away is visible, though the visitors are so disoriented still from their first day in Cuba that they barely get her joke. Maria Haidi opens her palms to the spidery tangles of two television antennas, one strapped at its base to a crumbling brick chimney, the other screwed to the little shed at the top of the dizzyingly steep stairway that led them up to the roof: These are my bell towers. Welcome.

Morejon's Poetic "Persona": Representations of Pan-Caribbean Women

Morejón's Poetic "Persona":Representations of Pan-Caribbean Women Lesley Feracho (bio) Much has been written of the representation of the Afro-Cuban woman in Morejón's poetics, particularly as a representation of her subjectivity since the inception of the Cuban revolution. As Janet Hampton has noted, poems like "Madre," "La cena," "Renacimiento," and "Mujer Negra" counter objective images of women found in Spanish American literature, revealing instead a Black woman who "is active, not passive; resistant, not submissive; regenerative, not destructive. She symbolizes the history of the Afro-Cuban people, the continuity of tradition and an optimistic vision of the future of her country" (170). While Morejón's presentations of Cuban women's reality specifically highlight the historically marginalized Afro-Cuban experience, she also presents a conceptualization of women's empowerment that goes beyond national boundaries. As she states in her interview with Elaine Fido: I think it is very important in these times for us to read Caribbean literature written by women because in our tradition we have had the male view of the Caribbean and we have to recognize now that these male views have been sometimes only sexual: a view that has limited women to sex. I believe women writers or Black women writers in the Caribbean and everywhere give a very special touch to their literature. (Morejón, "A Womanist Vision" 266) For Morejón, women's experience is marked by two important characteristics. The first is its ability to give voice to an identity not constrained by patriarchal ideas of the feminine as solely sexual in nature. Secondly, their experiences create a community of Caribbean women who use the word as a mirror of their historical realities, cultural realities, and desires. Nonetheless, in describing this solidarity Morejón rejects more common uses of the label "feminist," opting instead for a "womanist" optic, as used by Alice Walker. Such a term connects women's experience to society and history. As Howe notes: When Morejón adopts Walker's concept, she emulates traditional Caribbean cross-cultural exchange to legitimize her appropriation of an Afro-American writer's theory. In other words, Morejón's critical position has implications that go far beyond her prorevolutionary stance vis-à-vis capitalist consumer societies [End Page 977] such as the United States. She reinforces her own critical womanist view by focusing on the Afro-Cuban woman's specific situation and breaking the perimeters of Cuba's racial and gender policies. (158) Alongside a womanist representation of the Afro-Cuban woman's experience—and its questioning of feminism, as Linda Howe has noted—is a larger vision of woman "still in process" in the poetic work of Nancy Morejón. This "woman" is not one—a Cuban woman—but in fact many—the women of the Caribbean who, while united by gender, are distinguished by specific historical and social particularities that defy facile gender conflations and homogenous representations of a unified female voice. Throughout Morejón's oeuvre, there is a persistent reference to diverse women that extends beyond a conception of womanism applied only within national boundaries. Who are these Caribbean women placed on the page as subjects, given a voice through their poetry and who, therefore resist invisibility? A close look at Morejón's work reveals some important characteristics of her womanist philosophies as applied to a pan-Caribbean context. The women she refers to both intersect and diverge in connections of individuality and community. While their specific histories may differ, they are nonetheless united by experiences of marginalization and struggles for subjectivity. This study will focus on three poems by Nancy Morejón in order to illustrate the ways in which the women of the Caribbean represented in her work serve as examples of survival, resistance, and strength beyond limiting patriarchal categories of passive female behavior or an essentialized feminine identity. The model for my analysis of this Pan-Caribbean woman is Morejón's application of Walker's theory of womanism and her poetic conception of female solidarity as illustrated in the poem "Persona." From this complex solidarity I will then look at the poems "Granadina" and "Escrito, Al Final del Siglo, Para...