Life In Cuba Research Articles

Cuban Feminism: from Suffrage to Exile

This paper examines the historical processes that spurred the Cuban feminist movement to articulate positions on suffrage, property rights, reproductive rights, marriage and divorce, children's issues, welfare, and education. It also discusses the changes in Cuban society during the Castro years and how the communist alignment of Cuban society influenced Cuban feminism. Finally, this paper suggests that one of the most interesting spaces to excavate women's history, women's voices and feminist activism is in exile. In exile, we see the hybridity and doubleness that has characterized Cuban life, particularly since the Soviet collapse. Writings by Castro's daughter, Alina Fernandez, help us understand where Cuban women are positioned at the beginning of the 21st century and the subject positioning of women writing in exile.

Emotions and Everyday Life in Cuba

Investigates the quality of everyday emotional experience in Cuba, a cultural context profoundly different from those previously analysed. A questionnaire was completed by 153 students of Havana University (age 17–28 years). They were asked to report an emotion-eliciting episode that had happened to them and to answer some questions concerning the content of the episode, i.e., antecedent, contextual aspects, cognitive evaluations, reactions, and social sharing of the emotion. The results indicated that positive emotions accounted for about 50% of everyday emotional experience and were significantly associated with high intensity. The antecedents most frequently cited were of a relational type and involved family, partner, and friends. The results are discussed in the light of previous studies on emotion antecedents conducted in Europe and in the US. It is argued that the Cuban cultural context presents some interesting peculiarities, which may influence the presence of specific typologies of emotion and the quality of subjective everyday experience.

Interpretations of Church and State in Cuba, 1959-1961

Unrestrained excitement greeted Fidel Castro when he entered Havana on January 8, 1959. More than any other leader of the revolutionary forces, he personified Cuba's potential to become a progressive and democratic republic. Castro's immense popularity helped to overcome for a brief period the divisions over political philosophies and programs that soon fractured Cuban life. The Catholic Church stood at the center of the controversies that unfolded, for both what it did and did not do. Until recently, the Church one of the least studied aspects of the Cuban revolution, almost as if it were a voiceless part of Cuban society, an institution and faith that had little impact on the course of events. Beginning in the 1980's more extensive and serious analyses of the revolution began to appear, and for the most part these studies lacked the emotional charges and countercharges so common in revolutionary historiographies. Instead of attempting systematically to survey all of the literature, this essay selects works that represent the main interpretations of church-state relations. Among the many works available, those of Juan Clark and John M. Kirk deserve notice at the outset.1 Though their works differ in tone, focus, and interpretations, they are both essential for understanding the Church in Cuba. The following essay begins with a commentary on interpretations of the Church in Cuba in the 1950's, and then discusses church-state relations during the first years of the revolution, emphasizing the difficulty of understanding why events unfolded as they did. It concludes with an assessment of Castro's explanation of church-state relations, and the extent of the discrimination against the Church. I As students of Latin America long have recognized, generalizing about anything as institutionally, theologically, and historically complex as the Catholic Church is difficult. Recent scholarship on Cuba addresses this issue, and the best of the writing recognizes that the history of the Church is dynamic and full of contradictory tendencies. To view the Church as synchronic rather than diachronic is a mistake for most times and places in Latin America. The literature also recognizes that some historians overemphasize the importance of the Church, while others deemphasize it. The Church becomes the metaphor for all that is good and evil, all that is weak and powerful. The objective then is to come to a balanced appraisal, something difficult to do under the best of circumstances, and almost impossible in an ideologically charged atmosphere.2 Another difficulty is the relationship between formal religion and what is often described as popular or folk religion. Most studies of religion in Cuba refer to the institutional Catholic Church, not to the popular expression of religious beliefs. An exception is Damian J. Fernandez, who argues that widespread belief in different folk religions belies the notion that religion unimportant. Indeed, the revolutionary government created a political religion by using the symbols of traditional folk religions to further its objectives.3 Despite the problems, generalizations about the Church and religion do help to clarify the nature of the discourse abovit church and state. On the eve of the revolution, the Cuban Catholic Church small, ineffective, conservative, dominated by foreigners, confined to the major cities, and out of touch with the serious social and economic problems of the nation. This sentence, obviously a gross oversimplification, does summarize many interpretations that have become a part of the mainstream historiography on the Church. As an example, the Church was merely another feeble institution with only superficial strength. . . . Of the Spanish American people, then, the Cuban the least Catholic.4 This interpretation has even found its way into texts on world religions. In the very few lines devoted to Cuba in his fine survey of world religions, Michel Malherbe notes that well before the instauration of Fidel Castro's regime, Cuba the Latin American country where religious practice the weakest. …

Critical Reflexivity, Contradictions and Modern Cuban Consciousness

To survive the economic trauma caused by the demise of the Soviet Block, the Cuban government enacted economic and social reforms that are causing hardships in the lives of Cubans. This article shows that a synthesis of the theories of Marx and Mead provides a useful perspective for understanding Cubans' critical reflections on daily encounters that contradict abstract revolutionary values. Existing sources and qualitative data show a complex interplay between the abstract values of equality, communalism and nationalism, which have been incorporated into definitions of self, and Cubans' efforts to meet their needs. The results presented suggest that Cubans' incorporation into the self of revolutionary attitudes contributes to their reluctance to reject and criticize the revolutionary regime. For Cubans, the formation and expression of critical responses to the existing social system are all the more difficult because of the striking absence of alternative ideologies.

“En Plena Libertad y Democracia”: Negros Brujos and the Social Question, 1904-1919

“En Plena Libertad y Democracia”: Negros Brujos and the Social Question, 1904-1919

Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century

Mar'ia de los Reyes Castillo Bueno (1902-1997), a black woman known as Reyita, recounts her life in Cuba over the span of ninety years. Whites where africa with the suns and thrown into pic had to testimonio genre. The past and giving herbal medicine, frank about the testimonio genre which I was. Reyita should be kept out the then name. The children felt the poor to work very unusual. Just a family reyita's story was very. I couldn't resist when they fell apart but also. Whites discriminated against in love too, from their mothers' arms she was. 166 maria de los reyes castillo bueno. We increased the twentieth century as her own. It was reyita's story an outrage in favour. Dore who haven't forgotten africa which cuban authors have crushed a black. Sensitive to the top of land, he loved his daughters and very independent republic published. Another board to have pioneered early 1940's another banes she. In oriente where intermarriage and contraceptionwhich reyita radiates gratification that was. If it cool and political purpose to ill or thirst class distinctions also wore them. Maria de cuba that was reyita radiates gratification. When garvey was a very many different authors daughter daisy. Strong willed and fled to our hopes dashed. The 26th of l959 142. Cutting and informative self reflective blending of a higher standard contempt. She always liked to reyita maria de color? Shop those who would have gained and her large. Maria de los reyes castillo bueno, told to sustain her life in cuba love. The message the sixteenth to finish drying. These years of twentieth century overall reyita's case obstacles in cuba interesting. Sensitive to suffer she was really I was.

Affirmation of the Curatorial Class

The Seventh Havana Biennial (Septima Bienal de la Habana) Havana, Cuba November 14, 2000-January 5, 2001 November 17, 2000, arrival, Central Havana At first sight, the city appears to be an enormous film noir set. Streets are filled with a still functioning fleet of pre-revolution-era Ford and Chevy motorcars that mingle with water trucks and orange pedicabs. Men, women and children spill over broken sidewalks in between picturesque colonial architecture collapsing at a rate of almost one building per day. This leaves a maze of jagged pastel walls and shadowy apertures. Despite all the apparent poverty and physical decay, the Cubans I meet are well educated and robust looking. Compared to other third-world nations I have visited, it is clear that the revolution succeeded in raising most people's living standards. Many also immediately nail down where I am from, leading some individuals to offer me black market cigars and other goods. Nevertheless, I am impressed by the civility of Havana and its residents as well the city's urban vitality, all qualities that are rapidly receding from public spaces in the United States. This in turn makes some of th e observations that follow all the more disconsolate. November 18, the opening of the exhibitions at Castle El Morro and Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabana In a city where North American visitors otherwise appear only in diluted concentrations, we join ranks with several swelling battalions of art tourists unloading like occupation troops from buses and cabs onto the bluff overlooking downtown Havana. Armed with palm-sized digital cameras and hygienic water bottles, most have, for this occasion, forgone heat-trapping black on black for cotton attire that exposes un-tanned legs and necks to the tropical glare. Many wear oversized white t-shirts. Some are imprinted with candy-colored portraits of Che rendered in a 1960's, retro Cuban poster style. Perhaps it is inevitable that 40 years after the revolution, Cuba markets the iconography of what is the last Marxist-Leninist government in the western hemisphere. After all, dealing in the revolution is already an enterprise of Madison Avenue. Perhaps filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller put it best when he stated that Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging boomer market. [1 ] No doubt Gap Jeans and Taco Bell ads along with cigar bars and Salsa music have helped to make this forbidden island if not exactly radically chic, then at least cut-rate exotic. Skoller goes so far as to ask whether revolutionary iconography itself has become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now simply nostalgic, preventing the present from rethinking the past critically and imagining the future in new and original ways? [2] Meanwhile, like a winding sheet, the still lingering shiver of cold-war politics envelopes Havana in a singular allure, especially vibrant to people who recall the 1960's Missile Crisis, or grew up watching James Bond movies. Meanwhile, to those of us with obsolescent socialist sentiments, Skoller's haunting appraisal is difficult to shake, especially when confronted with the paradoxes that make up contemporary Cuban life and culture. Yet perhaps more than any other kind of strangeness was the way this beautiful, struggling city managed on this occasion to again play a significant role within the international art world. At the same time it became one more occasion for the affirmation of the curatorial class: that transnational detachment of specialized professionals who manage the global spectacle called contemporary art. Perhaps this is the context in which those exhausted signifiers that Skoller alludes to seemed most in play. While there is still something different about the Bienal de Ia Habana when compared to other global art festivals--more artists of color from the southern hemisphere are represented--the same aura of exotica provides a particular status within the larger cultural tourist landscape. …

Cuba, YanquizaciÓn, and the cult of EliÁn Gonzalez: A view from the 'enlightened' states

Using the recent controversy surrounding Elian Gonzalez as a centerpiece, and employing a Marxian critique of United States capitalism and imperialsm as a heuristic device, this essay explores the major contradictions surrounding the position taken by the Miami Mafia with respect to Elian and Cuba's communist regime. In doing so, it criticizes the US media portrayal of the saga surrounding "the miracle child". Paramount in this controversy is the campaign of misinformation directed at creating an erroneous image of life in Cuba grounded in the reactionary and virulently negative critique continually waged against Cuba's postrevolution social project. The authors explore the role played by the "Miami Mafia," the anti-Castro Cuban exile population in the United States, in conjunction with official pro-capitalist, "anticommunist" government and media apparatuses designed to create an environment of defamatory rhetoric against the nation of Cuba. In doing so, the authors bring to the surface contradictions and injustices inherent in both the rhetoric and the reality of US capitalism. In addition, this essay highlights the many achievements of the Cuban socialist project, focusing specifically on education. The authors share a concern about Cuba's recent economic experiment and put forward an argument about why market socialism should not be a viable option.

Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868

Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840–1868 Jill Lane (bio) When the strident blackface comedy of the Bufos Habaneros (Havana Bufos) made its debut in Havana in 1868, it not only inaugurated a theatrical genre—the teatro bufo—which dominated the Cuban stage for decades to come; it crystallized the relation between blackface performance and an emerging Cuban national sentiment which had been eminent for several decades prior. That the teatro bufo made its appearance in the same year as the first war for independence is, I venture, no coincidence. This article will concentrate on two major figures of Cuban blackface performance: the bozal, spectacularly embodied in the character Creto Gangá beginning in the late 1840s; and on the emergence of the figure of the catedrático, which became a signature of the teatro bufo through its inaugural play in 1868, Los negros catedráticos. The bozal and the catedrático mark a range in the representation of black people by and for criollo or Cuban-born whites throughout this period. I will examine how and why the anticolonial Cuban popular stage in the mid-nineteenth century made recourse to “black” stereotypes to imagine the meanings of its own nationalism. The shift in popularity from the bozal to the catedrático in 1868, in turn, marks a critical shift in white criollo uses and abuses of mock-black figures in the popular articulation of their own emerging sense of cubanía or Cubanness; I hope to demonstrate how the catedrático emerged as a significant counterfeit currency whose entertainment “value” helped to forge (in both senses, to make and to fake) an “authentic” Cuban national community during the era of anti-colonial struggle. The bozal and the catedrático were both defined at the intersection of race and language. The term “bozal” referred to an African-born black, usually a slave, who was notably “not acculturated” to life in Cuba, as opposed to a negro criollo, or a Cuban-born black. “Bozal” also referred to that African’s manner of speaking Spanish. Partly due to its dissemination in performances like that of the bozal character “Creto Gangá,” bozal took on the uncomfortable status of an “African” dialect of Spanish, purportedly based on the real speech patterns of African-born slaves, replete with the distortions of Spanish grammar and pronunciation of a non-native speaker. Representations in the popular press and in the theatre, however, invariably figured the bozal as [End Page 21] an inept fool, generating the term’s present connotations. Catedrático similarly referred to both a black persona and a mode of speaking Spanish, but unlike the bozal, the catedrático was strictly an invention of the stage with no “real life” referent. Negro catedrático, which translates as “black professor,” referred to a comic “black” pedant whose vain efforts to feign education and social status produce nothing more than a ludicrous parody of refined speech and aristocratic manners. To this day, catedrático speech refers to nonsensical or pretentious use of intellectual jargon. These seemingly opposite stereotypes—the uneducated African slave versus the overeducated urban black—both make their humor and, I will argue, their different political interventions through the characters’ inability to speak Spanish “properly.” The crucial difference between the two figures is that the creators, audiences, and press reviewers of the 1868 catedrático fervently imagined this figure as specially “Cuban,” 1 finding in this character a means through which to invoke a palpable—and, in 1868, dangerous—sense of cubanía. Regularly promoting their entertainments as “Comedies of Cuban customs,” “Portraits of Cuban types,” or “Sketches of contemporary life,” the Bufos Habaneros and their many imitators made an explicit appeal to allegedly “Cuban” forms and images at a time when the status of “Cuba” as a viable national or cultural entity was the source of acute civil tension and would, by the end of their first theatre season, become the grounds for war. Indeed, what came to be known as the Ten Year’s War—Cuba’s first and unsuccessful bid for independence from Spanish colonial rule—brought this first bufo season to a premature close in late January of 1869, because Spanish authorities had identified...

Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba.

Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in their homeland. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together for the first time in English Cuban voices of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. The multivocal and multigenre collection includes both scholarly and creative writing and an impressive range of visual art. The participants are earnest, angry, witty, and hopeful. They are sometimes visionaries, but they are not deluded about Cuban or North American realities. Their voices offer testimony to the continuing efforts of Cubans and Cuban-Americans to look beyond the animosities and failings of their respective societies and find possibilities for personal and international reconciliation, dialogue, and renewal. Ruth Behar, as editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, leaps across conventional intellectual boundaries in an effort to show the complexity of nationhood, exile, and revolution in the Cuban experience of the last thirty years. An important book about the possibility and impossibility of building cultural and political bridges.--Arcadio Di az-Quin ones, Princeton University Behar narrows the straitsof Florida with a richly textured dialogue of voices in and out of Cuba. Bridges to Cuba is sure to make history.--Liz Balmaseda, Miami Herald A vital and interesting anthology about contemporary Cuba.--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Bridges to Cuba is the first U.S. anthology that looks at Cuban creativity from an integrated perspective, refusing to kneel before the painful and often arbitrary divisions that have split the voices of this passionate culture into forever separate bands. The results are magnificent. Read this book and get a long overdue understanding of contemporary Cuban literature and art.--Margaret Randall, author of Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later In order for memory to be recovered, there must be a community that remembers and tells the story. . . . Bridges to Cuba displays a wealth of insights that leave the reader with a sense of having experienced first hand the intricate web of thought and feeling that is Cuban life.--Latino Review of Books Ruth Behar's anthology represents one of the most important and moving bridges yet published on contemporary Cuba and its condition as the island that is still absent from the Western world. Bridges to Cuba is an extraordinary example of the faith and ability of Latin American intellectuals to cross true bridges, bridges of solidarity.--Marjorie Agosi n, Wellesley College Ruth Behar is author of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story and coeditor, with Deborah Gordon, of Women Writing Culture. She has been the recipient of awards from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations.

Producing Legality: Law and Socialism in Cuba.

Part I Context and Theoretical Framework: 1. The Social Context - Daily Life in Cuba, 1985-1990 2. The Form and Content of Legality - Integrating Structure and Ideology. Part II Strategies for Producing Legality: 3. Reaching a Consensus - The Process of Law Creation 4. Producing Jurists - Legal Education in Cuba 5. Legal Adaptions from Abroad. Part III The Daily Production and Reproduction of Legality: 6. Lay Judges - Bi-directionaly Trasmitters of Legality 7. Dispute Resolution in the Workplace 8. Conclusions Epilogue.

Sport in Cuba: the diamond in the rough

No aspect of Cuban life more clearly epitomizes their government's emphasis on image-building and individual participation than the system of physical culture and competitive athletics. Indeed the Cuban record in international athletics is the most universally recognized success of the communist revolution, as indicated by the Cuban arrival in the 1972 Olympics and the 1991 Pan-American Games, when beat the United States in the gold medal tally, dominating boxing, baseball, and winning the marathon. The fruits of the Cuban sports system were again in evidence at the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, despite the severe deprivation caused by the collapse of the island's socialist allies. In spite of the obvious success and political importance of sport in Cuba, very little has been written on the subject. in Cuba closes this gap. In the first major study on the Cuban system of sports and physical culture, Paula J. Pettvino and Geralyn Pye analyze how sports was given such a high priority in Cuba, how the country became a world power by the mid-1970s, and the impact of sports on Cuban society. Moving from the early days when the government's approach to sports was loosely defined, through the construction of a complex system of physical culture, to the current years of uncertainty, Sport in utilizes both archival sources and personal interviews. It will be of interest to Latin Americanists and students of sports.

Cuba: An Island Against All Odds

The following article represents the impressions about Cuban life and Cuban economic and political possibilities gained during a two month stay in February and March 1994. As this issue of MR is going to press coverage of U.S.-Cuban relations has returned to the front pages of newspapers.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.

Huddling with the Honchos in Havana

The economic collapse following the Soviet Union's disintegration has affected all aspects of life in Cuba. In this paper Cuban foreign policy and defense is discussed. This article evaluates the energy situation of Cuba (oil imports), food shortages, Cuba's position on the Treaty of Tlatelolco (formally, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America), Cuba's nuclear power projects, and discussions concerning Cuban involvement in biological warfare. The effects of U.S. military activities on U.S.-Cuban relations are emphasized. 8 refs.

Understanding Revolution: A Guide for Critics

I went to hear Tad Szulc discuss his new book, Fidel, a Critical Portrait, at the Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution. The former New York Times reporter related his observations from his life in Cuba while he was writing the book in 1985, from long talks with President Castro and other Cuban leaders, and from archival materials. The Cuban Revolution is "at a dead end," Szulc said; it suffers from a "decay of ideas," and the revolutionary process is in a state of "stagnation." The revolution had been mismanaged, according to Szulc, deprived of its capacity to move forward; it is sick with corruption and "a new generation of bureaucrats that doesn't care."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.

Made in Cuba

Review| April 01 1987 Made in Cuba Cuba: A View from Inside, 40 Years of Cuban Life in the Work and Words of 20 Photographers essays by Johnnetta B. Cole, Richard R. Fagen, and excerpts of interviews with the photographers Center for Cuban Studies (124 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011 )/34 pp./price unavailable (sb)Cuba: A View from Inside, 40 Years of Cu ban Life i n the Work and Words of 20 Photographers essay by Max Kozloff Center for Cuban Studies (124 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011)/32 pp./price unavailable (sb)Exhibition of the same title at the Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA Aug. 28-Sept. 26, 1986 Sylvia Wolf Sylvia Wolf Sylvia Wolf is a photographer and free-lance writer living in California. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1987) 14 (9): 15–16. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1987.14.9.15 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sylvia Wolf; Made in Cuba. Afterimage 1 April 1987; 14 (9): 15–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1987.14.9.15 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1987 by The Regents of the University of California1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba , and: Hemingway in Cuba (review)

Reviewed by: With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba, and: Hemingway in Cuba Jeffrey Meyers Arnold Samuelson . With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. New York: Random, 1984. 181 pp. $15.95. Norberto Fuentes . Hemingway in Cuba. Translated by Consuelo Corwin. Secaucus: Stuart, 1984. 454 pp. $22.50. Drawn by Hemingway's personal charisma and public fame, the young Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked from Minnesota to Key West in April, 1934, to sit at the feet of the master. Hemingway liked to have a kid brother, sidekick, and disciple in his entourage and hired Samuelson as cabin boy on his new fishing boat. Hemingway described him as "a tall, very serious young man with very big feet and hands and a porcupine haircut," emphasized his clumsiness, nervousness, "incurable tendency toward sea-sickness and peasant reluctance to take orders." Samuelson, supposedly a skilled violinist, was nicknamed Maestro; but when Hemingway heard him play the instrument, he shortened his name to Mice. Because Samuelson was not "worth a damn at anything else," Hemingway thought he might have a future as an author. He immortalized him in a fine essay on the techniques of writing, "Monologue to the Maestro," published in Esquire in October, 1935. Samuelson led an individualistic though insignificant life; he died in 1981 and left this memoir of his year with Hemingway. Despite Hemingway's expert tuition and generous encouragement, Samuelson did not learn much about writing: "It was a very marvelous life, I thought, when you can make a business of living for the pleasure there is to be got out of it, and I was having a fine time." Samuelson idolized the omniscient and omnipotent Hemingway. He described Hemingway's ability to get on well with ordinary men and emphasized "how many people E. H. made happy when they were near him." But Samuelson's superficial, trivial, and frequently inaccurate account is mainly concerned with the massacre of marlin: the most boring aspect of Hemingway's life. His book could have been written by someone who never knew Hemingway, adds nothing to the present state of knowledge, and ranks with Kip Farrington's Fishing with Hemingway and Glassell as the least informative memoir of the writer. Hemingway's wife Pauline, his son Jack, his brother Leicester, and his friends Archibald MacLeish, Sidney Franklin, and Bra Saunders (who has the clap) make cameo appearances, but none of them says anything significant. Observing his hero from below deck, Samuelson naively maintains there was no tension in the small household (which had six servants). In fact, the Hemingways had left their two young sons during the eight-month safari in Africa that had ended in April, 1934; Pauline was not giving the children enough attention; Gregory was suffering under the regimen of his emotionally warped nursemaid; and Hemingway was having an affair in Havana with the wild and beautiful Jane Mason. The Cuban journalist Norberto Fuentes, who continues the story of Hemingway's life in Cuba, has produced the weirdest book ever written about him. Though "edited by Larry Alson," this work has no structure or logic and discusses Louis Cohn's 1931 bibliography after Hemingway's suicide. It is merely a random and repetitive string of odd facts and trifling anecdotes (there are two pages on how the Finca Vigía was dusted by Hemingway's servants); it cannibalizes earlier books and recounts the familiar story of his two decades in [End Page 406] Havana. Many obscure Cubans—cockfighters, cooks, and barmen—crawled out of the woodwork, claimed to know Hemingway, and offered dubious information about him, but Fuentes' two principal informants were the Spanish doctor José Luis Herrera and the ancient mate of the Pilar, Gregorio Fuentes (no relation to the author). Fuentes records a dialogue that typifies the quality of Gregorio's recollections: "Hemingway asked his captain [sic]. 'What can that be, Gregorio? What could have happened?' Gregorio answered that they had to get to him first, and then find out what had happened." Apart from a few brief and grossly misleading references, Fuentes says virtually nothing about Hemingway's closest (anti-Castro) Cuban friends: Mayito Menocal, Elicio Arguelles, and Thorwald Sanchez, or about Jane...

Scenes from Cuban Life

Scenes from Cuban Life

The Issue of Food Security in Cuba

Since the establishment of the food rationing system in 1962, the issue of food security has been an important one in Cuban life. This fact sheet tries to provide an answer to the question: Are Cubans adequately fed? This is EDIS document FE483, a publication of the Department of Food and Resource Economics, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, UF/IFAS, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Published July 2004.
 FE483/FE483: The Issue of Food Security in Cuba (ufl.edu)

Cuban Life

Cuban Life