Cuba's Period Research Articles

The Family Doctor and Nurse Program: development of the health care model in CubaO Programa de Médicos e Enfermeiras da Família: desenvolvimento do modelo de saúde em Cuba

RESUMENEl modelo de medicina familiar cubano se desarrolla, desde hace más de tres décadas, como el tercer modelo de atención médica del período revolucionario en Cuba. Es la expresión más acabada de la aplicación de la estrategia de atención primaria de salud. Aún muestra potencial para la mejora en la organización, la calidad y la eficiencia de los servicios de salud en el primer nivel de atención de salud. El objetivo esencial de este trabajo es describir el modelo, sus singularidades, sus elementos distintivos, y sus principales logros, retos y desafíos. Se realizó una revisión documental en artículos de revistas, libros y documentos oficiales del Ministerio de Salud Pública de Cuba sobre la creación y desarrollo del modelo, seleccionados y analizados por expertos para la elaboración del presente informe. Se presentan elementos conceptuales del modelo, así como indicadores que sustentan la información. En este trabajo se identificaron las principales características de la medicina familiar en Cuba, sus logros fundamentales, retos y desafíos. Con base en sus resultados, se concluye que el modelo de medicina familiar de Cuba es un referente para la Región de las Américas. Es aún un modelo en desarrollo, perfectible y susceptible de transformaciones para enfrentar nuevos retos, el mayor de los cuales será renovar el modelo manteniendo y fortaleciendo las ideas fundacionales del programa.

The Veterans' Movements and the Early Republican State in Cuba

This article analyses the Cuban Association of Veterans and Patriots of 1923–1924. This was one among many of such organisations in the early republican period in Cuba. Its formation was motivated by a need to put political pressure on the incumbent administration of the nation for political, social and economic demands. Of particular interest is the insight an analysis of this movement gives us into early state formation in the early republican period, and how ties of loyalty from the wars of independence helped shape the politics and political party formation of post-independence Cuba.

Garzona Nationalism: The Confluence of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Cuban Republic

Garzona NationalismThe Confluence of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Cuban Republic Kristie Soares (bio) Although policing the sexual (stigmatizing and outlawing several kinds of non-procreative sex, particularly lesbian and gay sex and prostitution) has something to do with sex, it is also more than sex. Embedded here are powerful signifiers about appropriate sexuality, about the kind of sexuality that presumably imperils the nation and about the kind of sexuality that promotes citizenship. Not just (any) body can be a citizen anymore. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas” [I see them] with their boyish haircuts, their aptitude for sports, and their masculine mannerisms, these biologically degenerate types that among women correspond to the perfect pepillito [gay man]: garzonas [lesbians]. Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Feminismo: cuestiones sociales y crítica literaria The two epigraphs above are, to the dismay of many, both from feminist thinkers. The first, from well-known Trinidadian scholar M. Jacqui Alexander, outlines the ways that sexuality is not just central to but in fact constitutive of notions of citizenship in the postcolonial Caribbean. The second, from a feminist thinker little known outside her home nation of Cuba, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, proves Alexander’s point in a haunting way. How two women with such differing views can both identify as feminists is the purview of another article, but central to this one is the question of how these two discourses—that citizenship often requires a policing of sexuality and that feminists themselves have often been the enforcers of such regulation—might help us understand both feminism and nationalism as always already in dialogue with one another. This article examines discourses of lesbian sexuality during the Republican period in Cuba (1920s–30s) to understand how many of our modern understandings [End Page 154] of gender and sexuality, both in the United States and in Latin America, can actually be traced back to this era. Many scholars have argued that the 1920s and 1930s were a fundamental period in the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity.1 It was during this period that Cuban nationals first attempted to articulate a vision of the Cuban character, while finding themselves plagued simultaneously by the memory of Spanish colonialism—having just gained sovereignty from Spain in 1898—and the threat of American imperialism—manifest in the Platt Amendment of 1901, which gave the United States partial jurisdiction over Cuban affairs. Cuban women, in particular, marked this period with an unprecedented amount of involvement in political and literary circles and saw themselves as an integral part of the development of a postcolonial Cuban identity. So successful was the activism that Cuban feminists engaged in during this time period that scholars have called the 1940 constitution “perhaps the most progressive charter in the Western Hemisphere” up to that time.2 It included, among other things, Article 23, which declared all Cubans equal to one another. Leading up to this momentous constitution were several landmark laws passed on behalf of gender equity, including a 1917 law that gave women control of property, the right to sue, and authority over their children; a 1918 law permitting divorces filed by both women and men and requiring that both be responsible for children after a divorce; the overturning of Article 437 of the Penal Code in 1930, which stated that a man could legally kill his adulterous wife; Decree 589 in 1934, promising equal pay for equal work; and a 1937 maternity law giving women time for breastfeeding during the workday and forbidding hiring discrimination in the case of pregnancy.3 Missing from this list is of course the right to vote, which women obtained in 1933 under the one-hundred-day government of Ramón Grau, which the United States did not recognize.4 So successful was Cuba’s feminist movement in these early years that its absence from most narratives of western feminism is both shocking and worrisome. One reason for the relative inattention to early Cuban feminism by US academia is the disconnect that existed between Cuban feminists and US feminists during this time period, with...

"Cimarroneándose y en bocabajos" ¿Una poesía afrocubana de la revolución? El caso de Georgina Herrera

The success of the Revolution in Cuba modifies the place socially occupied by the black population, the cultural policies and the genre paradigms as well as their organizational ways. How this process affects writing? Our essay try to show the importance of the presence of afro-cuban in the written poetry during the revolutionary period in Cuba. Specifically, we are interested in highlighting the genres and ethnicity cross and his differentiation with respect, on the one hand, to what had been considered until the moment like black poetry, and on the other hand, to the institutional poetry, that coincident with the aesthetic paradigm established by the regime. The study around as it is located the subject woman-black in the Cuban cultural field is too broad to be face in this work. However, we try to study the Georgina Herrera’s case to show some of the textual strategies that she used for to be inserted in a tradition and a social literary circuit like the Cuban.

Classical Architecture and the Cultural Politics of Cemetery Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba

CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CEMETERY REFORM IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY HAVANA, CUBA Paul Barrett Niell University of North Texas Introduction In an Exhortation of 1805, the bishop of Havana, Juan José Díaz de Espada y Landa condemned the “disastrous effects that have always been produced by the abuse of burying corpses in the churches.”1 The following year, the city inaugurated a new public cemetery for its extramuros, the area outside the city walls [Figure 1]. Designed by French architect Stephen Hallet, the General Cemetery of Havana was built one mile west of the city near the sea on a frequented road in a location between the piers of La Tierra and El Arsenal. The distancing of the cemetery from the lived city was consistent with the belief of reformers that myriad human illnesses were caused by living in close proximity to the deceased.2 Stephen Hallet conceived the new public work as a rectangular space enclosed from the surrounding landscape by a high masonry wall entered through a neoclassical gateway evoking a Roman triumphal arch. Inside the cemetery, graves were organized rigorously in a grid-like pattern and extended from the gateway to a chapel at the far end, designed to appear like a Greco-Roman temple. Architectural historians have noted that this cemetery was perhaps the first mature example of Cuba’s relatively late neoclassical movement.3 Scholars have also studied the work in relation to its principal patron, Havana’s Bishop Espada (served 1802-32), a man of the Spanish Enlightenment who sought to bring aesthetic reforms to the city.4 What is missing from the scholarship, however, are broader considerations of where the cemetery fits in the late colonial material culture of Cuba. The project was promoted by senior clerics, Spanish officials, and local elites through the rhetoric of enlightened reform as equitable, universal, and dedicated to “all classes of persons.” However, few studies get beneath this rhetoric to examine the interplay between imperial objectives, international forms, changing identities, and the requirements of colonial representation in early nineteenth-century Havana. How, for example, was this “general” public cemetery, intended for all classes of persons, conceptualized locally in a colonial environment maintained by the repetitive political and social performances of the Church, State, and nobility? How did the local elite and the general population react to an institutional practice and its formal representation that rudely interrupted C 2011 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 57 The Latin Americanist, June 2011 Figure 1. Pierre Toussaint Frédéric Mialhe, View of the General Cemetery of the City of Havana, c. 1860’s, lithograph, Courtesy of the Charles W. Tebeau Library of Florida History, Historical Museum of Southern Florida. their traditional funerary rituals and sites of interment? Furthermore, how was the work and it appropriation of Euro-American classical architecture and imagery related to changing socio-economic identities? This article proposes to examine the General Cemetery of Havana of 1806, also known as the Espada Cemetery, as the transcultural product of the late colonial period in Cuba. This approach aims to open strategies for interpreting the material culture of Bourbon cemetery reform in the Americas in general by looking at the complex ways in which classicism was integrated into the colonial scene. The focus on classicism is an effort to study the cultural politics of cemetery reform in Havana. By “cultural politics of cemetery reform” in this article, I am referring to three overlapping ways in which classicism was used in the cemetery: 1) it was deployed to promote the legitimacy of this new Bourbon institution based on assumptions about the exemplarity of classical forms, 2) classicism began to assume a cultural authority over other artistic styles in colonial Havana from the perspective of the local elite and thus reinforced church, state, military, and social hierarchies, and 3) classicism embodied the reform ideals of the cemetery, in particular, the mastery of the self and the embrace of “enlightened” piety. Thus as a formal and rhetorical idiom, classicism became part of elite representation as well as elite cultural capital.5 While examining the relationship between classicism, cemetery reform, and the representation of...

El Pragmatismo en Cuba By Antonio Armas Váázquez

Reviewed by: El pragmatismo en Cuba Rosa Mayorga Antonio Armas Vázquez. El pragmatismo en Cuba. Habana, Cuba: Sociedad de Investigaciones Filosóficas, 2004. 184 pp, no index. In his 1987 article “Introducción al pragmatismo en Cuba” (“Introduction to Pragmatism in Cuba”) for Revista Cubana de Ciencias Sociales (Cuban Journal of Social Sciences) and in his 2004 book El pragmatismo en Cuba (Pragmatism in Cuba), Antonio Armas Vázquez1 theorizes that crucial events in Cuba’s history between 1895 (the commencement of the war of independence from Spain) and 1959 (the official takeover by the Castro rebellion), are directly related to the promulgation of pragmatism as a philosophy in Cuba by the United States.2 Through social and pedagogical reform as well as publicity and marketing campaigns, Armas argues that the U.S. sought to exert its complete control over the young nation in order to fulfill its own capitalist and imperialist agenda. In the 1987 article, Armas proposes to answer the following questions: In dealing with a philosophy with profound roots since its origins in the North American tradition and the needs of a developing capitalism, we are led to ask, during the time of the hindered [Cuban] republic: what relation could exist between a “pure” philosophy article and an educational program? Between a psychometric test [End Page 327] and a class in middle school? Between the political program of the Conservatives and Liberals, the economic policy propagated by the governments in place, and the publicity campaigns and marketing? [Armas, 1987, p.51]3 Armas’ basic thesis (in both his paper and in his subsequent book) is the following answer to these questions: It is not possible to understand the diversity of the philosophical problems of the time. . . unless we become aware of the determining factor of capitalist production needs which demanded a “suitable” alteration of the Cuban political superstructure in line with the new needs of development and the characteristics of the ties of dependence with respect to the U.S. . .. We could therefore confirm that pragmatism spread in Cuba not by a proper calling card, but rather by various coinciding currents, schools of thought, theories, and through the ever present propaganda of North American imperialism. [1987, pp.40, 51] The book is an attempt to argue, with particular examples, how Cuban life was guided and controlled by the U.S., sometimes overtly, sometimes in more subtle ways, by a continuous and constant bombardment of ideas, techniques, organizations, social projects, cultural manifestations, and policies (scientific and economic) all with the intention of restructuring the base of a new social system and to consolidate a new culture based on the Anglo-Saxon one. Pragmatism as a philosophy provided the methodology for this, Armas argues, since its strides in psychology, education, and sociology served to become “a notorious influence” in better integrating the aspirations of the U.S. in spreading its system of ideas in Cuba. Before presenting historical examples of how Cubans were affected by pragmatism, Armas proposes to explain pragmatist theory in the first part of the book in order to substantiate his claims regarding its influence during this period in Cuba’s history. He rightly identifies pragmatism’s origins with Charles Peirce and William James. However, Peirce is mentioned only in passing; the most that is said about him is that one of his contributions was to focus on semiotics. Indeed, none of Peirce’s works are listed in the bibliography, nor for that matter any of the works of Peirce scholars. Armas has more to say about James, Dewey, and Mead (listed in the bibliography are five of Dewey’s works, two of James’, and Mead’s Mind, Self and Society).4 With two or three exceptions in Dewey’s case, however, there is no mention of secondary philosophical sources for these other pragmatists either.5 According to Armas, for Dewey “the proof of the truth of a proposition is its practical usefulness, which explains the purpose of thought guiding action,” so that “the effect of an idea is more important than its [End Page 328] origin” (2004, p.11). Armas’ point, which he will argue for throughout the book, is that it is...

Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century

Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century

The Working World of the Paladar: The Production of Contradictory Space during Cuba's Period of Fragmentation*

This article examines the social spaces of self-employment in Havana, Cuba, to uncover the deeply conflicting and contradictory values that comprise the dialectics of state–society relations. These spaces and the many actors who traverse them provide important insight into the complexity surrounding contemporary Cuba. Through detailed research into one form of self-employment, paladares (small in-home restaurants), this article examines how paladares have come to reflect the struggle for society and state to mediate the multitude of external and internal pressures amongst the current geopolitical climate. Using interviews conducted during several visits in 1999 and 2000, we demonstrate that paladares do not necessarily represent a capitalist transition. Rather, they embody the struggle to mediate contradictory spaces through the assertion of the self in the discourse of change. *We would like to thank Tom Klak and Eugene McCann as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Also, we offer special thanks to Araceli Masterson for her assistance on the streets of Havana.

Revolutionary archaeology in Cuba

The Revolution of 1959 brought forth changes in the mission, theoretical orientation, and organization of archaeology in Cuba and created a role for, and constraints on, the profession that are unique in the Western Hemisphere. This paper draws upon examples from substantive field and laboratory research to examine the methods and theoretical perspectives of Cuban archaeology since the Revolution, focusing on the period from 1962 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Archaeological practice during the Revolutionary period in Cuba has reflected the aims of the Revolutionary government, the influence of Soviet archaeology, the legacy of pre-Revolutionary approaches in North American archaeology, and the Cuban sense ofpatria.