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Cuba: A BookList
Compiled by
Herbert B. Rogers
General
Information Department / Enoch Pratt
Free Library /State Library
400 Cathedral Street / Baltimore, MD
21201
Books on
Cuba
Barnet, Miguel, ed.
The Autobiography of a
Slave. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.
Behar, Ruth. Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guarde.
Matanzas: Ediciones Vigia, 2001.
Behar, Ruth.
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Brandon, George.
Santeria from
Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
Bunck, Julie.
Fidel Castro and
the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba. University
Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Carpentier, Alejo.
The Kingdom
of this World. (translated by Harriet de Onis). New York: Knopf,
1957.
Carpentier, Alejo.
The Lost Steps. (translated by
Harriet de Onis). New York: Knopf, 1967.
Castillo Bueno, Mario de los
Reyes.
Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the
Twentieth
Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, ed.
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon. Washington, DC:
Howard University Press, 1999.
De la Campa, Roman.
Cuba on My
Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation. New York: Verso, 2000.
Fernandez Retamar, Robert.
Caliban
and Other Essays. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1989.
Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto.
The
Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Keeble, Alexandra.
In the
Spirit of Wandering Teachers: Cuban Literacy Campaign. New
York/Havana: Ocean Press, 1978.
Kozol, Jonathan.
Children of
the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban School.
New York: Delacorte Press, 1978.
Lindsey, Arturo, ed.
Santeria
Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America Art. Washington,
DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
Le Bartolo, Giuseppe.
Santiago
de Cuba: Teatro en la calle. Havana: Editorial Jose Marti,
1994.
Lockwood, Lee.
Castro's Cuba,
Cuba's Fidel. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
long, p.w., etal.
Cuba is a State of Mind: The Spiritual Traveler.
Blue Ocean Press, 2006.
Lorenzetto, Anna and Karel Neys. Methods
and Means Utilized in Cuba to Eliminate
Illiteracy. Havana: Cuban National Commissions for UNESCO,
1965.
Luis, William.
Culture and
Customs of Cuba. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2000.
Marquez, Robert, ed and trans.
Patria
o Muerte! The Great Zoo and Other Poems by Nicolas Guillen. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1973
Marquez, Robert, and David
A. McMurrays, ed and trans.
Man-making Words; Selected Poems
of Nicholas Guillen. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1973.
Murphy, Joseph:
Santeria: An
African Religion in America. Boston: Beacon, 1988.
Perez Sarduy, Pedro and Jean
Stubbs, eds.
Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity on
Contemporary Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000.
Perez Sarduy, Pedro and Jean
Stubbs, eds.
Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing
on Race, Politics, and Culture. New York: Ocean Press, 1994.
Rayan, Alan, ed.
The Reader's
Companion to Cuba. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Rosendahl, Mona. Inside the
Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997.
Smart, Ian.
Nicolas Guillen:
Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia, Missouri:
University of
Missouri Press, 1990.
Thompson, Robert Ferris.
Flash
of the Spirit: Africa and Afroamerican Art and Philosophy.
New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Vega, Marta Moreno.
The Altar of
My Soul: The Living Tradition of Santeria. New York: One
World, 2000.
Weaver, Kathleen, trans.
Where
the Island Sleeps like a Wing: Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejon. San Francisco, CA: Black Scholar Press, 1985.
Wolf, Bernard.
Cuba: After the
Revolution. New York: Dutton, 1999. * *
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Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image
(2009)
By Michael
Casey
Illustrated. 388 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95
Casey, Buenos Aires
bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires, tap dances across
history— and the globe to examine intellectual property and
iconography through the lens of the famous image of Che
Guevara captured by fashion photographer Alberto Korda. Some
say that only the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe, her
skirt rising as she stands over a subway grate, has been
more reproduced, writes Casey. The author does not neglect
the relevant biographical details or history, but his focus
is Che as a brand. He wants to understand why the Korda
image remains so compelling to such a wide variety of people
and how it continues to represent so many different (and
differing) causes; he suggests that the power of Che, the
brand, is in its ability to be anything to anyone. The book
can feel like a disorderly amalgam of travelogue, visual
criticism, biography and reportage—fragments befitting a
study of globalized culture. Readers interested in the
impact of visual culture or in better understanding the
elusiveness of intellectual property rights, particularly in
a global marketplace, will find much food for thought.
Publishers Weekly
Reminiscences
of the Cuban Revolutionary War |
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Poem: Fireman's
Ball /
Guarding the Flame of Life
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The Brilliant Disaster
JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs
By Jim Rasenberger
My telling of the Bay of Pigs thing will certainly not be the first. On the contrary, thousands of pages of official reports, journalism, memoir, and scholarship have been devoted to the invasion, including at least two exceptional books: Haynes Johnson’s emotionally charged account published in 1964 and Peter Wyden’s deeply reported account from 1979. This book owes a debt to both of those, and to many others, as well as to thousands of pages of once-classified documents that have become available over the past fifteen years, thanks in part to the efforts of the National Security Archives, an organization affiliated with George Washington University that seeks to declassify and publish government files. These newer sources, including a CIA inspector general’s report, written shortly after the invasion and hidden away in a vault for decades, and a once-secret CIA history compiled in the 1970s, add depth and clarity to our understanding of the event and of the men who planned it and took part in it. . . . |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
By David Graeber
Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy. Economist Glenn Loury /Criminalizing a Race
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update 8 November 2008
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