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Books on Cuba
The Autobiography of a
Slave /
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba
/
Santeria from
Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories
Fidel Castro and
the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba
/
Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the
Twentieth
Century
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
/
Caliban
and Other Essays /
The
Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball
Santeria
Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America Art /
Culture and
Customs of Cuba /
Man-making Words; Selected Poems
of Nicholas Guillen
Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity on
Contemporary Cuba /
Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing
on Race, Politics, and Culture
Nicolas Guillen:
Popular Poet of the Caribbean /
Selected Poetry by Nancy Morejon
/
Cuba: After the
Revolution
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Nicholas Guillén, Cuban Poet
(1902-1989)
Guillen: Man Making Words
(1972) /
Songoro
Consongo (1931) /
Tengo
(1964) /
El gran zoo
(1969)
Nicohlas Guillen was born on in 1902. He was an
Afro-Cuban poet, writer, journalist, and social activist. From
Camageuey, Cuba, he was the sixth child of Argelia Batista y
Arrieta and Nicolas’ Guillen y Urra, both who were of mixed
African-Spanish decent.
Guillen’s father introduced him to Afro-Cuban music when he was very
young. His father, a journalist, was assassinated by the Cuban government.
As he and his brothers and sister finished school in pre-revolutionary
Cuba; they encountered the same racism black Americans lived with prior to
the 1950’s. Guillen began writing about the social problems faced by
blacks in the 1920, his first poems appeared in Camaguey Grafico in 1922.
This was followed by his first collection of poems, Cerebro y
Corazon (Brain and Heart). In 1926, Guillen became a regular
contributor to the Sunday literary supplement of Havana’s Diario de
la Marina and in 1929 published El Camino en Harlem, an
article that condemned Cuba’s racial structures. During the same year,
Guillen interviewed Langston Hughes in Havana, he deeply admired Hughes
and they became lifelong friends.
In 1930, he created an international stir with the publication of Motivios
de son, eight short poems inspired by the Son, a popular Afro-Cuban
musical form, and the daily living conditions of Cuban blacks. Composed in
Afro-Cuban vernacular, the collection separated itself from with Spanish
literary cannon and established black culture as a legitimate focus of
Cuban literature. It was as if Guillen had touched on something that the
people of Cuba could recognize as having been on the tips of their tongues
waiting for Guillen to articulate it.
Like Hughes, he believed that black artists must be free to "express
our individual dark-skinned selves without shame." Guillen was as
much a political activist as a poet, in 1937 he traveled to Spain as a
delegate to the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense
of Culture. In an address before the congress he condemned fascism and
reaffirmed his black roots
In 1940, he ran for mayor of Camaguey and in 1948, Guillen
was a senatorial candidate for the Cuban Communist Party; both campaigns
were unsuccessful. He truly identified with the plight of blacks beyond
his native Cuba, this is reflected in his Elegias (1958). Upon his
return to Cuba in 1959, Fidel
Castro awarded him the task of designing a new cultural policy and
setting up the Union of Writers and Artist of Cuba, of which Guillen
became president in 1961. During the next two decades, he wrote and
published a number of collections of poetry including Tengo
(1964),
El gran Zoo (1967), La rueda dentada, and El diario que a
diario (1972), and Sol de Domingo (1982). Guillen died in
Havana in 1987.
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Guillen: Man Making Words
(1972) emphasizes
the mature works of Guillen, one of an international group of poets
of the African Diaspora, which includes Leopold Sedar Senghor and
Aime Cesaire in the francophone literature, and Langston Hughes and
Leroy Jones in the African-American tradition.
Like his
contemporaries, Guillen combined modernist and surrealist influences
on poetic form and content--including a valorization of "Africanity"--with
revolutionary political engagement in the construction of a new
society, one that comprised exposure of the social discrimination,
prejudices, and poverty which plagued Africans of the Diaspora, and
revindication of the beauty of Africaness--physically,
linguistically, musically, and culturally.
In encouraging revolt against the existing order, Guillen
encouraged Afro-Cubans to pride of race and place. By connecting
this revolt to International Socialism he wove a cosmopolitan
interconnectedness for an otherwise disenfranchised people. Rooting
this interconnectedness in the rivers, bars, cities, regions, and
heroes of Cuba, Guillen created a new vision of Cuban culture on
which to ground social and political change.
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In encouraging revolt against the existing order, Guillen
encouraged Afro-Cubans to pride of race and place. By connecting
this revolt to International Socialism he wove a cosmopolitan
interconnectedness for an otherwise disenfranchised people. Rooting
this interconnectedness in the rivers, bars, cities, regions, and
heroes of Cuba, Guillen created a new vision of Cuban culture on
which to ground social and political change.
In these selected works of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen--ranging from his early sound experiments through his more overtly
political poetry to his final works--the Afro-Cuban experience of everyday
life and its socio-historical and contemporary political underpinnings are
constants. From slavery on to the natural and urban settings of Cuba, to
the international places and communities of poets, politicians and
activists shaping contemporary Cuban life, to the twinned invasions of
Cuba by soldiers and tourists, and to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution,
Guillen portrays a life where everything, including love, is colored by
suffering and rebellion
Like the other poets of revolutionary decolonization Guillen pointed
the way to constructivist postmodernism and planted the seeds of
contemporary postcolonialism. His poetry is thus an important page in the
literary theorization of these movements.
Translated and annotated with introduction by Robert Marquez and David
Arthur McMurray. Original titles and dates of Guillen's publications (in
Spanish): Primeros Poemas 1920-1930 (1930), Motivos de son (1930),
Songoro
Consongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1934), Cantos para Soldados (1937),
Sones para Turistas (1937), Espana (1937), El Son Entero (1947), Elegias
(1958), La Paloma de Vuelo Popular (1958),
Tengo
(1964), Poemas de Amor
(1964),
El gran zoo
(1969).
Univ. of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, Mass.,1972)
Sources: Cubaheritage.com
and
Afrocubaweb.com
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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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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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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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
15 April 2012
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