Aviva Chomsky

The Cuba reader : history, culture, politics

Cuba is often perceived in starkly black and white terms—either as the site of one of Latin America’s most successful revolutions or as the bastion of the world’s last communist regime. The Cuba Reader multiplies perspectives on the nation many times over, presenting more than one hundred selections about Cuba’s history, culture, and politics. Beginning with the first written account of the island, penned by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the selections assembled here track Cuban history from the colonial period through the ascendancy of Fidel Castro to the present. The Cuba Reader combines songs, paintings, photographs, poems, short stories, speeches, cartoons, government reports and proclamations, and pieces by historians, journalists, and others. Most of these are by Cubans, and many appear for the first time in English. The writings and speeches of Jose Marti, Fernando Ortiz, Fidel Castro, Alejo Carpentier, Che Guevera, and Reinaldo Arenas appear alongside the testimonies of slaves, prostitutes, doctors, travelers, and activists. Some selections examine health, education, Catholicism, and santeria; others celebrate Cuba’s vibrant dance, music, film, and literary cultures. The pieces are grouped into chronological sections. Each section and individual selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editors. The volume presents a number of pieces about twentieth-century Cuba, including the events leading up to and following Castro’s January 1959 announcement of revolution. It provides a look at Cuba in relation to the rest of the world: the effect of its revolution on Latin America and the Caribbean, its alliance with the Soviet Union from the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. The Cuba Reader also describes life in the periodo especial following the cutoff of Soviet aid and the tightening of the U.S. embargo. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.

Barbados or Canada? Race, Immigration, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba

The most optimistic Cuban commentators today can be heard arguing that the economic crisis on the island in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union has brought with it Cuba’s first chance to be truly independent. The island passed from being a literal colony of Spain to being what Cuban scholars refer to as a “neocolony” of the United States in 1898, and then to a state of economic and political dependence (albeit of a different nature) on the USSR after 1959. In each of these periods ideologies of national independence provoked strong resonances among the population. But the nature of this nation and the meanings of independence have been subject to repeated contestation. Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Cuba on 22 January 1998 with a speech denouncing Spanish colonialism, and linking Spain’s extermina-

Empire, Nature, and the Labor of Coal: Colombia in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: A twenty-first-century coal mine in Colombia reveals much about labor and empire in Latin America. To the extent that modern empire has been a project of extraction of mineral and agricultural commodities, it has also been a project of exerting imperial control over labor and nature. This essay puts nature at the center of the study of labor and empire, to examine how humans’ relationships with the natural world shaped, and were shaped by, imperial projects of extraction. Extractive industry workers have a long, radical history of resistance to foreign control of natural resources, positioning their unions as defenders of the nation as embodied by its natural environment, its natural resources, and its people, both workers and local residents, that are being exploited by a foreign oppressor. At the Cerrejón coal mine, labor environmentalism and the association of natural resources with the nation are embedded in militant anti-imperialism.

Social Impacts of Resource Extraction

Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru. By Moisés Arce. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Pp. xxviii + 171.

Empire, Labor, and Environment: Coal Mining and Anticapitalist Environmentalism in the Americas

25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822963097. A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico. Edited by Christopher R. Boyer. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 307.

they Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816502493. A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present. By Kendall W. Brown. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. Pp. xix + 257.

West Indian workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940

34.95 paper. ISBN: 9780826351067. From Enron to Evo: Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia. By Derrick Hindery. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Pp. xxiii + 303.

Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780816531400. La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Confl ict in Chile’s Frontier Territory. By Thomas Miller Klubock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 385.

Identity and struggle at the margins of the nation-state : the laboring peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean

27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356035.

A History of the Cuban Revolution

Latin American political movements linking traditional peasant values of subsistence with a leftist critique of imperialism are contributing to new forms of environmentalism there. While in the United States labor and environmental movements tend to operate within mainstream political and economic models based on privileging high levels of consumption and economic growth, Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development. From indigenous and peasant movements to leftist labor unions to political leaders, Latin Americans are calling for economic development that privileges the rights of rural peoples and their environments, and redistribution of resources domestically and globally. Yet they remain imbedded in an international economy based on extractivism and economic growth, which poses significant challenges to any alternative paths.