La Lucha For Cuba

For many in Miami’s Cuban exile community, hating Fidel Castro is as natural as loving one’s children. This hatred, Miguel De La Torre suggests, has in fact taken on religious significance. In La Lucha for Cuba, De La Torre shows how Exilic Cubans, a once marginalized group, have risen to power and privilege—distinguishing themselves from other Hispanic communities in the United States—and how religion has figured in their ascension. Through the lens of religion and culture, his work also unmasks and explores intra-Hispanic structures of oppression operating among Cubans in Miami. Miami Cubans use a religious expression, la lucha, or "the struggle," to justify the power and privilege they have achieved. Within the context of la lucha, De La Torre explores the religious dichotomy created between the "children of light" (Exilic Cubans) and the "children of darkness" (Resident Cubans). Examining the recent saga of the Elián González custody battle, he shows how the cultural construction of la lucha has become a distinctly Miami-style spirituality that makes el exilio (exile) the basis for religious reflection, understanding, and practice—and that conflates political mobilization with spiritual meaning in an ongoing confrontation with evil.

Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meanings offers a provocative look at what it means to belong in modern socialist Cuba. Drawn from her extensive travels throughout Cuba over the past decade, author L. Kaifa Roland pulls back the curtain on a country that has remained mysterious to Americans since the mid-twentieth century. Through vivid vignettes and firsthand details, Roland exposes the lasting effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of state-sponsored segregated tourism in Cuba. She demonstrates how the creation of separate spheres for locals and tourists has had two effects. First, tourism reestablished the racial apartheid that plagued pre-revolutionary Cuba. Second, it reinforced how the state's desire to maintain a socialist ideology in face of its increasing reliance on capitalist tools is at odds with the day-to-day struggles--or La Lucha--of the Cuban people. Roland uses conversations and anecdotes gleaned from a year of living among locals as a way of delving into these struggles and understanding what constitutes life in Cuba today. In exploring the intersections of race, class, and gender, she gives readers a better understanding of the common issues of status and belonging for tourists and their hosts in Cuba. Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha is one of several volumes in the Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology series, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups. Ideal for introductory anthropology courses--and as supplements for a variety of upper-level courses--these texts seamlessly combine portraits of an interconnected and globalized world with narratives that emphasize the agency of their subjects.

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.

This first-time paperback edition, now updated, describes and analyzes Cuba's history from the English capture of Havana in 1762 through Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, the Cuban Revolution, and the Missile Crisis to Fidel Castro's defiant but precarious present state.

Examines the everday struggles, insights, attitudes, and lives of Hispanic women from the perspective of Hispanic identity in North American society, with summaries of the sources, aims, goals, and tenets of mujerista theology.

A front-line human rights defender fighting murderous impunity in the Mexican borderlands The Mexican border state of Chihuahua and its city Juárez have become notorious the world over as hotbeds of violence. Drug cartel battles and official corruption result in more murders annually in Chihuahua than in wartorn Afghanistan. Thanks to a culture of impunity, 97 percent of the killings in Juárez go unsolved. Despite a climate of fear, a small group of human rights activists, exemplified by the Chihuahua lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro, works to identify the killers and their official enablers. This is the story of La Lucha, illustrated in beautiful and chilling comic book art, rendering in rich detail the stories of families ripped apart by disappearances and murders—especially gender-based violence—and the remarkably brave advocacy, protests, and investigations of ordinary citizens who turned their grief into resistance.

As Castro’s democratic reform movement veered off course, a revolution that seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America brought about its tragic opposite. Jonathan C. Brown examines in forensic detail how the turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the century’s most transformative events.

The Surrender Tree is a lyrical, Newbery Honor-winning historical tale in poems, and this edition has the Spanish and English text available in one book. It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not free. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her. Black, white, Cuban, Spanish—Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Using the true story of the folk hero Rosa la Bayamesa, acclaimed poet Margarita Engle gives us another gripping, breathtaking account of a tumultuous period in Cuban history. A 2009 Newbery Honor Book Winner of the 2009 Pura Belpré Medal for Narrative Winner of the 2009 Bank Street - Claudia Lewis Award A 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year