Mexico And The Caribbean Under Castro S Eyes

This book provides a first-hand account of the author’s encounters as a social geographer, based on his field research and travels in Mexico and the Caribbean. The interlocutors of different classes and races introduce the reader to a variety of urban and rural communities, many of them involved in development projects. Two leitmotifs of the 1960s and 1970s recur throughout the volume: decolonization, state formation, and the quest for democracy in the post-colonial societies of Mexico and the Caribbean; and the conditions which were likely to constrain or challenge these developments, quintessentially associated with the 1959 Cuban revolution, the cold war and student radicalism.

This book critically explores the impact of national security, violence and state power on citizenship rights and experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing on cross-country analyses and fieldwork conducted in two “garrisons,” a middle-class community and among policy elites in Jamaica—where high levels of violence, in(security) and transnational organized crime are transforming state power —the author argues that dominant responses to security have wider implications for citizenship. The security practices of the state often result in criminalization, police abuse, violation of the rights of the urban poor and increased securitization of garrison spaces. As the tension between national security and citizenship increases, there is a centrality of the local as a site where citizenship is (re)defined, mediated, interpreted, performed and given meaning. While there is a dominant security discourse which focuses on state security, individuals at the local level articulate their own narratives which reflect lived-experiences and the particularities of socio-political milieu.

This book argues that during the Cuban Revolution (1952–1958), Fidel Castro, his allies, and members of the Movimiento 26 de Julio tapped into a larger network of transnational revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the region’s dictatorships. With his research in multiple archives including those in Cuba, Prados offers a new, transnational perspective on conflicts over dictatorship and democracy, which shaped the Caribbean in the decades that followed World War II. The book traces the roots of the ‘Caribbean Legion’, a transnational network of anti-dictatorial revolutionaries, before detailing how Castro and many of his allies in exile exploited this web during the struggle against Fulgencio Batista. Contacts in this network provided the Cuban revolutionaries with crucial military, financial, and diplomatic support from the democratic governments of José Figueres in Costa Rica, and Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, entangling the Cuban revolutionaries in a larger regional struggle between democratic regimes and military dictatorships. This transnational involvement shaped the revolutionary regime of 1959 and had far-reaching repercussions for the larger geopolitical dynamics in the region, and for the Cold War as a whole.

This memorandum posits and critically analyzes several apologies, motivations, and principles contributing to Mexico's increasingly active foreign policy role in Central America. It sets out a series of explanations including those typified as socio-cultural, historical, and ideological, economic, political, and strategic/security. In each case, the author proposes the argument and then exposes it to analysis, featuring its strengths and weaknesses. The several categories define distinct and distinguishable parts of the larger foreign policy matrix and their proposition and elucidation contributes to an enriched understanding of the formulation and articulation of Mexican policy in Central America. In this effort, the author is not concerned essentially with the substance of Mexico's Central American policy, but rather with the motivations and principles informing the policy (or policies) and the apologies devised to explain Mexico's activities in the region. (Author).

Reported from inside Cuba by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andres Oppenheimer, Castro's Final Hour chronicles the dramatic events that have crippled the more-than-three-decades-old Marxist regime of Fidel Castro. From the execution of the country's most celebrated Army general in 1989 to the devastating effects of the loss of all Soviet aid, the picture Oppenheimer paints is extraordinarily detailed and engrossing, revealing a country on the brink of disaster. He uncovers Castro's never-before reported efforts to radicalize Noriega's regime in Panama, the failure of his "Zero Option" plan to restore economic stability without outside aid, and tells how, in a last ditch attempt to save the country from its dire slide, Castro's top aides pushed a plan to strip him of some of his powers. Including exclusive interviews with Soviet officials, Latin American leaders - including Daniel Ortega and Manuel Noriega - as well as the top echelon of current Cuban leadership and Fidel's dissident daughter, Alina, Castro's Final Hour is a compelling and intimate portrait of the Cuban leader, and an authoritative evaluation of what the future may hold for his country.

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued--through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country's future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington--Barack Obama's opening to the island, Donald Trump's reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden--have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an ambitious chronicle written for an era that demands a new reckoning with the island's past. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History reveals the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the influence of the United States on Cuba and the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba. Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States--as well as the author's own extensive travel to the island over the same period--this is a stunning and monumental account like no other. --

The book Ken's Shorts is both entertaining and edifying as it is a series of short stories and documentaries—and perhaps a tad irreverent, judging by its title and cover design—that seems to strike a perfect balance between funny and entertaining with educational.