Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975

Description

This book examines the ways in which Cuba's revolutions of 1933 and 1959 became touchstones for border-crossing endeavors of radical politics and cultural experimentation over the mid-twentieth century. It argues that new networks of solidarity building between US and Cuban allies also brought with them perils and pitfalls that could not be separated from the longer history of US empire in Cuba. As US and Cuban subjects struggled together towards common aspirations of racial and gender equality, fairer distribution of wealth, and anti-imperialism, they created a unique index of cultural work that widens our understanding of the transition between hemispheric modernism and postmodernism. Canvassing poetry, music, journalism, photographs, and other cultural expressions around themes of revolution, this book seeks new understanding of how race, gender, and nationhood could shift in meaning and materialization when traveling across the Florida Straits. Cover Half-title Title page Copyright information Dedication Table of contents List of figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Remapping “Our America” 2 Documenting the “Crime of Cuba” The Transnational Routes of Revolutionary Politics Searching for an Américan Alternative: Revolutionary Exiles in the United States Returning to Martí’s New York City Confronting Gaps in the Transnation: Documenting The Crime of Cuba The Limits of Revolutionary Politics: The Popular Front Realignment 3 Good or Bad Neighbors? Pan-American Politics and the 1933 Revolution Exposing Gaps in Pan-Americanism The Ambivalence of Pan-American Tourism Rewriting the Intimate Ties 4 Race and Revolution in Verse Left Politics of the Diaspora “I, Too, Am America:” The Poetics of Diaspora Minding the Diasporic Gap Silencing the Maracas? Diaspora on the Antifascist Front 5 The Making of Revolutionary Exceptionalism Modernization and the Contest between Exceptionalisms Saying “No” to the American Way of Life: The New Left and Revolutionary Culture Of Mimicry and Monologues: Performing Postmodern Cuba Remixing the Folk, or the Postmodern Logic of “Guantanamera” 6 Race and the 1959 Revolution in the Post-Bandung Era Distancing from Scottsboro: Cuba Libre in the Cold War Tricontinental Politics in the Post-Bandung Era “Ser como el Che”: Postcolonial Identity and the US Third World Left Minding the Gaps in Revolutionary Humanism 7 From Suffragists to Soldiers The 1933 Revolution and Pan-American Women’s Rights Revolutionary Womanhood and Cold War Modernization Searching for a Feminist Utopia Conclusion Index