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Subject Area: Cuba

A Dictionary of 1,000 English Loan Words in Cuban Spanish With Usages, Synonyms, and Etymologies
 Fajardo, Jose A. Sanchez
2017 1-4955-0574-X 324 pages
This work is a differential dictionary that compiles Cuban anglicanisms (calques and loanwords) that have been found in written and oral texts that cover the last century. Most of the dictionary entries are accompanied by authentic texts, synonyms and etymology to guarantee an easy understanding of word meaning and formation.

Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)
 Gutiérrez, Mariela A.
2008 0-7734-5040-8 272 pages
In this work the author presents the reader with an annotated English version of forty enchanting and complex short stories by Cuban ethnologist Lydia Cabrera translated by Gutiérrez herself. The author’s translation also offers an array of impeccable and timely cultural, historical, and linguistic annotations that place in the forefront the Afro-Cuban way of life that has existed on the island since the 16th century.

An Ethnological Interpretation of the Afro-Cuban World of Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)
 Gutiérrez, Mariela A.
2008 0-7734-5042-4 288 pages
This work explores Cuban ethnologist’s Lydia Cabrera works that have a mythic symbolic base within her ethnological and literary production. More specifically the author’s approach comes out of the need to create a mythic-symbolic analysis regarding Cabrera’s opus. In this book the author accomplished the task of an in-depth analysis regarding the myth and symbolism that permeates Lydia Cabrera’s short stories which up to the present have remained unexplored. Includes the most complete and exhaustive bibliography on the author to date. This book contains eleven black and white photographs.

Developmental Analysis of Cuba’s Health Care System Since 1959
 MacDonald, Théodore H.
1999 0-7734-8049-8 402 pages
This book deals with the development of Cuba's elaborate health care system and critically analyses various aspects of it. It is a compendium of clinical and social information in that regard and, in particular, focuses on the impact of the US Trade Embargo and the Helms Burton Act on the continued viability of the enterprise. In this account, the medical reader will find a huge amount of relevant and difficult to obtain epidemiological and clinical data. The study discusses current areas of Cuban research as well as the historical context. The book is also readily accessible to the non-medical reader, so that social scientists, educationists and others can fruitfully use it.

Fictional First-Person Discourses in Cuban Diaspora Novels
 Rosales Herrera, Raúl
2012 0-7734-2588-8 304 pages
This book considers Cuban diaspora novels written since 1980, critically examining the autobiographical elements of the works and the authors who wrote them. Incorporating autobiographical theories and Cuban exile history across literary generations, the study analyzes different approaches to fictional self-figuration. It underscores how the autobiographical within fictional discourses does not conceal, but instead reveals more flexible outlets for authorial and diasporic self-representation.
From the beginning the author defines the difference between diaspora and exile. The text then studies three periodic phases in the first-person fictional novels of Cuban writers outside the island, taking into consideration the writers’ own displacement and the nature of the dynamics between exile and adopted country. The author discovers a commonality in all of the novels: strong parallels between history and fiction and overlapping characteristics of the novels’ authors and their narrating protagonists – both displaced subjects. The text represents an important contribution to autobiographical studies and to the study of both Cuban and Latino literature in the United States, but especially to the studies of one of the newest routes of Cuban literature in the world.

Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban- American Literature
 Montes, Rafael Miguel
2006 0-7734-5851-4 184 pages
Through a critical examination of a number of artistic, musical, and literary productions created by the children of Cuban exiles, this book defines frameworks with which to discuss second-generation Cuban-American texts. Via the cultural critiques of exile produced by theorists such as Bhabha, Appadurai, Seyhan, and Rushdie, the work analyzes the social and political implications of works produced by Cristina García, Roberto G. Fernández, Virgil Suárez, Carmelita Tropicana, Albita Rodríguez, and several other artists all engaged in defining a cultural identity in exile. The overall study reveals a generational solidarity of much greater complexity than the common assumptions of assimilation and acculturation previously assigned to this generation’s cultural output. The art produced by this particular generation, born either wholly outside of Cuban territory or children at the time of their departures, considers the necessity of interrogating parental as well as grandparental narratives as they settle on the task of creating independent identity narratives. Primarily by accessing memories, childhood stories, tales of pre-Revolutionary Cuba, traumatic narratives of departure, and accounts of social (mal)adjustments, these texts offer a number of viable ways in which to produce and ultimately locate a multi-faceted cultural identity despite the potentially alienating condition known as exile.

Historical Pre-Conditions of the Origin of the Cuban Nation
 Opatrny, Josef
1994 0-7734-2304-4 264 pages
This study examines the highlights of annexationism in the 1850's when Cuban Annexationists found strong support from some American groups after the Texas annexation and the Mexican-American war. Examines the significance of annexationism in three areas: as representing one step beyond the early Creole reformism; introducing into the political climate the acceptability of armed struggle; and adding to the sense of separate Cuban community and identity, not least with the debates it engendered, especially that between the essentially European cultural nationalism of Saco, and Cisneros Betancourt's logic of economic integration with the U.S. and hence protection by its growing power.

Influence of Emerson and Whitman on the Cuban Poet José Martí. Themes of Immigration, Colonialism, and Independence
 Schwarzmann, Georg
2010 0-7734-4728-8 316 pages
This study analyzes the impact of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman on José Martí and his search for a political and cultural design for postcolonial Latin America. Martí integrated Emerson’s call for individual self-reliance and for cultural independence from Europe, as well as Whitman’s embrace of liberty and democracy and his poetry and prose reveal the formal and conceptual influence of the two North American writers.

Just Defense of the Natural Freedom of Slaves: A Critical Edition and Translation of Servi Liberi Seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio by Edward R. Sunshine
 de Moirans, Epifanio
2007 0-7734-5504-3 532 pages
Awarded the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship

This book offers a critical Latin text with English, facing-page translation of Epifanio de Moirans's Servi Liberi seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio. The events described in Servi Liberi occurred in Havana, Cuba toward the end of 1681 and the beginning of 1682. It was then that the author, de Moirans, a Frenchman from Burgundy, along with Francisco José de Jaca, a Spaniard from Aragon and fellow Capuchin, did what was most impossible and subversive at the time: he condemned the very institution of slavery. The only extant copy of Servi Liberi is in Seville’s Archivo General de Indias, which, though formerly a stock exchange, became the official depository for Spanish colonial documents over two hundred years ago. Servi Liberi has survived because of the Archive; had it perished, we would have no knowledge of these events, no awareness of these campaigns, and no idea of how two Capuchins struggled with all the established political, economic, and religious interests of their time to change the widespread and destructive practice of slavery.

Postmodern Poetic Narrative of Cuban Writer Reinaldo Arenas / La Narrativa Postmoderna Del Escritor Cubano Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990)
 Zendegui, Ileana
2004 0-7734-6434-4 147 pages
In Spanish.
This study focuses on the works of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most prolific and controversial Latin American authors in the second half of the 20th century. Through the analysis of the five novels of the pentagony and other texts, this study follows the tragic journey of the antihero protagonist, from adolescence into adulthood, registering the correlation between his existential crisis and the narrative historical discourse. Despite the ostracism Reinaldo Arenas suffered for ten year, this study illumines how he established through his work a meditative dialogue with himself and the common man; this perspective formulates a permanent literary and philosophic reflection with thinkers and writers of his country and the West, as a basis for a rejection of the Cuban reality. The resultant interdisciplinary and postmodern dialogue constitutes one of the most significant and distinctive contributions of his work.

Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain. America’s 1898 Adventure in Imperialism
 Edgerton, Robert B.
2004 0-7734-6266-X 235 pages
This book describes and eva1uates the turn-of-the-century foray by the U.S. into imperialism. It describes our conflict with Spain. over the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Cuba followed by our invasion of the island and its seizure. It also describes our seizure of Puerto Rico from Spain. That island today stands as the oldest colony in the world and the author proposes that it is a place with no independence or political rights. The annexation of Hawaii that took place at the same time is also examined as is the seizure of Guam and the invasion and eventual conquest of the Philippines after many years of bloody combat. Finally the book assesses the impact of these imperialistic adventures on US politics at that time and over the years since.

Teatro y Revolución Cubana: Subversión y Utopía en los Siete Contra Tebas de Antón Arrufat / Theater and Cuban Revolution - Subversion and Utopia in Seven Against Thebes by Antón Arrufat
 Barquet, Jésus J.
2002 0-7734-7140-5 176 pages
This study offers a profound study of Arrufat’s play, using most recent critical trends concerning the performance aspect of the drama. It examines the genre of the drama and its relationship to the phenomenon of the Cuban Revolution, Arrufat as a Cuban playwright of the 60s and his re-writing of the Greek theme of the fratricidal fight in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Also contains a recent interview with Arrufat in which he describes the social circumstances surrounding the play and some of his classical re-writing techniques. In Spanish. “With the useful journey through Seven Against Thebes and its epoch furnished by this book, two assertions are well-established: first, the play is one of the masterpieces of Cuban theater of all time; and second, Barquet’s study constitutes a model of criticism in the field of Latin-American drama.” – José A. Escarpanter

U. S. Expansionism and Cuban Annexationism in the 1850s
 Opatrny, Josef
1993 0-7734-2308-7 324 pages
This study examines the highlights of annexationism in the 1850s when Cuban Annexationists found strong support from some American groups after the Texas annexation and the Mexican American war. Cuban annexationists and American expansionists both feared social disorder, racial strife, and political and economical instability. The significance of annexation lies in three areas: it represented one step beyond early Creole reformism; it introduced the idea of the acceptability of armed struggle; and finally, it added to a sense of separate Cuban community and identity.

Understanding Contemporary Cuba in Visual and Verbal Forms
 Dorsinville, Max
2004 0-7734-6576-6 212 pages
This study is a contribution to literary and cultural history. It argues that, as mirrored acts of representation, the visual and verbal yield a common language based on the image defined by Ezra Pound as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ The study refers to other modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the theories on perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Berger. It applies these perspectives to the works of diverse writers who chose Cuba for a subject, finding a rich field for discussion of issues of representation, language and perception. In the concept of the gaze, it argues for the significance of a link between modernist theory and Cuban life represented in a range of works by Cristina Garcia, Edmundo Desnoes, Pico Iyer, Derek Walcott, and others, where nothing is what it seems.