Mainstream media in the United States for the past 60 years has converged with the neo-colonial foreign policy objectives of the state to create a misinformed, biased narrative against the Cuban revolution. Using extensive examples, including pre-revolutionary historic coverage, journalist Keith Bolender reveals how the national press has established an anti-Cuba chronicle in adherence to Washington's unrelenting regime change policies. From coverage of the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cuban Five and the current issues of Obama's 'Cuban Thaw' in 2014 to the renewed hostility under the Trump Administration, the edition examines with specific clarity how damaging corporate media treatment of Cuba is to the understanding of the revolution and those who continue to support it. This original treatment scrutinises the foundation for the media’s hostility against Cuba's socialist political/economic system, providing new insight into the propaganda workings of the so called 'free' press in the US and across Western liberal democracies. The work is a unique resource for activists, journalists and students interested in the ever-complicated relationship between the United States and its island neighbour to the south.

With Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920, Duke University Press proudly assumes publication of the final volumes of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. This invaluable archival project documents the impact and spread of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914 and led by him until his death in 1940. Volume XI is the first to focus on the Caribbean, where the UNIA was represented by more than 170 divisions and chapters. Revealing the connections between the major African-American mass movement of the interwar era and the struggle of the Caribbean people for independence, this volume includes the letters, speeches, and writings of Caribbean Garveyites and their opponents, as well as documents and speeches by Garvey, newspaper articles, colonial correspondence and memoranda, and government investigative records. Volume XI covers the period from 1911, when a controversy was ignited in Limon, Costa Rica, in response to a letter that Garvey sent to the Limon Times, until 1920, when workers on the Panama Canal undertook a strike sponsored in part by the UNIA. The primary documents are extensively annotated, and the volume includes twenty-two critical commentaries on the territories covered in the book, from the Bahamas to Guatemala, and Haiti to Brazil. A trove of scholarly resources, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 illuminates another chapter in the history of one the world’s most important social movements.

Praise for the Previous Volumes:
“The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers will take its place among the most important records of the Afro-American experience. . . . ‘The Marcus Garvey Papers’ lays the groundwork for a long overdue reassessment of Marcus Garvey and the legacy of racial pride, nationalism and concern with Africa he bequeathed to today’s black community.”—Eric Foner, the New York Times Book Review

“Until the publication of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, many of the documents necessary for a full assessment of Garvey’s thought or of his movement’s significance have not been easily accessible. Robert A. Hill and his staff . . . have gathered over 30,000 documents from libraries and other sources in many countries. . . . The Garvey papers will reshape our understanding of the history of black nationalism and perhaps increase our understanding of contemporary black politics.”—Clayborne Carson, the Nation

“Now is our chance, through these important volumes, to finally begin to come to terms with the significance of Garvey’s complex, fascinating career and the meaning of the movement he built.”—Lawrence W. Levine, the New Republic

Volume XII of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers covers a period of twelve months, from the opening of the UNIA's historic first international convention in New York, in August 1920, to Marcus Garvey's return to the United States in July 1921 after an extended tour of Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize. In many ways the 1920 convention marked the high-point of the Garvey movement in the United States, while Garvey's tour of the Caribbean, in the winter and spring of 1921, registered the greatest outpouring of popular support for the UNIA in its history. The period covered in the present volume was the moment of the movement's political apotheosis, as well as the moment when the finances of Garvey's Black Star Line went into free ­fall.

Volume XII highlights the centrality of the Caribbean people not only to the convention, but also to the movement. The reports to the convention discussed the range of social and economic conditions obtaining in the Caribbean, particularly their impact on racial conditions. The quality of the discussions and debates were impressive. Contained in these reports are some of the earliest and most clearly enunciated statements in defense of social and political freedom in the Caribbean. These documents form an underappreciated and still underutilized record of the political awakening of Caribbean people of African descent.

Volume XIII of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers covers the twelve months between the UNIA's second international convention in New York in August 1921 and the third convention in August 1922. It was a particularly tumultuous time for Garvey and the UNIA: Garvey’s relationship with the UNIA's top leadership began to fracture, the U.S. federal government charged Garvey with mail fraud, and his Black Star Line operation suffered massive financial losses. This period also witnessed a marked shift in Garvey's rhetoric and stance, as he retreated from his previously radical anticolonial positions, sought to court European governments as well as the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, and moved against his political rivals.

 

Despite these difficult and uncertain times, Garveyism expanded its reach throughout the Caribbean archipelago, which, as Volume XIII confirms, became the UNIA's de facto home in the early 1920s. The volume's numerous reports from the UNIA's Caribbean divisions and chapters describe what it was like for UNIA activists living and working under extremely repressive circumstances. The volume's major highlight covers the U.S. military's crackdown on the UNIA in the Dominican Republic, as documented in the correspondence between John Sydney de Bourg—whom Garvey had dispatched to monitor the situation—and U.S. and British government officials.

 

In addition to UNIA divisional reports and de Bourg's extensive correspondence, Volume XIII contains a wealth of newspaper articles, political tracts, official documents, and other sources that outline the complex responses to Garveyism throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, all the while documenting this watershed moment for Garvey and the UNIA.

 In this interdisciplinary study, scholars consider the aftermath of slavery, focusing on Caribbean societies and the southern United States.  What was the nature and impact of slave emancipation?  Did the change in legal status conceal underlying continuities in American plantation societies?  Was there a common postemancipation pattern of economic development?  How did emancipation affect the politics and culture of race and class?  This comparative study addresses precisely these types of questions as it makes a significant contribution to a new a growing field.

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic. Memory, migration and (de)colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of decolonisation. The chapters in this book range across disciplines and time periods to present a vibrant understanding of the ever-changing interactions between Caribbean peoples and colonialism as they migrated within and between colonial contexts. At the heart of this book are the voices of Caribbean migrants themselves, whose critical reflections on their experiences of migration and decolonisation are interwoven with the essays of academics and activists.

Una historia apasionante de los migrantes afro-latinos que lucharon en el destierro para derrocar la monarquía colonial, acabar con la esclavitud, y asegurar la ciudadanía plena en su patria lejana.
 
A fines del siglo XIX, un grupo pequeño de cubanos y puertorriqueños de ascendencia africana se instaló en las viviendas segregadas de la ciudad de Nueva York. En una sociedad de instrucción y recreo que fundaron en Greenwich Village, estos primeros neoyorquinos afrolatinos aprendieron a ser poetas, periodistas y revolucionarios. Al mismo tiempo, estos individuos—liderados por Rafael Serra, tabaquero, escritor y político; Sotero Figueroa, tipógrafo y editor; y Gertrudis Heredia, una de las primeras mujeres afrodescendientes que estudió en la Clínica de Partos de la Universidad de La Habana--construyeron una red política y articularon un ideal de nacionalismo revolucionario centrado en los proyectos de justicia racial y social. Sus esfuerzos tuvieron una profunda influencia en los escritos del poeta y diplomático José Martí sobre raza y en su apuesta por el liderazgo entre los exiliados cubanos.  Desde Nueva York, este grupo también luchó en años posteriores por crear espacios para la participación política negra en la República de Cuba.

En Migraciones raciales, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof presenta un vívido retrato de estos migrantes revolucionarios quienes habían sido, en gran parte, olvidados, entretejiendo sus experiencias de “migrar siendo negros,” sus relaciones con líderes afro-americanos en la lucha por la igualdad racial en Estados Unidos, y su participación en el desarrollo de los movimientos políticos nacionalistas antillanos. Destacando el papel fundamental de los neoyorquinos afrolatinos en la historia de la política revolucionaria del caribe hispánico, Hoffnung-Garskof ofrece una nueva interpretación del movimiento separatista y de su idea de que Cuba podría convertirse en una nación sin divisiones raciales.

Un modelo de investigación transnacional y comparativa, Migraciones raciales revela las complejidades de las formaciones raciales dentro de las comunidades migrantes y el poder de pequeños grupos de inmigrantes para transformar sus sociedades de origen.
 

Modern Blackness is a rich ethnographic exploration of Jamaican identity in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Analyzing nationalism, popular culture, and political economy in relation to one another, Deborah A. Thomas illuminates an ongoing struggle in Jamaica between the values associated with the postcolonial state and those generated in and through popular culture. Following independence in 1962, cultural and political policies in Jamaica were geared toward the development of a multiracial creole nationalism reflected in the country’s motto: “Out of many, one people.” As Thomas shows, by the late 1990s, creole nationalism was superseded by “modern blackness”—an urban blackness rooted in youth culture and influenced by African American popular culture. Expressions of blackness that had been marginalized in national cultural policy became paramount in contemporary understandings of what it was to be Jamaican.

Thomas combines historical research with fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica between 1993 and 2003. Drawing on her research in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston, she looks at how Jamaicans interpreted and reproduced or transformed on the local level nationalist policies and popular ideologies about progress. With detailed descriptions of daily life in Jamaica set against a backdrop of postcolonial nation-building and neoliberal globalization, Modern Blackness is an important examination of the competing identities that mobilize Jamaicans locally and represent them internationally.

Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.

Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity—including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty—cannot be fully understood.

Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora.

Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.