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The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, who was born in the eastern province of Camagüey in 1902, died in 1989. This new edition of his selected poems, reissued thirty years after its original publication, includes an extensive, new introductory essay by Roberto Márquez, one of the original translators and a leading authority on Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture.

A historically significant memoir offering a firsthand perspective on life, identity, and cultural transformation in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Memoir of My Youth in Cuba: A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898 is a translation of the memoir Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba: Un soldado del ejército español en la guerra separatista (1895–1898) by Josep Conangla. The English edition is based on the Spanish version edited by Joaquín Roy, who found the memoir and was given access to the Conangla family archives. Conangla’s memoir, now available in English, is an important addition to the accounts of Spanish and Cuban soldiers who served in Cuba’s second War of Independence.

Spaniard Josep Conangla was conscripted at the age of twenty and sent to Cuba. In the course of his time there, he reaffirmed his pacifism and support of Cuban independence. The young man was a believer who unfailingly connected his view of events to the Christian humanitarianism on which he prided himself. Conangla’s advanced education and the influence of well-placed friends facilitated his assignment to safe bureaucratic positions during the war, ensuring that he would not see combat. From his privileged position, he was a keen observer of his surroundings. He described some of the decisions he made—which at times put him at odds with the military bureaucracy he served—along with what he saw as the consequences of General Valeriano Weyler’s decree mandating the reconcentración, an early version of concentration camps. What Conangla saw fueled his revulsion at the collusion of the Spanish state and its state-sponsored religion in that policy. “Red Mass,” published six years after the War of Independence and included in his memoir, is a vivid expression in verse of his abhorrence.

Conangla’s recollections of the contacts between Spaniards and Cubans in the areas to which he was assigned reveal his ability to forge friendships even with Creole opponents of the insurrection. As an aspiring poet and writer, Conangla included material on fellow writers, Cuban and Spanish, who managed to meet and exchange ideas despite their circumstances. His accounts of the Spanish defeat, the scene in Havana around the end of the war, along with his return to Spain, are stirring.

There are 27 million slaves living in the world today—more than at any time in history. Three hundred thousand of them are impoverished children in Haiti, who "stay with" families as unpaid and uneducated domestic workers, subject to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. This practice, known locally as restavek ("staying with"), is so widespread that one in ten Haitian children is caught up in this form of slavery.

Jean-Robert Cadet was a restavek in Haiti from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. He told the harrowing story of his youth in Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American—a landmark book that exposed ongoing child slavery in Haiti. Now in My Stone of Hope, Cadet continues his story from his early attempts to adjust to freedom in American society to his current life mission of eliminating child slavery through advocacy and education. As he recounts his own struggles to surmount the psychological wounds of slavery, Cadet puts a human face on the suffering that hundreds of thousands of Haitians still endure daily. He also builds a convincing case that child slavery is not just one among many problems that Haiti faces as the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. Rather, he argues that the systematic abuse of so many of its children is Haiti's fundamental problem, because it creates damaged adults who seem incapable of governing the country justly or managing its economy productively.

For everyone concerned about the fate of Haiti, the welfare of children, and the freedom of people around the globe, My Stone of Hope sounds an irresistible call to action.