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Tracing Cuba’s ideological history, Gordy first looks at the ways in which the 19th century wars of independence and the 1959 revolution were used as the basis for both challenging and legitimizing Cuban socialism. Following the embrace of a pure socialist ideology in the 1960s, state policies of the 1970s became more accommodating of market imperatives, while still holding on to the principles articulated by Che Guevara and Karl Marx. In the 1990s, the Cuban people themselves pushed back against further economic reforms, reasserting the value of socioeconomic equality. Gordy also examines ideological debates among intellectuals, from the controversy sparked by Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” speech to the demand in the 1990s for a separation between academia and the state—not to safeguard academia from politics, but to ensure that academics as such could contribute to the political dialogue.

Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema. The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director.

This double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based. An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.

 

What does the Cuban Revolution look like “from within?" This volume proposes that scholars and observers of Cuba have too long looked elsewhere—from the United States to the Soviet Union—to write the island's post-1959 history. Drawing on previously unexamined archives, the contributors explore the dynamics of sociopolitical inclusion and exclusion during the Revolution's first two decades. They foreground the experiences of Cubans of all walks of life, from ordinary citizens and bureaucrats to artists and political leaders, in their interactions with and contributions to the emerging revolutionary state. In essays on agrarian reform, the environment, dance, fashion, and more, contributors enrich our understanding of the period beginning with the utopic mobilizations of the early 1960s and ending with the 1980 Mariel boatlift. In so doing, they offer new perspectives on the Revolution that are fundamentally driven by developments on the island. Bringing together new historical research with comparative and methodological reflections on the challenges of writing about the Revolution, The Revolution from Within highlights the political stakes attached to Cuban history after 1959.

Contributors. Michael J. Bustamante, María A. Cabrera Arús, María del Pilar Díaz Castañón, Ada Ferrer, Alejandro de la Fuente, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Lillian Guerra, Jennifer L. Lambe, Jorge Macle Cruz, Christabelle Peters, Rafael Rojas, Elizabeth Schwall, Abel Sierra Madero

In To Change the World, the legendary writer and poet Margaret Randall chronicles her decade in Cuba from 1969 to 1980. Both a highly personal memoir and an examination of the revolution's great achievements and painful mistakes, the book paints a portrait of the island during a difficult, dramatic, and exciting time.

Randall gives readers an inside look at her children's education, the process through which new law was enacted, the ins and outs of healthcare, employment, internationalism, culture, and ordinary people's lives. She explores issues of censorship and repression, describing how Cuban writers and artists faced them. She recounts one of the country's last beauty pageants, shows us a night of People's Court, and takes us with her when she shops for her family's food rations. Key figures of the revolution appear throughout, and Randall reveals aspects of their lives never before seen.

More than fifty black and white photographs, most by the author, add depth and richness to this astute and illuminating memoir. Written with a poet's ear, depicted with a photographer's eye, and filled with a feminist vision, To Change the Worldùneither an apology nor gratuitous attackùadds immensely to the existing literature on revolutionary Cuba.

A collection of writings based on Enzensberger’s personal experience as a left-wing sympathizer during the 1960s. 

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, widely regarded as Germany’s greatest living poet, was already well known in the 1960s, the tempestuous decade of which Tumult is an autobiographical record. Derived from old papers, notes, jottings, photos, and letters that the poet stumbled upon years later in his attic, the volume is not so much about the man, but rather the many places he visited and people whom he met on his travels through the Soviet Union and Cuba during the 1960s. The book is made up of four long-form pieces written from 1963 to 1970, each episode concluding with a poem and postscript written in 2014. Translated by Mike Mitchell, the book is a lively and deftly written travelogue offering a glimpse into the history of leftist thought. Dedicated to “those who disappeared,” Tumult is a document of that which remains one of humanity’s headiest times.