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The enigma of Cuba’s resistance to the collapse of socialism around the world is equaled by the fact—surprising to some outsiders—that the Cuban cultural movement remains healthy, even with the problems brought about by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Represented in this issue of South Atlantic Quarterly by artwork, essays, short stories, and interviews, Cuban art and literature continues to produce dramatic testimony to a struggle for survival and a shared belief in the Cuban revolutionary project’s right to exist and develop on its own terms.
Fostered by both caution and audacity, in a climate of both trust and tension, and in the face of sustained North American hostility through nearly four decades, Cuban artists and writers have succeeded in building bridges between domestic and foreign cultural institutions, partly offsetting the profound material deprivations under which they have labored. The work collected in this volume introduces a group of writers, artists, and filmmakers who provide a window on Cuban life, illuminating this enigmatic island and bridging the troubled waters it shares with its continental neighbor to the north.

Contributors. Arturo Arango, Emilio Bejel, Rosa Ileana Boudet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Ambrosio Fornet, Rafael Hernández, Francisco López Sacha, Humberto Manduley López, Vivian Martínez Tabares, Margarita Mateo Palmer, Miguel Mejides, Reinaldo Montero, Lisandro Otero, Graziella Pogolotti, Magda Resik, Cintio Vitier

Angola, a former Portuguese colony in southern central Africa, gained independence in 1975 and almost immediately plunged into more than two decades of conflict and crisis. Fidel Castro sent Cuban military troops to Angola in support of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), leading to its ascension to power despite facing threats both international and domestic. What is less known, and what Cubans in Angola brings to light, is the significant role Cubans played in the transformation of civil society in Angola during these years. Offering not just military support but also political, medical, administrative, and technical expertise as well as educational assistance, the Cuban presence in Angola is a unique example of transatlantic cooperation between two formerly colonized nations in the global South.

Miami is widely considered the center of Cuban-American culture. However vital to the diasporic communities’ identity, Miami is not the only—or necessarily the most profound—site of cultural production. Looking beyond South Florida, Ricardo L. Ortíz addresses the question of Cuban-American diaspora and cultural identity by exploring the histories and self-sustaining practices of smaller communities in such U.S. cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.

In this wide-ranging work Ortíz argues for the authentically diasporic quality of postrevolutionary, off-island Cuban experience. Highlighting various forms of cultural expression, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America traces underrepresented communities’ responses to the threat of cultural disappearance in an overwhelming and hegemonic U.S. culture. Ortíz shows how the work of Cuban-American writers and artists challenges the heteronormativity of both home and host culture. Focusing on artists who have had an ambivalent, indirect, or nonexistent connection to Miami, he presents close readings of such novelists as Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto G. Fernández, Achy Obejas, and Cristina García, the playwright Eduardo Machado, the poet Rafael Campo, and musical performers Albita Rodríguez and Celia Cruz.

Ortíz charts the legacies of sexism and homophobia in patriarchal Cuban culture, as well as their influence on Cuban-revolutionary and Cuban-exile ideologies. Moving beyond the outdated cultural terms of the Cold War, he looks forward to envision queer futures for Cuban-American culture free from the ties to restrictive—indeed, oppressive—constructions of nation, place, language, and desire.

Ricardo L. Ortíz is associate professor of English at Georgetown University.

Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2015 Stetson Kennedy Award

The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as “Marielitos.”
 
Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants. The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources, first-hand accounts, archival research, government records, and interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to influence Florida, the United States, and Cuba today.
 
Emerging from these key records and accounts is a grand narrative of high human drama. Castro’s haphazard and temporary opening of Cuba spurred many thousands of Cubans to depart in calamitously rushed, unprepared, and dangerous conditions. The book tells the stories of these Cuban citizens, most legitimately seeking political asylum but also including subversive agents, convicted criminals, and the mentally ill, who began arriving in the US beginning in April 1980. It also recounts how local and state agencies and private volunteers with few directives or resources were left to improvise ways to provide the Marielitos food, shelter, and security as well as transportation away from Key West.
 
The book provides a definitive account of the political, legal, and administrative twists on the local, state, and federal levels in response to the crisis as well as of the often-dysfunctional attempts at collaboration between governmental and private institutions. Vivid and readable, Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 presents the significant details that illuminate and humanize this complex humanitarian, political, and logistical crisis. 

In the Land of Mirrors is a journey through the politics of Cuban exiles since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It explores the development of Cuban exile politics and identity within a context of U.S. and Cuban realities, as well as within the broader inquiry of the changing nature of nation-states and its impact on the politics and identity of diaspora communities. Topics covered include: the origins of the post-revolution exile enclave of the 1960s; the evolution of the Cuban community over the 1960s; the pluralization of exile politics in the 1970s, particularly regarding the relationship with the island; the emergence of Cuban-American political action committees in the 1980s; post-Cold War developments; and the transition of Miami by the coming of age of a second generation of Cuban-Americans and the arrival of a new wave of exiles.

Interspersed with vignettes from the author's own experiences and political activism, In the Land of Mirrors explores the meanings and ramifications of exile, of belonging, and of seeing the self in the other. It will appeal to political scientists, Latin Americanists, and those studying the politics of exile.

María de los Angeles Torres was born in Cuba and came to the United States as a young child. She is Associate Professor of Political Science, DePaul University.

As a result of the conflicts between Cuba and the United States, especially after 1959, Cubans immigrated in great numbers. Most stayed in Miami, but many headed north to Union City, making it second only to Miami in its concentration of Cubans. In The Cubans of Union City, Yolanda Prieto discusses why Cubans were drawn to this particular city and how the local economy and organizations developed. Central aspects of this story are the roles of women, religion, political culture, and the fact of exile itself. 

As a member of this community and a participant in many of its activities, Prieto speaks with special authority about its demographic uniqueness. Far from being a snapshot of the community, The Cubans of Union City conveys an ongoing research agenda extending over more than twenty years, from 1959 to the 1980s. As a long-term observer who was also a resident, Prieto offers a unique and insightful view of the dynamics of this community’s evolution.

A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"—Velazquez herself.

Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly impossible autobiographical account, as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, travel literature, and historical account, while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alemán concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.

Cuban-Americans are beginning to understand their long-standing roots and traditions in the United States that reach back over a century prior to 1959. This is the first book-length confirmation of those beginnings, and its places the Cuban hero and revolutionary thinker José Martí within the political and socioeconomic realities of the Cuban communities in the United States of that era. By clarifying Martí’s relationship with those communities, Gerald E. Poyo provides a detailed portrait of the exile centers and their role in the growth and consolidation of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism.
Poyo differentiates between the development of nationalist sentiment among liberal elites and popular groups and reveals how these distinct strains influenced the thought and conduct of Martí and the successful Cuban revolution of the 1890s.