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Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift. Ten years later, after struggling with poverty and AIDS in New York, Arenas committed suicide.

Through insightful close readings of a selection of Arenas's works, including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, Olivares examines the writer's personal, political, and artistic trajectory, focusing on his portrayals of family, sexuality, exile, and nostalgia. He documents Arenas's critical engagement with cultural and political developments in revolutionary Cuba and investigates the ways in which Arenas challenged literary and national norms. Olivares's analysis shows how Arenas drew on his life experiences to offer revealing perspectives on the Cuban Revolution, the struggles of Cuban exiles, and the politics of sexuality.

In her new book, Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall explores the Cuban Revolution's impact on the outside world, tracing Cuba's international outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. Randall combines personal observations and interviews with literary analysis and examinations of political trends in order to understand what compels a small, poor, and underdeveloped country to offer its resources and expertise. Why has the Cuban health care system trained thousands of foreign doctors, offered free services, and responded to health crises around the globe? What drives Cuba's international adult literacy programs? Why has Cuban poetry had an outsized influence in the Spanish-speaking world? This multifaceted internationalism, Randall finds, is not only one of the Revolution's most central features; it helped define Cuban society long before the Revolution.

 

Many critics consider The Initials of the Earth to be the quintessential novel of the Cuban Revolution and the finest work by the Cuban writer and filmmaker Jesús Díaz. Born in Havana in 1941, Díaz was a witness to the Revolution and ardent supporter of it until the last decade of his life. In 1992 he took up residence as an exile in Berlin and later in Madrid, where he died in 2002. This is the first of his books to be translated into English.

Originally written in the 1970s, then rewritten and published simultaneously in Havana and Madrid in 1987, The Initials of the Earth spans the tumultuous years from the 1950s until the 1970s, encompassing the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. The novel opens as the protagonist, Carlos Pérez Cifredo, sits down to fill out a questionnaire for readmission to the Cuban Communist Party. It closes with Carlos standing before a panel of Party members charged with assessing his merit as an “exemplary worker.” The chapters between relate Carlos’s experiences of the pre- and postrevolutionary era. His family is torn apart as some members reject the Revolution and flee the country while others, including Carlos, choose to stay. He witnesses key events including the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, and the economically disastrous sugar harvest of 1970. Throughout the novel, Díaz vividly renders Cuban culture through humor, slogans, and slang; Afro-Cuban religion; and references to popular music, movies, and comics.

This edition of The Initials of the Earth includes a bibliography and filmography of Diaz’s works and a timeline of the major events of the Cuban revolutionary period. In his epilogue, the Cuban writer Ambrosio Fornet reflects on Díaz’s surprising 1992 renunciation of the Revolution, their decades-long friendship, and the novel’s reception, structure, and place within Cuban literary history.

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