Lillian Guerra has written another major contribution to Cuban history, drawing on her extensive knowledge of Cuban archives, other primary sources, and personal interviews that shed new light on a decisive period of Cuban history.For too long most work on the Cuban Revolution has accepted false claims or misleading myths about its origins and development.One is the mistaken notion that a small group of guerrillas, under Fidel Castro, embodied the revolutionary struggle and that urban activists played only a supporting role.Yet anyone who has spent time with veterans knows that the historical record does not confirm this view.Guerra's book is the most recent attempt to correct the historical record, showing how Cuba's democracy underwent a crisis, which ended in dictatorship.Especially significant is the way Guerra highlights the role of men and women who participated in mass mobilizations, civic activism, and a wide range of organizations that fought for social justice and democracy.Equally important, she returns Cuba's most popular politician of the time, Eduardo Chibás, to his rightful place as the most important leader who challenged corruption.Between 1946 and his suicide in 1951, Chibás embodied Cubans' desire for national dignity and democracy.Even after his death, his long shadow over all opposition groups (including Castro and his followers) shaped the moralistic discourse of the resistance to Batista.The figure of Chibás has almost disappeared from official histories of the Revolution, despite the fact that (to my knowledge) no veteran of the Revolution, on or off the island, would deny his historical importance.Guerra's argument is twofold.First, the Cuban Revolution before the late 1950s was conducted by grass roots civic activism and not armed struggle in the mountains.By the second half of the 1950s, Castro's 26th of July Movement was part of the larger network of resistance groups, but the guerrilla forces in the mountains were by no means the vanguard of the struggle.It is true that after 1957 the inability of the Cuban army to defeat the guerrillas meant that Castro's star within the revolutionary leadership rose rapidly.But what brought Batista down were the combined efforts of civic organizations throughout the island and the guerrillas, not simply the latter.The second argument Guerra makes is that between 1946 and 1959 Cubans clamored for a messianic leader who could lead them toward a more democratic and socially just future.Chibás served that role well before 1951.Yet during the most intense and violent years of the struggle against Batista, there was no single leader who could replace him.According to Guerra, Castro understood this problem well, and he and his clos-
This compelling and timely study proposes to read "hunger and irony together, as mutually elucidating and complicating terms" (p.2).From the outset, however, Nicole Simek acknowledges the moral dilemma that an appraisal of irony ("a trope associated with playfulness, ambiguity, or deception") alongside hunger ("a threat to biological survival") would evoke (p. 2), if not explained through the capacity of irony to deploy the analytical potential of hunger.To achieve her authoritative pairing of this seemingly incompatible match and unravel a twist that is both ironic and fittingly accurate, she analyzes a diverse range of genres and forms, including "fiction, essay, manifesto, and photography" (p.3).In twinning hunger and irony as critical tools to interrogate the complex and often dire concerns that suffuse the literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique, she builds on recent studies that have evaluated configurations of politics and aesthetics in discourses relating to food, consumption, hunger, and domination in the Caribbean literary imagination.She also acknowledges studies that invoke cannibalism as a dominant critical trope, a crucial site for Caribbean cultural identity and literary criticism.The book builds on Simek's previous work on the act of reading as consumptive practice and the interpretive ethics that undergird any engagement with Maryse Condé's varied oeuvre.Not surprisingly, then, Condé's works dominate the list of texts sampled, along with writings by Patrick Chamoiseau.Chapter 1 introduces the principal theoretical concepts bolstering her critical enterprise.Anchoring Hunger and Irony in paradigms deriving as much from Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, and Slavoj Žižek as from postcolonial criticism more broadly, Simek grounds the study's persuasive argument in the varying registers and competing interpretations that can be ascribed to the deployment of hunger and irony in selected texts of the Francophone Caribbean tradition.Chapter 2 reads Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003) along with Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique (1988) in a move that underscores both novels as detective narratives.She centers her inquiry in the meanings that theorizing can help clarify, rightly identifying the scribal encroachment on oral culture that propels Solibo forward-a "parasite's hunger"-as an ironic "hunger for relationality" (p.29).Simek concludes that Condé "brings irony to bear on the hunger of both artist and reader as it sets the question of literature's purpose within a tale of cannibalistic appetites" (p.30).Chapter 3 seeks to evaluate the political function of literature through an examination of Chamoiseau's Écrire en pays dominé (1997) alongside Gisèle
When Jack Greene first began, in the 1960s and 1970s, to collect the materials for this study of Jamaican society and economy in the mid-eighteenth century, the profession was in the midst of a methodological revolution that looked to cliometrics to suggest how the slave societies and plantation economies of the Americas had functioned.Forty years later, the profession is now asking different questions about the nature of culture and society in the Americas during the era of slavery, and the systems of thought and practice that helped to maintain and then to undermine racial hierarchies.What then does this richlydetailed study of the society and economy of selected Jamaican parishes in the 1750s, framed mainly in the terms set by the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, and based largely on the methodical quantitative study of tax rolls and parish censuses, have to offer?Each historian will inevitably find specific points of interest in this work, but three seem to me to be of particular importance.First, Greene's figures lend empirical weight to recent work highlighting the economic diversity of Jamaica.By careful comparison of various surveys he shows that even in this powerhouse of the sugar economy, only a quarter of estates may have specialized in this crop, including in the "harvest years" of the 1760s.Although previous historians have made use of individual surveys, Greene is the first to bring them together to generate a more accurate assessment.His work confirms a line of argument going back to Sidney Mintz via Trevor Burnard, Verene Shepherd, and Barry Higman that even Jamaica was no sugar monoculture, and that the economic, social, and cultural experiences of labor and work among both its free and enslaved populations were correspondingly heterogeneous and diverse.Greene's work will also provide an important context for much recent work on society, gender, childhood, and family in Jamaica, complementing more detailed studies of individuals or plantations by offering a broader perspective that takes in entire parishes and towns.He shows that profiles of land ownership varied widely across the island, and sometimes produced surprising results, as in the capital of Spanish Town in 1754, where over 30 percent of proprietors were black and more than half were women.Once again, this lends a definitive empirical base that can help to contextualize these case studies, to confirm the diverse and heterogeneous nature of black and white experience within Jamaica, and to provide a quantitative measure of the varying chances for agency that it offered to different social groups.
In 1994, to mark the journal’s 75th anniversary, Gert Oostindie wrote a useful history of the evolution of the New West Indian Guide beginning with its first half-century as the Dutch-language, Dutch-oriented West-Indische Gids, founded in 1919 and renamed the NieuweWest-IndischeGids in 1959 (“FromWig to NWIG, 1919–1993,” published with vol. 68). He noted that in the first 40 volumes, fully 250 of the 280 articles dealt with Dutch territories and concerns, and that the book reviews reflected the same national focus, a trend that continued during the 1960s and 1970s. But once a decision was taken in the early 1980s to “transform the Gids into a major English-language journal,” it began providing “the world’s most complete review of books covering all parts of the [Caribbean] region and all disciplines of Caribbean studies.” In 1982, when the Nieuwe West-Indische Gids was rebaptized the New West IndianGuide and became an exclusively English-language publication, the two of us joined the editorial board, with Sally becoming book review editor. She held that position for the next five years, producing an average of 36 reviews and 3 review articles annually. (At that time the review process was distinctly pre-computer-era—reviews were submitted on typescript pages, editing was done in handwriting, and all correspondence with reviewers arrived and left through thepost office; once a reviewwaspublished, she scissor-clipped it from a spare copy of the journal and put it in the mail to the book’s publisher.) After we moved to the Caribbean, recent Johns Hopkins Ph.D. Michel-Rolph Trouillot replaced her for five years, producing some 21 reviews per year, but almost no review articles. Then, when the two of us took over in 1992, we began publishing 50–60 reviews and 5 review articles per year. In 2012, we were afforded greater space in the journal, which allowed us thenceforth to effectively double the number of reviews to an annual offering of 100 reviews, two-to-six review essays, and an essay commenting on more than a hundred additional books. The first six of these essays adopted Caribbean culinary themes, discussing recipes before turning to books—“Callaloo,” “Rundown,” “Migan,” “Sancocho,” and “Turning Coo-coo”—ending with “Cook’s Day Off,” before settling into
Antonio Maceo Grajales (1845–1896) is one of the most celebrated heroes of Cuban independence. Though he died before he could see the dawn of a sovereign, if U.S.-occupied, Cuba, Maceo would become an important node of nationalist commemoration. Throughout this process, Maceo’s blackness represented both a source of his prestige—the struggle against African slavery had been intimately tied to independence—and a barometer of lingering racial inequalities. Posthumous depictions thus tended to downplay racial tensions in a unifying vision of nation. Yet Maceo’s martyrdom in the Spanish-Cuban-American War also reverberated in more uncanny registers. Before and after his death, apocryphal sons emerged periodically from the shadows, opening battles over Maceo’s legacy. In their movement across borders, these real and apocryphal children gave voice to silences around race and sovereignty as they converged on the body of their lionized “father,” while also opening up narrative spaces wherein the status quo could be reimagined.
It has often been observed that, since 1960, Cuba has punched well above its weight globally.The Revolution reshaped international politics (quite apart from the 1962 Missile Crisis), bringing a "before and after" dimension to U.S. policies in Latin America, and later helping to reshape southern Africa's political map.Modern Cuba's external profile has certainly been remarkable.However, when assessing it, we inevitably meet one bugbear of interpretations of the Revolution: the hotly contested nature of academic views of Cuba's recent history, and current politics, society, and economics, all still attracting polemic and easy binaries.That external profile is especially vulnerable to that contestation, since Cuba's global behavior continues to feed easily into our preconceptions; while the Cold War may be over, it still seems to shape our reading of Cuba.Cuba's ability to challenge and resist the United States has long generated sympathy beyond political confrères, but interpretations of its relations elsewhere in the world have been bedeviled by binary approaches.Thus, Cuba's 1960-91 relationship with the Soviet Union is seen either as a leadership betray-
Seeking Imperialism's Embrace is a major contribution to the literature of the modern Caribbean.Kristin Childers focuses on Antilleans' decision in 1946 to become a French department instead of seeking independence the way other colonies did during the postwar era.She asks why Martinicans and Guadeloupeans opted for heightened integration instead of independence.(Childers opts to deal only with the insular Antilles, leaving aside Guyane, which became a département at the same time.)Criticizing those who have seen the departmentalization decision as a "psychosis" borne of misguided eagerness to be metropolitan, she emphasizes Antilleans' agency, and seeks to contextualize their decision within the circumstances of the 1940s.She sees their choice as "a pragmatic step in the Antilleans' … long struggle for equality" (p.6), driven by "rational calculations" (p.97).She notes that departmentalization held the promise of overturning the colonial relationship with metropolitan France.Antilleans greeted 1946 as analogous to 1848, an auspicious moment for completing their equality and repairing emancipation's failures.Chapter 1 focuses on the Antilles during World War II, particularly with regard to fears that the United States would occupy the French Caribbean.Given legalized racism in the United States at the time, the prospect that Antilleans might be taken over worried them greatly.Chapter 2, "Liberation Choices," explores the hopes surrounding departmentalization.Antilleans expected that a more regularized relationship with the metropole would end the tyranny of the békés (wealthy descendants of slaveowners), and "rectify … the injustices Antilleans had suffered for centuries" (p.47).Childers notes that intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire viewed Haiti as a "cautionary tale" of what Antilleans should avoid (p.52); independence was seen as a dangerous course.Childers cites Césaire liberally to explain what departmentalization meant to Antilleans in 1946.She argues that if inequalities endured afterward, "disappointment with outcomes would be a problematic yardstick by which to judge any version of decolonization, whether violent, revolutionary, or consensual" (p.64).Chapter 3 looks at the disappointments that followed departmentalization.Childers outlines Europeans' enduring belief that they "ought to be running things" in the Antilles (p.91), and the fact that metropolitan civil servants were installed above (and paid more than) locally born citizens.The chapter also explores the "geographic dilemma of the Antilles" (p.100); though legally part
