Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba

Alistair Hennessy died in 2013, having brought a breadth of scholarship to the study of Cuba that continues to be influential, encompassing not just Cuba, but Spain and the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean.This helped move Cuban studies away from insularity, toward new approaches that see the island in a wider geohistorical context.This edited collection comes out of the 2014 Cuba Research Forum conference held in his memory, and all the contributions demonstrate a broadening of research such as he advocated and practiced throughout his life.Hennessy's career began in Spain, with a 1962 study entitled The Federal Republic ... 1868-74.Two of the essays in this collection edited by Antoni Kapcia connect with this period of Spanish history.Christopher Schmidt-Nowara reflects on the way we have come to understand how interconnected metropolitan society and colonial empire were, reappraising the importance of Spanish republicanism.Catherine Davies explores the role of Rafael María de Labra in furthering the cause in Spain of Cuban and Puerto Rican slave abolition and the later racial divisions that continued to fracture the nascent Cuban polity.She argues that "the impetus for the rapid advancement of African-descended Cubans came as much from Spain as it did from Cuba" (p.60), and that Labra's contribution to this deserves to be remembered.Cuban racial politics and identity have not only been about people of non-European descent, but also about what it means to be white, as Margaret Brehony explores in her chapter on Irish immigration to Cuba.While some of the most prominent aristocratic families on the island had their origins in Ireland, poor white Irish immigration was encouraged as part of the attempt to whiten the population.But this was short-lived, quickly giving way to using the Irish as cheap laborers working alongside black slaves, as "economic imperatives superseded racial anxieties" (p.82).Fernando Martínez assesses the genesis of a specifically Cuban socialism.He looks at how Julio Antonio Mella in the 1920s, and Antonio Guiteras in the 1930s, established a creole revolutionary praxis that later informed the 1959 Revolution and its subsequent development.Steve Ludlam takes up the exploration of Cuban socialist political economy in more recent decades.After detailing the relationship between the trade unions and the state since 1959, he analyzes more recent changes.With the emergence of a mixed economy, several challenges were being confronted for "updating" labor law and practices "to achieve a new balance between the state and markets" (p.130)

Ancient history · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Economic history · Empire · Historiography · Irish · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Polity · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law