I like to see people exercising on the boardwalk, the crazy "Knight of Paris" walking slowly, while a handful of boys mortify him. The couples waiting for the arrival and farewell of the Sun on that wall of ancestral secrets. The Malecon of Havana is one of the most beautiful places in the World.

In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba’s hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island’s ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation. Situating hip hop within a long history of Cuban racial politics, Perry discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges between raperos and North American rappers and activists, and their relationships with older Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African American political exiles. He also examines critiques of Cuban patriarchy by female raperos, the competing rise of reggaetón, as well as state efforts to incorporate hip hop into its cultural institutions. At this pivotal moment of Cuban-U.S. relations, Perry's analysis illuminates the evolving dynamics of race, agency, and neoliberal transformation amid a Cuba in historic flux.

This book explores the role of emotion and affect in recent Latin American cinema (1990s-2000s) in the context of larger public debates about past traumas and current anxieties. To address this topic, it examines some of the most significant trends in contemporary Latin American filmmaking.

In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or “leopard,” which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society called Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba's urban life and music. Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba's creative energy and popular consciousness.

"You want the dreams they dreamed of to come true-Then They Do." That line from one of country music's best songs in recent memory pretty much sums up the way millions of parents feel about their children. Many times as they are growing up and driving you crazy, you dream of when they will be out of the house-and you will have your life back again-and then they do. Then They Do is filled with heartwarming, and sometimes tear-inducing, stories from parents about cherishing the moments with your children and celebrating the fine young men and women they have become. This book will serve as a reminder to parents to seize those moments when their tiny ones are still underfoot, and will be a nostalgia-inducing keepsake for those whose children have moved upwards and onwards. A fine gift for parents young and old or for grown children in the midst of raising their own families.