Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920

Celia Sanchez Manduley (1920–1980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution. Clad in her military fatigues, this "first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra" is seen in many photographs alongside Fidel Castro. Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties, initially as an arms runner and later as a combatant. She was one of Castro's closest confidants, perhaps lover, and went on to serve as a high-ranking government official and international ambassador. Since her death, Sanchez has been revered as a national icon, cultivated and guarded by the Cuban government. With almost unprecedented access to Sanchez's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany A. Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals. Sippial reveals the scope and depth of Sanchez's power and influence within the Cuban revolution, as well as her struggles with violence, her political development, and the sacrifices required by her status as a leader and "New Woman." Using the tools of feminist biography, cultural history, and the politics of memory, Sippial reveals how Sanchez strategically crafted her own legacy within a history still dominated by bearded men in fatigues.

This dissertation uses prostitution as a lens through which to study the intersections of gender, sexuality, and nation-building in late colonial and early republican Cuba. Between 1840 and 1920, Cuba underwent a series of profound transformations spurred by the abolition of slavery, national wars of independence, mass migration, and foreign occupation. My investigation of Spanish, Cuban, and U.S. sources reveals that as Cubans struggled to define a sense of national identity in the face of changing political alliances and shifting populations, prostitution became a focus for the expression of contemporary social and sexual anxieties. State policies, designed to control prostitutes' lives and labors during this period, thus occupied a heavily contested and dynamic terrain upon which state and local imperatives frequently collided. I find that state agents, local citizens, and prostitutes negotiated every aspect of Cuba's regulatory project, from the geographic boundaries of Havana's tolerance zone to the legal and medical precepts that guided the treatment of venereal disease. For their part, prostitutes continuously subverted the supervisory and disciplinary intentions of the state by appropriating and rearticulating key aspects of government policy and ideology to suit their own needs. These negotiations over the form and function of Cuba's regulatory mechanism ultimately shaped, and were shaped by, broader competing discourses about citizenship, the legitimate exercise of state power, and the development of Cuba as a "modern" nation. This study thus contributes not only to the study of prostitution in Latin America, but also to our understandings of the complex intersections of power, identity, sexuality, and state formation during one of the most dynamic periods of Cuban history.

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Studies the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred while slaves in Haiti successfully overthrew the institution.

Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

New Directions in the History of Cuban Medicine and Public Health: Introduction to the Dossier / Mariola Espinosa -- "An earnest pledge to fight tuberculosis": Tuberculosis, Nation, and Modernity in Cuba, 1899-1908 / John A. Gutiérrez -- "The dangers that surround the child": Gender, Science, and Infant Mortality in Postindependence Havana / Daniel A. Rodríguez -- The "Black Plague" in a Racial Democracy: Tuberculosis, Race, and Citizenship in Republican Cuba, 1925-1945 / Kelly Urban -- Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2015 / Pedro de Oraá -- Primary Sources -- Autobiography of a Cuban Businessman in the 1940s and 1950s / Jorge J. Domínguez (with annotations by Jorge I. Domínguez) -- "No se sabía dónde estaba la verdad y dónde estaba la mentira" Entrevista a Edith García Buchaca, 30 de abril de 2012. Enrevistada por Abel Sierra Madero / Editada por Lillian Guerra -- Book Reviews -- History -- Tiffany Sippial, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Reviewed by Bonnie A. Lucero -- Ada Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Reviewed by Melanie Newton -- Christina Abreu, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Reviewed by Elizabeth Schwall -- Alfred J. López, José Martí: A Revolutionary Life. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Reviewed by Emilio Bejel -- Ernesto Chávez Álvarez, Maestro voluntario (Memorias de un maestro rural: Vol. 1), edited by Rolando García Milián. Gainesville, FL: Milián Books, 2014 -- Ernesto Chávez Álvarez, Maestro rural (Memorias de un maestro rural: Vol. 2), edited by Rolando García Milián. Gainesville, FL: Milián Books, 2014. Reviewed by Rafael Rojas