One hundred testimonies on the Cuban diaspora are gathered together from narratives, interviews, creative writing, letters, journal entries, photographs, and paintings to capture the strong emotions surrounding this ongoing ordeal. Simultaneous.

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.

Offers a detailed picture of the lives of Cuban Americans through interviews with artists, writers, and philosophers. This fascinating volume contains interviews with nineteen prominent Cuban-American artists, writers, and philosophers who tell their stories and share what they consider important for understanding their work. Struggling with issues of Cuban-American identity in particular and social identity in general, they explore such questions as how they see themselves, how they have dealt with the diaspora and their memories, what they have done to find a proper place in their adopted country, and how their work has been influenced by the experience. Their answers reveal different perspectives on art, literature, and philosophy, and the different challenges encountered personally and professionally. The interviews are gathered into three groups: nine artists, six writers, and four philosophers. An introductory essay for each group is included, and the interviews are accompanied by brief biographical notes, along with samples of the work of those interviewed. Jorge J. E. Gracia is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Chair in Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His many books include Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity. Lynette M. F. Bosch is Professor of Art History at SUNY College at Geneseo and author of Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque. Isabel Alvarez Borland is Monsignor Edward G. Murray Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona.

This groundbreaking collection offers an understanding of why Cuban-American literature and visual art have emerged in the United States and how they are so essentially linked to both Cuban and American cultures. The contributors explore crucial issues pertinent not only to Cuban-American cultural production but also to other immigrant groups—hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile. The complex ways in which Cuban Americans have been able to keep a living memory of Cuba while developing and thriving in America are both intriguing and instructive. These essays, written from a variety of perspectives, range from useful overviews of fictional and visual works of art to close readings of individual texts.

Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation. Solimar Otero is Associate Professor of English and a folklorist at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature and ethnography. Dr. Otero is the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant (2013), a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program (2009 to 2010), and a Fulbright award (2001).

In Cuba, internationally renowned artists, philosophers, and writers reflect on the idea of a nation displaced. Featuring contributions from Isabel Alvarez Borland, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, María Cristina García, William Navarrete, Eliana Rivero, Rafael Rojas, and Carlos Victoria, as well as many others, Cuba is a rich collection of essays, testimonials, and interviews that reveal the complex, often antagonistic cultural and political debates coexisting within the Cuban exile population. As a multivoiced text, Cuba formulates a deeper understanding of diasporic identity, and broadens the discussion of the manner in which Cuban cultural identity and nationhood have been constructed, negotiated, and transformed by physical and cultural displacement.

Chronicling the history of sexuality in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, this book frames the relationship between passion and politics in the revolution's wider history and argues that the Cuban revolutionary regime intervened in the sexual lives of Cubans in a variety of ways and transformed key areas of Cuban life, including the family, reproduction, sexual values, and sexual relationships. Drawing from a major oral history project--the “Memories of the Revolution” oral history project conducted by a team of British and Cuban researchers (Hamilton was one of the British researchers on the team) between 2003 and 2007--Hamilton explores the experiences and perceptions of sexuality among Cubans across generations and social groups. She contextualizes the oral histories within an array of archival and secondary sources, relating them to issues of race, class, and gender, as well as to social, economic, and political change. Organized thematically, the volume opens with a historical overview that points out that after 1959 revolutionary values continued to coexist with pre-revolutionary ideologies in a potent and often contradictory mix. Succeeding chapters examine discourse on love, romance, and passion on both personal and national levels; male and female homosexuality; sexual repression; and changing gender roles and service to the revolution. Hamilton explores conflicting notions of Cuba as a site of desire on the one hand, and as a place of intense sexual repression, especially with regard to homosexuality, on the other. She identifies many ways in which revolutionary policy affected sexual behavior, including changes to policy and laws, mass education programs, leaders' pronouncements on the relationship between good revolutionaries and private life, and the provision of incentives to encourage certain forms of sexual union and repressive measures to discourage and punish others. Hamilton argues that sexual politics were central to the construction of a new revolutionary society.