The Cuban Revolution and the New Left, livre ebook

Understanding overlooked dimensions of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the global left in the 1960s and beyond

This volume reconsiders revolutionary Cuba’s global influence by shifting the focus from high-level political leaders to perspectives traditionally sidelined, offering new insights into how everyday lives, family dynamics, and notions of gender and sexuality impacted revolutionary transformation. Its expansive scope uncovers ties among Cuba and Latin America, the United States, Africa, and Asia, examining the interplay of global forces including new models of mass consumption, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and national liberation struggles.

Chapters include analyses of Chinese reinterpretations of a Cuban play, Angela Davis’s influential visits to the island, Cuba’s complex relations with Black militants in Angola, and a Mexican transgender and disability activist who reimagined Che Guevara’s legacy. They also present research on Cuba’s solidarity campaigns with Vietnam, foreign journalists who covered the revolution, the role of consumption and fashion, and the lasting impact of the revolution’s refugee policies on exiled children and families from the Southern Cone.

Through its interdisciplinary sociocultural approach, this volume challenges conventional top-down narratives by foregrounding the interplay between grassroots actors and transnational affairs. It is an essential resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the multilayered stages of the Cuban Revolution and its continued relationship with global politics and culture.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Island and the World: Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Through Transnational and Sociocultural Histories
Michelle Chase and Isabella Cosse

Revolutionary Women

1. “The Voice of the Skin”: Racial Politics in Cuban-Angolan Cooperation, 1965–1967
Rafael Cesar

2. The Heroic Example of the Vietnamese Woman: Gender and Solidarity in Cuba’s Age of the Tricontinental
Michelle Chase

3. Angela Davis in Cuba as Symbol and Subject, 1960–1970s
Sarah J. Seidman

Sexuality

4. The Orphans of the Sierra Maestra: Cuba and the Homosexual Movements in Latin America, 1960–1990
Felipe Caro Romero

5. Transgressing Che: Irina Layevska Echeverría Gaitán, Disability Politics, and Transgendering the New Man in Mexico, 1964–2001
Robert Franco

Gender, Media, and Culture

6. Cuba, 1959: Revolutionary Attraction and Journalism
Ximena Espeche

7. Revolutionary Roses on the Cane Field: Staging Cuban Women in Socialist China, 1960–1965
Siwei Wang

Family, Childhood, and Daily Life

8. The Paradoxes of Paradise: Memories of Exile and Family Life in Revolutionary Cuba, 1972–1990
Tanya Harmer

9. Between Two Empires: Youth, Identity, and Consumption in 1970s and 1980s Cuba
Alexis Baldacci

10. “We Were Like a Bomb”: Child Refugees, Cuban Politics, and Argentine Revolutionary Organizations, 1970–2020
Isabella Cosse

11. Internationalizing the Revolutionary Family: Love and Politics in Cuba and Nicaragua, 1979–1990
Emily Snyder

Afterword
Ailynn Torres Santana

List of Contributors

Index