Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Van Gosses's Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left analyses revolutionary Cuba's startling appeal to restless Cold War bohemians and liberals, many of them members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committees. But the FPCCs were

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the last two decades feminist scholars have been theorizing about the centrality of race, class, and gender in daily life. Although theorizing about the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression has resulted in exciting new epistemological frameworks, feminist researchers have yet to articulate concrete strategies for capturing this intersectionality empirically. Using examples from our own research in Cuba, we build upon previous feminist epistemological insights and begin to develop methodological principles that can be used to capture the intersection of race, class, and gender in the context of cross-cultural research.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reassesses Tannenbaum’s thesis on the differences between North American and Latin American race relations by looking to the colonial period for the origins of modern racial categories and by placing the development of free labor and ideologies of whiteness at the center of analysis. Focusing on Virginia and Cuba, the study examines how colonial legal and social regulations, particularly those surrounding labor and sexual relations, generated distinctive systems of social stratification and novel conceptions of race in the two colonies. These disparate approaches to labor and racial classification in the colonial period shaped nineteenth century transformations in the labor regime and nation-building in Cuba and the US more broadly, as the dismantling of slavery, the rise of wage labor, and increased immigration altered discourses of race and nation. The paper argues that the way in which colonial Virginia and Cuba solved their labor problems fundamentally shaped their constructions of racial categories. It concludes that the absence of a cross-class racial contract comparable to the one scholars like Edmund Morgan and Charles Mills have identified with the US is key to the disparate racial economies of Anglo and Iberian America.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study deals with the construction of cultural freedom in post-revolutionary Cuba as it relates to cultural policy, in particular media and arts policies. I see Cuba’s example as one that forces us to look at cultural freedom as a contingent set of practices and discourses. This approach challenges liberal ideas to freedom by forcing us to explore freedom’s relation to cultural policy and state power. Using Foucault’s ideas on power, I perform a brief genealogy of cultural freedom where I examine freedom’s discursive constitution and its relationship to cultural policy and institutional practices in Cuba from 1959 to 1975. During this period the Cuban leadership instituted policy for film, literature, news, and the general production of culture within the Revolution. Also during this period, Cuba experienced the conflicting forces of censorship, cultural repression, and a cultural renewal that open the field of culture to greater production. This dialectic of power’s productivity puts into question essentialist ideas of freedom and suggest the existence of an ongoing link between freedom, discourse, and practice.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper uses a modified version of Putnam's concept of Two-Level Games to explain the outcomes of two separate trade disputes between the US and the EU. These disputes emerged from legislation in the US Congress designed to punish companies and individuals benefiting from doing business with former US-owned properties confiscated by Castro after the 1959 revolution. The analysis shows how US domestic laws can collide head-on with its larger global trade interests. Putnam's approach facilitates an understanding of how the two trade disputes were resolved.