Louis A. Pérez Jr. - Böcker

Probably no American scholar is better qualified to prepare a general bibliographic guide to Cuba than Perez. . . . The present volume is a selective, annotated bibliography intended for generalists or other scholars working outside their specialty.. Preference is given to English-language sources and titles generally available outside Cuba. The book fulfills its stated purpose and should prove helpful to students and scholars. ChoiceThis bibliography provides a general guide to the literature on Cuba from 1512 to the present and identifies the major works in a wide variety of fields and disciplines, such as geography, archaeology, history, population and demographics, health and medicine, politics, economics, science and technology, literature, and the performing arts. This important work has been developed to include those materials that are at once comprehensive treatments of the subject, representative of the field and state-of-the-art, and suggestive of additional research. Preference has been given to English-language works and titles that are generally available to readers.

Historical research on Cuba, since the ascent of Fidel Castro to power, has been an uncertain and difficult pursuit. Scholars both in and out of Cuba have faced seemingly insurmountable problems when trying to research archival records and manuscript collections--especially in light of poor Cuba-U.S. relations. As this long-needed guide to Cuban materials shows, extensive collections of Cuba-related materials exist in the United States. Although these collections are not as complete as some original collections in Cuba itself, they do offer excellent starting points for various research projects on Cuba--pending future access to original Cuban collections. This is an indispensable guide to Cuban materials for both American and Cuban scholars.The guide is organized alphabetically by state, with each significant Cuban collection in that state listed. Perez includes U.S. government and presidential collections, since most administrations since the Revolutionary War have dealt with Cuba in one way or another. In all cases, effort was made to list only substantial and varied Cuba-related holdings. This guide will be of great value to historians, political scientists, archivists, and other researchers interested in the history of Cuba.

A century after the Cuban war for independence was fought, Louis Perez examines the meaning of the war of 1898 as represented in 100 years of American historical writing. Offering both a critique of the conventional historiography and an alternate history of the war informed by Cuban sources, Perez explores the assumptions that have shaped our understanding of the ""Spanish-American War"" - a construct, he argues, that denies the Cubans' participation in their own struggle for liberation from Spanish rule. Perez examines historical accounts of the destruction of the battleship ""Maine"", the representation of public opinion as a precipitant of war, and the treatment of the military campaign in Cuba. Equally important, he shows how historical narratives have helped sustain notions of America's national purpose and policy, many of which were first articulated in 1898. Cuba insinuated itself into one of the most important chapters of US history, and what happened on the island in the final decade of the 19th century - and the way in which what happened was subsequently represented - has had far-reaching implications, many of which continue to resonate today.

The first book to establish hurricanes as a key factor in the development of modern Cuba, Winds of Change shows how these great storms played a decisive role in shaping the economy, the culture, and the nation during a critical century in the island's history. Always vulnerable to hurricanes, Cuba was ravaged in 1842, 1844, and 1846 by three catastrophic storms, with staggering losses of life and property. Louis P erez combines eyewitness and literary accounts with agricultural data and economic records to show how important facets of the colonial political economy--among them, land tenure forms, labor organization, and production systems--and many of the social relationships at the core of Cuban society were transformed as a result of these and lesser hurricanes. He also examines the impact of repeated natural disasters on the development of Cuban identity and community. Bound together in the face of forces beyond their control, Cubans forged bonds of unity in their ongoing efforts to persevere and recover in the aftermath of destruction. |The first book to establish hurricanes as a key factor in the history of Cuba, Winds of Change shows how the savage storms of the 1840s played a decisive role in shaping the economy, the culture, and the nation during a critical century in the island's development.

For much of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, the per capita rate of suicide in Cuba was the highest in Latin America and among the highest in the world - a condition made all the more extraordinary in light of Cuba's historic ties to the Catholic church. In this richly illustrated social and cultural history of suicide in Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. explores the way suicide passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable in Cuban society. ""To Die in Cuba"" ultimately tells as much about Cubans' lives, culture, and society as it does about their self-inflicted deaths.

Rich cultural ties between Cuba and the United States influence Cuban's sense of themselves.With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. ""On Becoming Cuban"" is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959.

For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Perez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba. |For more than two hundred often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. One of the foremost historians of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island.

The Times Literary Supplement calls Louis A. Pérez Jr. "the foremost historian of Cuba writing in English." In this new edition of his acclaimed 1990 volume, he brings his expertise to bear on the history and direction of relations between Cuba and the United States.Of all the peoples in Latin America, the author argues, none have been more familiar to the United States than Cubans—who in turn have come to know their northern neighbors equally well. Focusing on what President McKinley called "the ties of singular intimacy" linking the destinies of the two societies, Pérez examines the points at which they have made contact—politically, culturally, economically—and explores the dilemmas that proximity to the United States has posed to Cubans in their quest for national identity.This edition has been updated to cover such developments of recent years as the renewed debate over American trade sanctions against Cuba, the Elián González controversy, and increased cultural exchanges between the two countries. Also included are a new preface and an updated bibliographical essay.

• Choice 1987 Outstanding Academic Book This book examines the early years of the Cuban Republic, launched in 1902 after the war with Spain. Although no longer a colony, the country was still hobbled by continuing dependence on and exploitation from a foreign power. P\u00e9rez shows how U.S. armed intervention in Cuba in 1898 and subsequent military occupation revitalized elements of the colonial system that would serve imperialist interests during independence. The concessions of the Platt Amendment in 1903 became the principal instrument for U.S. expansion in Cuba. The U.S. then gained control over resources and markets.

Cuban independence arrived formally on May 20, 1902, with the raising of the Cuban flag in Havana - a properly orchestrated and orderly inauguration of the new republic. But something had gone awry. Republican reality fell far short of the separatist ideal. In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.The last quarter of the nineteenth century found Cuba enmeshed in a complicated colonial environment, tied to the declining Spanish empire yet economically dependent on the newly ascendant United States. Rebellion against Spain had involved two generations of Cubans in major but fruitless wars. By careful examination of the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba, and of the political content of the separatist movement, the author argues that the successful insurrection of 1895-98 was not simply the last of the New World rebellions against European colonialism. It was the first of a genre that would become increasingly familiar in the twentieth century: a guerrilla war of national liberation aspiring to the transformation of society.The third player in the drama was the United States. For almost a century, the United States had pursuedthe acquistion of Cuba. Stepping in when Spain was defeated, the Americans occupied Cuba ostensibly to prepare it for independence but instead deliberately created institutions that restored the social hierarchy and guaranteed political and economic dependence. It was not the last time the U.S. intervention would thwart the Cuban revolutionary impulse.

Joseph J. Dimock's descriptions of Cuba in his travel diary provide a remarkable firsthand view of a fascinating period in the island's history. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was pursuing manifest destiny. The war with Mexico had resulted in a vast increase of national territory, and many north Americans wanted Cuba as the next acquisition. In addition to annexationist plots, Cuban life was marked by slave conspiracies, colonial insurrections, economic expansion, and political intrigue. Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century describes the social, economic and political conditions in the 1850s. Dimock's entries of his travels and observations as an American reveal details of Cuban agriculture, plant life, and natural resources. The diary also provides elaborate accounts of the sugar industry, extensive commentary on the daily live of slaves, Spaniards, and Cubans. Dimock's curiosity led him around the island, into prisons, salons, and other unusual places, resulting in a wide-ranging account of Cuban life. Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century provides a highly accessible, entertaining, and insightful look at Cuba.

In this expansive and contemplative history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. argues that the country's memory of the past served to transform its unfinished nineteenth-century liberation project into a twentieth-century revolutionary metaphysics. The ideal of national sovereignty that was anticipated as the outcome of Spain's defeat in 1898 was heavily compromised by the U.S. military intervention that immediately followed. To many Cubans it seemed almost as if the new nation had been overtaken by another country's history.Memory of thwarted independence and aggrievement - of the promise of sovereignty ever receding into the future - contributed to the development in the early republic of a political culture shaped by aspirations to fulfill the nineteenth-century promise of liberation, and it was central to the claim of the revolution of 1959 as the triumph of history. In this capstone book, Perez discerns in the Cuban past the promise that decisively shaped the character of Cuban nationality.

In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island's cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. Perez shows how the logic of the sugar trade resulted in the development of an agriculture for consumers abroad at the expense of consumers at home. In the process, dependency on food imports, a signal feature of the Cuban economy, was set in place.Efforts to diversify the economy through expanded rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as Cubans were on the U.S. market. U.S. growers prepared to retaliate by cutting the sugar quota in a struggle to control Cuban rice markets. Perez's chronicle culminates in the 1950s, a period of deepening revolutionary tensions on the island, as U.S. rice producers and their allies in Congress clashed with Cuban producers supported by the government of Fulgencio Batista. U.S. interests prevailed—a success, Perez argues, that contributed to undermining Batista's capacity to govern. Cuba's inability to develop self-sufficiency in rice production persists long after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Cuba continues to import rice, but, in the face of the U.S. embargo, mainly from Asia. U.S. rice growers wait impatiently to recover the Cuban market.

In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island's cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. Perez shows how the logic of the sugar trade resulted in the development of an agriculture for consumers abroad at the expense of consumers at home. In the process, dependency on food imports, a signal feature of the Cuban economy, was set in place.Efforts to diversify the economy through expanded rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as Cubans were on the U.S. market. U.S. growers prepared to retaliate by cutting the sugar quota in a struggle to control Cuban rice markets. Perez's chronicle culminates in the 1950s, a period of deepening revolutionary tensions on the island, as U.S. rice producers and their allies in Congress clashed with Cuban producers supported by the government of Fulgencio Batista. U.S. interests prevailed—a success, Perez argues, that contributed to undermining Batista's capacity to govern. Cuba's inability to develop self-sufficiency in rice production persists long after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Cuba continues to import rice, but, in the face of the U.S. embargo, mainly from Asia. U.S. rice growers wait impatiently to recover the Cuban market.