Rafael Bernabe – författare

Offering a comprehensive overview of Puerto Rico's history and evolution since the installation of U.S. rule, Cesar Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. ""Puerto Rico in the American Century"" explores the history of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on an island that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected.

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them. These three interlocutors—the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989); and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000—all saw in the famous American poet and pacifist a key lens through which to understand North American capitalism and is imperial projections.Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the backdrop of capitalist modernity's contradictions, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Bernabe deftly uses Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion to frame his discussion of each individual author and of Martí's, James's, and Mir's responses to Whitman.

Obstinate Star is a history of Puerto Rico’s independence struggle against Spanish and U.S. colonialism. From the time of the Napoleonic Wars, it traces the movement’s currents, within and beyond the island, linking them to ongoing social conflicts and international trends and conjunctures. Beginning with the radical democratic fight against Spanish control, it moves on to the early reactions to U.S. rule, the role of Nationalism, Communism and New Deal currents during the Great Depression and the Second World War, the rise of new forces in the wake of the Cuban revolution and recent struggles in the epoch of capitalist globalisation.