No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban filmmakers had to rethink the socialist values and esthetics developed in Cuba after the revolution of 1959. A number of these precepts, encapsulated in Julio García Espinosa's 1965 manifesto "For an Imperfect Cinema," had been influential in both Cuban filmmaking and Latin America's socialist cinema in general. As a consequence of capitalist globalization, many of these cultural concepts had to be reinvented for a new, more skeptical era disinclined to romanticize their legacy. This dissertation opens a discussion of the heritage of Cuban cinema in Latin American culture through an examination of the post-Soviet production of Cuban filmmakers working within the framework of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). An analysis of the films of Daniel Díaz Torres, Juan Carlos Tabío, Tomás Gutíerrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Fernando Pérez traces these directors' struggle to create a new film vocabulary that depicts more accurately Cuban reality while remaining committed to revolutionary ideals. Further, the dissertation examines the reconstruction of history through the epic film adaptation of Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and through Juan Padrón's animated features. It then reflects on issues of gender, auteurism, and superstardom centered on the persona of actor Jorge Perrugoría, as it speculates on the new path that Cuban cinema may follow in the 21st century with the new system of coproductions with countries such as Spain and Germany. In order to explore the changes in the Cuban film industry outlined above, I deconstruct the cultural and visual language developed by the Revolution. Drawing on the ideas of major schools of criticism such as Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Marxism, and Post-Colonialism, I prove that, while Marxist legacy is an essential part of the island's heritage, the multiethnic nature of Cuban culture is too complex to be limited or reduced to a single philosophy. This supports my argument that the Revolution's survival and finding its new place in the international community depends in part on an evolution from its original precepts, including an open dialogue with the other aspects of Cuban reality that constitute the fabric of the island's society.

Developed from the similarity between exile theory and age studies, the term "exile" is expanded to a natural form of exile because of the shocking temporal shift that reconstructs social interaction, familial dynamics, and the aging body. Using Heidegger's theoretical work Being in Time, Simon de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, and Jean Améry's On Aging as insight, this literary analysis captures how the elderly protagonists Goyo from Cristina García's King of Cuba, Máximo from Ana Menéndez's "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd," and Soledad from Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés's "Abuela Marielita" experience a natural exile among society, their family and within their own body. These areas express how the elderly's sense of displacement equates that of a political/geographical exile.

Various lines of evidence indicate that levels of anthropogenic pollutants, such as lead, mercury and cadmium, have increased in terrestrial and atmospheric environments since the early 19th century and the advent of industrialization. While the exposure to these three trace elements is a global concern, this study focused primarily on marine environments located throughout the Caribbean. Using ICP-MS, this study aimed to detect and quantify anthropogenic pollutants, specifically lead (Pb), mercury (Hg) and cadmium (Cd), using skeletonized remains of sea turtles as biological proxies for environmental quality. Archaeologically derived (n=5) and mid-late 20th century (n=6) Hawksbill and Green turtles were used to create a chronology of pollution exposure in Caribbean marine environments and establish a pre-industrial baseline for pollution exposure, useful for precisely gauging how human activities in the Caribbean, namely industrialization and tourism, have changed the concentration of these elements over time. Results from this study revealed that the industrial, modern sea turtle sample and the archaeological sample exhibit similar distributions of lead and cadmium ppm levels. Whereas, the mercury datasets revealed that the two samples share differing distributions of ppm levels, but that the archaeological sample yielded the higher mercury concentrations. Based on these results, this study was unable to verify whether skeletal sea turtle remains, specifically humeri, can be used as a biological proxy to reconstruct anthropogenic pollution in marine environments. Furthermore, it failed to quantify pre-industrial to mid-late 20th century anthropogenic lead, mercury, and cadmium pollution in Caribbean Marine Environments.

No description available.

No description available.