(in English): The Master thesis depicts a concept of interpersonal relationships in a novel Cecilia Valdés by the Cuban writer Cirilo Villaverde. It describes author's life and circumstances which accompanied the origin of the novel. The thesis introduces a plot of the novel, analyses the main characters and their role in the novel. It deals with a theme of the novel as a genre in general and informs about Indian and Costumbrism novel as well. It follows historic events in Cuba at the time when the novel was issued. Knowledge of the historic events is necessary for comprehension of the novel in its broader sense. The thesis examines Cecilia Valdés from the point of a concept of interpersonal relationships, deals with relationships among black people, mulattoes and white people. It analyses a relationship between the main characters which is greatly influenced by different racial origin. The topic of slavery is introduced in connection with a plot of the novel. The Master thesis compares a novel Cecila Valdés with other significant Hispano- American novels which carry similar aspects, namely with Cumandá o un drama entre salvajes by Juan León Mera and Aves sin nido by Clorinda Matto de Turner. The thesis mainly focuses on interpersonal and partner relationships in these novels which are influenced...

Regarding the existence of nuclear weapons, which were never used all over atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as a tool of war against civilian or military targets during the Cold War, I try to give an explanation of "armed peace". I consider the question of why the two superpowers (the USA and the USSR) didn't start a "hot war" that would have been more likely nuclear. As an example of the most critical event will serve me Cuban Missile Crisis, with which can be the description of it understood in broader context. The paper points to the interrelations of opposing ideologies that related to atomic weapons have often drawn the same conclusions. I examine the military-strategic value of the atomic bombs which have shaped international relations troughtout the second half of the twentieth century. Besides the military aspects I also mention economic interpretation of the nuclear arms race and economic potential of the USSR and the USA. Why have in the first instance occured one-sided and than gradually overall disarment, reducing the number of nuclear warheads? I try to documented the explanation out of historical events also by using teoretical models.

The main goal of the thesis was to find out why leaders decide the way they do. Using the example of the Cuban Crisis from 1962 I try to analyze the decision making process of the american president John F. Kennedy and the soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. The Cuban Crisis was the most dangerous moment since World War II and the world got to the edge of a nuclear war. The lives of thousands of people were in the hands of the two leaders. Their decision making process was influenced by many internal and external factors and in this thesis I am trying to find out which factors and to what extent had the biggest influence on their decisions.

This thesis analyzes key moments from the tenures of Harold Macmillan as British Prime Minister and John Fitzgerald Kennedy as President of the United States. The United Kingdom and the United States had a Special Relationship between them, which was based upon their close political cooperation. Macmillan and Kennedy deepend this relation by their personal friendship, which played a major role in the course of finding solutions to the conflicts they had to face in the context of the Cold War, when there was a real possibility of nuclear annihilation. The analysis shows that the Special Relationship in the years 1957-1963 went through several dynamic developments, however it never lost its unique status. Despite initial distrust between the two countries immediately following the Suez Crisis, both politicians always managed to find a compromise solution. Thanks to their friendship and deep personal respect, they managed to always unite, even during times of gravest peril. A typical example of the personal relationship is the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy kept in touch via telephone with Macmillan and often asked him for advice. By virtue of this contact, Macmillan became one of the President's principal advisors in the course of the crisis. The Special Relationship between the two countries did...

La revolución cubana no solo se concentró en cambiar el gobierno sino también en reforzar la producción de productos culturales. Se encargo de activamente fomentar la resolución de preguntas intelectuales sobre cultura, arte y estética. Desde el comienzo del régimen socialista se hicieron esfuerzos consientes para crear instituciones que fomenten la creación de productos culturares. Una de estas instituciones fue el Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) la cual fue indispensable para el desarrollo del cine cubano. Como consecuencia directa un nuevo tipo de cine comenzó a surgir en Latinoamérica que se encargó principalmente en denunciar la miseria y en celebrar la protesta. Este cambio en la narrativa cinematografía a causa de la revolución cubana se conoce como el nuevo cine latinoamericano. El presente trabajo se encargará de analizar el rol del cine documental en la revolución cubana, partiendo de las obras cinematográficas de Santiago Álvarez y Sara Gómez; cinematógrafos instrumentales durante el régimen socialista. / The Cuban revolution did not only focus on changing the government it also preoccupied itself with reinforcing the cultural production. It actively engaged in encouraging the resolution of intellectual problems about culture, art, and aesthetics. From the start, the socialist regime made constant efforts, with the creation of institutions charged with the responsibility of boosting the creations of cultural products. One of these institutions was the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The ICAIC was indispensable in the development of Cuban cinema. As a direct consequence a new type of cinema started surging in Latin America which primary focused in the denouncement of misery and in celebrating protest. This change in the cinematography narrative in reaction to the success of the Cuban revolution it known as the New Latin American Cinema. This project will focus in analyzing the part documentary cinema played in the socialist regime focusing in the films made by Santiago Alvarez and Sara Gomez two cinematographs who were instrumental in the Cuban socialist regime. / Trabajo de investigación

Ce travail porte sur les performances scéniques qui naquirent à Cuba de la rencontre entre l'idéologie marxiste, officiellement adoptée par le gouvernement depuis 1961, et les religions afro-cubaines, pratiquées sur l'île depuis l'arrivée des premiers esclaves africains. D'un côté, le gouver-nement révolutionnaire entreprit de transformer les rituels afro-cubains en folklore national, tout à la fois pour en neutraliser la portée religieuse et pour les intégrer au patrimoine d'une nation en pleine construction. De l'autre, il exigea au fil des années un militantisme croissant de la part des artistes et notamment des dramaturges, auxquels il était demandé de produire un théâtre social, au service d'une cause politique résolument athée. Ces deux univers, celui des rituels afro-cubains et celui du théâtre engagé, étaient donc a priori bien distincts. Certains dramaturges entreprirent cependant de les mettre en contact : Carlos Felipe (Réquiem por Yarini, 1960/1965), José Ramón Brene (Santa Camila de la Habana Vieja, 1962), José Triana (Medea en el espejo, 1960 et La muerte del Ñeque, 1964), Eugenio Hernández Espinosa (María Antonia, 1964/1967) et José Milián (Mamico Omi Omo, 1965). Leurs approches et leurs objectifs sont très variés mais d'une manière ou d'une autre tous en vinrent, par le détour théâtral, à restituer au langage rituel l'efficacité qu'il avait perdue sur les scènes folkloriques et à produire, le plus souvent involontairement, un théâtre qui s'apparente à de maints égards au théâtre de la Cruauté théorisé par Antonin Artaud, ce théâtre de « l'invisible rendu visible » - théâtre justement décrié par les autorités révolutionnaires. / This work studies on stage performances created in Cuba as a result of the encounter of Marxist ideology, officially adopted by the government in 1961, and Afro-Cuban religions, practised in the island since the arrival of the first African slaves. On one hand, the revolutionnary government set out to transform Afro-Cuban rituals into a national folklore in order to both neutralize its religious significance and insert it within the heritage of a nation in building; on the other hand, artists, playwrights in particular, were ordered over the years to be the activists of a staunch atheist political cause. Therefore these two worlds, Afro-Cuban rituals and socially engaged theater, were a priori quite distinct. However, some playwrights took on bridging the gap between them : Carlos Felipe (Réquiem por Yarini, 1960/1965), José Ramón Brene (Santa Camila de la Habana Vieja, 1962), José Triana (Medea en el espejo, 1960 and La muerte del Ñeque, 1964), Eugenio Hernández Espinosa (María Antonia, 1964/1967) and José Milián (Mamico Omi Omo, 1965).Their approaches and goals were diverse but, somehow or other, by the detour of theater, they all came to restore the effectiveness of the ritual language, lost in the context of folk scenes, and to create, often unwittingly, a theater similar to the Theater of Cruelty theorised by Antonin Artaud, the theater of « the invisible made visible » – the one precisely criticized by the revolutionary authority.

This study of political decision-making stressing the process of decision-making in a group setting is, in part, a reaction against traditional approaches of political analysis. The study of international relations is overburdened with historical studies of the interaction between states. The classic approach to the study of a given decision by one government affecting another might be called the “rational actor model”. This model treats the state as the entity reaching the decision. The decision itself is seen as behavior that reflects a rational purpose or intent. The central concepts of the model center around the calculated weighing of goals, alternatives, consequences, and choices. The “rational actor model” is the dominant method of current political analysis. I will implicitly contend in this paper that the concept of foreign policy as a rational process of gathering information, setting alternatives, and making decisions is not an adequate tool of understanding. In fact, the “rational actor model” does not make sense out of much political phenomenon. I will directly contend in this paper that a process model of political decision-making provides an adequate and helpful tool for the understanding of political decisions.

This thesis examines the differences between the Czech and Cuban phonological inventory. It aims to give a theoretical overview of both systems, to define phonemes, which do not exist in Cuban Spanish, and based on recordings of Cuban speakers living in Prague to give evidence of how they pronounce these phonemes. The paper is divided into two parts: in the theoretical part, the inventory of vowels and consonants in both Czech and Cuban language is thoroughly described, consequently the differences between those two inventories, and then the phonemes problematic for Cuban speakers are identified. In the experimental part, all the realizations of Czech phonemes appearing in the recordings are described. The paper looks at the realizations of Czech vowels and consonants in light of four main variables (level of Czech language, length of stay in Czechia, language used at home, and language used at work). Finally, the results of the research are summarized. Even though, there are quite a few different variations of the pronunciation, as the level of language goes up (also because of other variables), the number of variations is decreasing, in certain cases to only one variation that is corresponding with the pronunciation of the Czech speakers. Keywords Contrastive Phonetics; Czech; Cuban Spanish;...

Many scholars have considered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to be a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. In her 2019 monograph on the artist, for example, Genevieve Hyacinthe writes: “brownness made Mendieta a powerful translator of Black Atlantic forms into contemporary art language because she was not, and could never be, part of the dominant white culture.” Mendieta also announced herself as a translator (and inheritor) of Siboney and Taino cultures. Her gallery notes that to celebrate her return to Cuba’s “maternal breast” as an adult, the artist titled the rock carvings she made there with “names of zemis, or Taíno spirits, such as Bacayu for ‘Light of Day.’” I argue that alongside her claims on Taino cultural heritage we might consider her actual ancestry and claims on Indigenous women in the art of Cuban settlers before her. My dissertation considers Mendieta as a translator not of Taino myths or Black cultural practices but of ethnological texts and nationalistic folklore which catalogued and caricatured Black and Indigenous cultures. “Bacayu,” for example, is not a Taino “zemi” but rather a word she culled from a glossary of Black and Indigenous terms: a performance of knowledge over Indigenous cultures rather than a Taino cultural product. It hails from a lecherous story written by a Havana dentist about the death of an “Indian doncella.” Each chapter considers her translations of such pieces, focusing in particular on her translation choices which I suggest are motivated by her feminist and anti-imperial politics. My first chapter considers the influence of ethnographic studies on Abakuá and particularly the writings of Fernando Ortiz in her Iowa campus performances which reference crime scenes and “sacrificial” initiation ceremonies. Rather than offering unmediated access to Black religious practices, I suggest she is performing an abased view of Abakuá as seen through the (exterminationist) lens of Ortiz’s scholarship from his criminological ethnography, Los negros brujos (1906), to his less punitive but still highly fetishizing account of Abakuá in “La ‘tragedia’ de los ñáñigos” (1950). I don’t believe Mendieta translates this work to oppress Black people. Rather as a bodywork artist composing a militant, corporal language of feminist critique, she aims the violence of cultural translation toward her chauvinistic art school cohort. The second chapter considers her literary translation of “La Venus Negra, based on a Cuban legend,” which was composed by Adrián del Valle, Ortiz’s secretary at La Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País for which he collated Cuba’s first public library among other projects. The original legend can be contextualized by del Valle’s broader stewardship of Cuban letters: he penned “La Venus Negra” for a collection celebrating the Centenary of Cienfuegos from the family notes of a prominent cienfueguero, Pedro Modesto. Examining the tacky national showcase in which the legend originally appears, I consider the ways Mendieta repositions la Venus Negra as a display of her own “will to continue being Other.” In particular, her translation imposes a “Siboney” ancestry on la Venus Negra and dispenses with the conditions which determine the protagonist’s muteness (in the original, la Venus Negra is a nude Black woman who is captured and displaced from her island hideout by criollo enslavers). In Mendieta’s translation la Venus is not muted Black protest incarnate but becomes an anti-colonial symbol. Mendieta publishes the piece in the feminist magazine Heresies, illustrating the legend with a silhouette of her own body from her Silueta Series. Again, I don’t think Mendieta poses as a Ciboney woman or absents Black women in a gesture of ill will toward Black and Indigenous people. Rather, she does so as an anti-imperial strategy consistent with Fidel Castro’s cadre, as her unavowed translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” into her “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” curatorial statement indicates. In the essay, Retamar, a white Cuban scholar, aligns the revolution with Black and Indigenous Cuba by “reclaiming” the caricature Caliban, which, as Coco Fusco writes, Shakespeare himself had based on an “Indian” exhibited in London. In the third chapter, I consider Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres, not as tributes to Taino spirits but as monuments of settler longing for mutilated Indigenous women. The legend I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, “Bacayu,” for example, is settler fanfiction about a daughter of a “cacique” whose death portends the coming of the white man and includes a lengthy description of the dead woman’s body. I also point toward the misnamings of Black women which appear within this rock series (Black Venus, Mother) which are often overlooked by scholars who ask us to read the work as Taino myth. Finally, building on these themes, I suggest a comparison to the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: emphasizing the similarities in their “cannibalistic” approaches to translation. Although differently aligned politically (leftist, anarchist), Oiticica’s family, like Mendieta’s, were culturally and politically prominent settlers; and, like Mendieta, Oiticica is often read as a translator of Black Atlantic culture. Further both artists engaged in the caricaturing of Indigenous “American” cultures. In New York, Oiticica translated Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) to contextualize his work and the work of his friends. Artists in Brazil had adapted de Andrade’s manifesto into a translation program “cannibalizing” European and North American cultures, a practice they misidentified as Tupi as de Andrade had. Comparing Mendieta and Oiticica as translators reveals shared patterns of Latin American vanguards employing caricatures of Black and Indigenous cultures in anti-imperial performances. These caricatures and their resemblance to caricatures in the U.S. also point to older (and enduring) transnational networks of white nationalism in the Americas.

This dissertation offers a novel quantitative method for assessing an actor's subjective temporal orientation. Our method involves the use of supervised machine learning techniques in concert with natural language processing tools and linguistic principles. We suggest our method may offer a clandestine technique for extracting aspects of an actor’s temporal orientations from right behind their back. This capacity occurs because of the unique ways time references are reflected in language syntax. This reflection does not simply occur in face-to-face spoken interactions, but also resides in recorded vocal transcripts and within textual documents articulated by speakers for a social audience (e.g., political speeches). . From a social theory point of view, we argue that our technique can help objectify some of the major links theorists have long made between the temporal features of mind, subjective meaning, and social processes. Temporal orientation has long been defined as a tripartite mental process. Edmund Husserl famously defined this process as involving retention (a mental focus on past), presentation (a mental focus on the present) or protention (a mental envisioning of the future). From a pure phenomenology perspective, Husserl’s innovation was to link this mental interlocking process with meaning-making. For Husserl, it was directly through an actor’s temporal orientation that meaning became variably constituted and the problem of subjectivity emerged. From a sociological point of view, it is primarily through Alfred Schutz’s formulation of social phenomenology that Husserl’s tripartite system was opened to accommodate the influence of the social in meaning-making. This opening has possessed a long-standing contradiction. For Schutz, endogenous social structure could affect where an actor temporally orients. The resulting implication is that social structure could have a direct effect on how actors assign specific meanings in social systems. Even more, social structure could facilitate shared temporal orientations among actors. However, Schutz also promoted the idea that different temporal orientations could explain how different meanings could be assigned to the same social object by disparate actors. This possibility served as the centerpiece of Schutz’s well-known methodological critique of Max Weber’s direct linkage between subjective meaning, motive, and empathetic based interpretations of social action. To carry out our efforts to quantify how the subjective processes of temporal orientation appear to be influenced by endogenous social processes, we employed our algorithm on three different text-based data sets. We suggest these datasets possess strong reflections of the social world. The first dataset entails a collection of matched twitter tweets that correspond to Trump’s reelection bid and Biden’s challenge during the 2020 period. In this dataset, our method illustrates how both candidates appear to have different temporal orientations despite being bounded by a similar social event. We suggest this finding may reflect the relationship between what Schütz called inner duration and the influence of external stocks of knowledge (i.e., external structures.) The second dataset corresponds to a recorded conversational transcript of the Cuban missile crisis, taken from President Kennedy’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) on the 6th of October in 1962. Using our algorithm, we offer objective measures of homogenous temporal orientations of committee members that are consistent with meso-group conformity. We suggest that our method may offer a novel way of measuring group conformity in general. The third dataset consists of the State of the Union Corpora (SOU). In this dataset, we apply our algorithm to identify changes in temporal orientation occurring among a single President’s entire collection of SOU speeches. Furthermore, we compare the average temporal orientation of the Presidents in relation to various social categories, such as party affiliation and societal events. The scope of the Presidents inventoried for temporal orientation is restricted from Eisenhower to Biden.