Orientador: Luís Fernando Ayerbe / Banca: Héctor Saint-Pierre / Banca: Harry E. Vanden / O Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais é instituído em parceria com a Unesp/Unicamp/PUC-SP, em projeto subsidiado pela CAPES, intitulado "Programa San Tiago Dantas" / Resumo: Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar a atuação dos cubano-americanos organizados sob a Fundação Nacional Cubano Americana (FNCA) na política externa dos Estados Unidos para Cuba. Para tanto, abordamos o processo migratório cubano para os Estados Unidos, com ênfase no período posterior à Revolução Cubana, quando essa emigração passa a ser concebida como base social da contra-revolução e promovida pelo governo norte-americano. Nessa direção, apresentamos o tratamento particular oferecido a essa emigração pela administração Ronald Reagan, que estimulou a formação da FNCA como uma organização política contrarevolucionária capaz de pressionar o Congresso em temas cubanos, e a inserção dos cubanos organizados sob esta instituição na vida doméstica do país, sinalizada por seus votos e por suas contribuições financeiras às campanhas eleitorais. Por fim, analisamos os atuais objetivos da FNCA, traduzidos na promoção de uma transição política em Cuba para a democracia e favorecidos pela administração George W. Bush, que financia e apóia programas para esse fim. / Abstract: This dissertation has as objective to analyse the cuban-americans' role, organized under the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), in the United States' foreign policy towards Cuba. For this purpose, we analyzed the cuban migration process directed to the United States, emphasizing the post Revolution period, when this emigration is conceived as the social basis of the counter-revolution and promoted by the U.S. government. In this direction, we presented the particular treatment offered to this emigration by the Reagan administration, which stimulated the CANF creation as a counter-revolutionary political organization capable of pressing the Congress in cuban themes, and the insertion of the cubans organized under this institution in the domestic affairs of the country through their votes and financial contributions. Finally, we analyzed the actual objectives of CANF, translated in the promotion of a political transition in Cuba for democracy and favored by Bush's administration, which finances and supports programs towards this end. / Mestre

Neste trabalho analisamos a história do Instituto Cubano del Arte e Indústria Cinematográficos, primeiro organismo cultural criado após a Revolução cubana, e seu papel na política cultural, entre 1959 e 1991. Por meio da análise de documentos da política cultural, da revista Cine Cubano, além de depoimentos, críticas e alguns filmes que repercutiram especialmente os dilemas e questionamentos dos intelectuais cubanos, abordamos as tensões entre a política cultural oficial, o ICAIC e os projetos dos cineastas. Esse Instituto, pelo qual circularam muitos cineastas latino-americanos e europeus, foi palco de debates, disputas políticas e diversas polêmicas envolvendo filmes e tendências estéticas, como o realismo socialista e a nouvelle vague. Nossa tese é de que o ICAIC, pode ser considerado uma instituição privilegiada no meio cultural cubano, pois consolidou uma autonomia relativa em relação aos mecanismos de controle governamentais, por meio da ação dos cineastas e da mediação da direção do Instituto. Esta autonomia foi abalada, em diversos momentos, em função de fatores como a reestruturação do Estado, os fracassos econômicos e o acirramento do autoritarismo em Cuba, principalmente a partir dos anos 70. Ainda assim, o Instituto se readaptou às demandas políticas governamentais num jogo político de adesão e resistência à política cultural oficial, que tornou possível a produção de vários filmes ambíguos e críticos ao regime, ao longo desse período. / This work analyzes the history of the Cuban Institute for Art and Film Production (ICAIC) ? the first cultural organization created after the Cuban Revolution ? and its role in cultural policy between 1959 and 1991. Through the analysis of documents on cultural policy, the magazine Cine Cubano, in addition to testimonies, critiques and a set of films specifically relevant to the issues and dilemmas of Cuban intellectuals, the thesis delves into the tensions between official cultural policy, the ICAIC, and film makers? projects. Various Latin American and European film makers were involved with the institute, and it served as a forum for debate, political discussions and varied polemics related to film and aesthetic tendencies, including Socialist Realism and New Wave. The thesis proposes that ICAIC constituted a privileged institution in the Cuban cultural environment because ? through the action of film makers and the mediation of the Institute?s leadership ? it attained relative autonomy with respect to mechanisms of government control. This autonomy was unsettled, at different points, by factors such as state restructuring, economic failure and the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Cuba, especially from the 1970s onward. Still, the institute adapted to the demands of government policy through a political dynamic that alternated adhesion and resistance to official cultural policy, making possible the production of various films that were ambiguous and critical of the regime during that period.

In the centuries since the colonization of the New World, the people of Cuba created a strong musical tradition. Initially, their music mirrored the European composition canons of structural, melodic and harmonic order. The eventual confluence of its distinct cultural elements (i.e. the European, African, and, to a lesser extent, Amerindian) led to the emergence of a new, distinctly Cuban musical tradition. The wars for independence that began in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth century created a surge towards political and cultural autonomy that swept across the Latin American colonies, generating a wave of nationalism during the nineteenth century. After finally gaining its independence in 1902, Cuba sought to define itself as a nation. Cubans looked inward to their regional folklore—their indigenous and popular traditions—for the source of their national identity, a trend that became of primary interest to Cuban artists. The nationalist trend found full musical expression during the twentieth century, when composers turned to folklore for their inspiration in creating new art music (works for the concert hall) with a unique sound and vitality. This study concerns itself with the Cuban nationalist movement and its role in the creation of art music by twentieth-century Cuban composers, most specifically that of Mario Abril. The monograph is organized into three general sections: the first section (Chapters 2 and 3) identifies the significant characteristics of nationalism, describes the manifestation of some relevant nationalist movements (e.g., in Europe and Latin America), and explores the manifestation of the nationalist movement in Cuba. The second section (Chapters 4 and 5) provides a history of Cuban art music, concluding with a biographical sketch of composer Mario Abril. The third part (Chapters 6 and 7)consists of a study of the music, beginning with a description of the pertinent characteristics of Cuban popular music, followed by an examination Mario Abril’s Fantasía (Introduction and Pachanga) for clarinet and piano. The document concludes with remarks about the characteristics that qualify the work as an example of Cuban nationalist art music with suggestions for the study and interpretation of the work.

Throughout history, women have played an important role in literature. Nevertheless, since Sappho's poetry until now, feminine voices have had to struggle for recognition of their works. Before the nineteenth century, women were almost ignored in Spanish literature. Society kept them as "ángeles de la familia," taking care of their homes, husbands, and children. Some of them, such as María de Zayas y Sotomayor in Spain and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, complained about their situation in their writings. However, they expressed their fight not as a generation but as individuals. In the nineteenth century, the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, were brought to Latin America from Europe. Cuba was among those countries where the new movement took roots. Initiated by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a group of women began to participate in literary reunions, and to found newspapers and magazines where works authored by women, dedicated to feminist ideas, were published. They indeed through literature started to live out womanhood in order to intellectually leave the ideological prisons where society had been keeping them. This study scans the literary works of all Romantic women writers in Cuba. It specifically analyzes poetry and short stories, and investigates how these authors expressed themselves in their works against the patriarchal society, where they lived and wrote their books. An eclectic critical method has been used. Findings were very revealing. Only three of the fourteen writers studied in my dissertation had been previously mentioned by major critics. Most of them had been ignored. However, the greatest discovery was that they prompted something new: For the first time they projected themselves as a group, as a collective consciousness, and this fact established a difference with former women writers in Cuban literature before Romanticism. In other words, they produced a "Renaissance" in Cuba's literature. In spite of how they lived between 1820 and 1900, their struggles for women's rights have linked them to our current times.

No description available.

The path of Cuba’s cultural economy and patrimony deviated substantially during the “Special Period in the Time of Peace” (1991-1999), including the collapse of state sponsorship for the arts and the opening of the Cuban economy to foreign investment. This opening was slight but significant. Artists found themselves in a position where their work no longer solely existed as patrimony of the state but as personal methods of success and survival. My dissertation analyzes how three Black Cuban artists, René Peña, Belkis Ayón, and Elio Rodríguez, engineer and manipulate self-portraiture as a critical tool through which they can explore issues of belonging and place in connection to the Cuban national project. I attest that each artist positions representations of themselves, or their avatars, within their work to examine what it means to be Cuban, Black, and human. I begin my project by establishing how the figure of the White, hyper-masculine man has served as the ideal Cuban citizen following the revolution and independence. Cuban artists have explored themes of national identity and belonging since the mid-nineteenth century, in many instances reflecting on race and the presence of African descendants in Cuban society. The continued discourse on “racelessness” and the supposed eradication of racism in the country made the potential to be both Black and Cuban impossible. Official discourses on race after the 1959 revolution attempted to erase, and in many senses, whitewash, the historical legacy of racism in Cuba through the expressly public abolishment of discrimination and difference in Cuban society. An attempt to erase all forms of difference, or the visibility of difference, within Cuban society accompanied advances in equal opportunity to jobs, education, and housing for the Black Cuban community after the revolution. My project focuses on how Peña, Ayón, and Rodriguez contest the long-established hierarchy of race and gender in official cubanía [Cubanness] through visual discourses. I argue that the works of Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez are not examples of a hybrid, creolized synthesis but instead working products of investigation and play. Considering identity as a process and project always in flux, I contend that these three artists use aesthetic strategies to represent Cubanness and Blackness as not mutually exclusive but simultaneously iterative and dynamic. Considering their artistic practices as performances of Blackness and self, I present these artists as critical interlocutors of the cultural moment. I argue that Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón mobilize the Afro-diasporic conception of the self as external and multiple through their avatars as a form of self-fashioning. An avatar functions as a proxy for a person, acting as an extension of their self, traversing locations and discourses otherwise inaccessible to the primary self. Avatars blur the boundaries between the material and the virtual world and muddle the distinctions between subject and object, flesh and body. Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón create portraits of their “other selves” to assert their subjectivity and personhood in realms that otherwise negate their presence. Through a close visual analysis of the work created by Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez, I show how their use of alter-egos elucidates their experiences of the materiality of Blackness and the multiplicity of being. I argue that this is mainly present in the material processes inherent in the print-making and performative productions included in each. For example, in terms of color, Peña and Ayón use black and white critically, manipulating the various gray scales between the two tones to illustrate the many potentialities of cubanía. Rodríguez has interestingly moved into soft sculptural forms of blacks and whites, but the works discussed here use fixed colors to create a humorous play with traditional Cuban aesthetics. Each artist uses color differently, but through their processes, they imbue their works with a sense of materiality and personhood that is only possible through print. For these artists, the work’s creation becomes a performance of self-definition that parallels the many ways we perform race, nationhood, and belonging.

This study analyzes Virgilio Piñera’s concept of performance in relation to his representation of mass media products and technologies. The central argument is that Piñera’s notion of theatrical representation connects fiction with politics in subversive ways, challenging assumptions of naturalness at different levels, from that of the gendered self, to the family and the nation. To support this argument, the study focuses on Piñera’s representation of a variety of mass media genres as these inspire everyday life performances, mainly in Cuba but also in Argentina. While fictional models and sentimental narratives from the mass media most often convey oppressive conceptions of gender, family, and nation, the author’s representation of the media’s pervasive influence questions and denaturalizes those conceptions. Piñera stresses the disruptive potential of individual performance against the repetitive character of both the mass media industry and the social reenactments of its sentimental myths. His references to mass culture thus destabilize structures of power, including stereotypes of both sexuality and gender. The analysis shows that Piñera’s fictions exhibit important characteristics of queer aesthetics. The study comprises a time span of almost three decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, and focuses on a selection of Piñera’s criticism, drama, poetry, and narrative. Within those texts, special attention is given to references to photography, radio programs, romance novels, movies, and popular music. The organization of Piñera’s texts in this study answers to both thematic and chronological considerations. Chapter 1 outlines the study’s objectives and methodology, also providing a background on critical studies about Piñera. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with plays and short-stories written before the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Chapter 2 examines texts that represent both family and nation in relation to a variety of mass media genres, from Cuban “radionovelas” to Hollywood gangster films. Chapter 3 focuses on two narratives, written in Buenos Aires, that address posing and self-representation in relation to issues of sexuality, masculinity, and power. Chapter 4 deals with a selection of poems written, for the most part, after 1959. In these poems, the literary use of photography stresses theatrical self-representation, often in direct resistance to revolutionary reformulations of masculinity in the figure of the “New Man.” / text

(in English): The topic of the present thesis is the lexical aspects of Cuban Spanish, primarily the influence of other languages on its vocabulary. The theoretical part is dedicated to the historical and cultural circumstances of the history of the Cuban variant of Spanish, it briefly outlines the evolution of the Cuban lexicography and, most importantly, it pays attention to the impact of other languages: Spanish of the conquerors, Indian languages, African languages, French, English, Chinese and Russian on Cuban lexis. In addition, a short part of the thesis is dedicated to the sociolinguistic situation in Cuba. The theoretical background serves as the basis for the practical part of the thesis, in which the occurrence of selected lexical items in the linguistics corpora CREA, CORPES XXI and Araneum Hispanicum Maius is examined.

Thesis advisor: Paul Gray / Since Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba over fifty years ago, U.S.-Cuban relations have been defined by mutual hostility. As the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, the United States has labored to combat this repressive force that threatens democracy only ninety miles from its shores. In this paper, I analyze the embargo against Cuba and the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, both of which are U.S. government initiatives intended to weaken the Cuban government. I find that neither of these initiatives has been effective and that the United States’ failure to reevaluate longstanding and unsuccessful policies is detrimental to the populations they are intended to serve. In order to create more effective programs, the United States government must consider human rights in its decisions, continuously follow through with and reevaluate its policies, and ensure that initiatives are in the best interest of all parties involved. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies.

Tradicionalmente as religiões afro-americanas são estudadas principalmente por meio de suas cerimônias, mitologia, hierarquia, organização ritual e conceitos éticos-filosóficos. Nesta tese se realiza uma aproximação da Santería1 cubana, religião de origem africana, por meio de sua cultura material. Com esta ideia se observou a presença desta religião na sociedade cubana contemporânea, inserida em um processo de transformações sócioeconômicas, em que ela, considerada uma prática subalterna assume um papel protogonista. Os objetos criados e/ou transformados para uso religioso funcionam na pesquisa como fio condutor para analisar os modos pelos quais a Santería é percebida dentro e fora da comunidade religiosa. Com esse intuito se realizou o exercício de examinar a apreensão de objetos para uso religioso em espaços públicos: museus e mercado, assim como privados: casas-templo. Questões como agência desses objetos, as redes de sociabilidade em que estão inseridos e seus processos de sacralização foram estudados com o auxílio de alguns pressupostos teóricos dos estudos sobre o consumo de cultura material. A etnografia foi decisiva para a construção da narrativa deste trabalho que confirmou a ideia de que a Santería se mantem intimamente vinculada às transformações atuais em Cuba. / Traditionally, African-American religions are mainly studied through their ceremonies, mythology, hierarchy, ritual organization and ethic-philosophical concepts. In the present thesis, one approaches the Cuban Santería, a religion of African origin, through its material culture. Bearing this in mind, we observed the presence of this religion in the Cuban contemporary society, inserted in a process of socio-economic transformations where it assumes an important role, although once it had been considered a marginal practice. The objects which are created and or transformed for the religious use are the connecting thread in the research to analyze how Santería is seen in and out of the religious community. In order to do so, we exanimated how religious objects are placed in public and private spaces for religious use: museums and markets and also the house-temples. Inquiries about the agency of those objects, the sociability networks in which they are inserted and their sacralization processes were studied with the assistance of some theoretical assumptions of the studies about the consumption of material culture. Ethnography was decisive to frame the narrative of this work, which confirmed the idea that Santería is still intimately affected and bound to the current transformations in Cuba.