Charles Tyng has been heralded as an American hero after the posthumous publication of his memoir, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833, in 1999. Recent research involving British Treasury report books from the nineteenth century suggest otherwise – that Tyng actively promoted and was engaged in the illicit trade of African captives. A Boston Brahmin, Tyng applied the lessons of his time at sea with Perkins & Company, the opium trading firm, to his occupation as an agent of notorious slave trading firms in Havana. This paper uses as evidence records of the captures of several vessels that implicate Tyng directly in equipping ships for the slave trade to correct the historical record and exposing a supposed hero as a predatory capitalist ignoring ethics for financial gain.

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.

Many citizens living in Old Havana, Cuba, do not have regular access to potable water in their homes. As a result, this thesis explores how the water infrastructure in Old Havana shapes the everyday lives of local residents. The empirical material in this study was collected during two months of minor field studies in Havana mainly through the qualitative research methods of interviews and diaries but also through observations. The results were analyzed through four main theoretical concepts: the social practice approach in technology, hydraulic citizenship, social practice theory and feminist theory. Results revealed that the local water infrastructure produces and reproduces social inequalities and domestic do-it-yourself practices. It was also revealed that women carry out most of the domestic water activities, largely due to prevailing machismo ideals and traditional gender norms. Consequently, women in Old Havana are generally more affected by water supply irregularities and malfunctioning infrastructure than men.

Through the broader contextualization of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana’s newly reformed housing market, this study theorizes the Cuban late socialist condition through a lens of utopian ideological conflict. A popular narrative of free market utopia has emerged in the face of the state’s recalcitrant ideology of state socialism. The popular narrative is reproduced through growth in the informal economy, while the socialist utopian narrative is maintained by the ubiquity of its bureaucratic apparatus. Inspired by postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994), this thesis theorizes the Cuban state narrative as an ideological simulation, supported only through its strongest simulacrum – the government bureaucracy. Previous work on Cuba has cited the importance of access to government-purchased goods to fuel the informal economy and individual wealth accumulation. This study highlights the reproduction of a narrative of free market utopia in the desire for access to transactions as intermediaries, particularly as the deals increase in hard currency value. The passage of Decreto-Ley Number 288, which authorized the buying and selling of homes has served to rapidly capitalize the market and encourage further development of an informal network of brokers. Greater economic hybridization in the housing sector, among others, is gradually eroding the totalizing nature of the state’s socialist utopia. / text

This work is a social and cultural history of the participation of enslaved and free Blacks in the Seven Years’ War in British America. It is, as well, an intellectual history of the impact of Blacks’ wartime actions upon conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity in the British Atlantic world. In addition to offering a fresh analysis of the significance of Britain’s arming of Blacks in the eighteenth century, it represents the first sustained inquiry into Blacks’ experience of this global conflict. It contends that, though their rhetoric might indicate otherwise, neither race nor enslaved status in practice prevented Britons from arming Blacks. In fact, Blacks played the most essential role in martial endeavors precisely where slavery was most fundamental to society. The exigencies of worldwide war transformed a local reliance upon black soldiers for the defense of particular colonies into an imperial dependence upon them for the security of Britain’s Atlantic empire. The events of the Seven Years’ War convinced many Britons that black soldiers were effective and even indispensable in the empire’s tropical colonies, but they also confirmed that not all Blacks could be trusted with arms. This work examines “Tacky’s revolt,” during which more than a thousand slaves exploited the wartime diffusion of Jamaica’s defensive forces to rebel, as a battle of the Seven Years’ War. The experience of insecurity and insurrection during the conflict caused some Britons to question the imperial value of the institution of slavery and to propose that Blacks be transformed from a source of vulnerability as slaves to the key to the empire’s strength in the southern Atlantic as free subjects. While martial service offered some Blacks a means to gain income, skills, a sense of satisfaction, autonomy, community, and even (though rarely) freedom, the majority of Blacks did not personally benefit from their contributions to the British war effort. Despite the pragmatic martial antislavery rhetoric that flourished postwar, in the end the British armed Blacks to perpetuate slavery, not to eradicate it, and an ever more regimented reliance upon black soldiers became a lasting legacy of the Seven Years’ War. / text

En analysant les interactions entre pratiques sociales quotidiennes et espace urbain à La Havane entre 1878 et 1921, cette thèse démontre combien l'émergence et la diffusion socio-‘raciale’ de nouvelles façons de pratiquer la ville contribuent alors à une ré-invention du quotidien, c'est-à-dire à la reconfiguration de l'expérience journalière que les Havanais ont de leur ville et à l'actualisation de la façon dont ils y font société.Enclenchés entre 1878 et 1895 puis consolidés après 1898, l'essor de transports en communs urbains à La Havane et leur appropriation progressive par les couches populaires favorisent un renouvellement des pratiques sociales quotidiennes de l'espace urbain, synonyme d'une entrée définitive des Havanais dans l'ère des transports urbains de masse. Atypique de par sa précocité et sa rapidité, ce processus est également remarquable par ses répercussions sur deux des formes structurantes de la convivance havanaise. Dès avant l'Indépendance, le régime appliqué à la marginalité havanaise s'en trouve désarticulé, à un moment où, la contestation de l'ordre colonial gagnant, le contrôle social devient un enjeu crucial pour les autorités. Sur l'ensemble de la période d'étude, le renouvellement des pratiques sociales quotidiennes œuvre à une redéfinition de la géographie résidentielle havanaise : il est à la base d'une diffusion des couches populaires dans l'ensemble de La Havane, qui entrave et contredit le projet élitaire de capitale républicaine.En « faisant les poches à l’histoire », en étudiant de nombreuses archives inédites ou peu valorisées et à partir de la constitution d'une base de données géo-référencée et d'un important matériel cartographique, cette thèse pose donc, entre lecture alternative de la chronologie canonique et complexification de la trame historique, un regard autre sur l'une des périodes charnières de l'histoire de La Havane et de Cuba. / By analysing the interactions between daily social practices and urban space in Havana between 1878 and 1921, this thesis demonstrates how new ways of moving through the city emerged and spread both socially and racially, thus contributing to reinventing everyday life, that is to say reorganising its inhabitants' daily experience of the city and updating the way they socialised. The development of public transport in Havana and the working class's growing use of it began between 1878 and 1895 and boomed after 1898, which fostered a renewal of daily social practices of urban space and allowed the people of Havana to enter the age of mass urban transport. This precocious, swift, therefore atypical process was also remarkable because of its repercussions on two of the structuring forms of convivance. Already before the Independence, government's treatment of social outcasts started to dislocate, precisely at a time when protest against colonial order was spreading and social control was becoming a crucial issue for the authorities. Over the period under study in this thesis, the reinvention of daily social practices led to redefining the residential geography of Havana: it made possible a wider diffusion of the working class throughout the city, which hampered and challenged the republican capital's project of the elite. By “emptying out history's pockets” and studying numerous unpublished or little valued archives, this thesis, which involved constituting a georeferenced database and a body of cartographic material, offers a different insight into one of the turning points in the history of Havana and Cuba through an alternative analysis of the conventional chronology and a complexification of historical framework.

The work studies a very specific period of the Czech-Cuban relations: the period of World War II and the Czechoslovakian refugees in Havana. For its creation, materials from two archives were used: the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, the so-called "London Archive" which keeps the documentation of the Czechoslovak government in exile, and the National Archive of Cuba. In the first half of the 20th century, Cuba was not for the Czech society a distant country on the other side of the world. It was its partner and competitor on the world sugar market, and the echoes of Cuban independence were still fresh in its memory. The young Czechoslovak republic was looking for markets for its industrial and consumer products, while Cuban exports generally did not exceed a few dozen tons of unroasted coffee. In the inter-war period, some 20 Czechs and Slovaks were living in Cuba. The Munich Treaty, the occupation and then the application of the Nuremberg Laws created an atmosphere of suffocation and drastically reduced the living space for the Jewish population in the occupied territory of Czechoslovakia. Many decided to leave their homeland, but the world around them was unwilling to receive larger numbers of Jewish refugees. The original idea of getting to a safe place beyond...

The objective of this thesis draws on my experience acquired during the internship in Galeria De Arte Servando in Havana, where I have been given the opportunity to learn about Cuban culture as well as to witness the restrictions and difficulties in gallery activities due to the communist government. The first part of the thesis focuses on historical facts highlighting the art exchange between Czechoslovakia and Cuba, a common part of running the state institution in the past. It was a common practice both in Havana´s House of Czechoslovak Culture and in the House of Cuban Culture in Prague. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, both houses were closed and the Czechoslovak-Cuban relations in art and culture have never been restored. The study subsequently discusses the concept and realization of the exhibition prepared in collaboration with Cuban curator Yenisel Osuna Morales. The aim of the thesis is to try to initiate a dialogue between two countries, Cuba and the Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia), countries with many differences, and probably even estranged nowadays. However, their relations were warm before, and they could be in many ways an inspiration. The primary outcome of this thesis is the exhibition project aimed at the topic of censorship in independent art, its influence on gallery activities and freedom of artistic expression in Cuba. The selection of cuban artists carried out by curator Yenisel Osuna Morales represents the topic of pluriculturalism, migration and diaspora. By means of exhibition exchange, I would like to refer to the terminated friendship between Cuba and former Czechoslovakia in the field of art. The purpose of these exhibitions is not only to present Czech contemporary art in Cuba but also to present Cuban art in the Czech Republic without any restrictions.