Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Envisioning Cuba) - Softcover

Guerra, Lillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469618869 ISBN 13: 9781469618869

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014

Synopsis

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba’s six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.
Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called “unanimous support” for a revolution whose “moral power” defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new Cuba that policed most forms of dissent. Devoted revolutionaries who resisted disastrous economic policies, exposed post-1959 racism, and challenged gender norms set by Cuba’s one-party state increasingly found themselves marginalized, silenced, or jailed. Using previously unexplored sources, Guerra focuses on the lived experiences of citizens, including peasants, intellectuals, former prostitutes, black activists, and filmmakers, as they struggled to author their own scripts of revolution by resisting repression, defying state-imposed boundaries, and working for anti-imperial redemption in a truly free Cuba.

About this title

About the Author

Lillian Guerra is professor of Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida and author of The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba and Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469618869
• ISBN 13: 9781469618869
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 488