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I A Cooperative Disagreement i offers "a comprehensive, chronological, archive-intensive exploration of the understudied Canada-US side" of the triangular relations between Canada, the US, and Cuba between 1959 and 1993. The author is a Canadian historian and, most importantly, a professional archivist who labored for years in both Canadian and US archives with one objective: to illuminate how Canada and the US successfully managed their "disagreement" on how to handle communist Cuba. [Extracted from the article]

What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the blurred, unregulated borders between journalism and the state. In embattled liminal spaces, reporters--negotiating a nebulous terrain of high-stakes reporting that tested and revised their emerging, unstable journalistic norms--fought in war, collaborated with US intelligence, and engaged in secret diplomacy. This article, focusing on the careers of two reporters, Sylvester Scovel in Cuba and William Bayard Hale in Mexico, explains how and why reporters came to work for the state, a neglected tradition conceptualized here as "state work," from the 1890s to 1920s. That history is an argument for scholars of journalism and political history to study what reporters did, not just what they published, to better understand the role of journalism in US democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Yingjin Zhang proposes polylocality as a theoretical framework to perceive Chinese cinema within a cross border and worldly network. Through polylocality, Zhang argues that cinema designates the relationality among differentiated positions across places, which challenges the concept of transnational cinema that predominantly underscores the spatial relationship between cinema and the world. The act of mobilization, migration, and nomadicity in the process of filmmaking also innovates (un-)wanted mutuality, intimacy, and reciprocity, with or without plan. In this paper, I argue that the framework of polylocality bears the potentiality to open the process of documentary filmmaking as a solitary practice, both on and off screen, through a close reading of Havana Divas, a documentary featuring two Cantonese opera divas living in Cuba. I contend that the field of transpacific studies, breaking through from the national imagination in the concept of (trans-)national cinema, reinforces Zhang's theory of polylocality and sheds light on the film practice that involves the mutual mobilization of both the filmmaker and the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The persistence of the peasantry challenges conceptualizations of smallholders on both the left and the right. It also highlights the vital role that smallholders play in socio-ecosystems. This paper uses the Cuban agroecological transition to re-think the role that smallholders play in development discourse and practice. By analyzing the public policies that Cuba enacted after the Special Period, this article derives several public policy lessons – including securing land tenure, localizing food production and regulating market development – to inform smallholder-driven transition elsewhere. These lessons provide important points of departure for efforts to improve the social, economic and ecological dynamics of smallholder agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals the theoretical framework and practical experience of Ernesto Guevara, investigating how he got involved in the specific task of building socialism in Cuba. Guevara studied Marxist literature extensively, and the changes experienced by socialist bloc countries in the 1960s. He elaborated the Budgetary Finance System which was opposed to the auto-financing defended by Carlos Rafael Rodrígues. This opposition was embodied in the Great Economic Debate. A crucial point of the discussion was the view on planning and the law of value. For Guevara, the latter could not be used to build socialism, whilst centralised planning was the 'defining category' of socialism. Explaining the context and the main measures of the New Economic Policy (NEP) applied in Soviet Russia in 1920s, this paper investigates Guevara's critical view on it, based on his methodological approach to Das Kapital. Guevara revealed a link between the NEP and market experiments of the 1960s, forecasting a return to capitalism in the USSR. Guevara's radical political economy is crucial for understanding his legacy holistically and may be considered a message to the countries and social movements of the Global South in their struggle for socialism, warning them away from distortion of Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delineates a distinctly post-1960s expression of hunger and desire for food in Cuban and Egyptian cultural production. Hunger has always been present in aesthetic renditions of everyday life in both locales. Following the early-1960s socialist expansion of the role of the state, a new expression of hunger for animal protein emerged that relied on vegetarian tropes and parodied official discourse. Expressions of this "new hunger" captured the contradictory state of being conditioned, through state food programs, to see the consumption of animal products as the epitome of a healthy diet that endows one with the status of being "developed" and "modern" while simultaneously not being afforded satisfactory access to those food items due to conditions beyond one's individual control. In such contexts, the average citizen is primarily vegetarian and not by choice, while those with access to power live the promised dream of carnivorous plenty. This article analyzes several political speeches, cartoons, jokes, and songs to map the rhetorical and aesthetic characteristics of such satiric expressions and demonstrate how they were informed by the growing gap between early revolutionary official promises of food for all and actual food shortages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the inventive everyday digital practices that Cubans have put into place to surf the waves of digital scarcity. The paper itself is an experiment in what Donna Haraway calls SF stories (Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation or Speculative Feminism). We will engage in a process of speculative narrative exploring stories about digital practices in Cuba by connecting them to the animal world. Through the use of metaphors belonging to the world of aquatic creatures emerging in our collaborators' stories, we will address everyday digital practices as symbiotic assemblages. We argue that the speculative mixture of fabulation and aquatic metaphors can function as an antidote to simple dualistic reductions, perhaps offering a critical understanding of the meaning of digital technologies outside Western deterministic and dualistic categories. Part of a larger project on digital culture in Cuba, this paper aims to present a speculative work of fabulation where the animal world meets technology, creative writing and situated stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of moral economy can be applied to all types of economies as they all involve conceptions of the 'common good' that determine who gets what, why and how, and who is responsible for this distribution, eg state or private actors. In this paper, we use the concept of moral economy to demonstrate how particular morals and logics shape public health governance in Cuba, comparing these with market liberal contexts. The paper draws from ethnographic and interview data from Cuba to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of Cuban agri-food governance, against the backdrop of market liberal approaches. While Cuban interviewees justified their activities in terms of Cuba's moral economy of collective need, there were also instances when the socialist moral economy conflicted with individual needs and aspirations. We conclude that, despite its faults, Cuba's holistic approach to food and agriculture illustrates how ecological approaches to public health might work in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal Decision Support Systems in Cuba as yet show few results, but now a resurgence of this field is possible. This new opportunity is due to the worldwide boom in AI & Law research. In addition to the current efforts towards the digital transformation of society. This paper aims to review some antecedents, and discuss some proposals for the evolution of this domain in the country. We first identify the strengths and constraints of some previous contributions and outline the current state of this topic in Cuba. Then, we propose some ideas for future projects, considering the main international approaches and state of the art in Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing, Big data, and Open Data. We argue the importance of creating different forms of legal knowledge representation, the development of specific algorithms based on the most appropriate techniques for each task, updating of jurists' and computer specialists' curricula, and the legislative process improvement. Besides, we advocate the feasibility of creating recommendations in natural language, and we exemplify their types and uses. Finally, the paper calls attention to the protection of personal data and the importance of jurists to participate in the development of systems and to understand how they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The everyday practice of food sovereignty varies across place, and efforts to democratize food systems and create more holistic and equitable forms of food production and access are highly politicized. Considering the "geo" of these practices assists with understanding how perceptions of place shape imaginaries about food sovereignty in place. Using the example of education-based food sovereignty tourism in Cuba I examine, in this paper, how outsiders from the US map geopolitical imaginaries onto Cuba in their efforts to see the "real Cuba" and authentic food sovereignty practices. I argue that the myopic character of food sovereignty tours creates a re-writing of space based on participants' hopes and fears regarding agricultural production and consumption. Drawing on a feminist geopolitical framing, I use recent theorizations that consider geopolitical encounters via tourism to elucidate what I observed, which trended towards paternalistic geopolitical imaginaries of Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will show how fashion practice in contemporary Cuba plays out as revolt in the face of two productive axes: the mythological machine of the Cuban Revolution, and that of capitalist accumulation. After establishing how the revolt is formulated within historical materialism, pointing out the need for its demythologization, the shared ontological foundations of the capitalist and the socialist models in their horror of the nonproductive are established, in order to show how this ethos is articulated with the revolt, a figure which guides our approach insofar as it differs from dissent. Once the framework is outlined showing how the Cuban State's sartorial socialization mechanisms contributed to the making of the symbolic-mythological machinery, the groundwork is laid for the socio-historical elements that enable the emergence of a new subjectivity traversed by the representational-specular intersectionalities which are key to our analysis. From the radical perspective of uselessness, waste and potlatch, this essay will then go on to situate the Cuban fashion praxis as destructive revolt that subverts and breaks with the historicist narrative of both capitalism and the Cuban Revolution. In order to illustrate this argument, the paper examines specific examples from among contemporary Cuba's fashion practitioners in 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we adopt some ideas from Quantum mechanics, and particularly the well-known Schrödinger's cat (1935) thought experiment in order to present some new views on the big question whether the markets are efficient or not. There are two main conflicting approaches in financial economics: the behavioral approach and the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The behavioral approach usually uses psychological theories in order to explain what the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) cannot. However, behavioral finance does not have a specific model to suggest, and this is one major counterargument put forth by EMH supporters. Using the well-known CUBA fund case as an example, we show that EMH seems to be in superposition (simultaneously correct and incorrect), but suddenly collapses into one configuration. These dominant economics approaches are supplementary, so it is better for scholars that support either the EMH or behavioral finance to incorporate their ideas into one model, than to continue debating the accuracy of the EMH. The Quantum approach enables us to distinguish the unexpectable from the irrational. Adopting the quantum way of thinking we can build more accurate models and work toward the goal that most scholars pursue: to understand how the world works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the life and political thought of the Afro-Cuban, communist, feminist activist and lawmaker Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa and her historical context. The article builds on the existing literature by using new periodical and archival sources from institutional collections of communist organizations and personal correspondence with feminist leaders. The paper's main objectives are the following. First, to demonstrate that Sánchez Mastrapa simultaneously engaged with Afro-Cuban, feminist, and communist organizations. Second, to illuminate how these platforms offered a productive space for some women activists like Sánchez Mastrapa to conceptualize a simultaneous critique of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. And third, to analyze how she used these institutional platforms to articulate an early intersectional feminism as part of a growing transnational left-wing movement fighting in favor of Black, poor, women workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food sovereignty promotes agroecological farming methods and the reduction of food insecurity through changing political relations between people, land and food policy. Market orientations to land and private property in liberal democracies restrict access to food, and thus for food sovereigntists, reframing the social relationship to land through property is key to making food more available. This paper examines the case of usufruct land rights in Cuba as a framework for reworking land rights. We identify key limitations that impair producer autonomy, suggesting how different orientations toward property present unique problems and potential solutions towards the goal of food sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper invites a critical reflection, from a decolonial perspective, on the importance of considering gender in the approach to mental health problems. From a methodological point of view, this critical position includes consideration of the hermeneutic condition of the intersection between gender, race and other social historical determinants. It also explores the development and the incorporation of a gender perspective as an expression of decolonial thought, in approaches to mental health in the Cuban context. The paper draws on the critique of colonial thought in relation to psychology and gender. It analyses the history and the development of these ideas from the academic experience developed in the East of Cuba, a place on the periphery, a context that is distant and distinct from Havana, which is often seen as the main scientific centre and point of reference. As such, this paper includes a critique of colonial power with respect to the geographical location of the profession of psychology. In this way, it contributes to the central objective of promoting awareness of decolonial thinking, with an emphasis principally on gender and as a way to favour the professional development of clinical psychology in all of Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cuban Revolution has inspired the guerrilla struggle in Latin America. Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was directly involved in processes that contributed to the organization of guerrilla forces in various Latin American countries. In this article, we argue that already at the beginning of the 1960s Guevara started to help organize and coordinate the organization of the revolutionary armed struggle in the Latin American continent. He considered that local socialist revolutions would not be able to survive if these were not accompanied by revolutionary struggle in other parts of Latin America. This paper presents Guevara's ideas on the necessity of continental revolution, in the context of United States military interventions in Latin America. It describes in detail Cuba's and Che's involvement in the organization of various guerrilla activities in South America, and demonstrates that guerrilla processes in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina were the first stones for the development of continental guerrilla warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent scholarly interest in Latin America's Cold War, this paper breaks new ground in using a broad range of original documents from previously largely overlooked voices – the foreign ministries, parties, and security services agencies of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Romania – in discussing Cuba's Cold War involvement in Central America and the Caribbean from the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party until the U.S. Grenada invasion. The candid reports provided by contemporary East European observers help us attain a more nuanced picture of Havana's complex policy dilemmas as it sought to negotiate and navigate between its vast ambitions, limited abilities, Soviet bloc restraint, and the ever-present threat of a U.S. invasion. Finally, further in line with the latest advancements in the globalized Cold War historiography, in hearing the voices of Moscow's junior partners, this article casts the events surrounding the tumultuous period in a broader Transatlantic setting beyond the shadows of the superpowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on both archival material from the European colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, Madrid, and London and documents held at the Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba, this paper analyses court cases related to petitions submitted by enslaved people to foreign diplomacy in Cuba, exploring the entanglement between mobility in trans-imperial Caribbean space and the use of law by enslaved people in the Age of Abolition. Drawing mainly on legal sources, it emphasizes how slavery and freedom remain ambiguous and contested concepts in the shifting boundaries between free and unfree labor. (Im)mobility - understood both as the transition from one legal status to another and as migration - represented a practice to escape coercion and a tool of control, through which new forms of coercion emerged and were regulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses why Cuba, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia attempted to establish air transport agreements with Chile, as well as their objectives and those of their airlines. It also examines the response of the Allende government and other Chilean key actors. The paper shows that the interest in signing these agreements lay in the Socialist bloc countries. Their reasons varied depending on their particular situation and foreign policy goals. By contrast, Chile saw the negotiation of agreements as a means of strengthening its ties with the Soviet bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing availability of previously declassified material on the Cold War has allowed scholars to revisit old questions with new, more decisive, evidence. In this paper, we draw on this archival material to address the unresolved question of what Cuba's involvement against the Eritrean Liberation struggle consisted of in the late 1970s, and importantly why they engaged in this way, given a historical commitment to the Eritrean Liberation movement's goals. While a seemingly minor point in a protracted 30-year struggle for Eritrean independence, we argue that clarifying this matters for several reasons, not least that Cuban support for the Ethiopian offensive against the Eritreans was seemingly pivotal for temporarily reversing the fighters' major gains in the late 1970s, meaning fifteen more years of fighting until Eritrea's de facto independence was secured. Drawing upon excerpts from the first author's original book manuscript on this topic, we also suggest that the effects of Havana's and other government's denial of Cuba's involvement in suppressing the Eritrean struggle contributed to the sense of betrayal and distrust that still haunts Eritrean politics and its leadership, as well as those Eritrean liberation fighters who experienced their staunch ally turn into an ideological and material adversary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cuban biotechnology industry is producing cancer immunotherapy, in particular, therapeutic vaccines that actively stimulate the immune system to stabilise the tumour. These products aim to transform metastatic malignancies into a chronic disease. Since 2010, this therapeutic concept has been integrated within a public health experiment, consisting of the large distribution of immunotherapies, including in primary healthcare centres, to enhance access and assess its effectiveness on a wider population of patients. Such experimental intervention, consisting of post-marketing clinical trials, has focused only on lung cancer, one of the most widespread and lethal cancers on the island. Combining interviews with ethnographic observations focusing on care performed by professionals, patients, and their relatives, this paper analyses the experience of lung cancer chronicity under this type of immunotherapy in Cuba. It shows how a certain form of continuity is made between prophylactic and therapeutic vaccination to shape a new temporality of cancer care, through the integration within primary care, constant access to biotechnology, and multiple care practices directed to strengthen the immunotherapy's efficacy. If vaccinal chronicity remains fragile due to its experimental dimension and the fact that long-term survivorship is still an exceptional phenomenon, lung cancer patienthood is deeply transformed through a shared effort of the people and the state to provide more stable, meaningful, and inclusive care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2006, 50 Cuban doctors have worked in Pacific Island countries (PICs), while 250 Pacific islanders have studied medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba, nearly doubling the medical workforce in some countries. Although Cuba has pursued an extensive South-South Cooperation (SSC) programme in health around the globe for 60 years, the relatively recent presence of Cuba in the Pacific is intriguing. The programme is based on what Cuba has called the "multiple coincidences" and shared experiences between Cuba and PICs as Small Island Developing States facing common challenges. Proponents argue Cuba's expertise in providing community-based and human-capital oriented care health care in low-resource environments could provide a suitable model for meeting the health goals and needs of PICs. Moreover, Cuba's medical cooperation is grounded in an ethics of solidarity and offers a clear example of social justice-oriented south-south cooperation which aims to both address immediate humanitarian need and to transform power structures that limit the accessibility and availability of sustainable health care within partner countries. Yet despite this there has been little research on Cuba's approach to medical cooperation in the Pacific. This paper addresses this gap, drawing on Maussian gift theory to argue that the Cuban 'gift of health' provides much needed capacity in health while building the dignity of both partners. As a theory of solidarity with distinct Pacific roots and which links clearly to the solidarity-based model of Cuban cooperation based on egalitarianism and relationship, gift theory provides an explanation for the presence of Cuba in the Pacific and highlights the importance of equitable relationships and dignity in development partnerships, providing theoretical roots to the idea that there might an alternative to traditional models of aid and development in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways do Cubans capitalize on inequalities created by globalization in order to advance socially and economically within a socialist system? What roles do migration and social reproduction play in the daily lives of Cubans at home and abroad, and how do these strategies advance the cause of the global capitalism? Theoretically, this paper utilizes William Robinson's conceptions of transnational social reproduction and the global working class, Gurminder Bhambra's theory of connected histories, and theories of transnationalism. These theories are used to analyze the experiences of Cubans resettled in Syracuse, New York, to provide a multilayered, relational look at globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the popular triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and declaration of its socialist character in 1961, a form of Cuban socialism has been in power. The historical trajectory of Cuban socialism in power has moved through periods of fierce independence and debate about a particular Cuban model of socialism, close and disciplined political and economic alignment with the former Soviet Union, and renewed periods of critical debate following its collapse. A constitutional commitment to building Cuban socialism was ratified in 1976, and continues in 2018, with no so-called "transition" to capitalism following the collapse of "historical socialism." This article focuses on approaches of the Cuban state toward popular discussion and debate, and the potential for popular debate to support Cuban socialism and its legitimacy in power. Following an overview of some key historical events and cycles related to popular debate about Cuban socialism, the paper returns to contemporary events, including the 2018 presidential and National Assembly elections. The paper concludes by arguing that there are indications of expanded debate within Cuba, and a reconsideration of the role of official media in this debate, with the potential to contribute both to the ongoing development of Cuban socialism, and more broadly to debate about socialism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the ways in which conceptualizations of race are (re)produced through Cuban genealogical narratives in Western Cuba. Ethnographic interviews collected among eleven Cubans in Havana were collected during summer 2017 and are described here. My ethnographic data argue that despite Cuba's colourblind racial democracy – where race "does not matter" because all races are "treated equally" – the familial narratives of ancestry actively reinforce the complex racial landscape and illustrates the superiority of whiteness that belie this ideal. These same family narratives ultimately highlight the various ways interlocutors negotiate racial self-identities and narrate family ancestry across lingering gendered and racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details four encounters we experienced while traveling in Cuba as part of a multiethnic delegation of US social justice advocates. The encounters were linked by a common thread of race, which made them noteworthy and uncomfortably familiar to us as Black women. Since our return to the US, we have reflected on the four encounters and concluded that, as a collective, they reinforce a lesson and highlight a fundamental challenge that is at the core of the work of all critical multicultural and social justice educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship formation is the bedrock of Cuba's national public education system. Built on ideals of active civic participation, formal citizenship education aims to prepare children and young people to contribute to Cuba's ongoing socialist project. This paper draws on interview data, civic education textbook analysis, and current literature to outline Cuba's historic vision for ideal citizenship as well as its current challenges. Cuba's changing economic and political structures, including increased privatization, have widened socioeconomic gaps between citizens, uncovering inequalities that run contrary to egalitarianism. These contradictions pose challenges for young people who must weigh their personal needs—represented by individualism—against their civic duty—represented by collectivism. As teachers continue to leave the profession for more lucrative employment and as young people seek vocations that link them to higher wages rather than national service, schools will need to respond pragmatically to these growing civic tests of socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the function and role of museums in revolutionary Cuba between 1959 and 1990. Drawing on a variety of hitherto unexplored archives and interviews with bureaucrats of the Cuban heritage field, the paper argues that there is a close relation between museum production, the prevailing narration of nation, internal power struggles within the regime and the changing relation with the USSR. Museums were considered primary tools for historical production and politico-ideological socialisation. These were two fundamental issues for communist regimes, concerned with fixing cultural identity and affirming historical continuity. The paper focuses on the case of the Museum of the Revolution to argue that Cuban museums changed in conjunction with the increasing crypto-colonial relations of subordination to the USSR. In the first, humanist and Universalist phase, museums served to expand culture and spread a nationalist-revolutionary narrative of nation. The second period after 1975 witnessed the institutionalisation and Sovietisation of Cuban museums. This involved their transformation into a device to instil a nationwide homogeneous class-based Marxist–Leninist narrative adapted to Cuba from the Soviet model. This ideological closure of museum production contributed to the ideological and identity-building objectives of the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its starting point memories of an encounter which saw a Jamaican dancehall queen perform on a locally produced television show in Santiago de Cuba at the height of the Special Period economic crisis. I propose that this encounter was a harbinger of subsequent experiences of popular culture consumption in contemporary Cuba, while also drawing from histories of regional connection that placed Santiago de Cuba in a constellation of trans-Caribbean exchanges. The moment shows how, during the Special Period crisis, media producers sought new paths through which to navigate the technological challenges of making television amidst material shortages, and in doing so created new imaginaries of a transnational consumer culture which featured (specific and appropriate) newly built spaces of leisure and distinctive brands of consumption. The television broadcast was a consciously crafted mediation of emerging consumer cultures that at once repudiated and represented the everyday experience of Cuban society as rooted in crisis, scarcity, and socialist taste hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theory which explains how wartime processes and relationships result in positive or negative 'wartime legacies' which can influence the degree of political stability experienced by countries after civil wars that end in rebel victory. Specifically, it predicts that variations in a) the character, scope, and extent of rebel-civilian wartime interaction, and; b) the decisiveness, costs, and payoffs of victory, combine to influence the legitimacy, capacity to govern, and capacity to control that rebels have when they capture power. These legacies in turn shape incentives and opportunities for violent challenge to the new regime in the postwar environment, thereby lowering or raising the prospects for political stability. To illustrate the utility of the theory, it is applied to three cases which experienced differing levels of political stability following rebel victory; Cuba, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Raul Castro’s accession to the presidency of Cuba, the country has witnessed the most far-reaching process of economic reforms for more than five decades. The government has expanded the private and cooperative sectors, has passed a new foreign investment law, restructured most of its old debt and has sought to end the long-standing dispute with the USA. Yet economic performance has been poor and the country faces significant challenges and contradictions arising from the reforms. This paper analyses the macroeconomic environment and the changes introduced by the Cuban government over the period 2007–15. While successful at restoring macroeconomic equilibria, restrictive macroeconomic policies have hurt economic growth, whereas growth- and efficiency-enhancing measures are yet to produce results. Moreover, transformation of the economic model is slow because of its many internal contradictions. The paper also discusses some of the main impediments to future change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores some of the consequences of using archival materials produced by an anthropologist's informants. What happens when a resident from a rural area of Cuba is hired to write about the “world”, a term used by Carl L. Withers, in which he, his relatives and his neighbours live? By reading letters and other papers sent during the late 1940s, and kept by Withers for more than thirty years, my hypothesis is that his informants took seriously their capacity to create something other than a simple “testimony”. Withers's principal informant, created himself, his neighbours, strange beings and the world in which they cohabited as a certain type of artefact, as “data”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of the USSR, Cuba was plunged into an economic crisis with devastating effects on the agricultural system. With few options, the government restructured its agricultural system from an industrial model to a model based on smallholders and agroecology. After several decades, the results of this transition have been far reaching for both landscapes and livelihoods. This research uses mixed-methods, including remote sensing, interviews, and economic and agricultural statistics to present the case study of a smallholder community that has undergone a shift from industrial sugarcane to small-scale agroecology. This work reveals that while agricultural extent has plummeted, production of staple crops has increased dramatically. At the same time, on-farm incomes and food market availability have risen steadily. In the context of strong social, economic, and environmental protections, this represents a process of a sustainable rural transition with several concurrent benefits to people and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass tourism began in the Caribbean during the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, increasing competition and a change in the motivation of tourists now force the authorities who manage these regions to introduce a new tourism offer that is not based directly on either the 3S (Sun, Sand, and Sea) or 3E (Entertainment, Excitement, Education) model. Hiking, trekking, and climbing, defined as mountaineering, might be one of these. This paper examines the potential for mountaineering in Cuba by verifying its accessibility for tourists. The assessment is based on a framework of true accessibility, which consists of two factors: (1) destination accessibility and (2) real access. Our results show that mountaineering in Cuba should be considered to be one of the key contributors to the development, prosperity, and well-being of all stakeholders, and especially for the communities outside the tourism enclaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There persists an intense debate on whether or not the traditional reference desk should be in academic libraries. Yet, despite many anti-desk studies, the place of the reference desk still remains. This paper aims to review the current significance of the reference desk for some libraries, as well as the importance of choosing the proper reference model that fits each institution. Furthermore, it points out that eliminating or reforming the reference desk requires careful analysis by both librarians and administrators. The paper also characterizes reference service at the National Medical Library of Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at how the principles of internationalism have been integral to the Cuban healthcare system and to Cuba's cooperation and medical support in other countries around the world. The paper details the range and scope of Cuban health internationalism and the principles that underpin the Cuban approach of long-term collaboration, humane care, contextualization, trans-disciplinarity, respect for collective/historical memory and an ethical stance. The paper details the role of Cuban psychologists who have contributed to disaster relief work and gives an example of the Cuban approach in relation to Haiti following the earthquake in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on mobile internet use in the Global South highlights access disparities, along with shifting social practices that accompany greater web connectivity. Cuba is part of the Global South, and ranks among the least internet connected countries in the world. Venegas’[2010. Digital dilemmas: The state, the individual, and digital media in Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press] thorough account of technology use in Cuba positions Cuban digital media as an assemblage of political, economic, historical, and global factors. Recently, however, mobile digital technologies in Cuba have undergone rapid transformation. Continuing tensions between the US and Cuba remain part of how the country's infrastructure and internet practices develop in location-specific ways. In this paper, we utilize ethnographically-informed data to provide a case study of the mobile internet adaptations in Havana, Cuba. Specifically, we draw upon Sutko and de Souza e Silva [2010. Location-aware mobile media and urban sociability. New Media & Society, 13(5), 807-823] framework for location-aware mobile media and urban sociability to examine the unique communication and coordination practices of Havana internet culture. Additionally, Massey [2005. For space. London: Sage] and Wiley and Packer [2010. Rethinking communication after the mobilities turn. The Communication Review, 13(4), 263-268] notions of space allow investigation of Cuban cultural technologies within a larger social field. These theoretical lenses enable interrogation of mobile device adaptations on mobility, sociability, and space to position Cuban media use as an assemblage of local and global forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a form of community engagement that differs from the way it is usually conceived and practiced in the domain of global health. This story takes place in the Cuban context and more specifically in a recent programme of oncology clinical trials implemented in primary healthcare (PHC) centres. By considering both the genealogy of this program and local interactions between PHC professionals and patients and their close relatives, I show that, in the context of Cuban socialist biomedicine, community engagement emerges as an implicit practice that forms part of the PHC professional ethos. I explore the ways cancer biomedicine is adapted in order to address specific needs and demands related to public acceptance of cancer in the Cuban society, diagnostic communication and palliative care. I argue that the way community engagement is enacted within Cuban socialist biomedicine is alternative to the global health dominant paradigm since it does strengthen existing relations between citizenry, health professions and public health infrastructures. Finally, by questioning the specificity of such socialist approach to community engagement, I suggest it greatly contributes to global health literature, because it creates continuity within existing state infrastructures rather than bypasses them, and, furthermore, offers a unique vantage on the treatment of chronic disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than 50 years, Cuba has been one of the most important playersin the field of international medical cooperation in the Global South.Between 2013 and 2016, Cuba maintained one of its largestcooperations with Brazil: nearly 11,400 Cuban physicians were sent towork within the framework of the Brazilian health programme ‘MoreDoctors-for-Brazil',which was implemented to improve Brazil'sprecarious public health sector. This paper inquires into the manifoldchallenges of horizontal connectivity in this medical South–Southcooperation. We will trace these back to deep-rooted contentions aboutthe epistemological approaches to medical practice and professionalrecognition within and between Cuban and Brazilian arenas of publichealth, which do not, however, conform to a simplistic socialism–capitalism dichotomy. Rather, this particular South–South cooperationreveals significant differences in how powerful the postcolonial legaciesof medical assistance remain in Global Health settings. This paperexplores how these legacies may impact on the moral and professionallegitimacy of the individuals involved in South–South partnership. Usingethnographic findings in newly established family clinics situated inurban poverty regions in Rio de Janeiro's North, we will also show howprolonged local interactions may create new spaces of horizontalencounters and connectivity in international medical cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1904, American itinerant photographer Sumner W. Matteson, a native of Decorah, Iowa, visited Cuba for about four months. He travelled extensively throughout the island and took over five hundred photographs. It was the first time Matteson had left the United States and, upon reaching the island, he headed into the countryside and began to photograph a wide range of individuals. Matteson's documentary work represents an image of Cuba that was relatively unknown in the United States at the time. His photographs cut across racial, gender, class, and geographic lines, and portrayed Matteson's subjects with a sense of pride and agency. This paper will argue that Matteson portrayed Cuba and its people with an intimacy unlike that of any photographer before him - this during the founding years of the republic, shortly after a four-year American occupation, and at a time when Cubans were seen as exotic others. The photographs reveal a multi-hued population of blacks, mulattoes, and whites, male and female - subjects rarely portrayed sensitively in photographs of the time. This paper will offer some suggestions as to why this white, Midwestern male photographer did not fall into the potentially exploitative trap of representing the Cuban people in the customary way. Matteson's images provide depictions of the Cuban people that had been previously absent, and offered a face of the rural subaltern consisting of both blacks and whites, working-class Cubans, and even a former Rebel Army leader - all less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two basic forms of 'lawfare' are employed by the United States in its enactment of the war on terror, both of which have a biopolitical focus. The first strategy has been well documented.1 It involves the indefinite detention and sometimes extraordinary rendition of enemy combatants, legally sanctioned and politically justified by the 'exceptional' circumstances of late modern war and terrorist violence. Geography plays a central role in strategy number one: the legal statuses of detainees, whose lives and bodies are cast out and denied basic juridical rights, are bounded, identified and allowed for in extra-territorial spaces throughout the world, from Guantanamo Bay to Bagram Air Force Base. Such exceptional biopolitical spaces are essentially 'defensive' and operate at the local scale. On the contrary, the second seldom-discussed legal strategy conditions and protects the US military in 'offensive' mode, operates at the national and transnational scale, and involves the careful legal designation and protection of US military personnel in forward deployed areas.2 This paper is centrally concerned with strategy number two - a strategy that can be defined as 'forward juridical warfare' and involves the US military's mobilisation of the law in the waging of war along the 'new frontiers' of its war on terror. The paper seeks to expound the legal and biopolitical constitution and operation of the current US military's forward presence overseas, and begins by drawing on recent work on biopolitics that has sought in various ways to critique the proliferation of practices of liberal lawfare and securitization in our contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines a particular cultural practice sponsored by a government agency in a touristic town in Cuba to consider the intersection of the global market, socialism, and local identity. Trinidad is a major tourist destination in Cuba, and tourism is the dominant economic activity in the city. The Office of Conservation serves to restore and maintain the historic townscape, which tourists from all over the world come to appreciate. At the same time, the Office plans and hosts cultural events for local residents. While bifurcated spaces that cater separately to tourists and residents seem prevalent in tourism in the global South, this paper explores specific events held for local residents in order to understand the spatial implications of such practices in post-Soviet Cuba. The paper discusses how the locally specific spatial practices emerge in response to and because of the tourist dominance of public space, and the global fame the World Heritage status earned the town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba's racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children's status-as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses mobility and migration, focusing mainly on the cases of Afro-Cuban jineteras who seek relationships with Europeans. Healthy (educated) hookers or decadent women? While Cuban government officials condemn the actions of Cuban jineteras, society and the Cuban family often refer to them as luchadoras (fighters). The paper introduces the voices of Cuban jineteras in debates of jineterismo and migration in order to develop a broader understanding of the concept. Drawing on ethnographic research in Havana and the UK, I argue that what makes jineterismo a complex concept is that it encompasses a wide range of actions, including the desire to love the (idealised) European man, and in many cases, the aspiration to migrate to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider some of the issues raised by the way the American Psychological Association has dealt with the participation of psychologists in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. I set forth some of my experience, and what I feel I learned, from trying to convince the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association to support a moratorium on the participation of psychologists in interrogations of detainees at centers where due process is systematically denied. The paper was written before the Council of Representatives voted down the idea of a moratorium, with a coda describing the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between the social, the ethical and the political in translation activity, based on military linguists' accounts of their work in the context of the “war on terror”. In particular, it examines the social conditions, drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and field, that contributed to the construction of an “ethics of the translator” in the context of Guantanamo and Iraq. The paper also explores a number of relevant philosophical theorizations of human rights, politics and the law to explore the complex nature of the ethical. It argues for a translation ethics that is not guided by professional codes of ethics based on the notion of impartiality but that is instead informed by the nature of the ethical encounter itself - where “the right thing to do” cannot be calculated or predetermined, but can only ever be decided in the event itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuba developed a unique community?oriented social work approach in the 1990s that transformed social work education and practice. This paper describes that approach and why it emerged when it did. A review of the literature on social change in Cuba in the 1990s, and 31 open?ended interviews conducted in Havana, Cuba, showed that social work changed in response to economic crisis, emerging social problems and the need for social workers for community practice. Social workers' participation in neighborhood development projects and Cuba's post?Revolutionary communal ethos also shaped a community?oriented social work approach in Cuba. This approach contrasts with an individually oriented model in the US and in Britain. Social workers in Cuba and in these countries can learn from one another, despite the differences that exist among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an empirical case study of ecotourism in the island state of Cuba. The paper attempts to gauge the success Cuba has had in establishing eco-tourist practices that could be considered sustainable, and provides analysis of the various political factors that condition this success. Using some well-known benchmarks of sustainable eco-tourist practices, the paper presents the results of numerous interviews with key informants involved with ecological tourism in Cuba, archival research and observations from on-site visits to key ecotourism projects to examine the relative success of ecotourism on the island. Concluding that Cuba has had mixed success in moving to sustainable ecotourism, the paper examines the various political constraints that will likely determine the trajectory of Cuba's ecotourism in the near and medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

international assessments of academic achievement are common. They are usually accompanied by attempts to infer the determinants of cross-country achievement gaps, but these inferences have little empirical foundation. This paper applies the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to the problem of explaining why primary students in Cuban schools score than Mexican students, on average, 1.3 standard deviations higher. The results suggest that no more than 30% of the difference can be explained by differing endowments of family, peer, and school variables. Of these, peer-group variables and, to a lesser extent, family variables explain the largest portion of the gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the outcomes of youth who live in Cuban and United States societies characterized by two distinct political systems. Although both societies claim to be child-centered, the value placed on health care, especially for children, and education, as well as the percentage of the budget allocated to support children is greater in Cuba than the United States. It also appears that, though the United States is a major world power that leads in technology and medical advance, there are few differences between the two nations in health and educational outcomes. In fact, statistics from numerous sources demonstrate the greater success of Cuban youth in terms of educational attainment, health promotion activities, and avoidance of negative outcomes as a result of risky behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]