...Jill Lane This essay analyzes the figure of the “smoking habanera”—a term I use to describe the sexualized image of a black Cuban woman smoking a cigar, usually wearing a headdress and revealing clothing, whose latest iteration is found among the plethora of small clay figurines on sale...

...Laura-Zoë Humphreys This article examines the changing dynamics of censorship and social criticism in revolutionary Cuban cinema in order to make a case for studying allegory not as a mode whose meanings analysts should (or should not) reveal but, rather, as a contested social process. From...

...Frank Guridy This essay examines how diasporic commonalities are experienced in the midst of cultural and linguistic difference by highlighting the making of Afro-diasporic linkages by participants in the Harlem Renaissance and the Afro-Cubanism ( afrocubanismo ) movement. The essay interprets...

.... The song “Guantanamera” is a quasi-officially Cuban cultural and national artifact, though in fact its history of composition, performance, and recording reveals it to be a remarkably unstable and fluid text. The site, the U.S. naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, continues into 2007 to challenge political...

... that is resoundingly Cuban, brown, and queer. © 2014 Duke University Press 2014 Parts of a World Alexandra T. Vazquez I. Under the subheading “Parts of a World,” Barbara Johnson offers a struc- turing logic to her book A World of Difference: Part One consists of a series of occasional pieces...

...Tavia Nyong’o Through an engagement with José Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer-of-color counterpublicity, this essay proposes that we participate in his legacy through acts of methexis—or “group sharing”—rather than mimesis. Muñoz and Pedro Zamora are two figures from the Miami-based Cuban exile...

...José Quiroga Originally delivered as a talk in a New York University conference titled Queer Cuba, organized by José Esteban Muñoz and others, this essay explores the present and the past histories of homosexuality and revolution, and it zeroes in on the work and presence of a group of young Cuban...

... of revolutionary governments, on the other hand, were also often the subject of criticism for contributors. This essay argues that such criticism is often ahistorical in its focus on Cuban politics in the seventies. Rather than prognosticate the death of revolution and the triumph of liberal democracy, as Social...

... In Search of Lourdes Casal’s “Ana Veldford” As with most good mysteries, it all started in the fall of 2003 with a ques- Frances tion that did not have an answer — at least for the moment. Negrón-Muntaner Both of us were independently teaching a poem canonical in Cuban, and Yolanda...

... Leagues. Miñoso is cast as the foreign Latino who many per- ceive as having traveled a less precarious path, due primarily to his Cuban ethnicity. Rooted in a peculiar form of U.S. chauvinism, such perceptions minimize the contributions of Afro-Latinos...

... rituals of grief that we attempt what we know will fail; we seek in the ephemera some trace of our beloved though we know we will not find him there. I am reminded also of a passage from Cuban novelist Achy Obejas, a passage José was fond of citing to me. Achy describes the Cuban habit...

... tourists on the bodies of Afro-­Cuban women. Lane offers an expert exegesis of the figurines, now common in Havana tourist markets, that feature Afro-­Cuban women smoking cigars in fruit-­topped nineteenth- ­century dress. During the rapid transformation of the Cuban economy in the post – Cold War...

... black European communities: black Britons and black Germans. Frank Guridy is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications have appeared in Radical History Review and Caribbean Studies. His book Diaspora in Action: Afro-Cubans and African- Americans...

... 1975 . “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges.” Feminist Studies 3 , nos. 4 : 5 – 14 . Lopez Kathleen . 2012 . Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press . Love Heather . 2010 . “Close but Not Deep: Literary...

..., the reception of Hughes’s work in Havana, the travels of Afro-Cuban musicians in Harlem, and the Mexican caricaturist Miguel Cobarrubias’s Harlem and Cuba paintings, Negro Drawings, Guridy demonstrates how an “Afro- diasporic affect” allowed exchanges and encouraged modes of belonging...

... of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban Revolution and with the birth of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The Nicaraguan Revolution, in particular, not only lit up Central...

... that this was due less to any parochialism on the part of Social Text contributors than to the historical contingency of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban...

... that this was due less to any parochialism on the part of Social Text contributors than to the historical contingency of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban...

... of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban Revolution and with the birth of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The Nicaraguan Revolution, in particular, not only lit up Central...

... of the moment of the journal’s founding in 1979, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the “triumph” of the Cuban Revolution and with the birth of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The Nicaraguan Revolution, in particular, not only lit up Central...