The special period in Cuban history (1991-2000)

The modern socio-economic model of Cuba is a unique example of an attempt to build a welfare state in extremely unfavorable conditions. Over the course of 30 years, since the collapse of the USSR and the so-cialist bloc, Cuban society has undergone several major transfor-mations, the most radical were the reforms of Raul Castro, which began in 2008 and were finally enshrined in the new constitution 11 years lat-er. In this article, the author puts forward a hypothesis that these re-forms are not something qualitatively new, but rather reflect the acceler-ating pace of transformations that were laid back during the "special pe-riod in peacetime", the most critical stage in the adaptation of Cuban society to new foreign economic and foreign policy realities. The author analyzes the key features of the economic policy of the Cuban govern-ment during this period, as well as its specific features in comparison with the neoliberal reforms that became mainstream for the post-soviet states.

Los vegueros canarios en Cuba durante el siglo xviii

Tobacco development in Cuba, combined with the Canarian migrant movements for centuries, were important factors of the politics, business, society and culture in the island. Fusion of two realities, tobacco and canary emigrant made the mythical figure of the tobac-co farmer, who was known as veguero along the cuban history. This article wants to shed light on the subject, who together with the vision of «labrador» and «guajiro», will be part of the Cuban collective imaginary.

Seeing the light in Santa y Andrés: Metaphor, myth and historical ambivalence

Drawing on theories about bricolage as creative resistance, this article examines the sudden, unexplained appearance of the masked Abakuá íreme in the middle of Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés (2016), a film that otherwise focuses entirely on the repression of a gay writer in post-Mariel era Cuba. This disruption of the narrative is explored as a strategy that urges the viewer to consider cyclical processes by which displaced social anxieties are mapped onto different marginalized groups to form a shifting locus of backlash following moments of progressive social change in Cuban history. The article tracks the ways in which the film evokes Abakuá mythology to create historical parallels for the viewer to discover. Utilizing doubled characters and parallel journeys as its analogical grammar, tensions between the film’s archetypal figures signal larger conflicts around the policing of acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality, and the social and political processes by which particular expressions of masculinity that are perceived as ‘dangerous’ or threatening are regulated in Cuban society at different historical moments. Even though Santa y Andrés is set in 1983, the film’s contentious reception in 2016 makes it what I am calling a historically ambivalent film about repression both in the past and in the present.

Vigía Iconography and the Construction of a Cuban Identity

Ediciones Vigia’s chief designer, Rolando Estévez Jordán, created his own artistic language by adopting and adapting iconography from a variety of traditions that span the vanguardia and New Art movements in Cuban art to ancient Greece statuary, medieval manuscripts, and modernist works of Western art. This chapter considers how Vigía created its own vision of twentieth-century Cuban history and contemporary Cuban identity through these allusions as well as the material designs of the books and the literature published within them.

“Children of the Revolution”

This interview of Gregory Randall offers a lens onto a transnational life experience, including that of international refugees in Cuba. Randall was born in New York in 1960. He spent his early childhood in Mexico and arrived in Cuba in 1970, where he remained until the 1980s. In this interview, Randall reflects on Cuban policies toward women, homosexuality, and youth. He also analyzes his own family’s experience, characterized by a strong commitment to reflecting the Cuban Revolution in its own social relations and its ways of living and loving. The interview provides a unique perspective on these challenges and on Cuban history, shaped by Randall’s particular position in that historical process. Unmoored from national frameworks, his subjectivity is anchored in a transnational Left sensibility. He belongs to a generation of children of the revolution, part of Socialist Cuba as children and teenagers, and belonging to Left and internationalist families.

Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal”

This examination of José Lezama Lima’s groundbreaking essay on the controversial late-nineteenth-century Cuban poet Julián del Casal situates the essay in the postrevolutionary context in which it first appeared in a Havana newspaper in 1941, a year after the ratification of the Constitution of 1940 and the publication of Fernando Ortiz’s celebrated Cuban Counterpoint. It explores Lezama Lima’s essay as a response to this moment in Cuban history as one that sought to forge, according to Rafael Rojas, a new “pact of national reconciliation,” and was characterized by anxieties over Cubans’ ability to produce. It argues that Lezama Lima’s essay responded by turning from questions of production and proposing instead an urban aesthetic practice of reception and failure that foregrounds—in a manner not unlike contemporary queer critics—the racial and sexual spectral and ephemeral as sources for alternative forms of productivity and agency.

Multidimensional diagnosis of competitive anxiety in youth baseball team

Santiago de Cuba It is one of the provinces with the best sports results in Cuban history, baseball is one of the leading disciplines in this regard, however, in recent years, such achievements have been affected. Multiple are the answers that technicians, researchers, and specialists have tried to offer these unfortunate events. Youth baseball has not been exempt from this problem and, in this sense, Sports Psychology has played an important role in the study and search for scientific alternatives that contribute to reversing these results. During the last 3 years, high manifestations of competitive anxiety have been observed in baseball players in this category, this fact motivates the present investigation, it aims to rigorously diagnose how this negative emotion has been presented in said population. To complete the objective, the 25 members of the Santiago youth team were selected as a sample, the study is descriptive, being able to record, analyze and describe the general and observable characteristics of anxiety in real moments of training sessions and competitions, it is supported by the qualitative-quantitative methodology using psychological techniques such as observation, interview, CSAI-2, attitude tests for competition and appreciation of time and pulsometer.