Cuba: A Short History brings together four chapters from Volumes 3, 5, and 7 of The Cambridge History of Latin America to provide for scholars, students and general readers a concise history of this important island nation. Contributors, top scholars in the field, trace the political, economic, and social development of Cuba from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day. The concluding chapter, updated for this volume, considers the dilemmas and challenges that Castro's Cuba faces in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay ... View More...
From America's number one Cuba reporter, PEN award-winning investigative journalist Ann Louise Bardach, comes the big book on Cuba we've all been waiting for. An incisive and spirited portrait of the twentieth century's wiliest political survivor and his fiefdom, Cuba Confidential is the gripping story of the shattered families and warring personalities that lie at the heart of the forty-three-year standoff between Miami and Havana. Famous to many Americans for her cover stories and media appearances, Ann Louise Bardach has been covering Cuba for a decade. She's talked to the crooks, spooks an... View More...
Rhetoric during and after the Cold War years has painted starkly contrasting portraits of Cuba's Fidel Castro: an unblemished idealist on the one hand, a ruthless dictator on the other. This book, an intimate and dispassionate biography of the revolutionary leader, shows that neither assessment is true. close to personal friendship with Castro as any foreigner was permitted. With frequent contact and regular conversations, Coltman was in a unique position to observe the dictator's personality in both public and private situations. Here he presents a close-up view of the man who for half a cent... View More...
In 1957, Herbert L.Matthews of the New York Times, then considered one of the premiere foreign correspondents of his time, tracked down Fidel Castro in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains and returned with what was considered the scoop of the century. His heroic portrayal of Castro, who was then believed dead, had a powerful effect on American perceptions of Cuba, both in and out of the government, and profoundly influenced the fall of the Batista regime. When Castro emerged as a Soviet-backed dictator, Matthews became a scapegoat; his paper turned on him, his career foundered, and he was accused ... View More...
Encompassing Amazonian rainforests, Andean peaks, coastal lowlands, and the Gal pagos Islands, Ecuador's geography is notably diverse. So too are its history, culture, and politics, all of which are examined from many perspectives in The Ecuador Reader. Spanning the years before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s to the present, this rich anthology addresses colonialism, independence, the nation's integration into the world economy, and its tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed among forty-eight written selections are more than three dozen images.The voices and creations of Ecu... View More...
For the first time, the story of "Tania the guerrilla" is told with tenderness and veracity by a key participant in the revolutionary movement in Latin America.Tania was born Hayd e Tamara Bunke to German Jewish refugees in Argentina in 1937. Her family moved to East Germany after the war, but she was soon drawn to the Cuban Revolution.She became one of Cuba's most successful spies in Latin America, penetrating Bolivia's high society and even making contact with the country's president and other members of the ruling circle. When her cover was blown she joined Che's guerrilla group but was kil... View More...
A unique history of Cuba, captured in the life and times of the famous rum dynasty The Bacardis of Cuba, builders of a rum distillery and a worldwide brand, came of age with their nation and helped define what it meant to be Cuban. Across five generations, the Bacardi family has held fast to its Cuban identity, even in exile from the country for whose freedom they once fought. Now National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten tells the dramatic story of one family, its business, and its nation, a 150-year tale with the sweep and power of an epic. The Bacardi clan--patriots and bon vivants, e... View More...
From the esteemed New Yorker correspondent comes an incisive volume of essays and reportage that vividly illuminates Latin America's recent history. Only Alma Guillermoprieto, the most highly regarded writer on the region, could unravel the complex threads of Colombia's cocaine wars or assess the combination of despotism, charm, and political jiu-jitsu that has kept Fidel Castro in power for more than 40 years. And no one else can write with such acumen and sympathy about statesmen and campesinos, leftist revolutionaries and right-wing militias, and political figures from Evita Peron to Mexico... View More...
In this compelling and deeply disturbing narrative, writer and human rights investigator Robin Kirk maps the social, political, economic, and human devastation wrought by the drug war in Colombia. More Terrible Than Death offers an invaluable analysis of the political realities that shape the expanding war on drugs and the growing U.S. military presence there. View More...
In this updated edition of the classic THE BROKEN SPEARS, Leon-Portilla has included accounts from native Aztec descendants across the centuries. Those texts bear witness to the extraordinary vitality of an oral tradition that preserves the viewpoints of the vanquished instead of the victors. View More...
In 1791, Saint Domingue was both the richest and cruelest colony in the Western Hemisphere; more than a third of African slaves died within a few years of their arrival there. Thirteen years later, Haitian rebels declared independence from France after the first--and only--successful slave revolution in history. Much of the success of this uprising can be credited to one man, Toussaint Louverture--a figure about whom surprisingly little is known. In this fascinating biography, the first about Toussaint to appear in English in more than fifty years, Madison Smartt Bell combines a novelist's pas... View More...
This is the first book in more than three decades to offer a complete and chronological history of revolutionary Cuba, including the years of rebellion that led to the revolution. Beginning with Batista's coup in 1952, which catalyzed the rebels, and bringing the reader to the present-day transformations initiated by Ra l Castro, Luis Mart nez-Fern ndez provides a balanced interpretive synthesis of the major topics of contemporary Cuban history.Expertly weaving the myriad historic, social, and political forces that shaped the island nation during this period, Mart nez-Fern ndez examines the ci... View More...
This concise illustrated volume recounts Tikal's rise from prehistoric obscurity to unparalleled success at the height of Maya civilization, as well as its spectacular collapse and abandonment. View More...
The building of the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. A tale of exploration, conquest, money, politics, and medicine, PANAMA FEVER charts the challenges that marked the long, labyrinthine road to the building of the canal. Drawing on a wealth of new materials and sources, Matthew Parker brings to life the men (including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Ulysses S Grant) who recognized the impact a canal would have on global politics and economics, and adds new depth to the familiar story of Teddy Roosevelt's remarkable triumph in making the waterwa... View More...
The story begins in a dusty village lost in the Argentine pampas, where a girl, born out of wedlock, scrambles her way to the capital city by the time she is fifteen. It ends with the embalmed corpse of Eva Peron being hidden away by nervous politicians for fear that if the working people of Argentina knew where it was buried, it would inspire them to revolution.In between Eva Peron became first the actress Eva Duarte, then the mistress of Colonel Per n, then, in October 1945 after the "shirtless ones" had swept Peron into office, the president's wife. In the colorful, tumultuous setting of po... View More...
In Indian Given Mar a Josefina Salda a-Portillo addresses current racialized violence and resistance in Mexico and the United States with a genealogy that reaches back to the sixteenth century. Salda a-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location. In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches t... View More...
Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2016 The story of two American teens recruited as killers for a Mexican cartel, and their pursuit by a Mexican-American detective who realizes the War on Drugs is unwinnable. What's it like to be an employee of a global drug-trafficking organization? And how does a fifteen-year-old American boy go from star quarterback to trained assassin, surging up the cartel corporate ladder? At first glance, Gabriel Cardona is the poster boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are po... View More...
