Next Year in Havana

Author: Chanel Cleeton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593337204
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
A HELLO SUNSHINE x REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK "A beautiful novel that's full of forbidden passions, family secrets and a lot of courage and sacrifice."--Reese Witherspoon After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary... Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

The History of Havana

Author: Dick Cluster
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230603974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive history of the culturally diverse city, and the first to be co-authored by a Cuban and an American. Beginning with the founding of Havana in 1519, Cluster and Hernández explore the making of the city and its people through revolutions, art, economic development and the interplay of diverse societies. The authors bring together conflicting images of a city that melds cultures and influences to create an identity that is distinctly Cuban.

The Occupation of Havana

Author: Elena A. Schneider
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964536X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years' War in North America. The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.

Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century

Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807878065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.

The Book of Havana

Author: Daniel Chavarria
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN: 1912697041
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Book Description
When a history teacher decides to throw out an old, threadbare Cuban flag, he doesn’t plan for the air of suspicion that quickly descends on him… A woman’s attempt to register ownership of her family home draws her into a bureaucratic labyrinth that requires a grasp of higher mathematics to fully comprehend… On the day of their graduation, a group of students spend the night drinking around the ‘Fountain of Youth’, ironically celebrating the bright future that doesn’t await them… The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana’s citizens have had to endure as a result of their country’s political isolation – from the hardships of the ‘Special Period’, to the pitfalls of Cuba’s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods – from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecón and Vedado – these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution. Translated from the Spanish by Orsola Casagrande and Séamas Carraher.

Havana Real

Author: Yoani Sanchez
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1935554913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
She's been kidnapped and beaten, lives under surveillance, and can only get online—in disguise—at tourist hotspots. She's a blogger, she's a Cuban, and she's a worldwide sensation. Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; and the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life. For these simple acts of truth-telling her life is one of constant threat. But she continues on, refusing to be silenced—a living response to all who have ceased to believe in a future for Cuba.

Havana Deco

Author: Alejandro G. Alonso
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393732320
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
An unparalleled tour of the Art Deco-style architecture, interiors, decoration, and art objects of Havana, this colorful book shows the work of Cuban artists, open to the winds of change and to outside influences, who filtered the movement born in Paris through the dazzling beauty of Caribbean nature and made the art their own.

Havana Boxing Club

Author:
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 9781576877838
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Boxing is one of the most popular sports in Cuba and its fighters are recognized the world over for their skills and finesse. The Cuban national team holds more Olympic medals in the sport than any other country, making the nation a hotbed of emerging global champions. State-sanctioned and promoted since the revolution, amateur boxing's potential for fame and relative wealth makes it a beacon for impoverished youth yearning for a better life. Shot all across the Republic of Cuba,Havana Boxing Clubdocuments amateur boxing schools and the aspiring, determined boys studying the sweet science. Compiled over the course of eight years, French photographer Thierry Le Goues spent countless hours in the complex network of training facilities that abound in the island nation, developing relationships with the coaches and their young progeny, following the rise and fall of countless talents and wannabes. The resulting images are of young fighters struggling, sweating, and fighting to overcome anything thrown in their way--inside the ring and out. Le Goues' luscious tritone black and white photographs depict rigorous training camps, boxing rings erected in the streets of small villages in the Cuban countryside, the lows of these young boxers struggling with abject poverty and crushing defeat, and the ultimate highs of rising up victorious over all obstacles and challengers. The pure instinct to survive against overwhelming odds and to realize their dreams of boxing on the national team is both startling and beautiful.Havana Boxing Clubcaptures the sport's arresting beauty and unrelenting brutality.

Good-bye, Havana! Hola, New York!

Author: Edie Colon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442434848
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
“Lush, evocative.” —School Library Journal “Raul Colón’s art…has a sweetness that’s sometimes tinged with anxiety, sometimes with hope. A fine addition to books about the immigrant experience.” —Booklist “This gentle look back at an important time will also speak to contemporary children whose families are starting anew in the United States.” —Publishers Weekly When five year old Gabriella hears talk of Castro and something called revolution in her home in Cuba, she doesn't understand. Then when her parents leave suddenly and she remains with her grandparents, life isn't the same. Soon the day comes when she goes to live with her parents in a new place called the Bronx. It isn't warm like Havana, and there is traffic not the ocean outside her window. Their life is different—it snows in the winter and the food at school is hot dogs and macaroni. What will it take for the Bronx to feel like home?

Waiting For Snow In Havana

Author: Carlos Eire
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147110835X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 579

Book Description
A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.