The men responsible included, from Cuba, the charismatic Fidel Castro, and his mysterious brother Raúl; from Argentina, the ideologue Che Guevara; from the Dominican Republic, the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and from Haiti, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement and torture.Alex von Tunzelmann's brilliant narrative follows these five rivals and accomplices from the beginning of the Cold War to its end, each with a separate vision for his tropical paradise, and each in search of power and adventure as the United States and the USSR acted out the world's tensions in their island nations. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life. Red Heat is an intimate account of the strong-willed men who, armed with little but words and ruthlessness, took on the most powerful nations on earth.

    Maligned and misunderstood, the nation has long been blamed by many for its own wretchedness. But as acclaimed historian Laurent Dubois makes clear, Haiti's troubled present can only be understood by examining its complex past. The country's difficulties are inextricably rooted in its founding revolution—the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world; the hostility that this rebellion generated among the colonial powers surrounding the island nation; and the intense struggle within Haiti itself to define its newfound freedom and realize its promise.Dubois vividly depicts the isolation and impoverishment that followed the 1804 uprising. He details how the crushing indemnity imposed by the former French rulers initiated a devastating cycle of debt, while frequent interventions by the United States—including a twenty-year military occupation—further undermined Haiti's independence. At the same time, Dubois shows, the internal debates about what Haiti should do with its hard-won liberty alienated the nation's leaders from the broader population, setting the stage for enduring political conflict. Yet as Dubois demonstrates, the Haitian people have never given up on their struggle for true democracy, creating a powerful culture insistent on autonomy and equality for all.Revealing what lies behind the familiar moniker of "the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere," this indispensable book illuminates the foundations on which a new Haiti might yet emerge.

    While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest--over ten and a half million--were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge-or deny--their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries--Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru--through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view.In Brazil, he delves behind the facade of Carnaval to discover how this "rainbow nation" is waking up to its legacy as the world's largest slave economy.In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in 1959.In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves's hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire became a double-edged sword.In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people--far greater than the number brought to the United States--brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru.Professor Gates' journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their African antecedents. Black in Latin America is the third installment of Gates's documentary trilogy on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.-from http://nyupress.org/books/9780814738184/

    A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Finalist for the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award in 1998, A Lexicon of Terror is a sensitive and unflinching account of the sadism, paranoia, and deception the military junta unleashed on the Argentine people from 1976 to 1983. This updated edition features a new epilogue that chronicles major political, legal, and social developments in Argentina since the book's initial publication. It also continues the stories of the individuals involved in the Dirty War, including the torturers, kidnappers and murderers formerly granted immunity under now dissolved amnesty laws. Additionally, Feitlowitz discusses investigations launched in the intervening years that have indicated that the network of torture centers, concentration camps, and other operations responsible for the "desaparecidas" was more widespread than previously thought. A Lexicon of Terror vividly evokes this shocking era and tells of the long-lasting effects it has left on the Argentine culture.

    A self-taught journalist, social scientist, and activist from Peru, he was the first to emphasize that those fighting for the revolutionary transformation of society must adapt classical Marxist theory to the particular conditions of Latin American. He also stressed that indigenous peoples must take an active, if not leading, role in any revolutionary struggle.Today Latin America is the scene of great social upheaval. More progressive governments are in power than ever before, and grassroots movements of indigenous peoples, workers, and peasants are increasingly shaping the political landscape. The time is perfect for a rediscovery of Mariategui, who is considered an intellectual precursor of today's struggles in Latin America but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This volume collects his essential writings, including many that have never been translated and some that have never been published. The scope of this collection, masterful translation, and thoughtful commentary make it an essential book for scholars of Latin America and all of those fighting for a new world, waiting to be born."

    In choosing the selections, the editors sought to avoid representing the country only in terms of its long experience of conflict, racism, and violence. And so, while offering many perspectives on that violence, this anthology portrays Guatemala as a real place where people experience joys and sorrows that cannot be reduced to the contretemps of resistance and repression. It includes not only the opinions of politicians, activists, and scholars, but also poems, songs, plays, jokes, novels, short stories, recipes, art, and photographs that capture the diversity of everyday life in Guatemala. The editors introduce all of the selections, from the first piece, an excerpt from the Popol Vuh, a mid-sixteenth-century text believed to be the single most important source documenting pre-Hispanic Maya culture, through the final selections, which explore contemporary Guatemala in relation to neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and the dynamics of migration to the United States and of immigrant life. Many pieces were originally published in Spanish, and most of those appear in English for the first time.

    Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. Tanya Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America--including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive--Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, Harmer reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.

    Arguing that this violence was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández examines the lynching of a Mexican woman in California in 1851, the Camp Grant Indian Massacre of 1871, the racism evident in the work of the anthropologist Jovita González, and the attempted genocide, between 1876 and 1907, of the Yaqui Indians in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Guidotti-Hernández shows that these events have been told and retold in ways that have produced particular versions of nationhood and effaced other issues. Scrutinizing stories of victimization and resistance, and celebratory narratives of mestizaje and hybridity in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and borderlands studies, she contends that by not acknowledging the racialized violence perpetrated by Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and indigenous peoples, as well as Anglos, narratives of mestizaje and resistance inadvertently privilege certain brown bodies over others. Unspeakable Violence calls for a new, transnational feminist approach to violence, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship in the borderlands.

    An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while government corporatism and clientelism are constant threats, the forms of political and cultural participation discussed are creating new discourses, networks, and organizational spaces—for better and for worse. With open yet critical minds, the contributors seek to analyze Venezuela’s Bolivarian democratic experience through empirical research. In doing so, they reveal a nuanced process, a richer and more complex one than is conveyed in international journalism and scholarship exclusively focused on the words and actions of Hugo Chávez.ContributorsCarolina Acosta-AlzuruJulia BuxtonLuis Duno GottbergSujatha FernandesMaría Pilar García-GuadillaKirk A. HawkinsDaniel HellingerMichael E. JohnsonLuis E. LanderMargarita López-MayaElizabeth Gackstetter NicholsCoraly PaganGuillermo RosasNaomi SchillerDavid SmildeAlejandro Velasco

    Spanning developments from the 15th to the 19th century, this ambitious book looks at the many ways and contexts in which indigenous peoples were represented in art of the early modern period—by colonial artists, European artists, and themselves. More than two hundred works of art, including paintings, sculptures, illustrated books, maps, codices, manuscripts, and other materials such as textiles, keros, and feather works, are reproduced in full-color illustrations, demonstrating the rich variety of these artistic approaches. A collection of essays by an international team of distinguished scholars in the field uncovers the different meanings and purposes behind these depictions of native populations of the Americas. These experts explore the role of the visual arts in negotiating a sense of place in late pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America. They address a range of important topics, such as the construct of the Indian as a good Christian; how Amerindians drew on their pre-Columbian past to stake out a place within the Spanish body politic; their participation in festive rites; and their role as artists. Lavishly illustrated, this ambitious book provides a compelling and original framework by which to understand the intersection of vision and power in the Spanish colonial world.

    Mark Santiago’s gripping account of Spanish efforts to subdue the Apaches illuminates larger cultural and political issues in the colonial period of the Southwest and northern Mexico. To persuade the Apaches to abandon their homelands and accept Christian “civilization,” Spanish officials employed both the mailed fist of continuous war and the velvet glove of the reservation system. “Hostiles” captured by the Spanish would be deported, while Apaches who agreed to live in peace near the Spanish presidios would receive support. Santiago’s history of the deportation policy includes vivid descriptions of colleras, the chain gangs of Apache prisoners of war bound together for the two-month journey by mule and on foot from the northern frontier to Mexico City. The book’s arresting title, The Jar of Severed Hands, comes from a 1792 report documenting a desperate break for freedom made by a group of Apache prisoners. After subduing the prisoners and killing twelve Apache men, the Spanish soldiers verified the attempted breakout by amputating the left hands of the dead and preserving them in a jar for display to their superiors.Santiago’s nuanced analysis of deportation policy credits both the Apaches’ ability to exploit the Spanish government’s dual approach and the growing awareness on the Spaniards’ part that the peoples they referred to as Apaches were a disparate and complex assortment of tribes that could not easily be subjugated. The Jar of Severed Hands deepens our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between Indian tribes and colonial powers in the Southwest borderlands.