Modern Cuba

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Despite its comparatively small population, Cuba has played an outsize role in the modern economic, political, and cultural history of the Americas and the world. In the nineteenth century, the island was among the pioneers of a new model of capitalism, combining unfree labor with emerging industrial and communications technologies and forging new economic and cultural links with North America. In the last third of the century, emerging contradictions — residual Spanish sovereignty, rising U.S. power, divisions among Creole elites, aspirations for justice by black, brown, and white Cubans alike — led to a rising independence movement, arguably the first modern revolutionary movement in the global South, and provoked the first of several U.S. interventions. During the Cuban Republic (1902-58), amidst a cultural renaissance with transnational resonance, these contradictions of truncated sovereignty and social, economic, and political injustice endured amidst cycles of economic boom and bust and continued political crises, precipitating another revolutionary cycle that resulted – unexpectedly for nearly all concerned – in the first and longest-enduring socialist state in the Americas. Its impact and legacies helped reshape the rest of Latin America and the global South, and remain complex and contested to this day in Cuba, the United States, and around the world. With special attention to Cuba's changing hemispheric and global connections, this graduate seminar will allow students to explore the rich and often contentious history of modern Cuba from the early nineteenth century to the present, through common readings and individual projects.