For his 1920s ballet librettos, Alejo Carpentier drew inspiration from the groundbreaking spectacles that ensembles such as Les Ballets Russes produced in Europe during the avant-garde era, even though he had not witnessed those theatrical productions. Rather, he experienced them from afar – as a vicarious spectator – in the act of reading texts about them. Carpentier approached the ballet libretto as an eclectic and experimental literary genre in which to explore his wide-ranging intellectual interests: in various styles of avant-garde art, music and theatre (from Futurism to Jean Cocteau’s poetics of the commonplace), as well as in politics, Afro-Cuban culture and ethnography. Although he held no direct contact with the artists creating experimental ballets in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America, he saw them and himself as forming an international community – which illustrates the extent to which the transatlantic and hemispheric networks of the avant-garde operated as imagined communities.

During his month-long visit to Cuba in 1965, Allen Ginsberg’s ideals of expressive freedom, sexual openness, and poetic individualism came into direct conflict with the increasingly repressive Castroist regime. Invited by the state organization Casa de las Américas to judge a poetry competition, Ginsberg quickly drew scrutiny from the regime for his outspoken views on homosexuality, drug use, and freedom of expression. His subsequent surveillance by the state’s vice squad, arrest, and deportation underscored the Cuban government’s intolerance for nonconformist expression, especially as it pertained to sexuality and dissent. Ginsberg’s experiences, recorded in his Cuban diaries, letters, and poems, reveal a central paradox of revolutionary politics: While seeking liberation, regimes might deploy repressive mechanisms of censorship and control. Ginsberg’s confrontation with Cold War ideologies – both US and Cuban – solidified his vision of a humanist poetics aimed at disrupting authoritarian systems and expanding consciousness through individuals’ radical self-expression.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

A substantial portion of Alejo Carpentier’s writings, nonfictional and fictional, can be classified as Neobaroque, making their author one of the key representatives of this transhistorical, transnational, cross-cultural and interartistic contemporary movement. This chapter focuses on images and expressions of deformed chronology that abound in Carpentier’s fiction, and which are associated with the Baroque, an aesthetics of excess and transgression that sets established forms into variation. It argues that what can be classified as baroque futurisms – eccentric because it deforms linear chronology – is the gist of Carpentier’s concept of the New World Baroque. The chapter briefly outlines Carpentier’s Baroque theory before exploring instances of baroque futurism in representative works of Carpentier’s fiction.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

The Introduction explains why nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying racialism (the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races), racial doubt (those moments when this assumption gets questioned and racial differences seem less clear), and the different groups of racialized people who mobilized doubt as they worked to reinvent themselves and their society. It also shows how the analysis of the notions at the core of each chapter – racist agnosia, farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – illuminates present-day critiques of color blindness. Finally, it explains why the book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist writing that attacked illegal slavery by denouncing lies, falsification, and farce; the second one, on free people of color who wrestled with two “one-drop” rules (one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made them whiter); and the third one, on the emergence of Black Cuban writing.

José Antonio Saco (1797–1879), a native of Bayamo in Cuba, studied philosophy under the notable Félix Varela and succeeded him in the philosophy chair at the University of Havana. He edited the journals El Mensajero Semanal and the Revista Bimestre Cubana, where his writing against the slave trade caused his exile in 1834 – he only returned to Cuba for a brief period in 1860–1861. He traveled extensively in Europe collecting the documentation for his Historia de la esclavitud (1875–1879). He was elected to the Cortes in Spain but, after 1837, Cuba was excluded from representation there. Saco also became conspicuous for his opposition to the annexation of Cuba to the United States. The current selection was written in the wake of Narciso López’s failed invasion of the island in 1851 and reveals a keen awareness of the international situation and the hard choices facing Cuba in the nineteenth century.

Juan Francisco Manzano (1797/8?–1853) was born and grew up as an enslaved person in the province of Matanzas, Cuba. He taught himself to write despite being forbidden to do so by his masters: “when everybody went to bed, I used to light a piece of candle, and then at my leisure I copied the best verses, thinking that if I could imitate these, I would become a poet.” He published a first selection of his poems in 1821, still under slavery. His work attracted the attention of literary circles in Havana, and the favour of Domingo del Monte (1804–1853), “a wealthy intellectual, leader, and patriot who … mentored a generation of young writers.” It was thanks to Del Monte’s efforts that Manzano was able to buy his freedom in 1836. Del Monte also persuaded Manzano to write his autobiography narrating his sufferings under slavery, which he started to write in 1835.

This chapter addresses the Black Atlantic threads contained in Pablo Neruda’s corpus, mainly in Canto general (1950) and Canción de gesta (Song of Protest, 1960). The chapter is particularly focused on moments of poetic representation of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. In this vein, it discusses the Caribbean literary influences – and specifically Négritude and Negrismo movements – that impacted Neruda’s writing, including the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. As a result, this essay unveils Neruda’s sociological but also political motivations for including the historiographical context of the Black Caribbean in his work, including Cuba’s Black internationalism in Canción de gesta. This latter part of the chapter, which is informed by a personal interview with Roberto Fernández Retamar, sheds light on the political reasons for the neglect of Neruda’s Black Atlantic in Canción de gesta, and offers considerations for correcting the overlooked dimensions of his work.

This chapter examines the US and Canadian government’s programs that allow for the sanctioning of countries as State Sponsors of Terrorism. The chapter also provides views into why countering countries engaged in state sponsorship of terrorism efforts are so difficult to counter.

This chapter is based upon an extensive examination of US statutes, regulations, and executive orders from 1994 to 2021 containing US blacklists against Cuba. The chapter discusses the effects of the listing on individuals or targeted entities. Because many of these targets are Cuban government officials or state-owned enterprises, the listing of these persons and entities has the effect of interfering with sectors of the Cuban economy. The chapter also discusses the secondary impact on Cuba’s trade partners in general, and the consequent “chilling effect” that interferes in Cuba’s overall ability to import and export goods, and attract foreign investment.

In the post-war period, the Western powers returned to economic sanctions to manage conflictst without the costs of war. From the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, the United States and its allies limited a wide range of exports to communist countries. The purpose was to weaken the Soviet bloc militarily and economically. The United States imposed a fuller embargo on Cuba’s trade after 1958. The losses caused by Western sanctions must be disentangled from the innate inefficiency of the command economies in question. The chapter combines evidence with insights from New Growth Theory to identify the channels of COCOM effects. As predicted, the effects of sanctions on output, although observable, were limited – and nearly non-existent in the case of mainly agricultural Cuba. In Eastern Europe, sanctions reduced the variety and increased the technical obsolescence of production equipment. Consistently, the main Soviet-bloc counter-measure, industrial espionage, brought observable but small gains to Eastern Europe. The costs of the command economy were much greater than the costs of sanctions, though both may have increased over time as the productivity gap with the West grew.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

This chapter develops a model of the relationship between revolution and person with detailed reference to the life and family histories collected in Havana in the late 1960s by the American anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis and the team of researchers they trained in Cuba. The focus here is on ethnographic material from the Lewis’ volumes pertaining to people’s revolutionary ‘integration’ through participation in state-coordinated mass organizations, and particularly the so-called Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). Tracking ethnographically the ways and degrees to which the Lewis’ respondents got involved in these neighbourhood level structures, the chapter develops a model of revolutionary personhood that emphasises the duality between ‘role’ and ‘person’. Due to the totalizing way it ensconces itself in every aspect of everyday life, this duality marks out the coordinates for people’s continual acts of comparison and calibration between the two, which becomes the prime format of daily social life in revolutionary Cuba. By the same token, the duality of role and person marks out the limits of the revolution’s transcendentalizing project, whose containing force reaches only as far as its designation of roles via the state’s structures can take it, leaving the remainders of people beyond its scope.

Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.

Prefaced by an extended ethnographic account of Fidel Castro’s charisma as it emerged in the days of national mourning that followed his death in 2016, Chapter 9 concludes the book’s morphological argument by drawing out its implications for two forms of comparison that contribute to its development. The first concerns the analogies and contrasts between political and religious concepts and practices, which feature throughout the development of the book’s morphological analysis and are viewed here in relation to the broader discussion about ‘political theology’. The second returns to the comparative anthropological framework with which the book begins, namely the varied ways in which the distinction between nature and culture can be made, locating revolutions in this comparative frame.

This chapter furthers the book’s morphological analysis of the revolution’s relationship to people by examining it as a relationship of care. The ethnographic context here is housing, focusing on the way in which the revolutionary state’s all-embracing involvement in the infrastructure of people’s lives acts as another prime avatar of its moral concretion. The chapter recounts the story of Clarita, for whom her state-built house embodies her own sense of being a revolutionary, though, as she says, ‘in her own way’. Getting an analytical handle on Clarita’s sense of commitment to the revolution involves showing the ways in which the state’s transcendental project of care is supplemented by relationships that are intimate and personal. This happens through the myriad ways in which personal relationships – with family, neighbours and workmates – are enlisted in order to bring to fruition the state-sponsored scheme that provided her with the means to build a new house. The revolutionary state is credited with providing houses as habitable wholes, and in this way is able to incorporate under its aegis of care the myriad ways in which nonstate resources and relationships are necessary in order for this to happen. Crucially, this centripetal dynamic renders the intimate ambit of personalized sociality a constitutive (albeit unacknowledged) feature of the revolutionary state’s project of care, traversing the distance that separates its institutional structures and procedures from the day-to-day sociality of people’s lives.

Chapter 8 tells the story of Lázaro, whose home collapsed and is now stuck in a long-term struggle to get the state authorities to assist him in rebuilding it. Here the focus is on the dire failures of the revolutionary state apparatus, though the twist is that, rather than cynically lamenting them, Lázaro maintains a steadfast conviction that the state will solve his problem. The reason for this, as we shall see, upends the whole framework of the revolutionary state’s relationship with people, since the source of Lázaro’s conviction in the state’s powers is not the revolutionary state itself, but rather certain spirits with which Lázaro has developed deep and abiding relationships, and who guide him through life, including in his interactions with the state authorities a propos his collapsed home. The chapter shows that the spirits’ mediation does not merely supplement Lázaro’s relationship with the revolutionary state, but rather upends its overall coordinates, drastically changing its shape. The signature ontological constitution of spirits is that they collapse dualist separations between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, ought and is – precisely the distinctions that mark out the coordinates within which the revolutionary project takes its shape. In so doing, the spirits present an altogether startling political possibility: a revolution able to deploy the transcendental structures and processes of the state in a way that somehow, per impossible, relates with people immanently in the intimate key of personal care.