bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Rachel Hynson’s Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1971 examines how the Cuban government engaged in socially engineering Cuban families in order to remodel them. There is four main engineering occurrences over 1959 to 1971 that Hynson highlights. The Cuban government tried controlling women’s reproductive rights, limiting women’s labour to the domestic sphere, controlling women’s autonomy, especially sexually, and the government forced men into state-sanctioned employment while women were controlled by their husbands or the state. Other historians have ignored the conservative family norms the Cuban government pushed during 1959-1971. Hynson shows Socialist Cuba did not oppose the intact family unit but embraced it. Focusing on how state policies shape gender ideology, the four government programs show how the Cuban government wanted to give rise to a patriarchal, European family unit.    

Hynson uses newspapers, government documents, travel narratives, plays, laws, oral histories, and interviews. Citing a lot of secondary sources throughout the text, Hynson shows she’s done her research drawing from various historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other professionals. Laws are used extensively to show how the Cuban government push their ideology onto the general population. Through legislating morality, the Cuban government tried to hone the family unit into a narrow patriarchal unit. 

Approaching the text with a thematic and bottom-up methodology Hynson writes with three ideas in mind: Feminist gender analysis, discourse analysis, and a theory of hegemony. Hyson herself says Laboring for the State gives a voice from those below who are under threat of whitewashing from the Cuban government narrative. It seems like throughout the Cuban revolution the government would decide on a course and then double back from the decided course. As seen in Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics if a government policy was not working the Cuban government would either pretend it did not happen or quickly turn to something else. 

It seems the Cuban government was trying to present itself as a great nation. Nation-building starts at home, if you control the family then you control the next generation. Particularly women are the primary focus because women nurture the children. The ideas they impart to their kids help to shape children’s ideology. By trying to create a nuclear, patriarchal family society the Cuban government was essentially targeting people of colour in Cuban society as Cuban, and largely Caribbean, family norms were common-law unions with matrifocal kinship units. While Hynson briefly mentions it throughout the text this plays into the racist undercurrents of Cuban society.

Rachel Hynson’s Laboring for the State sets out to prove her theory and provides enough evidence to do it. A nuanced look at Cuban history, the text is a great addition to Cuban historiography. Highlighting underrepresented areas of history, Hynson’s work is a great read. 

Tatiana Seijas’ Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico looks at Southeast Asian enslavement in the area of modern-day Mexico. Chinos, as enslaved Asians were labelled, are examined in the broad framework of the Spanish Colonies. The main focus of Seijas is coerced labour and forced migration, and how that connects to colonial expansion. This work challenges some of the uniform assumptions about “the uniformity of the slave experience in the Americas.”  
While Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico is laid out very systematically, Seijas’ writing style is captivating. Based on her dictatorial dissertation, Seijas creates a palatable monograph that includes great information in the footnotes and clear directed thoughts in each chapter. There were a lot of examples throughout the text and Seijas could have culled some of them as example after example to prove small points started to overwhelm the reader. I admire the obvious amount of research that went into the text as in footnote 10 Seijas says she had to cast a wide net for sources and documents related to Chinos. She even read through an entire collection for the seventeenth century because she didn’t want to sample a decade for a century.  
I wish there had been more clarity on the lack of diversity in groups looked at, as at one point it seems like Seijas only talked about Filipinos for two chapters. I know lack of sources was probably the issue here, but I would have liked for her to clearly state that she would only be addressing this people group for most of the text. Lack of available sources was probably Seijas' weakness throughout the text. She does a wonderful job of finding what was available. The upward mobility of Chinos and free Filipinos by associating themselves as Indians was the most fascinating point of the text. The examples Seijas brings throughout the text, especially as it relates to legal aspects of being Indian prove that the association of being Indian led to abolition. 

Guerra writes about the radicalization of the Cuban revolution. She covers topics of religion, race, culture, and gender through a social and political look at Cuban history. She shows the revolution was made and spread mostly through talking/word of mouth. Guerra wants to refute the claim of Cuban exceptionality by comparative studies. Guerra takes a micro-historical look at this period in Cuba over a macro one.

John Monteiro writes about the Indigenous in Brazil, specifically in the Sao Paulo area, and the Portuguese settlement in that area as well. The text is based on John Monteiro’s doctoral dissertation. Described by scholars as a field-defining work, and in Brazil it's considered a classic among historians in Brazil (222). Blacks of the Land or Negros da terra as published in its original language was translated by James Woodard and Barbara Weinstein. These two scholars agree Blacks of the Land is a transitional work that “bridge between the traditions in social and economic history” (xvii). Showing the social history of Luso-indigenous relations and “the development of the economy and society of colonial Sao Paulo” Blacks of the Land opens a new vein in the historiography of Brazilian history according to the author himself.

Reading Blacks of the Land was interesting. Monteiro writes on the topic of Indigenous slavery because according to him the impact of indigenous slavery is overlooked by African slavery, which he briefly mentions in a few of his chapters. Since this is a translated work, I wonder if it is as dense in Portuguese as it is in English. The chapters were a decent length for processing the information but there was so much information packed into each chapter. It was a lot to process as a reader, yet the writing was smooth. The layout of the book was chronological which helped build the timeline of the destruction of indigenous in my mind. Chapter one does give background information for what Monteiro writes about in the rest of Blacks of the Land but I felt that the text overall is presupposing that the readers are informed of Brazilian history and Portuguese relations.

Chapter one shows how the Portuguese used the naïve native narrative to strip away everything from the natives in the Sao Paulo region. The language they used when writing about the natives, words such as savage, lazy, barbarous, and dumb create a narrative of people who must be governed and subjected to European rule. Natives who need the wiser European to show them right from wrong and help guide them with a firm hand. Monteiro says the Portuguese destroyed indigenous societies because they were unable to be integrated into the colonial sphere.

The tension between Paulistas and Missions was surprising to me. Attacking places that are supposed to be related to your faith for easy access to slaves shows how economically motivated everyone was in the new world. When Monteiro mentions Missions are they only Jesuit ones? Is the tension between the Jesuits and Paulistas indicative of deeper political ongoings in Portugal and throughout the Catholic Christendom? It does seem like the Missions were wealthy as they rented their surplus of slaves out to Paulistas who needed porters. Paulistas being both buyers and consumers of the labour in the created colonial system is an example of showing how the indigenous did not have any room for Indigenous rights or freedoms, let alone social norms.

Contemporary observations show “in every corner of Brazil, slavery became the measure of society” (123). The most interesting source John Monteiro uses is the role of Donativo Real and how the Donativo has helped create a document not used in the study of Sao Paulo society until now (183). I wonder why it had not peaked the interests of historians until now? The shift from agriculture to mining and the decline of the prominent Paulista farmer shows the destruction of the indigenous communities were all for nought. The ending of the text shows an “impoverished peasantry” and the destruction of the land and indigenous people who lived there. The afterword saddened me, in learning of John Monteiro’s untimely passing. The text shows there is still more to glen and grow in the area of Brazilian historiography as it comes indigenous in the Sao Paulo area.

Carnival of Love's description is slightly misleading. This is a work of fiction characterized as 'memoir-ic' (yes, I'm making up words here) by Maria's first-person view. I'm not sure if Fraser is basing this off of herself or someone else close to her. It didn't seem like that was the case. I'm pretty sure it's all fiction. HOWEVER Carnival of Love is a great piece of work. One of the main themes in Carnival of Love is sweethearting which is

infidelity

in 'cute' Bahamian terms.

Carnival of Love is split up into two main sections which coincide with Maria's parents. Each chapter is a memory of Maria's that help piece the narrative together of why her parents' marriage dissolved. Ernestia Fraser's writing draws you into the story and gets you invested with the characters within the first chapter. The journey of Maria's realization and healing brought me to tears. Learning your parents' faults and coming to the realization that they're not perfect can be difficult. Loving them in spite of their faults is difficult. Family and familial bonds are complex, yet Fraser works magic by showing the complexity.

Carnival of Love takes place in New Providence and I loved reading about places familiar to me. There are so many little Bahamian things throughout the narrative, common to Bahamian living that will resonant with Bahamians, and Caribbean people on the whole. The little things, like superstitions, obeah mixed with Christianity, biggety Bahamian people, small-town gossip, police who don't do shit, "sugar" or diabetes (which is quite common among a lot of older Bahamians).

Predatory relationships were the biggest thing that stood out to me.

Maria's mother (Martha) was only 16* (or 17) when she moves out to be with Maria's father (Mario) who is around 25 years her senior. Mario is constantly cheating on Maria throughout their entire marriage until their separation, yet he has the GALL to threaten her about having other men. Just like a man!!! One chapter had me question whether Maria was molested by a family member but it wasn't clear.

Predatory relationships was one of the main things that stood out to me. It's so common in Bahamian society that you can become numb to it. Sweethearting stood out to me as well, since it was the plot of the book. I HATE how common that is in Bahamian society, and it made cute with sweet words like sweethearting.

Xenophobia and Colourism come up in Carnival of Love. Martha remarks on the bad treatment she received from her family because she was the darkest of her siblings. Mama (grandma) constantly rails on her caretakers, who are Jamaica immigrants. She talks to them like dogs and treats them like poop. Fraser captures attitudes and sayings that are in everyday Bahamian life. I can think of quite a number of examples that would fit into similar stories, such as the one Fraser writes.

Carnival of Love is a great piece of work, that shows how difficult it can be to grow up and let go. Bahamian society and social attitudes are very prevalent in the story. I do wish there would have been more dialect throughout the story though.

*16 is the legal age of consent in The Bahamas, I know yuck.

"To understand the depopulation of the Zone, it is important to remember the symbolic importance of the Panama Canal at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as US ideas about Latin America, particularly tropical Latin America."

Reading parts of Erased for the school made me want to come back and read the entire book which I did! Erased discusses the creation of the American Canal Zone area by its Panamanian depopulation. Marixa Lasso attempts to reconstruct Panamanian life in the Canal area throughout the book, as well as general feelings on leaving the Canal Zone. To explain how the creation of the American Canal Zone came about Marixa Lasso shows how American Imperialism first had to deconstruct the idea of Panama being modern. Lasso splits up the text into Port Towns, Creation of the Canal Zone, Creation of Canal Zone Towns, depopularization of the Panamanians in the Zone, Different stages of the Canal Zone after is depopularization.

Marina Lasso does a great job of laying out and proving her point to the reader. Lasso says the depopulation of the Panama Canal Area has severed “Panama’s historical connection the isthmian route and any attempt to challenge the idea that the canal was built over a barely habited jungle requires reconstructing the lives of these lost towns.” By losing the narrative of black Panamanians as modern, it is much easier to connect them to the idea of the helpless jungle native. A trope that shows up time and time again in history. The American viewpoint on these subjects as it relates to Panama and the Panamanians come back into time and time again in the narrative. Coming from a western education, seeing American imperialism on full display continues to open my eyes.

I didn’t realize how important Panama was to the international economy, and more importantly the American economy. The Panama railroad played a part in moving miners to California during the Gold Rush, by connecting passage from one ocean to another. I wonder if that was one part of the reason why America decided to take over the canal project, besides wanting to prove themselves to be a world leader. The idea of American superiority leads Americans to believe in others’ inferiority. Lasso shows everything the Panamanians did, was clothed in the naive native narrative by the United States to justify doing what they pleased in Panama.

This quote from chapter two sums up the whole book, “assessments that characterized Zone agriculture as primitive or non-existence erased the connections between Panamanian peasants and their nineteenth-century history and technology in the same way that ideas about black tropical people had erased the membership of black Panamanian citizens in the political history of the nineteenth century…If the deep historical connections between Zone inhabitants and their region had been acknowledged, the decision to depopulate would have been much harder to justify.”

Alejandro de la Fuente breaks up his text into four sections. His main argument is split into three questions that he seeks to answer for readers. Race plays a part in all three questions. The questions are how unequal racial has Cuban society been across education, the labour market, and power resources; How did the revolution’s programs help Afro-Cubans economically and socially; and lastly, how did racial ideologies within Cuba define racial coexistence. Fuente claims to do something new with his approach to these questions. According to Fuente, previous literature “does not provide a coherent explanation for the often ambiguous roles that perceptions of race have played in Cuban society, economy, and politics.”

I wonder at Fuente’s claims to bring something new to Cuban historiography. I am not familiar with Cuban historiography, so I cannot answer that question well in its entirety, but I do think he answers the questions he poses well. Fuente does not highlight gender; there is only a male-driven narrative in looking at Cuba in this book. Women are rarely highlighted in terms of what they contributed to an era of Cuban history. I feel this was a missed opportunity because the issues of race and gender can be intersectional.

The claim of race is central to making Cuba into a nation. Race, or lack of race, depending on the era of Cuban history, has helped shape the country into its modern-day form. Fuente strives to show the readers how Afro-Cubans secured their rights from the state and how limited those rights were for Afro-Cubans. Each book section highlights race in the era it covered in Cuban history. The second section was my favourite in its highlighting the racial inequality in Cuba. The third and fourth sections are not broken up into as many sub-sections as the first two sections in the text.
The sources Fuente uses in A Nation for All has a wide range. The national archives in Cuba and the USA are used. Afro-Cuban periodicals and Cuban government documents are cited in this text. Other books, articles, and papers are used for research as well. Films are used, which surprised me, though Fuente mentions films Afro-Cubans participated in. I would not have thought of using movies as research or source work. Though I suppose the film is an excellent way to capture what is happening in society or what the popular narrative pushes during its release. Looking through the sources, another one that struck me was the Cuban Ministry of Social Welfare used for some of the statistics throughout the book. I was surprised to see these items available for public use.

Fuente argues the link many scholars make between the revolution and racial justice is problematic. He says that it implies racial equality is dependent upon a particular set of structures that the government has to enforce. This comment struck me. While I do not know a great deal of Cuban history, there are parallels in other parts of the world regarding people’s expectations of the government reenforcing ‘proper’ social norms. The way Fuente phrased that statement made me think about the subject in a way I had not previously.

The rise of educated black people in Cuba went up due to Afro-Cubans own motivation to show while Cubanness was supposed to overshadow race, it did not. While Afro-Cubans did not have as easy access to education as their white counterparts when opportunities were available for educational advancement, Afro-Cubans seized them. The tension with why Afro-Cubans were not as educated shows that prejudice still existed. Fuente says, “white intellectuals, politicians, and employers perceived Afro-Cubans’ lack of education as a manifestation of ‘black problems’” while Afro-Cubans blamed racism and colonialism. The bias is evident in this sentence because what does “black problems” mean? What did it mean to white Cubans who faulted blacks for society faults?

The association between Fidel Castro’s regime and their support of African Americans surprised me. I remember hearing they supported more radical black movements in the USA, but it is not mentioned much in the famous historical narrative. Presenting Cuba as a diverse nation is an interesting tactic. Using the issue of race to help align themselves with other people of colour struggling gives an exciting view into Cuba’s foreign policy. A Nation for All had great information related to Cuban history and race in the 20th century. It was an informative read.

Paul Lovejoy says in his second edition preface that transformations in African slavery were inevitable but whether they were internal or external is not the main issue. The main issue is how they influenced the course of African history. However, Lovejoy’s main argument throughout Transformations of Slavery is how the transformations in African slavery occurred from outside influences. In studying the changes, Transformations of Slavery show the “pervasiveness of slavery in African history and the significance of the transition that occurred under colonialism.”

Lovejoy claims to differ from other scholars with his belief that outside influences had such a significant impact on African society and the economy. I wish Lovejoy had named some of the main scholars whose belief he opposed. Not being familiar with the historiography of African slavery, I would have appreciated being able to look up see other scholars in the area of the subject. I do wonder why the opposite theory has so much more traction than Lovejoy’s theory. I think Lovejoy does a great job of showing how the European influence caused the expansion and transformations of African slavery.

The claim for the transformations of slavery in Africa evolving “as a form of colonialism” is something that struck me deeply. Lovejoy says carrying enslaved Africans to “become the population of European colonies of the Americas” has never occurred to me as a form of colonialism. Colonialism can take many forms and being mainly economic in nature it should have been obvious to me before, but it wasn’t. The tragedy of it may be lack of emphasis on how the slave trade itself was so economically fueled and the influence of capitalism on it.

Repetition causes Lovejoy to repeat the same points again and again through Transformations of Slavery. For example, I could recite word for word that external demand for slaves and rivalry between African states directly affected the spread of slavery. The argument is a part of the main thesis in this book but by chapter six I wrote in my notes, he say this exact thing numerous times. Of course, Transformations in Slavery looks at the bigger picture in the beginning chapters and then breaks it down throughout the book in the later chapters but as a reader, I was being pounded over the head.
Lovejoy claims the domestic demand for slaves was probably larger than the external demand as he says “The vicissitudes of the export trade has been the growth of an internal market for slaves…the number of people who were bought and sold was considerable, which indicates that the supply of slaves was maintained and indeed augmented.” The idea of the African demand for slaves being larger than the European one does not help to prove Lovejoy’s main theory, in my opinion. Unless it is the external demand helped increased the internal demand of slaves? Lovejoy doesn’t make clear why the domestic demand would have been larger except to claim that the plantation sector on the East African coast would have played a part in the domestic demand.

Slavery redefining frontiers within Africa show that borders are ever-shifting throughout the world. People are constantly redefined as friends or enemies within regions, political insecurity and illegal activities help move borders around. Slavery has had a lasting impact on the formation of Africa and the world. Paul Lovejoy shows how the transformations in slavery affected the African people, and the world. Transformations in Slavery is a well-written, well-researched book.

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean is a masterpiece of economic and (somewhat) political history. This is not a light read. It is, however, a very informative one. Published in 1970 From Columbus to Castro is a classic in the field of Caribbean history. The amount of information Williams was about to pack into this text is astounding. I aspire to such research depths and heights. Since Williams is writing from an economic and political view the narrative of From Columbus to Castro is dry but to counter that the characters of From Columbus to Castro are very short, making the information consumable. There are 49 chapters in here with titles ranging from "A sixteenth-century view of the West Indies" to "A Slave in Chains" to "Che' Guevara." The main theme of From Columbus to Castro here is capitalism. Economics driving how the Caribbean is colonized and its resources subsequently drained by European powers are in every chapter. Presenting data analysis and statistics, Williams makes his claims with powerful proof. However, throughout the text, there is no endnotes or footnotes, not citations at all. There is a bibliography but no way to check on all of the statistics and data he presents us. The bibliography is extensive though!! Eric Williams ends with suggestions on moving forward as a united Caribbean. From Columbus to Castro is a great read for anyone deeply interested in Caribbean history. If you want more narrative history, I would suggest another text. From Columbus to Castro is a great reference work and addition to anyone's shelf.

Quotes from the last chapter
“A too-long history of colonialism seems to have crippled Caribbean self-confidence and Caribbean self-reliance, and a vicious circle has been set up: psychological dependence leads to an ever-growing economic and cultural dependence on the outside world. Fragmentation is intensified in the process. And the greater degree of dependence and fragmentation further reduces local self-confidence.”

“Fragmentation is accompanied by massive dependence on the outside world, even in the independent countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean. With the exception of Cuba (the character of whose dependence is different from that of the others), the politically dependent and the politically independent countries of the Caribbean differ only in the latter’s possession of formal sovereignty. For the most part, they are all high dependent on the outside world— for economic aid; for large portions of the capital annually invested in both the traditional and the new manufacturing and tourist sectors of the economy; for sheltered markets for their traditional primary products; and even for emigration outlets for their surplus labour….”

“It is not possible at this stage to sketch out precisely the type of relationship which might be established between the Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth Caribbean. Suffice it to say there is great scope for functional collaboration in respect of the production, processing and marketing of commodities such as sugar and minerals such as bauxite; for the exchange of technological and scientific knowledge; for the rationalism of regional agriculture; and, not least, for the establishment of regional integrated industries in specific sectors, drawing their raw materials either from regional or extra-regional sources and serving both regional and non-regional markets.

Once there is true integration among all the units of the Caribbean, and once all the vestiges of political, economic, cultural and psychological dependence and of racism have been removed from the Caribbean, then and only then can the Caribbean take its true place in Latin America and the New World. And put an end to the international wars and inter-regional squabbles which, from Columbus to Castro, have marked the disposition of Adam’s will.”

A Heart of Blood and Ashes was a pretty good romance book! It had a decent storyline and plot. The romance did progress pretty quickly (over the short span of one month) HOWEVER it advanced the plot well. The character progression was done really well, it was a trajectory of growth. The ending was rushed as compared to the first half of the book. I did like Mila Vane's ability to link the characters' romance plot to the plot that was going on with the world. I'm interested to see what else is going to happen in the world.