Monday, May 19, 2014

List of readings keeps expanding. This time: Guillermina de Ferrari latest book Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba.


De Ferrari joins a growing list of woman scholars who have recently been publishing seldom books and texts reflecting on post-soviet Cuban culture.

Is it possible to identify the emergence of a distinct female gaze in studies about Cuba's cultural production and narratives of identity since the end of the 20th century, including but not limited to literature? If that is the case, what does this entail?

De Ferrari, Guillermina. Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba. New York: Routledge, 2014.


Book Synopsis: Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the globalization of Cuban culture, along with the bankruptcy of the state, partly modified the terms of intellectual engagement. However, no significant change took place at the political level. In Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, De Ferrari looks into the extraordinary survival of the Revolution by focusing on the personal, political and aesthetic social pacts that determined the configuration of the socialist state.Through close critical readings of a representative set of contemporary Cuban novels and works of visual art, this book argues that ethics and gender, rather than ideology, account for the intellectuals’ fidelity to the Revolution. Community and Culture does three things: it demonstrates that masculine sociality is the key to understanding the longevity of Cuba’s socialist regime; it examines the sociology of cultural administration of intellectual labor in Cuba; and it maps the emergent ethical and aesthetic paradigms that allow Cuban intellectuals to envision alternative forms of community and civil society.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Latest books by three women thinkers on Cuba. Odette Casamayor, Jacqueline Loss and Lilian Guerra. Highly Recommended.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Interactivo | Que Lindo Es el Amor | CD Baby Music Store



The latest CD by Cuban band Interactivo, "Que Lindo es el Amor," directed by pianist and composer Robertico Carcasses, is now available online. The album is produced by Dafnison Music, an independent record label from outstanding percussionist Dafnis Prieto, who is based in New York since the late nineties. Previous collaborations between Prieto and Carcasses, together with Descemer Bueno and Yosvany Terry, dates back to the 80s in the art schools where they studied, and later in jazz venues and festivals in Havana and New York in the band Columna B.

Interactivo is part of what I call the Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS), a network of Cuban music production, interactions and collaborations among academically trained musicians, songwriters and singers, operating across urban spaces like New York, Miami, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Italy, and France, etc., including the island, which emerged after the massive migration of artists and musicians born and raised after '59, prompted by the profound nineties' crisis in the island.


This network of musicians have created a boheme transnational scene, based on their own interpretations and updates of the incredible music made since the 1970s in the island by renown musicians like Grupo de Experimentacion Sonora, Chucho Valdes' Irakere, Emiliano Salvador, Afrocuba (Oriente Lopez), Van Van and NG La Banda, among many others. They eclectically fusion Afro-Cuban music, Timba, Funk, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Brazilian music, Argentinian Rock, and Pop, resulting in an irresistible dance music with conscious lyrics. This generation of musicians have been an important part of the sound production of several Cuban singers and songwriters since the 1990s like Santiago Feliu, Carlos Varela, Xiomara Laugart, Gema Corredera, Pavel Urquiza and Habana Abierta, to name a few.

Please check an interview I made to Robertico Carcasses, Interactivo's director, previously published in Cubaencuentro online magazine in 2012.