About the presentation: My presentation will cover three main topics. First, it will introduce my dissertation project, exploring how Cuban-Spanish relations from the late Cold War to the end of the 1990s played a key role in Cuban regime survival during the economic crisis that followed the fall of the USSR. Second, it will expound on the situation in Cuba today, based on my extended research there last year, as the country undergoes what many are calling a ‘Second Special Period’, which by many metrics is the most catastrophic crisis since 1959. Third and finally, I will close by explaining the somewhat Byzantine process of engaging in academic research in Cuba under current government policies. The goal is to not just share the results of my own research, with a generous chunk of my funding having been thanks to LACIS, but also to help apprise other scholars interested in Cuba on current events and the obstacles facing researchers interested in studying the island.
About the presenter: I am a historian of Latin America & the Caribbean specializing in the history of Cuba and its relations with the wider world. In the past, my research has focused on early 19th century Cuba-US relations, specifically failures in American intelligence gathering in Havana in the early 19th century. More recently, my MA thesis explored how the Cuban government post-1959 cultivated leftist intellectuals and artists as part of its soft power projection during the early Cold War. Now, I am exploring Cuban-Spanish relations during the late Cold War and early post-Cold War world as a lens through which to understand a key part of the story of regime survival on the island despite losing 3/4ths of its foreign trade almost overnight, due to the collapse of the USSR and COMECON.
I have a somewhat unique background which has contributed greatly to my expertise in Cuban Studies. My professional middle class family fled Cuba in the early 1960s and remade their lives in the United States, after which they reconnected with the island and began visiting it regularly during the late Cold War and increasingly since 1991. I pursued and completed my undergraduate studies in History at the University of Havana, Cuba, where I was – as far as I know – only the second American since 1959 to do the entirety of my BA in Cuba (excepting medical students at the ELAM). My half a decade living in Cuba as a student and my repeated travel there since then have been invaluable in providing me the experience necessary for in-depth analysis of a notoriously ‘closed’ society where truth, half-truth, and fiction are often hard to discern, not just for outsiders but for Cubans themselves.
My expertise and analysis has been cited in publications such as Reuters, the Financial Times, and other publications, and I have appeared on the BBC and DW as an invited expert to offer analysis of contemporary Cuba. I have been published in The Nation, Dissent, and Letras Libres magazines, among others, and regularly review new monographs on Cuba for both academic journals and magazines read by the general public. MORE
