Transitions in the Cuban Revolution (poster), February 21-22, 2008

This conference will bring together some of the leading scholars on Cuba to elucidate and analyze transitions in the Revolution, as well as its implications for human interactions, creative activities, and relationships of national and international power. A main component in the discussion will be the current challenges presented in the U.S.-Cuba relationship and its impact on the entire region. This year marks the forty-eighth anniversary of the Revolution that brought Fidel and Raúl Castro to power in 1959. Though in the interim Cuba has passed through the changes and transitions that historical forces impose on all societies. The revolutionary process itself introduced some of those changes, such as land reform, the literacy campaign, and the struggle against the counterrevolution in the 1960s, as well as the military campaigns in Africa in the 1970s. Other transitions came about as a result of international conditions, the U.S. economic blockade of the 1960s, the reliance on Eastern Bloc trade in the 1970s and 1980s, and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Oftentimes changes resulted from more subtle, bottom-up causality. Cubans in the street and at work had to design new strategies for accommodating the impact of emigration, privatization, militarization, Sovietization and de-Sovietization, and the ever-present legacy of slavery. Ordinary Cubans responded by offering or withholding participation to the state and by giving creative expression though music and dance. Quite clearly, a single narrative cannot suffice to explain the complexities and nuances of how the Revolution evolved as one event-filled decade followed upon another. The Revolution has always been in the process of becoming, whether viewed from the podiums of power or in the everyday relationships that people conduct at the grassroots level.