Browsing by Subject "Cuba"
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Item Open Access Arte Abstracto E Ideologías EstéTicas En Cuba(2009) Menendez-Conde, ErnestoThis dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.
Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.
This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.
Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.
Item Open Access As the Fairy Tales Unfold(2016-05-05) Geng, YangyangThis project consists of two parts. The first part is a photo book, which includes my photographs of children and an accompanying text of individual stories of childhood, including my own. The second part is an analytical essay, which explores my process in creating and editing my photographs in the larger context of how other artists have approached the depiction of childhood. Specifically, I look at the work of photographers Wendy Ewald, Sally Mann and Olive Pierce, as each of these artists chose to depict the days of childhood by giving individual voice to the children who are most often overlooked or ignored. Over the summer of 2015, I worked with and photographed children in an orphanage school in China. I continued to make photographs of children in Durham, North Carolina and in Cuba in 2015 and 2016. As the photographs pulled me back to the past of my own childhood, I discovered that in a child’s world, ordinary things became magical vehicles and that childhood is often about the awkward process of learning to inhabit a newly bulky, changed body with aggressive needs and intensified fantasies. As a photographer, I am drawn to the beauty and pathos of the moments, when, for example, a boy, in his games, becomes a pirate, a soldier, or a sailor, or a little girl plays with a doll and imagines she is the princess. I have tried to capture and evoke the daydreams and the feelings of being lost that are specific to childhood. With my writing and in my photo book project, I have also tried to create spaces in which I allow other’s perceptions to surface with my own.Item Open Access Cuban-Russian Relations in the 21st Century: Oil and Geopolitics(2015) Moldes, ChristopherThis thesis examines how the recent discovery of massive oil reserves off the coast of Cuba has driven a resurgence of Cuban-Russian relations in the 21st century. The first chapter demonstrates how the Russian government came to conceptualize the export of hydrocarbons as integral to the nation's development. It also examines the internal situation in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union to explain what initiated shifts in domestic policy that allowed for greater external investment. The second chapter discusses the effect of the discovery of these oil reserves, and how the Russians and the Cubans have come together over this issue against the backdrop of larger anti-American tendencies in Latin America. The first chapter relies more on secondary analyses of trends in both nations to help familiarize the reader with key concepts, such as the idea of Russia's energy weapon and Cuba's impetus for change. The second chapter heavily uses newspaper articles and speeches to demonstrate the visible shift in Russian attitude towards Cuba.
This thesis shows that the oil reserves have stimulated both countries to work closely together, though each has their respective reasons.
Item Open Access Financing Renewable Energy in Cuba(2018-04-27) Masters, Harry; Swofford, PaigeCuba’s 2014 commitment to generate 24% of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 presents a unique opportunity to explore how an island nation can decarbonize its power system. To successfully increase renewable energy production of electricity from approximately 4% of Cuba’s supply mix to 24%, the government plans to install 2,144 MW of new renewable generating capacity from four sources: biomass (755 MW), wind (633 MW), solar photovoltaic (700 MW), and small-scale hydroelectric (56 MW). This new capacity development is expected to require between $3.5 to $4.0 billion of capital investment. While more than half of this investment is expected to come directly from the Cuban government, the remaining capital will have to be obtained from external sources. This analysis estimates that roughly $1.1 billion (955 MW) of new capacity will be open to foreign investors. This project presents an assessment of the challenges and opportunities that Cuba faces in attracting the necessary foreign investment to achieve its renewable energy goals. The main objective is to present information that can be useful both to investors seeking to enter the Cuban market and to officials in Cuba and other jurisdictions who are seeking capital to fund a transition to a more sustainable and resilient electricity system. The paper first provides a review of the physical and institutional infrastructure of the country’s electricity sector, an overview of the renewable energy goals and development progress, and a summary of recent laws and regulations governing foreign investments. Second, it evaluates Cuba as a potential investment target through a lens of foreign direct investment (FDI) theory and project finance. Third, it summarizes the recent efforts by three other Caribbean island states to compare their success using the same project finance and FDI framework.Item Open Access Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840(2020) Yero, FarrenThis dissertation examines the colonial history of medical rights in Latin America through a study of the world’s first vaccine. The Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to their empire in 1804, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and medical consent a natural right ceded to parents. Yet, the vaccine first arrived there incubated in the bodies of two enslaved girls. Doctors would continue to rely on enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve the vaccine for those otherwise accorded this ostensibly universal right. Their doing so prompted profound questions about individual liberty, embedding vaccination into struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, and the preservation of colonial rule. By analyzing the politicization of preventative health, the dissertation follows the vaccine through the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico to ask why imperial—and later, national—authorities protected voluntary vaccination, what this choice meant for parents and patients, and what this story can tell us about the meaning and value of consent in an era of both race and rights-making.
To understand how consent operated, I trace the vaccine through the bodies that sustained it, examining the gendered and racialized claims to medical authority that legitimized the vaccine, the state’s patriarchal formulation of consent to it, and the responses and rejections of colonized subjects to both. Medical texts, newspapers, legal codes, orphanage records, plantation guides, and government reports related to the vaccine reveal that recognition of medical rights was inconsistent and often determined by elite assumptions about reason and bodily difference. Racial and sexual politics informed decisions about which bodies were best suited to incubate and test the vaccine, whose knowledge was deemed a threat to public health campaigns, and ultimately, who should be recognized as a parent, worthy of rights and capable of informed consent.
Amidst political and social unrest, I argue that these articulations worked to uphold colonial structures of power, as healthcare became woven into the fractional freedoms accorded to and claimed by subjects and citizens. Medical consent, as it was envisioned and employed in vaccination policies, helped to reinforce these hierarchies even after independence. Mexico retained voluntary vaccination, but the medical rights of women and men, particularly those of indigenous and African descent, remained restricted by assumptions about culture and competence. By tracing the vaccine through the postcolonial era, my project addresses the enduring effects of colonialism across political discourses of liberalism and access to resources and care. Such historicization suggests the limits of consent and prompts a more ethical conceptualization of "informed refusal" that embraces and respects indigenous and other cultural articulations of bodily autonomy.
Item Open Access Playing the State: Imagining Youth in Cuban Baseball(2021) Daley, ChristopherMy research lies at the intersections of youth and their imaginaries in late socialist Cuba. Through ethnographic and historical research, I explore how Cuban teenagers and young adults make sense of their place in a changing world. My dissertation asks, what does the experience of young baseball players tells us about the way that socialism works and how it is experienced in Cuba today? I argue that baseball in Cuba reflects the distinctive trajectory of this island nation that remains one of the world’s last socialist states. I detail how the amateur athlete can be seen as an on-going experiment in the state’s attempt to create new subjectivities, which are channeled through an equally new system of ethical values based on sacrifice, care, and anti-colonial nationalism. But while players are seen to embody socialist values, I argue that baseball creates a range of meanings and possibilities for players that exceeds the State’s ability to direct or control.
Item Open Access Site (Trans)Formation and Decolonial Praxis in Cuban Civic Art: Exploring Digital and Analog Approaches(2023) Fitzpatrick, SavannahLife in Cuba is largely defined by el Partido Comunista de Cuba’s (PCC) tradition of governance. Since the ratification of Decree 349 in 2018 – a law that punitively curtails freedom of expression – Cuba has witnessed an upsurge in publicly staged resistance. The emergence of several artist-led, non-partisan civic groups, united by their fight for human rights, exemplifies this. Two prominent examples are el Movimiento San Isidro (MSI) and 27N. This thesis investigates how the artistic interventions of MSI, 27N, and their members can be understood as decolonial praxis. To navigate and convey this argument and its associated logics, this thesis employs a two-part methodological approach: exploratory mapping in digital and analog forms, as well as critical feminist and queer phenomenological analysis that is woven with Doreen Massey’s relational spatial theory.
Item Open Access THE CARIBBEAN SPINY LOBSTER FISHERY IN CUBA: An approach to sustainable fishery management(2009-04-24T17:05:49Z) Muñoz-Nuñez, DaylinThe Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) is the most valuable fishery resource in Cuba. Intensive fishing efforts and deterioration of essential habitats have led to overexploitation of this resource over much of its distributional range. In Cuba, the spiny lobster fishery collapsed in 1990, and since then landings have consistently declined. In response to this crisis and with the aim of obtaining the maximum economic benefits from this highly-prized resource, the Cuban Ministry of Fishery attempted to improve the management of this fishery. The purpose of this study is to identify the biophysical, human and institutional components of the spiny lobster fishery in Cuba and map their interactions to better understand the current management of this fishery and promote its long term sustainability. An exhaustive literature review and an analysis of the current management regulations show that Cuba has met some of the most important criteria that could lead to the long term sustainability of the fishery. The limited access to the fishery, allocation of exclusive territorial rights and quotas, as well as the strict enforcement of the minimum legal size and a lengthening of the closed season have led many researchers to consider the Cuban fishery as one of the best managed spiny lobster fisheries in the world. Despite these regulations, landings have not increased. This indicates that the lobster population has not recovered from the previous overexploitation. The management could be improved by providing protection to the lobsters with the highest reproductive capacity through an increase in the minimum legal size to 81 mm carapace length and establishment of a maximum legal size (142 mm CL). More complete socio-economic impact analysis is necessary to better understand the human components of the fishery. This could help illuminate the reasons for illegal lobster fishing, a common problem in the Cuban waters. Additionally, fishermen integration into the fisheries policy-making process is crucial to achieve effective management regulations. A sustainable spiny lobster fishery in Cuba is essential for the recovery of this transboundary resource both in the local waters and in the Wider Caribbean Region.Item Open Access The Cuban Balseros Voyage of Uncertainty(1995) Ackerman, H; Clark, JM