Fans pick 100 books like Sexual Revolutions in Cuba

This book contributes greatly to the global history of the Cold War by showing that “moral technocrats” during the military dictatorship in Brazil equated political subversion with sexual subversion: Anticommunist countersubversion included anxieties about gender, sex, and youth. South American Cold War dictatorships have been traditionally understood as modernizing projects but Cowan complicates the definition by exploring the moral panic, and consequent calls and attempts at repression, related to the sexual revolution, new forms of female sexual expression, and pornography. 

In this first book in English about the history of sexual commerce in Peru during the state regulation of brothels, Drinot tells a multilayered story of the complex interactions among sex workers, clients, the police, the government, feminists, and physicians. With a remarkable diversity of archival sources, Drinot explores topics that are frequently disregarded in the history of prostitution like the meanings of masculinity and the interaction between race and venereal diseases that, in the case of Lima, resulted in the stigmatization of Chinese migrants and indigenous men as infectious agents.

Using a truly interdisciplinary approach anchored in queer studies and affect theory, Frazier subverts the common approach to sex as privatized and located in individual subjectivity by looking at desire as a central component of political culture and power. The book explores a variety of Chilean political projects and actors throughout the twentieth century including feminists, the revolutionary left, and the military dictatorship to understand the ways in which both sexual and non-sexual practices and ideologies were intrinsically connected to emotions and ideas of pleasure and to sexualized and gendered discourses and experiences.

This is a solid edited volume that has contributions from leading scholars of Mexican history exploring straight and gay sexualities from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in different parts of the country. The chapters examine a wide range of interesting topics including cinema and movie going, public bathhouses, prostitution, elopement, and mariachi culture to untangle how masculinities are historically constructed and to interrogate the concepts of macho and machismo.

Naturally, when we think of sports in Latin America we first think of the region’s great athletes, from Pelé to Roberto Clemente, from Lionel Messi to Albert Pujols. But baseball and soccer players do not make sports meaningful on their own; many others – owners, sponsors, politicians, fans – make them what they are. This is the essential insight that guides Thomas Carter’s anthropology of Cuban baseball. He acknowledges the important role of the Communist regime in shaping the game, but he shows convincingly that the game belongs to its fans, for it is their passion that makes baseball important to Cuba, and it is their arguments about the game which make it a site for the negotiation of what it means to be Cuban.

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

Intelligence expert, professor, and former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America, Dr. Brian Latell, offers insight into Cuban Intelligence and their—largely—successful infiltration of the US security apparatus. Based on interviews with high-level defectors, the book delves into Castro’s mindset with assassination plots and uncover operations emanating from both sides of the Florida Straits as well as a behind-the-scenes look at some key events of the Cold War.

It’s very interesting to learn more about Castro’s mindset beyond the news headlines and how he managed to maintain power after the revolution. However, the real bombshell is an anecdote given by a former Cuban radio operator during the 1960s. I won’t give anything away, but it certainly adds fodder to the JFK assassination, giving one something to think about without falling into a deluge of conspiracy theories. Compelling reading from a true expert in the area.

Lincoln Cushing was born in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a State Department official with the U.S. Information Agency. I first met Lincoln at a conference on the Global Sixties and he later introduced me to his extensive poster and political graphics collection. This book, one of several by Cushing on political posters, documents Cuba’s extraordinary post-revolutionary poster art, which became renowned the world over in left-wing circles. Cushing has in-depth knowledge of the printing processes involved and was granted direct access to many of the most well-known graphic artists who stayed in Cuba to collaborate with the regime. If you’re looking for the best book discussing Cuba’s revolutionary poster art tradition, this is it.

What I appreciated most about this book is the clarity of the images and the close attention to historical detail that Cushing provides. He organizes the book thematically, focusing especially on the posters produced by OSPAAAL… show more.

I loved this children’s picture book because it involves a little girl with a big dream—to play drums in public—which was forbidden to girls in Cuba at the time.

Despite many obstacles, she practiced and practiced and finally reached her goal. I also love that this story was inspired by a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s tradition of the taboo on female drummers.

Tom Chaffin is a great writer of narrative history, and this, his exciting first book, covers the daring filibuster attempts between 1849 and 1851 by a native Venezuelan to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. López and many of his recruits died in two futile invasions of Cuba in 1850 and 1851, as his landings on Cuba’s shores were brutally repressed by Spanish military authorities. Lopez’s story fascinates on many levels, one of them being his contacts and intersections with key southern politicians of the time like John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Mississippi’s radical secessionist governor John A. Quitman, as well as New Yorker John L. O’Sullivan, the newsman often credited with coining the famous term “manifest destiny.” The book is great on the nuts and bolts of mounting filibuster expeditions and how filibuster leaders managed to launch their expeditions from U.S. soil despite attempts by U.S. legal officers and… show more.