For more than a decade, filmmaker Michelle Memran worked creatively with Fornés on what would become the award-winning 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up. The celebrated and widely screened film distilled some 400 hours of footage into a 79-minute exploration of a friendship and creative collaboration that began during the period when Fornés had “stopped writing” but had not yet received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Pearl and Memran’s co-written piece continues the collaborative process of critical reflection and creative compilation that guided the post-production phase of the film, when Katie Pearl joined the project as producer. Interweaving unused scenes from the film – transcribed from the original footage and presented here in “screenplay” form – with their own experiential observations, Pearl and Memran’s experimental memoir “documents” the complexity of María Irene Fornés’s role as “elder” during the last two decades of her life, a period beginning in 2000 and continuing through to Fornés’s death from dementia-related causes in 2018.

Alisa Solomon excavates the fragmented evidence of María Irene Fornés’s intimate relationship with noted public intellectual Susan Sontag. Arguing that the two came together at a pivotal time in their lives, Solomon demonstrates how Fornés and Sontag galvanized each other as they embarked on their disparate professional careers as writers, producing a persistent synergy in spite of their radically different backgrounds and career trajectories. Carefully charting how Fornés and Sontag cryptically acknowledged and deliberately effaced their history as romantic and creative partners, Solomon argues the relationship was foundational to both writers as not so much a matter of mutual influence as confluence rippled through both of their careers long after their romantic relationship ended.

This chapter discusses Caribbean antifascism’s roots and its connection to the Comintern’s regional radical network, tracing the evolution of the movement from its anti-imperialist origins as early as 1924. The discussion provides specific examples as to how visions of fascism and antifascism were created for and/or adapted to the local and regional realities through an anti-imperialist prism. The study also maps the transnational and transatlantic journey of an antifascist discursive formula from its origins as a Caribbean hologram equating fascism with imperialism, to its official incorporation to the Communist internationalist lexicon as Comintern policy in 1935, and finally to its application as a propaganda formula during the Spanish Civil War. In the long run, while Caribbean antifascism’s anti-imperialist sensibilities may have been lost in translation in the mayhem of theoretical battles and iron-fist, Stalinist policies, the gist of the messages survived the turmoil, and perhaps still lingers on in our culture even to this day.

In a certain sense all theatre is an act of translation. We translate written and devised texts into stage action, characters are translated into beings, images are translated into physical spaces. In this essay, Adam Versényi explains how, because she was a playwright writing primarily in her second language throughout her career, María Irene Fornés was simultaneously writing and translating, with each practice inextricably linked to the other. Drawing upon his on own professional practice as a dramaturg and translator, Versényi argues that not only does an understanding of translation provide greater access to Fornés’s creative process but also that a careful reading of Fornés’s work informs the topic of translation itself. As example, Versényi explores how Fornés’s playwrighting method and the process of theatrical translation affect two notably distinct translations of Fornes’s The Conduct of Life (1985).

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

In the main, critics have regarded Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) as a tragic mulatto detached from enslaved black people yet unable to join the ranks of the white literary elite. This essay takes an innovative approach to Plácido by reading his poetry as transculturated colonial literature rather than a poor imitation of European aesthetics. Plácido produced poems situated at the crossroads between classical European deities and enigmatic African spiritual practices. I argue that Plácido transculturated Mars, the Roman god of war, with the Yoruba principles of the divine masculine most often attributed to the orisha Oggún. In Oggún philosophy, the divine masculine is the capacity to exploit the powers of devastation and dissension either to ensure the survival of a given polity or to remake it entirely. Plácido appropriated Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, and most prominently Mars, the Roman god of war to reimagine Cuban resistance as a just war between good and evil. Plácido’s portrayal of ancient deities divested of sacred authority enabled him to convey an alternative God concept without contravening censorship guidelines that forbade any criticism of Catholicism, the official religion of the empire.

Reconsidering nineteenth-century Cuban history from the perspective of African-identified people requires that we read Cuban history as tragedy. While there were several important socio-political transitions during Cuba’s long nineteenth century, including slave emancipation in 1886, de-Africanization, or the processes by which colonialists and their successors endeavored to corral, contain, control, co-opt, and eliminate African influences in Cuba persisted well into the twentieth century. Even though these repressive efforts were never fully successful, centering traditional forms of resistance alone leads us to ignore alternative paths/ideas/options that surfaced in response to White supremacy. Simply put, these alternatives garner less attention because they do not fit our narrative constructs and are hard for us to “think.” Centering de-Africanization as process offers a helpful corrective to progressivist and romantic narratives. This essay situates one historical case study in a differently conceived nineteenth-century Cuba to explore forms of resistance that were effectively silenced at the time of their enunciation. In exploring the methodological approaches to understanding this specific case, the essay contributes to a rising trend in Latin American and Latinx studies that centers the importance of Afro-diasporic peoples’ roles in shaping the histories of Latin America and of Latinx experiences in the United States.

This chapter considers the promises and potential pitfalls of the digital era for Latino/a/@/x/e literature. It begins with an exploration of the multiple iterations of the virtual project/website El Puerto Rican Embassy over the last twenty-nine years as a way to think with evolving attitudes about Puerto Rican nationalism and its relationship to Nuyorican identity. The conversation then shifts to think about the potential dangers of relying on digital archives as safe repositories for Latino/a/@/x/e history. After all, with these new forms of digital power, come new responsibilities, including the need for a steady stream of resources. As exciting as the possibilities for redefining Latin@s online may be, the precarity that Adela Vázquez, Jaime Cortez, and Pato Hebert’s queer, Cuban comic Sexile (2004) currently faces makes clear that the expectation that cyberspace serve as a catchall for the margins may foster a false sense of security that risks reproducing new forms of digital exile.

Under the umbrella of solidarity missions, since the early 1960s, Cuba’s socialist government has dispatched tens of thousands of medical brigades to geographically diverse locales. This approach to humanitarian medical aid, according to the Cuban government, is an act of solidarity grounded in an ethos of social justice. The magnitude of this brand of humanitarianism far outpaces the most iconic faces of the contemporary global health industry. Despite these important if not groundbreaking roles in primary healthcare, for most readers in North America and Europe, Cuba likely occupies the rhetorical and discursive space of the singular “case study” or “alternative,” if it even makes an appearance. How do we understand the absence–presence of Cuba’s medical-internationalism efforts as a non-event in the global health landscape? This chapter explores the structuring logics shaping global health’s dominant script – the problematics, concepts, methods, and practices – that render different imaginaries of care and aid illegible, thus unthinkable.

The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

The effects of sanctions have been extensively studied in both the political science and economic literature, but with little appreciation of their consequences for third countries and the firms in these countries. This is an important oversight, given that secondary sanctions have the stated objective of holding third countries not party to the original sanctions regime to account for their actions. This chapter surveys the economic theory behind the possible effects of sanctions on firms in third countries and then extends this to the specific case of secondary sanctions. Looking at the US sanctions regimes on Cuba and Iran, and using the scarce empirical evidence available, this chapter concludes that secondary sanctions are likely to amplify the effect of sanctions. However, their effects will depend on the particular firm, the overall trading relationship between the third party and the sanctioned party, and the relationship between the firm and the sanctioning country.

A few years into the post-Cold War era, the adoption by the US of sanctions legislation geared to penalise foreign firms investing in countries under Washington’s sanctions elicited resistance from European allies, which coalesced into an unusually unified response by the EU. This response notably combined elements from the Community trade toolbox and that of the répertoire of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In the event, a negotiated solution to the conflict could be reached. However, secondary sanctions resurfaced some fifteen years into the new millennium, most conspicuously in the framework of the settlement of the Iran nuclear proliferation crisis, pitting Brussels and Washington again. Notably, the use of secondary sanctions after Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action threatened its survival altogether, jeopardising a key CFSP goal. This chapter explains the background to the current political conflict over secondary sanctions, illuminates the political dynamics that inform it, presents the tools developed for addressing the dilemma they pose to the EU and assesses recent developments.

Chapter 5 turns to the law in action and the politics of litigation involving adjudication and interpretations of the law. The chapter opens with an examination of the Council of the Indies’ initial judgment in September 1784 on the plaintiffs’ case. Based on a narrow reading of slave law and on pro-slavery policies, the ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ controversial claim to collective freedom and to the criteria of freedom presented by the plaintiffs’ brief but allowed hearings to determine ambiguous cases and stipulated the criteria to be utilized by colonial courts in those cases. The ruling gave way to a cascade of hearings and legal actions in lower-level colonial courts and to a conflict of interpretation over the imperial ruling. Ordinary enslaved and fugitive cobreros dispersed throughout the island became direct participants in the judicial arena at this point as they directly engaged in the politics of litigation for freedom in colonial courts. The chapter shows the way imperial and colonial authorities centralized and controlled judicial outcomes but also the room for maneuvering available in some cases.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.