The Personal, the Public, and the Political: Civil Society and Early Twentieth Century U.S.-­Cuban Relations

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel examines cultural interchange and degrees of precariousness between Cuban civil society and representatives of the United States during the period 1898­-1958 in work carried out by emerging scholars. The papers in this panel particularly deal with the relationship between formal U.S. influences through civil society including commercial relations, the press, and educational institutions, and the ways that those influences played out in nominally private spheres including childrearing, religion, and the celebration of holidays. In the process, the papers in this panel explore the ways that cultural interchange could serve both to reproduce and contest relations of power.

Sub Track

• Transnationalism and Globalization

Chair

• Alejandro De La Fuente, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Santa Claus vs los Reyes Magos: Ups and Downs in the Expansion of U.S. Culture into Pre­revolutionary Cuba - Maikel Fariñas Borrego, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Inscribing Modernity: The Cuban Educational Association and the Reconfiguration of Cuban Society, 1898-1901 - William T Kelly, Rutgers University

• El intercambio intelectual entre Cuba y Estados Unidos: Un debate en y a través de «Ideales de una Raza» (1928­-1931) - Pedro Alexander Cubas Hernández, Faculdade Ateneu - FATE

• Salvation and Order: The Role of Missionaries in Establishing U.S. Dominance During Cuba’s Republican Era (1898­-1958) - Samuel R Finesurrey, Univeristy of North Carolina/Chapel Hill

Discussant

• Ann E Halbert-Brooks, University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill