Thread by @ASPertierra

Finally started it tonight (it's been a hectic few days).

Erudition that went into this is pretty impressive even for famously widely read scholar like Pérez. Lots of interesting social history here.

Also can't help but be wary of focus on US-Cuba relationship though

From what I can tell the US-Cuba focus of the text is part of a bigger meta-argument about how maybe the cultural ties between the two countries can serve as the basis for a reconciliation in the future, but I'm still not sure that justifies the centrality of US-Cuba so far

It's hard to argue against it to some extent because the US is obviously really key to understanding the formation of Cuban national identity and the evolution of Cuban nationalism. But I still feel wary about just how central the book is making it.

Calling the US “el norte” (the north) is a much older practice than I thought

Also interesting to hear that Cuban cigar factories spread not just to more obvious places like key west and New York but also Philly

Martí was not messing around, as he writes about Catholic church’s relationship with colonial Gov:

“When the [old] society has been crushed and another, new society has been created… Catholicism must perish”

I always kind of assumed the Cuban obsession with baseball started with the first US occupation of the island, but apparently it dates back to emigres returning from the US after the Ten Years War (Cuba’s first independence war, which failed)

Apparently the Spanish outright banned baseball for a time because they saw it as an “anti-Spanish activity” and even after the end of the ban conservatives saw it as a “threat” to “the integrity of [Spain]”.

Supporting baseball offered non-Spanish sport alternative

Reading about the War of 1895 in Cuba always makes me feel deeply sad. Reconcentration camps, the destruction of tons of farms and ranches, entire towns abandoned

A massive national trauma that culminated in independence being stolen away and a protectorate imposed instead

Ads for the Cuban Colonization Company, one of a number of projects that sprang up as Americans flooded into Cuba post-1898, buying up lands at low prices since so many Cubans had died or been bankrupted.

Does this mean Eduardo Chibás spoke English with a Jamaican accent?

There’s still lots of misplaced nostalgia for the Cuban economy of the 1950s, but this is really useful at getting at the structural crisis it faced and the stagnation everyday people lived through, even as the economy slowly diversified

Finally stopped reading. I really love this as a social history of US-Cuban connections and exchange

I still come away feeling like it overemphasizes it a bit and leaves big gaps in the construction of Cuban identity, but I don’t have to agree with its arg for book to be useful