Category Archives: Cuba

Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien

Posted on October 16, 2013 by wcd2

October 16, 2013 This week saw the passing of Oscar Hijuelos: guitar-playing, cake-loving (I suspect), also lover of bountiful, sometimes over-stuffed prose. His father was the morning-to-lunch shift cook at the Biltmore Hotel, so he definitely knew a thing or … Continue reading →

Posted in Caribbean literature, Cities, Contemporary novel, Cuba, Diaspora, Food in literature, Latin America, Latino/a literature, Music | Tagged A Simple Habana Melody, Cuba, Harlem, Mambo KIng Plays Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos, Our House in the Last World, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien | Leave a comment

Amiri Baraka: jazz side of the brain

Posted on July 18, 2013 by wcd2

July 18, 2013 I’ve always loved this account of jazz from Amiri Baraka: “Jazz enabled separate and valid emotional expressions to be made that were based on older traditions of Afro-American music that were clearly not not a part of … Continue reading →

Posted in African-American literature, African-American music, Cuba, Music | Tagged Amiri Baraka, Cuba Libre, Fidel Castro, jazz, Lucifer | Leave a comment

Mangoes: Richard Blanco, Sandra Cisneros

Posted on January 9, 2013 by wcd2

January 9, 2013 Conceived in Cuba, born in Spain, raised and educated in Miami– that’s Richard Blanco, as described by the inaugural planners. What poem would he be reciting on January 20? It’s not so easy to guess based on … Continue reading →

Posted in Americas, Cities, Contemporary literature, Cuba, Diaspora, Ethnicity, Food in literature, Global South, Latino/a literature, Poetry, Spanglish, Vernacular dialects | Tagged Barcelona, Bethel, Brazil, Chicago, Cienfuegos, City of a Hundred Fires, Cuba, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, Guatemala, House on Mango Street, Maine, Malta, Miami, Richard Blanco, Rome, Sandra Cisneros, Spain | Leave a comment

Spanish Civil War: Hughes and Hemingway

Posted on July 4, 2012 by wcd2

July 4, 2012 The Beinecke Library doesn’t have a great Hemingway Collection (most of his material is at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston), but I did find a rare photo, taken in Madrid in 1937, Hemingway with Langston Hughes, … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, African-American literature, Arabic, Caribbean literature, collaboration, Cuba, Cuban poetry, Ethnicity, Global South, Islam, Latin America, Letters, Libraries, Modernist poetry, Newspapers, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged Baltimore Afro-American, Beinecke Library, Cuba Libre, Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bells Tolls, General Franco's Moors, Gypsies, Havana, JFK Presidential Library, Langston Hughes, Michael Koltyov, Moors, Nicolas Guillen, Oklahoma, Spanish Civil War | 2 Comments

Hemingway’s Four Wives

Posted on June 27, 2012 by wcd2

June 27, 2012 Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Matha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh — I sometimes think of them as punctuation marks to the writing. And yet a good chunk of world history seems written into these marriages. Hadley was in Paris … Continue reading →

Posted in Americas, Caribbean literature, Cities, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, museums, Nobel Prize, Spanish, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged Battle of Ebro, Chinese Revolution, Collier's Magazine, Cuba, Fascists, Finca Vigia, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Guardian, Harley Richardson, Havana, Hemingway, Key West, Martha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh, Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Republicans, Siege of Madrid, Spain, Spanish Civil War, The Face of War, The Old Man and the Sea. Evwen MacAskil, World War I | 12 Comments

Wallace Stevens, amigo of Cuban writers

Posted on April 18, 2012 by wcd2

April 18, 2012 Wallace Stevens and Cristina García? Not the most obvious pairing. Yet it is Stevens’s poems that remained on García’s desk throughout the writing of Dreaming in Cuban, giving the novel its epigraph. And for Stevens, Havana is … Continue reading →

Posted in Caribbean literature, Comparative literature, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, Letters, Modernist poetry, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, Universities, world literature | Tagged " José Rodríguez Feo, "Academic Discourse in Havana", "Someone puts a Pineapple 'Together", Antillean, Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban, El Sol, Hartford, Havana, Key West, Madrid, Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens | 2 Comments