Main Library, Lecture Hall, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138
Cuba: Why the Revolution Still Matters
While the U.S. media may portray Cuba as a crumbling relic of twentieth-century socialism, it is in fact a dynamic and vibrant country that has both changed drastically in the past three decades, and continues to engage with local, regional, and global events in significant ways. This talk will look at the changes that have been happening in Cuba and explore how studying the Cuban Revolution can help us understand Latin American politics, migration, violence, global trade and economic issues, race, U.S. foreign policy, economic development, and many other issues that are both contemporary and pressing.
Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her books include Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Beacon Press, 2014; Mexican edition, 2014), A History of the Cuban Revolution (2011, 2nd ed. 2015), Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (2008), They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration (2007; U.S. Spanish edition 2011, Cuban edition 2013), and West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 (1996). She has also co-edited several anthologies including The People behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals and Human Rights/Bajo el manto del carbón: Pueblos y multinacionales en las minas del Cerrejón, Colombia (2007), The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2003, 2nd edition 2019) and Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (1998). She has been active in Latin America solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for several decades.