Studying Cuba: Historical and Theoretical Challenges and Opportunities

March 19, 2009 - 4:00 pm

Revisiting Cuban Sugar before the Revolution
Alan Dye, Barnard College, Columbia University

The Cuban Transition and Its Crossroads
Samuel Farber, Brooklyn College, CUNY

The Cuban Revolution: A Historical Perspective
José Moya, Barnard College, Columbia University

Notes on Cuba’s ‘Exceptionalism’
Mauricio Font, The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY

Cubanía and the Study of Freemasonry
Julie Skurski, The Graduate Center, CUNY

This panel is part of an effort at the Cuba Project/Bildner Center to take stock of major academic debates about the understanding of contemporary Cuban society historically and theoretically. The five panelists offer stimulating accounts and sharpening of issues regarding important aspects of republican Cuba, the 1959 revolution, and current the dynamics of succession or transition. Future panels will extend this discussion.

About the Speakers:
Alan Dye is Associate Professor of Economics. He has written and lectured extensively on Cuba, in particular US-Cuba trade policy. He is author of Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology, and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929 (Stanford University Press, 1998).

José Moya is Professor of History and director of the Barnard Forum on Migration. He is a native of Cuba and an expert on Latin American history and global migration. His award-winning book, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930, has been widely acclaimed as a model for migration studies.

Samuel Farber has also published extensively on Cuba, his most recent book being The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Mauricio Font is director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. He has published several papers and books on Cuba.