Hearing Cuban Voices in a Time of Crisis

September 17, 2024 - 6:00 pm

Skylight Room
The Graduate Center, CUNY

The late historian Elizabeth Dore spent the last 20 years directing “Cuban Voices,” a Ford Foundation-sponsored oral history project collecting memories of the Cuban Revolution. In 2023, Duke University Press published her posthumous book, How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution, which tells modern Cuba’s story through the lives of seven islanders from the post-Soviet generation.

The 15-year project, which involved a large team of Cuban interviewers and over 100 interviewees, faced many challenges, including difficulty finding a publisher for Dore’s controversial findings. “The ghost of Oscar Lewis kept me awake at night,” she notes wryly in the book’s opening pages. Following Dore’s death in 2022, her children donated the project archive to Columbia University, where it is now digitally available to the public.

A lifelong socialist and principled scholar, Dore was dedicated to hearing diverse, critical, and often contradictory Cuban voices describing the Revolution’s challenges, rewards, and dilemmas. Her book captures the voices of those who built, supported, opposed, and even fled the Revolution.

This initial panel, the first of three inspired by Dore’s work, will focus on Dore’s personal and political history and intellectual legacy (Brooke Larson), an analysis of How Things Fall Apart (Ted A. Henken), and an introduction to Columbia’s “Cuban Voices” oral history collection by the archivist who prepared it for public access (Flor Barceló).

Brooke Larson is a Professor of History (Emerita) at Stony Brook University, SUNY. She co-founded the Latin American Caribbean Center and has taught a wide range of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, including Colonial Latin America, Race and Nation, European/Indian Encounters, and Comparative Frontiers. Her research spans five centuries of colonial and modern history, focusing on the Andes. Her latest book, The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and the Indigenous Education in 20th-century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), is an ethnographic history exploring the epic battle over indigenous education, its implications for Bolivian nation-building projects, and the contested meanings of race and citizenship throughout the 20th century.

Ted A. Henken (Ph.D., Tulane University) is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY. He has conducted sociological research in Cuba and interviewed numerous Cubans over the past 25 years. Based on this extensive research, he has published several books, articles, and profiles, including Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy (2021, co-edited with Sara García Santamaría) and Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape (2015, co-authored with Archibald Ritter). He is currently working on an oral history of Cuban independent journalism, tentatively titled Saturn’s Children: The 60-Year Struggle to Reestablish a Free Press in Cuba (under contract with the University of Florida Press).

Flor Barceló is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. They hold a Licenciatura in Letras (BA) from the University of Buenos Aires, where they concentrated on Literary Theory. Since 2015, Flor has worked as a high school teacher and a community college professor. Their research interests include the construction of queer archives, DIY publications (magazines and fanzines) produced by LGBT+ activists from Latin America and Spain, subjectivity and grievable lives under neoliberalism, and literature written during the AIDS epidemics. Flor interned at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library during the Summer of 2023, where she processed the interviews that led to Elizabeth Dore’s book How Things Fall Apart.

TO REGISTER send email to bildner@gc.cuny.edu