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Cuba: A Reading List

My Life; a spoken autobiography, Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro Handbook, George Calloway

Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition, Ernesto Che Guevara

Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History, Tony Perrottet

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, Julia E. Sweig

The Real Fidel Castro, Leycester Coltman, Julia E. Sweig

The Yankee Comandante: Love and Death in the Cuban Revolution, Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss

Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, Jorge Edwards, Octavio Paz (Preface)

We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Helen Yaffe

Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer

The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, Anthony DePalma

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, T.J. English

Cuba: A History, Hugh Thomas

Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, Socialism in Cuba, Leo Huberman, Paul M. Sweezy

Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence, Phillip Brenner

The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, Joan Mellen

The Cuban Counterrevolution, Jesus Arboleya, Rafael Betancourt (Contributor)

Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Rojas

Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, Lillian Guerra

The Island Called Paradise: Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts, Philip D. Beidler

The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky (Editor), Barry Carr (Editor), Pamela María Smorkaloff (Editor)

Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion, The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History, David H. Brown

Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Ned Sublette

Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, Robin D. Moore

La Belle Créole: The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris, Alina García-Lapuerta

Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba, Sarah Rainsford

Travelers’ Tales Cuba: True Stories, Tom Miller

The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, Alan Ryan (Editor), Christa Malone (Editor)

                          Literature

Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights,

The Assault, Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, Before Night Falls, Autoepitaph: Selected Poems, Reinaldo Arenas

Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia

The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Carlos Hernandez

Cobra, Firefly, From Cuba with a Song, Footwork: selected poems, Written on a Body, Christ on the Rue Jacob, Severo Sarduy

The Kingdom of This World, The Chase, Alejo Carpentier

Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke, Mea Cuba, Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Adiós Hemingway, Havana Fever, Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Woman in Battle Dress, Sea of Lentils, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez Rojo

Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora, Eduardo González

The Distant Marvels, Chantel Acevedo

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, A Simple Habana Melody, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Oscar Hijuelos

In the Cold of the Malecon and Other Stories, Tales from the Cuban Empire, Antonio José Ponte

My Last Name/El Apellido, Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Márquez

The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words, Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems,

Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings, Soaring Earth: A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air, Margarita Engle

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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