Welcome to Cuban Studies

“HERE ANY TOURIST IS FREER THEN WE ARE”

As happens in most majority-poor countries dominated by authoritarian regimes, foreigners in Cuba often enjoy far more freedom than local citizens. To anyone familiar with Fidel Castro’s prior claims to have created the most anti-imperialist, socially just, and therefore “freest” country in the world, there was a palpable difference in the Special Period when the […]

THE SHOES OF DON TOMÁS

On a single night in 1961, the Cuban Communist Party carried out a “lightning operation” that physically removed all evidence from Havana’s iconic monuments of what leaders considered Cuba’s imperialist past. Famous examples included the toppling of the massive brass eagle that once topped the memorial to the Maine, an American naval vessel. Its destruction […]

THE MYTH OF CUBA’S GRATEFUL INDIAN

Whether applied to its native people or the descendants of enslaved Africans, a long-standing fiction survives in Cuba that non-whites were deeply grateful to individual whites, as this monument argues, or whites in general, for having “saved them” from either their own savagery and “incultura” [inferior culture], or from the injustices perpetrated on them by […]

100 SHADES OF BROWN

As the granddaughter of Agustín Guerra, an orphan who worked as a field hand until he could establish a tobacco farm of his own in the 1920s, I confess to loving Cuba’s exquisite cigars—even though my father, Agustín’s son, cringed when first I told him I had visited several state-owned cigar factories in the 1990s. […]

“ART IS A WEAPON OF THE REVOLUTION”

First announced by Fidel Castro in 1967, what might have been a mere off-the-cuff remark in any other context quickly became a decades-long policy and slogan that demanded adherence from all artists, writers, and cultural workers. Left up to the state’s censors at the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, top militants of the Communist […]

Welcome to Cuban Studies at the University of Florida! Together, the History Department, Smathers Library and the Center for Latin American Studies at UF are committed to uncovering and sharing knowledge of Cuba with the world. Visit this site to learn about and experience Cuba through visual galleries of unique historical photographs and photo essays, filmed oral interviews, and links to specially selected treasures from UF’s vast library collections and private archives on Cuba.
— Professor Lillian Guerra and Miguel Torres Yunda

Ex-Libris

On March 21, Dr. Lillian Guerra and Martha Kapelewski presented the Smathers Libraries newest collection. The Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández collection contains documents, letters, newspaper articles, photographs, slides, correspondence, films, documentaries, and ephemera. Guayo was one of the premiere cameramen and journalists of pre-revolution Cuba. Guayo formed Noticuba, a news documentary production company that featured his documentaries in theaters.

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Conversatorio Cubano

In this two-part interview, Atlantic historian Richard Denis, Ph.D. Candidate in History at Florida International University discusses the importance of journalism to Cuban history.

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Gems of the Archive

On April 9, 1948, the assassination of Liberal Party presidential candidate and congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán provoked an incendiary riot in downtown Bogotá. Military and police repression combined with violent protests left over three thousand dead. Working as a photojournalist who had planned to cover an inter-American diplomatic congress, Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández witnessed and fearlessly documented these tragic events.

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