This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro: The Playboy Comandante
The comandante produced ideological fantasies on a mass scale within the context of the Cold War which led to an exotic, sexy, and happy vision of Cuba.
...moreThis Week in Books: To Have Been There Then
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
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The Real Fidel
In a flash nearly 200,000 Cuban refugees understood that we’d lost our homeland and had better get used to life en la Yuma. We packed for six weeks, and we stayed for six decades.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For the office drones struggling to come back after the four-day weekend, take heart in James Livingston’s essay for Aeon considering whether work is necessary in our present age. Here at The Rumpus, Helen Betya Rubinstein expresses a sense of dislocation that’s familial and personal in the face of our newly reinforced election-cycle gender binary. For Vogue, […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
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Baseball with Mister Way
When summer arrived, the butler for the newcomer the villagers called “Mister Way”—they couldn’t pronounce Hemingway—came into town to fetch the boys. He left the house and followed the long drive to the gate, turned into the village, gathered the boys from their homes and led them back to the Finca, where they found a baseball diamond marked out in the grass.
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The Rumpus Interview with Cristina García
Writer and journalist Cristina García talks about her latest novel, King of Cuba, how she came to write about Fidel Castro as an octogenarian, and returning to Cuba after more than a decade’s absence.
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poetry Wars
One of the more mind-blowing get-togethers to take place in the last ten years occurred in Havana, Cuba, when Fidel Castro led a unique international conference that brought together participants in the Cuban missile crisis from the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and Cuba to discuss the events of October 1962. Events that gave the […]
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The Way We Left Cuba
In chess, it’s called zugzwang: you’re forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Welcome to the daily struggle of every face you meet in Cuba.
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