Robert Whitney Boydas poetry reflects on the various stages of love and companionship, along with some humor about wrestling and fears of the unknown. Most of the poems deal with love, and with it, the agony of being separated from each other by the actions of one of the parties. He details the inevitable process of aging, the path of which is not always smooth, and the normal apprehension about the future. The poems are of contemporary life in the complicated century where sometimes the electronic and communication devices tend to overwhelm you. Boyd sings the songs reflecting the present day with all its foibles and complaints, but with a grain of hope for the future.
Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a remarkable transition, moving from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. The events of this period are crucial to a full understanding of the nation's political evolution, yet they are often glossed over in accounts that focus more heavily on the revolution of 1959. With this book, Robert Whitney accords much-needed attention to a critical stage in Cuban history. Closely examining the upheavals of the period, which included a social revolution in 1933 and a military coup led by Fulgencio Batista one year later, Whitney argues that the eventual rise of a more democratic form of government came about primarily because of the mass mobilization by the popular classes against oligarchic capitalism, which was based on historically elite status rather than on a modern sense of nation. Although from the 1920s to the 1940s politicians and political activists were bitterly divided over what "popular" and "modern" state power meant, this new generation of politicians shared the idea that a modern state should produce a new and democratic Cuba.
Cuba is widely recognized as a major hub of the transatlantic Hispanic and African diasporas throughout the colonial period. Less well known is that during the first half of the twentieth century it was also the center of circum-Caribbean diasporas with over 200,000 immigrants arriving mainly from Jamaica and Haiti. The migration of British West Indians was a critical part of the economic and historical development of the island during the twentieth century as many of them went to work on sugar plantations. Using never-before-consulted oral histories and correspondence, Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita examine this British Caribbean diaspora and chronicle how the immigrants came to Cuba, the living and working conditions they experienced, and how they both contributed to and remained separate from Cuban culture, forging a unique identity that was not just proudly Cuban but also proudly Caribbean.
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