The Cubalogues - by Todd F Tietchen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"As an early supporter of the original non-Communist Cuban revolution, I much appreciate this story of the involvement of American beat poets with the Fidelista cause. Dubbed the 'Cubalogues, ' their interaction with Cuban editors and poets is a unique part of Cuban cultural history, and it needs to be told to an American audience."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti"An exciting, timely, and wide-ranging intervention which reassesses the Beat Movement, the Beat canon, Cold War politics, and the Cuban Revolution. . . . A tight, lively and skillful presentation of the topic."--Sarah MacLachlan, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Chicano/a Literature and Culture Immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Havana fostered an important transnational intellectual and cultural scene. Later, Castro would strictly impose his vision of Cuban culture on the populace and the United States would bar its citizens from traveling to the island, but for these few fleeting years the Cuban capital was steeped in many liberal and revolutionary ideologies and influences. Some of the most prominent figures in the Beat Movement, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Amiri Baraka, were attracted to the new Cuba as a place where people would be racially equal, sexually free, and politically enfranchised. What they experienced had resounding and lasting literary effects both on their work and on the many writers and artists they encountered and fostered. Todd Tietchen clearly documents the multiple ways in which the Beats engaged with the scene in Havana. He also demonstrates that even in these early years the Beat movement expounded a diverse but identifiable politics.

Review Quotes

"Focusing on Beat travel writings set in Cuba during the Cuban revolution, [Tietchen] reveals a social awareness in the US literary movement. . . . This first-rate book contributes to understanding U.S. politics (both in the Cold War and after) as well as Bohemian writing. . . . Essential."--Choice

"Offers a sweeping perspective that includes freedom of speech, black nationalism, and sexuality and gender politics. . . . A tightly-focused, compelling narrative about the encounter between mid-century American radicals and the intense, blossoming of promise in the political landscape of revolutionary Cuba."--Journal of Modern Literature

"This delightful incursion into Beat studies opens entirely new territory through its examination of Beat writers' treatment of Castro's revolution in Cuba."--American Book Review

"Tietchen argues that in the immediate aftermath of the Castro revolution, Cuba was a collaborative imaginative space . . . for the creation of Beat counterdiscourses on imperialism, race, sexual freedom, and democracy."--American Literature

"Tietchen's book is well researched, smartly argued, and quite successful at rehabilitating an unfair popular image of the Beats as apolitical deadbeats. He situates the Cubaloguers skillfully and interestingly among the ideological and political battles of that time."--Caribbean Review of Books

About the Author

Todd F. Tietchen is assistant professor of English at Union County College in Cranford and Elizabeth, New Jersey.