Showing titles in Caribbean & West Indies

During the 1960s and 1970s, the images of two men came to dominate the iconography of left-wing movements: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The story of the revolution these two men led in Cuba became a fable that drove and encouraged other revolutionary movements around the world. The Cuban Revolution is certainly astonishing. Beginning with fewer than 100 armed men, the Fidelistas took on a government that had a well-equipped army, air force, and navy. On paper, the handful of rebels stood no chance.

In late April 1902, Mount Pelee, a volcano on the Caribbean island Martinique, began to wake up. It emitted clouds of ash and smoke for two weeks until violently erupting on May 8. Over 30,000 residents of St. Pierre were killed; they burned to death under rivers of hot lava and suffocated under pounds of hot ash. Only three people managed to survive: a prisoner trapped in a dungeon-like jail cell, a man on the outskirts of town, and a young girl found floating unconscious in a boat days later.   

Built on sugar, slaves, and piracy, Jamaica’s Port Royal was the jewel in England’s quest for empire until a devastating earthquake sank the city beneath the sea. Apocalypse 1692 exposes the lives of the individuals who made late seventeenth-century Jamaica the most financially successful, brutal, and scandalously corrupt of all of England’s nascent American colonies.

Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

Ana Montes had spent seventeen years spying for the Cubans. She had been raised in a patriotic Puerto Rican household: Her father, a psychiatrist, was a former colonel in the US Army. Her sister worked as a translator for the FBI and helped break up a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. Her brother was also a loyal FBI agent. Montes impressed her bosses but in secret spent her breaks memorizing top-secret documents before sending them to the Cuban government. Retired FBI agent Peter J. Lapp explains the clues that led their team to catch one of the United States’ most dangerous spies.

The triumph of the Rebel Army in Cuba’s mid-20th-century war against Batista marked the beginning of a profound revolutionary process that reshaped the island’s destiny. Emerging outside the corrupt political systems that ruled before March 10, 1952, the revolutionaries sought to abolish the deep-rooted injustices inherited from Spanish colonialism and the neocolonial domination of the United States. Their victory on January 1, 1959, opened a new chapter in Cuban history—one filled with achievements, challenges, and the pursuit of genuine political and economic independence.

In this compelling, behind-the-scenes account, former top CIA officer and Cuba expert Brian Latell examines the extraordinary Castro brothers and the impending dynastic succession of Fidel's younger brother, Raul. Exploring the brothers' remarkable relationship, he reveals how Fidel and Raul have collaborated, divided responsibilities, and resolved disagreements for more than 46 years, a challenge to the notion that the little-known Raul has been an insignificant player.

Fidel Castro was more than just a politician. His is a story that involves heroic voyages through turbulent oceans, affairs with young women from all over the world, spies, assassins, betrayal, conquest, riots, and battles. He was controversial, inimitable, cruel, courageous, stubborn, disrespectful of human rights, and utterly indomitable. But most of all, he never gave up. And this is his story.

Pirates plundered other ships on the high seas while on the brig Crawford a cunning act of piracy was perpetrated by a veteran pirate leader. He slit his own throat to escape justice while three Spaniards he recruited stood trial with the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall presiding over the federal court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1827, a rare trial. Follow the action in a blow-by blow description of the murder and mayhem right into the courtroom.

This is Cuba is a true story that begins in the summer of 2009 when a young American photo-journalist is offered the chance of a lifetime - a two-year assignment in Havana. For David Ariosto, the island is an intriguing new world, unmoored from the one he left behind. From neighboring military coups, suspected honey traps, salty spooks, and desperate migrants to dissidents, doctors, and Havana’s empty shelves, Ariosto uncovers the island’s subtle absurdities, its Cold War mystique, and the hopes of a people in the throes of transition.

Havana is Cuba's soul: a mix of Third World, First World, and Other World. After over a decade of visits as a teacher, researcher, and friend, Karen Dubinsky looks past political slogans and tourist postcards to the streets, neighborhoods, and personalities of a complicated and contradictory city. Her affectionate, humorous vignettes illustrate how Havana's residents - old communist ladies, their skeptical offspring, musicians, underground vendors, entrepreneurial landlords, and poverty-stricken professors - go about their daily lives.

She wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into, the tedious cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world. But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, do get to see the outside world. Growing up in rural Claremont, working amid the hustle and bustle, lawn parties and houses of joy in Trenchtown, the two sisters take a chance and move to England with their husbands, that far-off land of riches, where they settle down to motherhood among the jazz cafés and bleak streets of Brixton.

Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of US-Cuban relations. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top-secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach", William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh reveal a 50-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, indicating a path toward better relations in the future.

Monkey Morales blends James Bond, Rambo, and Scarface—a concoction of danger, politics, and family drama told in its entirety for the first time by authors Sean Oliver and Morales's son, Ricardo Morales, Jr.

Secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere...

When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, it seemed as if much of the world didn’t quite know what to make of the revolutionary leader. The images of loyal Cubans in Havana openly crying in the streets stood in stark contrast to the Cuban exiles and their descendants just 90 miles away in Miami, Florida. While Cuban citizens were mourning, Cuban Americans were celebrating; they were laughing, dancing, and drinking to celebrate Castro’s demise. It seems Fidel Castro was just as polarizing in death as he was in life.

"Empowering Puerto Rico" by Sage Ellison is a crucial guide for anyone seeking to contribute to Puerto Rico's journey toward self-determination and community resilience. The book addresses the pressing challenges faced by those looking to support Puerto Rico's independence movement while providing practical strategies to engage effectively. Ellison outlines a roadmap to understanding Puerto Rico's complex history and current political landscape, enabling listeners to identify avenues for empowerment through community initiatives.

In 1609, two years after its English founding, colonists struggled to stay alive in a tiny fort at Jamestown. John Smith fought to keep order. When he left, desperate colonists ate lizards, rats, and human flesh. Meanwhile, the Virginia-bound Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda, the dreaded, uninhabited “Isle of Devils”. Bermuda became England’s second New World colony in 1612. A Tale of Two Colonies examines the existing sources on the colonies, sets them in a transatlantic context, and weighs them against circumstantial evidence.

The themes of the history of Cuba are as vast as they are inspiring. Cuba has stared death in the face throughout its rocky history, and most of the time it has gazed into the eyes of death and smiled. Over and over, oppressors have attempted to seize this island and its riches for their own selfish purposes. And over and over, revolutions have risen up to conquer in an attempt to return Cuba to its people.

Successful sea rovers were careful practitioners of a complex profession that sought wealth by stratagem and force of arms. Drawn from the European tradition, yet of various races and nationalities, they raided both ship and town throughout much of the world from roughly 1630 until 1730. Using a variety of innovative tactics and often armed with little more than musket and grenade, many of these self-described "soldiers and privateers" successfully assaulted fortifications, attacked shipping from small craft, and even circumnavigated the globe.