Here are 100 books that Sexual Revolutions in Cuba fans have personally recommended if you like Sexual Revolutions in Cuba. Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil

Natalia Milanesio Author Of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina

From my list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.

Natalia's book list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America

Natalia Milanesio Why Natalia loves this book

This book contributes greatly to the global history of the Cold War by showing that “moral technocrats” during the military dictatorship in Brazil equated political subversion with sexual subversion: Anticommunist countersubversion included anxieties about gender, sex, and youth. South American Cold War dictatorships have been traditionally understood as modernizing projects but Cowan complicates the definition by exploring the moral panic, and consequent calls and attempts at repression, related to the sexual revolution, new forms of female sexual expression, and pornography. 

By Benjamin A. Cowan ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Securing Sex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Drawing on little-tapped archival records, he shows that by midcentury, conservatives-individuals and organizations, civilian as well as military-were firmly situated in a transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s

Natalia Milanesio Author Of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina

From my list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.

Natalia's book list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America

Natalia Milanesio Why Natalia loves this book

In this first book in English about the history of sexual commerce in Peru during the state regulation of brothels, Drinot tells a multilayered story of the complex interactions among sex workers, clients, the police, the government, feminists, and physicians. With a remarkable diversity of archival sources, Drinot explores topics that are frequently disregarded in the history of prostitution like the meanings of masculinity and the interaction between race and venereal diseases that, in the case of Lima, resulted in the stigmatization of Chinese migrants and indigenous men as infectious agents.

By Paulo Drinot ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Sexual Question as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The creation of Lima's red light district in 1928 marked the culminating achievement of the promoters of regulation who sought to control the spread of venereal disease by medically policing female prostitutes. Its closure in 1956 was arguably the high point of abolitionism, a transnational movement originating in the 1860s that advocated that regulation was not only ineffective from a public health perspective, but also morally wrong. The Sexual Question charts this cyclic process of regulation and abolition in Peru, uncovering the ideas, policies, and actors shaping the debates on prostitution in Lima and beyond. The history of prostitution, Paulo…


Book cover of Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

Natalia Milanesio Author Of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina

From my list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.

Natalia's book list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America

Natalia Milanesio Why Natalia loves this book

Using a truly interdisciplinary approach anchored in queer studies and affect theory, Frazier subverts the common approach to sex as privatized and located in individual subjectivity by looking at desire as a central component of political culture and power. The book explores a variety of Chilean political projects and actors throughout the twentieth century including feminists, the revolutionary left, and the military dictatorship to understand the ways in which both sexual and non-sexual practices and ideologies were intrinsically connected to emotions and ideas of pleasure and to sexualized and gendered discourses and experiences.

By Lessie Jo Frazier ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Desired States as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Desired States challenges the notion that in some cultures, sex and sexuality have become privatized and located in individual subjectivity rather than in public political practices and institutions. Instead, the book contends that desire is a central aspect of political culture. Based on fieldwork and archival research, Frazier explores the gendered and sexualized dynamics of political culture in Chile, an imperialist context, asking how people connect with and become mobilized in political projects in some cases or, in others, become disaffected or are excluded to varying degrees. The book situates the state in a rich and changing context of transnational…


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Book cover of Trusting Her Duke

Trusting Her Duke by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.

Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…

Book cover of Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico

Natalia Milanesio Author Of Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina

From my list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of twentieth-century Argentina and a professor of modern Latin American history currently teaching at the University of Houston. Born and raised in Argentina, I completed my undergraduate studies at the National University of Rosario and moved to the United States in 2000 to continue my education. I received my M.A. in history from New York University and my Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, Bloomington. I have written extensively about gender, working-class history, consumer culture, and sexuality in Argentina. I am the author of Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture and Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina.

Natalia's book list on the history of sexuality in modern Latin America

Natalia Milanesio Why Natalia loves this book

This is a solid edited volume that has contributions from leading scholars of Mexican history exploring straight and gay sexualities from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in different parts of the country. The chapters examine a wide range of interesting topics including cinema and movie going, public bathhouses, prostitution, elopement, and mariachi culture to untangle how masculinities are historically constructed and to interrogate the concepts of macho and machismo.

By Víctor M. Macías-González (editor) , Anne Rubenstein (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, historians and anthropologists explain how evolving notions of the meaning and practice of manhood have shaped Mexican history. In essays that range from Texas to Oaxaca and from the 1880s to the present, contributors write about file clerks and movie stars, wealthy world travelers and ordinary people whose adventures were confined to a bar in the middle of town. The Mexicans we meet in these essays lived out their identities through extraordinary events--committing terrible crimes, writing world-famous songs, and ruling the nation--but also in everyday activities like falling in love, raising families, getting…


Book cover of The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball

Gregg Bocketti Author Of The Invention of the Beautiful Game: Football and the Making of Modern Brazil

From my list on sports in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Why am I passionate about this?

For almost thirty years, I have studied and tried to understand Latin America and the Caribbean. As a historian I have worked with manuscripts and newspapers and books, in archives and libraries and private collections, but I’ve learned my most important lessons elsewhere: on the baseball diamond in Holguín, Cuba, at pick-up cricket matches in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and in soccer stadiums in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. These books help give us a sense of the power of such places, the power of sports to reveal the region, and as such they’re a great place to start to understand it. 

Gregg's book list on sports in Latin America and the Caribbean

Gregg Bocketti Why Gregg loves this book

Naturally, when we think of sports in Latin America we first think of the region’s great athletes, from Pelé to Roberto Clemente, from Lionel Messi to Albert Pujols. But baseball and soccer players do not make sports meaningful on their own; many others – owners, sponsors, politicians, fans – make them what they are. This is the essential insight that guides Thomas Carter’s anthropology of Cuban baseball. He acknowledges the important role of the Communist regime in shaping the game, but he shows convincingly that the game belongs to its fans, for it is their passion that makes baseball important to Cuba, and it is their arguments about the game which make it a site for the negotiation of what it means to be Cuban.

By Thomas F. Carter ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Quality of Home Runs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. Thomas F. Carter contends that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. The Quality of Home Runs is Carter's lively ethnographic exploration of the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, Carter points out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security,…


Book cover of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Eric Zolov Author Of The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile

From my list on Latin American culture and politics in the 1960s-70s.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always been fascinated by the political aesthetics and political ferment of the 1960s. As someone born in the 1960s but not of the 1960’s generation, this has allowed for a certain “critical distance” in the ways I approach this period. I'm especially fascinated by the global circulation of cultural protest forms from the 1960s, what the historian Jeremy Suri called a “language of dissent.” The term Global Sixties is now used to explore this evident simultaneity of “like responses across disparate contexts,” such as finding jipis in Chile. In our book, The Walls of Santiago, we locate various examples of what we term the “afterlives” of Global Sixties protest signage. 

Eric's book list on Latin American culture and politics in the 1960s-70s

Eric Zolov Why Eric loves this book

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

By Tanya Harmer ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Beatriz Allende as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942-1977) - revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende - portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s.

Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the…


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Book cover of The Duke's Christmas Redemption

The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.

Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…

Book cover of Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, The CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Lachlan Page Author Of Magical Disinformation

From my list on spy books set in Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I lived in Latin America for six years, working as a red cross volunteer, a volcano hiking guide, a teacher, and an extra in a Russian TV series (in Panama). Having travelled throughout the region and returning regularly, I’m endlessly fascinated by the culture, history, politics, languages, and geography. Parallel to this, I enjoy reading and writing about the world of international espionage. Combining the two, and based on my own experience, I wrote my novel, Magical Disinformation, a spy novel set in Colombia. While there is not a huge depth of spy novels set in Latin America, I’ve chosen five of my favourites spy books set in the region.

Lachlan's book list on spy books set in Latin America

Lachlan Page Why Lachlan loves this book

Intelligence expert, professor, and former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America, Dr. Brian Latell, offers insight into Cuban Intelligence and their—largely—successful infiltration of the US security apparatus. Based on interviews with high-level defectors, the book delves into Castro’s mindset with assassination plots and uncover operations emanating from both sides of the Florida Straits as well as a behind-the-scenes look at some key events of the Cold War.

It’s very interesting to learn more about Castro’s mindset beyond the news headlines and how he managed to maintain power after the revolution. However, the real bombshell is an anecdote given by a former Cuban radio operator during the 1960s. I won’t give anything away, but it certainly adds fodder to the JFK assassination, giving one something to think about without falling into a deluge of conspiracy theories. Compelling reading from a true expert in the area.

By Brian Latell ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Castro's Secrets as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Published to glowing reviews, thisriveting narrative takes us back to when the Cuban Revolution was young and offers a new and surprising look at Fidel Castro. Drawing on interviews with high-level defectors from Cuban intelligence, Cuba expert Brian Latell creates a vivid narrative that chronicles Castro's crimes from his university days through nearly 50 years in power. As Cuba's supreme spymaster Fidel built up an intelligence system that became one of best and most aggressive anywhere. Latell argues that the CIA grossly underestimated the Cubans' extraordinary abilities to run moles and double agents and to penetrate the highest levels of…


Book cover of José Martí: A Revolutionary Life

Ilan Ehrlich Author Of Eduardo Chibás: The Incorrigible Man of Cuban Politics

From my list on biographies peeking into the lives of Cuban people.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was weaned on Cuban stories by my Havana-born mother and first visited the island in 1998. Since then, I earned a PhD in history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York–where I studied twentieth-century Cuban politics. While conducting research in Havana and Miami, I confirmed that legends were imbibed with the same fervor as café cubano. All histories are marked by tall tales, but Cubans are governed by theirs, inside and out, more than most. 

Ilan's book list on biographies peeking into the lives of Cuban people

Ilan Ehrlich Why Ilan loves this book

José Martí is Cuba’s secular saint who represents all things to all Cubans. He was the idol of Cuba’s first generation to come of age in independent Cuba, during the 1920s, who were taught he was a Christ-like figure who sacrificed himself for Cuban independence. Fulgencio Batista adored him, Fidel Castro revered him, and anti-communist Cuban exiles worshiped him. Even so, Martí was largely unknown on the island during his lifetime and at the time of his death in 1895. This biography of Martí depicts him as a human as well as a hero. 

By Alfred J. López ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked José Martí as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jose Marti (1853-1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the "Great Liberator" Simon Bolivar rivals Marti in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Marti was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the "apostle" of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.

In Jose Marti: A Revolutionary Life,…


Book cover of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

Rick Jervis Author Of The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer

From my list on take readers on a journey to unknown lands.

Why am I passionate about this?

Since I was old enough to read and watch screens, I’ve been fascinated by the promise of adventurous journeys. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, the Starship Enterprise, Star Wars – all occupied valuable real estate in my consciousness. That thirst for journey took me to Eastern Europe after college, where I worked as a freelancer, and to Baghdad and other Middle East cities, where I was a correspondent during and after the Iraq War. My sense of adventure continues today in my writing, drawing me to stories in colorful places, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, to try to make sense of the world and our place in it. 

Rick's book list on take readers on a journey to unknown lands

Rick Jervis Why Rick loves this book

The history of rum is, in so many ways, the history of Cuba. Bacardi shows this about as good as any book I’ve seen. I’m a first-generation Cuban-American (my parents left Cuba in the early ‘60s as teens and resettled to Miami).

So, it was particularly moving to follow the generational story of the Bacardis, the family from Santiago de Cuba who not only created what became the world’s best-known rum but whose patriarchs participated in or funded every coup, uprising, or political lurch in Cuba stretching back to the Spanish-American War.

I loved how Gjelten shepherds the reader from the horrors of the 19th-century war to the Cuban exodus following Fidel Castro’s ascent to power. It transported me to Cuba’s past and, more importantly, deepened my understanding of my own roots.  

By Tom Gjelten ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of…


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Book cover of Old Man Country

Old Man Country by Thomas R. Cole,

This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.

In these and other intimate conversations, the book…

Book cover of Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960

Ariel Mae Lambe Author Of No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War

From my list on understanding Cuba’s turbulent 1930s.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was a history major when I left for a Havana study abroad semester in 2003, but I had not studied Cuba. My introduction was a University of Havana class on the period of the Cuban Republic, in which I sat surrounded by Cuban students. My classroom learning was aided by the public history representations all around me in the city. I was hooked. I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Yale on Cuban activist intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a few years later went on the begin my doctorate in Latin American History at Columbia. I have been a historian of Cuba ever since, 20 years.

Ariel's book list on understanding Cuba’s turbulent 1930s

Ariel Mae Lambe Why Ariel loves this book

Samuel Farber grew up in Cuba and has been a prolific commentator on the island’s history and current events for decades. Although Revolution and Reaction is an older book, it is still a vital source for understanding Cuba’s Revolution of 1933 and its aftermath. Written less than two decades after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Farber’s book begins from the premise that analysis of that revolution was oversimplified because observers lacked sophisticated, complex understanding of the island’s decades leading up to that event. In particular, he identifies the Revolution of 1933 as “a major turning point,” and sets out to “analyze the interplay of… structural conditions and historical processes and events” surrounding and following that conflagration. In addition to this overarching analysis, Farber offers discussions of various critically important organizations and constituencies of Cuba’s popular politics.

By Samuel Farber ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 is an historical study of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and at the same time an explanation of Castro's rise to power. Rather than an event-by-event description of this upheaval. it is a careful consideration of the entire period from the Revolution of 1933 until early in 1960 when Cuba became openly and fully Communist. Applying the techniques of the sociological method to his examination of historical facts. Mr. Farber places as much emphasis on Cuban society during this crucial period as on Cuban politics. He examines the development of political groups in terms…


Book cover of Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil
Book cover of The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s
Book cover of Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

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