With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view
Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is
a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the
peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped
shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the
early 1850s until the revolution of 1959.
Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records
and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion
pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral
connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S.
cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans'
sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the
cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the
middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times
and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their
American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not
be realized, the stage was set for revolution.
With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view
Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is
a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the
peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped
shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the
early 1850s until the revolution of 1959.
