Much of the external literature on the Cuban Revolution has been characterised by two dichotomies between ‘exceptionalism’ on the hand and the application of non-Cuban paradigms on the other, and that between Fidel-focussed interpretations and more systemic perspectives. This article examines the evolution of these dichotomies, from initial enthusiasm or condemnation, through an emerging awareness of a historical dimension, a focus on the social revolution, and new disenchantments, to the emergence of a less polemical attention to detail before the post-1991 return to type. In the light of this trajectory, new approaches are suggested to break with these patterns, while acknowledging the challenges for exogenous research.

This article examines the ways in which Cuba's revolution shaped the changing politics of the Left in the United States. Using critical strategies of transnationalism, it illustrates how a dialogue developed between US activists and Cuban cultural producers, and reveals how Cuba's revolutionary discourse inflected the radical shift towards Third World nationalism. As the post-Bandung global moment brought a network of new political and cultural affiliations, Cuba's state apparatus invested in the manufacture and dissemination of tricontinental politics worldwide. This alternative moral and political imaginary lent authority to Havana's status as leader of the Third World and drew global attention to Cuba's revolutionary model in new thinking on post-colonial identity and culture. This new thinking imbibed the US Left's humanistic turn which challenged standard boundaries of race, class and nation. The dialectical nature of Cuban political discourse and social activism in the United States changed Cuban exigencies while it enticed US dissidents to experience the exception in the western hemisphere that fought for the greater moral good.

This article seeks to explain why such a wide range of Cuban cultural producers have opted to remain on the island and work ‘within the revolution’, despite all the notorious problems caused by state censorship, political persecution and material shortages. It accounts for the importance of culture to the legitimacy of the revolutionary government; suggests that the regime has drawn effectively on the long-established significance of culture in Cuba's radical tradition; and illustrates the extent to which the government has backed up its rhetoric of commitment to culture for all with a sustained policy of support for institutions, organisations and events across the island. The main argument is that culture has been a key element – perhaps the only successful element – in the revolution's attempt to implement an alternative model of modernity that was distinctive not only from the Western capitalist version but also from that promoted by the Soviet Union.

This paper analyses recent debates on race and racism in Cuba in the context of changing economic and social conditions in the island. Since the early 1990s, and largely in response to the negative effects that the so-called Special Period had on race relations, a group of artists and intellectuals began denouncing the persistence of racist practices and stereotypes in Cuban society. Although they are not organised around a single program or institution, these musicians, visual artists, writers, academics and activists share common grievances about racism and its social effects. It is in this sense that they constitute a new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. It is too early to fully assess the impact of this movement, but these artists and intellectuals have been largely successful in raising awareness about this problem and bringing it to the attention of authorities and the Cuban public.

Cuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade.

This paper argues that the household has become a renewed space of significance for Cuban women in the post-Soviet period. It draws from existing scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the city of Santiago de Cuba to discuss the effect of post-Soviet crisis and reform upon women's domestic practices, the management of domestic economies, and longstanding gender ideals that link women to the domestic sphere. Physical, economic and social factors leading to post-Soviet Cuban women's increased concentration upon the household are argued to be both the result of pre-existing social orientations towards households as a womanly space and a response to specific politico-economic shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This article attempts to analyse the nature of Cuban policymaking during the period of economic ‘adjustment’ since the collapse of the Soviet bloc by focusing on one aspect: the opening to foreign capital. It outlines the widely-accepted characterisation of policy as a cyclical process and identifies the assumptions about the policy-making process that underlie it. Citing data on the changes in economic conditions and the sequencing of policy towards foreign capital in the post-1990 period, it suggests that policy-making can be better understood as an evolutionary process. This conclusion has implications for the way in which we understand the renewed wave of reforms launched in March 2008.