Recent protests in Cuba have generated debate on the international Left. What were the protests about and how should progressives make sense of them? What do the protests mean for debates about anti-imperialism, socialism, solidarity and internationalism? Join us for this important discussion with three Cuban leftist intellectuals and activists.

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Speakers:

Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a Cuban intellectual and writer based in Matanzas, Cuba. She is a longtime contributor to the influential Cuban publication La Joven Cuba and is the author of several books, including Segundas lecturas: intelectualidad, política y cultura en la república burguesa, El (des)conocido Juan Marinello: estudio de su pensamiento político, and En tiempos de blogosfera.

Latest article:

“Cuba: el Partido único ante la crisis”

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is a Cuban-born scholar and writer. She is associate professor of Latin American cultural studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Centered on Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx experiences, her current academic, fiction and nonfiction works examine self-identification processes and the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge in the global African diaspora. She is the author of Utopia, Dystopia and Ethical Weightlessness: Cosmological Reconfigurations in post-Soviet Cuban Fiction (in Spanish) and is currently writing “On Being Blacks: Self-Identification Processes and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Cuban Cultural Production.”

Latest article:

“My Heart Aches for Cuba — and I Yearn for More Solidarity From the Global Left” (Truthout)

Samuel Farber was born and raised in Marianao, Cuba. He was active in the Cuban high school student movement against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, and has been involved in socialist politics for more than fifty years. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the author of several books on Cuba, including Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959 and The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (both published by Haymarket) and The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. He is a frequent contributor to New Politics magazine and is a member of Internationalism from Below.

Latest article:

“Why Cubans Protested on July 11” (In These Times)

Moderator:

Natalia Tylim is active in the NYC-DSA labor branch. She’s a restaurant worker and a founding member of DSA’s Restaurant Organizing Project.

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This event is co-sponsored by Internationalism from Below, Haymarket Books, and New Politics.