In a new post, “The Past and Future of US_Cuba Academic Exchange,” the University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American Studies showcases EthnoCuba:

US-Cuba policy experts have likened the new regulations to Cuba travel policies under the administration of Bill Clinton. During this period, a generous grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation allowed CLAS to administer a program of scholarly exchange between Chicago faculty and graduate students, and scholars at the University of Havana, as well as other universities and cultural institutions in Cuba. Many of those who participated in the program went on to make significant contributions to the field, based on the research they conducted and scholarly connections that they formed as participants in the program.

Among them are cultural anthropologist Ariana Hernández-Reguant, now on the faculty of the School of Communications at UC San Diego, who writes on ideology, media, and cultural production in Cuba, and Paul Ryer, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Riverside, who studies Cuban culture and the African migrant communities on the island. Today, Hernández-Reguant and Ryer co-edit a collective blog, Etnocuba, where Cuba scholars discuss research in the field, their experiences on the island, and the latest happenings in Cuba and in the international Cuban community.

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Ethnocuba is pleased to announce the first book of 2011, Denise F. Blum’s Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Educating the New Socialist Citizen, University of Texas Press.   Here we reproduce some information from the publisher:

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana’s secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government’s attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba’s high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny…. Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro’s educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Denise F. Blum is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University.

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