CANCELED: The Resurgence of the Right: Evaluating the impact of the Trump policies on the opinion towards Cuba and its government within the Cuban diaspora of South Florida

Date: 

Friday, February 28, 2020, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, Room S-216, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Guillermo J. Grenier, Professor of Sociology and Chair in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University

Moderator: Alejandro de la Fuente, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History; Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University

The work presents the results of the most recent Cuba Poll, (November 2018) and compares the details with the opinions compiled by the research project during the last twenty years (1997-2018) in an evaluation of the changes and political tendencies within the population. The policies of the Trump administration seem to have rekindled the isolationist preferences of the “old guard.” The newer arrivals and U.S. born Cuban-Americans maintain an attitude of engagement with the island. The analysis suggests that rather than guiding U.S. policy towards the island, Cubans in the U.S. follow the lead of Washington in its attitudes towards the homeland.

Guillermo J. Grenier is Professor of Sociology and Chair in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University, the State university of Florida in Miami. Born in Havana, Cuba, Dr. Grenier is one of the founders of the Miami School of social analysis, Dr. Grenier is the author of numerous books and dozens of articles on labor, migration, immigrant incorporation, and Cuban-American ideological profiles, particularly in the Greater Miami area and lectures nationally and internationally on his research. His books include Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles and Anti-Unionism in American Industry (Temple University Press, 1988), Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity and Social Change, edited with Alex Stepick (University of Florida Press, 1992), Employee Participation and Labor Law in the American Workplace, with Ray Hogler (Quorom/Greenwood, 1993), Newcomers in the Workplace: Immigrants and the Restructuring of the U.S. Economy, with Louise Lamphere and Alex Stepick, (Temple University Press, 1994. Winner of the Conrad Aresnberg Award, American Anthropological Association), Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States, with Lisandro Perez (Allyn and Bacon, 2002), This Land is Our land: Newcomers and Established Residents in Miami, with Alex Stepick, Max Castro and Marvin Dunn (University of California Press: 2003) and A History of Little Havana, with Corinna Moebius (History Press: 2015). His current book length manuscript and most recent articles explore the social dynamics of the Cuban-American ideology. Dr. Grenier initiated the FIU Cuba Poll in 1991 and has conducted regular surveys of the Cuban-American political attitudes roughly on a bi-annual basis ever since. The Cuba Poll the longest running research project tracking the ideological tendencies of the Cuban-American community in South Florida. His other current book project is on the creation and importance of the Camino del Cimarron in Cuba (Walking Cuba: El Camino del Cimarron). Dr. Grenier worked with UNEAC and the Ministry of Culture in Cuba to establish a trekking route from Sagua la Grande to Cienfuegos, tracing the steps of the Cimarron, Estaban Montejo, in recognition of the work of Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Run Away Slave, on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Grenier walked and created the path in 2016 and is in the process of establishing it as a historic itinerary for alternative tourism on the island.

A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente joined Harvard University after holding faculty appointments at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the University of Havana. His works on race, slavery, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is also the curator of two art exhibits dealing with issues of race: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Havana-Pittsburgh-New York City-Cambridge, Ma, 2010-12) and Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Santiago de Cuba-Havana, 2013, ongoing). Between 2007 and 2012 de la Fuente served as a Senior Co-Editor of Hispanic American Historical Review. Professor de la Fuente is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), published in Spanish as Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba, 1900-2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), winner of the Southern Historical Association's 2003 prize for “best book in Latin American history.” He is the editor of two bilingual (English-Spanish) volumes, Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Pittsburgh, 2013) and Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh, 2011) and of a special issue of the journal Debate y Perspectivas titled “Su único derecho: los esclavos y la ley” [“Their Only Right: Slaves and the Law”] (Madrid, 2004). In 2004, Law and History Review published a "forum" on de la Fuente's article “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited.” This article was also debated in the Workshop "Comparative Slavery in the Atlantic World: The Tannenbaum Thesis Revisited" of the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard. Professor de la Fuente is the founding Director of the Institute of Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard and the faculty Chair of the DRCLAS Cuban Studies Program. 

Presented in collaboration with Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research