Publication Date: April 6, 2020
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, this book tells for the first time the remarkable story of how Cuba survived while the rest of the Soviet bloc crumbled.
Yaffe shows how Cuba has been gradually introducing select market reforms. While the government claims that these are necessary to sustain its socialist system, many others believe they herald a return to capitalism. Examining key domestic initiatives including the creation of one of the world’s leading biotechnological industries, its energy revolution, and medical internationalism alongside recent economic reforms, Yaffe shows why the revolution will continue post-Castro.
This is a fresh, compelling account of Cuba’s socialist revolution and the challenges it faces today.
Youth Activism and Solidarity The non-stop picket against Apartheid By Gavin Brown, Helen Yaffe
From April 1986 until just after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990, supporters of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group maintained a continuous protest, day and night, outside the South African Embassy in central London. This book examines how and why a group of children, teenagers and young adults made themselves ‘non-stop against apartheid’, creating one of the most visible expressions of anti-apartheid solidarity in Britain.
Drawing on interviews with over ninety former participants in the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy and extensive archival research using previously unstudied documents, this book offers new insights to the study of social movements and young people’s lives. It theorises solidarity and the processes of adolescent development as social practices to provide a theoretically-informed, argument-led analysis of how young activists build and practice solidarity.
Youth Activism and Solidarity: The Non-Stop Picket Against Apartheid will be of interest to geographers, historians and a wide range of other social scientists concerned with the historical geography of the international anti-apartheid movement, social movement studies, contemporary British history, and young people’s activism and geopolitical agency.
Author: Helen Yaffe
Publishers: Palgrave Macmillan, 20 February 2009. [Paperback], 368 pages
ISBN-10: 0230218210
ISBN-13: 978-0230218215
Based on new archival research and interviews with his contemporaries and colleagues, this book records Guevara's contribution to industrial organisation, economic management and socialist political economy debates as a member of the Cuban government. It rescues the history of his work as President of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialisation and Minister of Industries from 1959-1965.