In July of 1995, I began an assignment as a social worker for Catholic Social Services’ Refugee Resettlement Program in Mobile, Alabama. I was hired for the specific task of receiving and resettling Cuban refugees from the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in southeastern Cuba, where over 20,000 Cuban balseros (rafters) were still being […]

Notes1 In “Fitzgibbon Survey of Latin American Democracy: An Update of the 2000 Tabulations,” Emporia State University Political Science Professor Phil Kelly asked whether “certain reformist and/or radical states, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, [are] given higher scale rankings because the majority of survey participants reflect a ‘liberal’ bias as was seen in the 1985 […]

Notes1 Partial results from the 2000 global census round, recently compiled by the University of Sussex’s Development Research Centre on Migration, plus examination of recent official Cuban statistics on emigration, are used in this paper to provide an approximate estimate of the Cuban-origin population residing abroad. These statistics are complemented with selected demographic and socioeconomic […]

Small-scale, tropical agricultural systems worldwide are often subsistence-oriented, resource-limited, and typically integrate multiple crops and livestock to form complex systems of biological diversity. Underlying these similarities are dynamic interrelationships between humans and the biophysical environment. As dynamic systems, they are subject to perturbation and change. This study of such a system in western Cuba presents […]

The Cuban archipelago is made up of 4,195 islands, cays, and islets, grouped into four main sub-archipelagos: Los Canarreos, De Los Colorados, Jardines de la Reina, and Jardines del Rey. Until the late 1980s, Jardines del Rey, the largest of the Cuban sub-archipelagos with some 400 cays and islets, had mostly pristine landscapes of mangroves, […]