Situation

• On July 26 1953, an attack on army barracks in eastern Cuba heralded the consolidation of a Cuban national resistance movement against the dictatorship of General Batista.
• A group of 111 young rebels attacked the army barracks, the Cuartel Moncada and Cuba’s second most important military fortress.
• Here are seven things I recommend reading and watching to better understand and mark the anniversary.

1. Fidel Castro’s defence speech

• He cited the 19th century writer and independence leader José Martí as the inspiration and intellectual guide.
• The speech ended with the words “Condemn me.
• The text of Castro’s speech was smuggled out in note form by a young Cuban journalist, Marta Rojas, and published after 1959.

2. El Mégano (1955)

• Released in 1955, the short documentary El Mégano highlighted the extreme poverty that afflicted rural Cuba.
• It was made by young Cuban filmmakers Julio García Espinosa, Jose Massip and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who were trained in the Italian neo-realist tradition.

3. The novels of Alejo Carpentier

• The Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, writing from exile in Caracas, published startlingly original novels with experimental forms.
• His novels, The Kingdom of this World (1949) and The Lost Steps (1953), offer fascinating explorations of the impact of colonialism and the wealth of cultures in the region.

4. The poetry of Nicolás Guillén

• Much of his work deals with the impact of colonialism, although it is explicitly political and often conversational in style.
• Collections such as West Indies Ltd (1934) offer an insight into the racialisation of power in pre-1959 Cuba.

5. The poetry of Roberto Fernández Retamar

• Roberto Fernández Retamar is best known for his seminal essay, Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America (1968), that reworked the Shakespearean figure of Caliban as a metaphor for anti-colonialism.
• But he also wrote poetry that underlined the humanist underpinnings of the rebel and revolutionary movements, such as Blessed Are the Normal (1962).

6. The Situation by Lisandro Otero (1963)

Lisandro Otero’s novel, The Situation, examined the bourgeoisie in 1950s Cuba. With its publication, Otero – a middle-class Cuban when the revolutionary government came to power in 1959 – marked his changing position to a writer in service of the Revolution.

7. Bertillón 166 by José Soler Puig (1960)

• José Soler Puig’s novel, Bertillón 166, narrated the events of the second half of the 1950s in Santiago de Cuba, including the growth of the 26 of July Movement.
• The events of July 26, 1953 marked just one of many stages in a complex and often violent exit from colonialism that lasted for half a century.
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• It finds that the majority (84%) of organizations will prioritize commercial objectives over sustainability in the face of economic challenges.
• The annual Reality Check report seeks to investigate how technology initiatives can benefit both sustainability and commercial objectives.
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• Hemsoth is a well-known force in enterprise IT publishing as editor in chief and founding creator of several long-standing publications.
• As part of the role, Hemsoth will help drive far-reaching strategies to bolster further growth across all Situation Publishing titles.
• "Nicole joins us from a background of enterprise technology publishing, where she has built publications and dominated her subject areas.
• She brings with her a trove of editorial and publishing experience, not to mention a depth of technical knowledge, that can help drive our publishing strategy into the future.

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