Editor's Note/Nota del editor

I write this editorial note in gloomy times, under the shadow of almost one year of the presidency of Donald Trump. It has been quite the year, rich in daily insults; a Goebbelian disregard for the truth; crass nepotism; vicious xenophobia; and a vulgar, exhibitionist racism of the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan kind. That is, of the worst possible kind. This is Trump's America, where some people feel entitled to publicly spew anti-Semitic diatribes and where black bodies are frequently on the receiving end of police bullets. Bigotry now lives in the White House, basking in arrogance and ineptitude. As I have written elsewhere, the White House is now the Whites' House. Make America great again.

To the community of authors, editors, and readers of Cuban Studies, the Donald Trump presidency has been particularly harmful. Some of the administration's new policies toward Cuba, particularly the drastic reduction of diplomatic personnel, has made it nearly impossible to do our work, which depends on frequent contacts, collaboration, and exchange. For our Cuba-based colleagues it is now extremely difficult, expensive, and cumbersome, to obtain a visa to attend academic events in the United States. To do so, they must travel to a third country to be interviewed and wait for the visa, which is not guaranteed. This has increased our operation costs exorbitantly and is having a rather negative effect on the sort of academic exchange and collaboration on which we all thrive. I sincerely hope that this policy is reversed soon and that the mystery surrounding the illness of several American and Canadian diplomats is promptly elucidated.

Meanwhile, it is somewhat refreshing to reaffirm what we all know: that scholarship and academic production have their own spaces, their own rhythms, their own logic, which is thankfully independent from short term partisan agendas. This issue is a superb illustration of the relative autonomy of scholarly production, as several articles here connect with longstanding concerns and conversations in the field that have little to do with the current political climate. In the last few years, in particular, we have witnessed a growing scholarly attention to the impact of the Cuban Revolution on a variety of economic, social and political processes. This scholarship offers new and important clues about how to conceptualize "the" revolution by analyzing overlapping dynamics of persistence and change in previously unexplored areas of national life. The central dossier in this issue builds on and contributes to this conversation by studying the revolution's contradictory impact on cultural production. The theme is further contextualized by another article that studies the cultural policies of the Cuban state before 1959, a useful reminder that republican administrations also perceived national culture as an important site for state action. We also include a group of sources—personal correspondence of well-known Cuban visual artists Antonia Eiriz and Raul Martínez to Guido Llinás—that speak to some of the issues explored in the dossier on cultural politics and that we hope will be of interest to our readers.

To end, a note to congratulate an admired artist and friend, Eduardo Roca Salazar, for his well-deserved Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2017. This I have to say in Spanish: ¡Felicidades, Choco!