The First and Second Declarations of Havana ed. by Mary Alice Waters (review)

Book Reviews anexo son prueba de ello, dado que los temas que presentan aluden directamente a la penı́nsula ibérica. Sin embargo, el libro intrı́nsicamente va a contracorriente de esta visión. Las primeras trece obras presentan una modalidad especı́fica del teatro conventual en la Nueva España, no un teatro “a la española.” Estas obras no pueden considerarse obra de “aficionados” (365) copiadas de un modelo peninsular. Al respecto, la aproximación de las autoras no llega a ‘descolonizar’ este tipo de teatro ya que busca enfocarse en las concordancias mientras que son precisamente las disonancias de este tipo de teatro con el modelo ibérico (o francés, o inglés, etc.) los aspectos más interesantes y enriquecedores para el lector, el crı́tico o el investigador literario. No sólo ayunos y oraciones es una obra valiosa en tanto ofrece material que difı́cilmente podrı́a haber llegado a ser difundido de no ser por la ardua tarea archivı́stica de sus autoras y, aunque resulta tradicional en su metodologı́a, es una puerta abierta a análisis más elaborados que indaguen en el abanico de posibilidades que ofrece el teatro novohispano del siglo XVIII. Elena Deanda Camacho Department of Spanish and Portuguese Vanderbilt University THE FIRST AND SECOND DECLARATIONS OF HAVANA. By Mary Alice Waters (ed.) New York: Pathfinder, 2007, p. 100, $10. For a book with a fairly complete, although doctrinaire, chronology of events in Cuba from 1952-1967, a glossary of terms than runs from “Antilles” to “Zapata,“ a useful index, and six pages of black-and-white photos of the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the price is right. Obviously , however, this is not the work’s raison d’être. Its purpose is to present the revolutionary declarations of Havana–issued respectively September 2, 1960, and February 4, 1962– in a new, expanded publication, to provide an explanatory preface and footnotes for the texts, and to propose a connection to the present. The themes and memories of the 1959 revolution continue to resonate nearly fifty years after the events. Che Guevara’s iconic image is visible around the world, the Center for Che Guevara Studies in Havana is flourishing, books and films about the guerrillero abound, and Guevara’s daughter, Aleida Guevara March, has a 2006 DVD about Che as father. In 2003, Cuba’s premier print-maker, Antonio Canet, produced a special edition of prints to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s assault on the Moncada Barracks, the event proclaimed in Cuba as the true beginning of the struggle to overthrow Batista. All of this is testimony to the continuing promotion of and interest in the early phases of the Cuban Revolution. 107 The Latin Americanist, October 2008 The professed goal of this slender paperback is to offer the declarations of Havana as guideposts to the movements for change throughout the Americas today. It proposes that the declarations serve as a response to questions about the viability of the political foundations of socialism, specifically Marx and Engels, and the role of capitalist classes and imperialism today in Latin America. As the preface states, Pathfinder perceived a need to make the texts accessible “ to the new generations of militants who did not live the tumultuous revolutionary events in the heat of which these documents were forged and signed on to by millions” (12). The first declaration of Havana was an emphatic answer to the “Declaration of San José” set forth in Costa Rica in August 1960 by the Organization of American States, a document which condemned both totalitarian rule in the Americas and intervention from outside the hemisphere. The second declaration of Havana defiantly noted the 1961 defeat of the United States-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and served as a response to the OAS expulsion of Cuba in 1962. In both cases the declarations were presented by Fidel Castro to mass rallies of Cubans gathered in the Plaza of the Revolution, and in both cases the crowds were depicted as National General Assemblies of the Cuban People. The first declaration had nine “points,” which included a condemnation of the Declaration...