Lecture & Discussion: Cuba's Caribbean Marxism
Date & Time: November 13, 2018 | 12:00 AM – 01:30 AM
Location: 232 Katz Building
Come celebrate the release of Professor Backer's new book with a lecture and discussion. Topics include: the process of law reform; constitutional change and national plebiscite; role of the Communist Party; socialist regional trade; the role of ideology; the state of Cuba-U.S. relations, the embargo, and targeted sanctions; outbound and inbound foreign investment; sovereign financing; and sonic weapons attack. This lecture will be live-streamed and recorded. For more information, contact Miaoqiang Dai at mxd600@psu.edu.
Cuba's Caribbean Marxism is about ideology in the contemporary world. Ideology serves as the foundation that makes it possible for a political community to develop principles through which it can organize itself by reference to a core baseline against which to understand the world around. This book is also more particularly about Cuba. Cuba serves as an ongoing living experiment in the possibilities of molding individuals and the society along the lines suggested by application of a quite explicit set of grounding principles that form an ideology. Fidelity to ideology within a national context makes it possible to create and operate government, society, politics, and economics that are “good” and against which reform can be assessed and applied. The essays that comprise the twelve chapters of this book are drawn from a decade and more of thinking about Cuban ideology and its application in the wake of the passing of Fidel Castro, the charismatic founder of what these essays identify as Caribbean Marxism.