Cuban Exceptionalism by Ken Cole

Cuban Exceptionalism: A Personal View 
by Ken Cole
Ken Cole is a member of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at London Metropolitan University. 

January 1, 2009, marks the fiftieth anniversary of victory in Cuba’s third war of independence. In his first speech of the Cuban Revolution, given in Santiago de Cuba on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro declared that for the first time in four centuries Cubans were free. Whereas Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí had led the previous wars, in 1868 and 1895, against Spanish colonial dominion, Castro’s July 26th Movement (named after the day in 1953 when the attack on the Moncada barracks marked the commencement of the revolution) challenged the economic domination of Cuba by the United States.

Reflections on Medical Internationalism by John Kirk

Reflections on Medical Internationalism 
by John Kirk
John Kirk is Professor of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University, where he specializes in Cuban political history. He has written/coedited several books on Cuba, including Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period” (2006), and Culture and the Cuban Revolution: Conversations in Havana (2001). Together with Michael Erisman he is writing a monograph on Cuban medical internationalism. 

Patria es humanidad. —José Martí

José Martí’s assertion that the Cuban homeland is all of humanity sums up elegantly the extraordinary generosity of spirit visible in Cuba’s medical internationalism program.