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On New Years Day, Cuba marked the fiftieth anniversary of its watershed revolution. On January 1st 1959, Fidel Castro’s armed rebels triumphantly marched to the nation’s capital of Havana after having defeated the dictatorship of Flugencio Batista. Current President Raul Castro declared at a celebration in the city of Santiago de Cuba that the revolution marked the most fruitful half century in Cuban history. Anniversary celebrations elsewhere in the island nation were marked with austerity after successive hurricanes devastated the region. Today we’ll hear from Jana K Lipman, author of Guantánamo: A Working Class History Between Empire and Revolution. Most of us think of orange-suit-clad Afghans and Iraqis imprisoned and tortured by US soldiers when we hear the word Guantanamo. But, how did Guantanamo come to become a US base despite being on Cuban land? And what is the history of the Cubans who worked on that base? In her book, Jana Lipman describes the timely story of how US empire transformed the lives of Cubans and how Guantanamo is a symbol of US-Cuba relations. Cynthia Enloe describes the book as “Engaging and eye-opening to anyone interested in Guantánamo’s current role, American imperialism, Caribbean history, working-class politics, or gender in international affairs.”

GUEST: Jana K Lipman, Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University in New Orleans, and author of Guantanamo: A Working Class History Between Empire and Revolution