An intimate conversation between towering public intellectuals examining the contentious interplay between the Cuban Revolution and U.S. empire An audacious revolutionary experiment in the backyard of empire, Cuba has occupied a vexed role in the international order for decades. Though its doctors (and fighters)—and the outsized influence of its example—have traversed the globe, from Venezuela to Angola, its political and economic future remain uncertain as the Castro era comes to a close and the U.S. embargo proceeds unabated. Through an intimate conversation between two of the country’s most astute observers of international politics, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba traces Cuban history from the early days of the 1950s revolution to the present, interrogating U.S. interventions and extracting lessons on U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere along the way. Neither a jingoistic condemnation nor an uncritical celebration, Chomsky’s heterodox approach to world affairs is on full display as he and Prashad grapple with Cuba’s unique place on the international scene. In a media landscape saturated with half-truths and fake news, Chomsky and Prashad—“our own Frantz Fanon . . . [whose] writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope” (Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana)—seek to shed light on the truth of a complex and perennially controversial nation, while examining the limits of mainstream media discourse.
Authors
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has affected the philosophy of language and mind. He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known for his media criticism and political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth-most cited scholar in any time period.
