Stanford University Press Blog

From U.S. Politics to Cuban Food

How sanctions have impacted Cubans' plates.

HANNA GARTH

February 15, 2020, Las Vegas- Senator Bernie Sanders  at the the Clark County Democratic Party's 2020 Kick Off to Caucus Gala.

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders recently made comments on Cuba that have stirred some criticism and controversy. Although Sanders condemned authoritarianism, he said that “it's unfair to simply say everything is bad” with respect to Cuba, as Sanders pointed to Fidel Castro’s massive literacy program put in place just after the 1959 socialist revolution. Between this literacy campaign and free education at all levels, Cuba continues to have a 99% literacy rate. However, what Sanders did not mention is that while Cuba has historically accomplished these things in spite of the U.S. Embargo, the impact of U.S. sanctions can be felt through other metrics and is only getting worse.

Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system.

Long before these comments Cubans on the island had been keeping a close eye on the 2020 US Presidential election; this year’s election is particularly important because of the recent crushing sanctions against Cuba that the Trump administration has put in place. Trump’s sanctions have happened in tandem with many political changes on the island. In 2019 Cubans approved a new Constitution that formally recognizes the operation of the market and legalizes forms of private property and business. These shifts continue to be within the single-party system and formalize an ongoing process of economic liberalization toward a mixed economy, which has been termed “market socialism.” Cuba’s new President Miguel Diaz-Canel assumed office on Oct 10, 2019, having served as the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers since 18 April 2018. Just before Diaz-Canel began, Trump activated a rarely used part of the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which allows U.S. citizens to file claims against Cuba’s trading and investment partners for properties nationalized following the revolution 60 years ago. This is an effort to tighten the U.S. Embargo by forcing other countries to stop trading and investing in Cuba.

Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system. I have written about this extensively in my new book, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal», which is based on research I conducted in Santiago de Cuba between 2008 and 2019. Cuba imports 60 to 80% of food consumed on the island. Not only are direct food imports an issue, but reductions in imported agriculture inputs, including fuel to operate farm machinery also have severe impacts on domestic food production. For instance, in March 2019, Cuba produced 900,000 fewer eggs than the 5.7 million needed daily to satisfy national demand. As a measure to ensure basic food access, in May 2019 the government tightened the food rations, food items that had recently been more abundantly available in non-subsidized markets were now only available through the food ration. This included chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products that are only available in limited quantities. At hard currency stores there is also a limit on powdered milk to four packets per person, sausages to four packs per person and peas to five packets per person. Adjacent to actual food shortages, in early January 2020 the Cuban government announced that tanks of petroleum gas, the main cooking source for most Cubans, would be scarce. This scarcity is directly tied to a contract that was cancelled due to Trump’s sanctions.

The Famous Fultz Quads

The origin of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets.

ANDREA FREEMAN

Pet Milk ad featuring the Fultz quadruplets. Their doctor sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company.

“Four Little Babies.” Pet Milk, “Four Little Babies Become Four Little Ladies,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1949, 5. Public Domain.

 

We're pleased to present an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice » by Andrea Freeman.

Annie Mae Fultz could not afford to let anything go wrong with her pregnancy. Her doctor, Fred Klenner, had detected three tiny heartbeats inside her. It was 1946. Annie Mae was a tall, strong, thirty-seven-year-old half-Black, half-Cherokee woman from Tennessee.¹ Dr. Klenner, although originally from Pennsylvania, happily adhered to southern racial norms.² He had separate waiting rooms for Blacks and Whites in his downtown Reidsville, North Carolina, office. The old-fashioned decor of his practice matched his dated views. His segregated waiting rooms gave way to treatment rooms full of ancient furniture and unusual medical instruments.³ His walls displayed White supremacist literature and, later, a “Vote for George Wallace” poster.⁴ He vigorously defended Hitler as misunderstood to anyone who would listen.⁵ The local hospital where he delivered babies, Annie Penn Memorial, relegated Black mothers to the basement.⁶ Despite his unapologetic racism, Annie Mae had faith in Dr. Klenner’s medical abilities.

The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.

Annie Mae had plenty of challenges to overcome in the face of the growing lives inside her. A childhood battle with spinal meningitis had robbed her of the ability to hear or speak, rendering the possibility of a medical emergency, when urgent communication would be essential, even more frightening.⁷ On the tobacco farm where Annie Mae’s husband, James, a fifty-nine-year-old Black man known to all as Pete,⁸ toiled as a tenant farmer, there was no electricity.⁹ The family had no car, and the road leading out to the farm was rutted, long, and lonely. On Dr. Klenner’s advice, Annie Mae left her six children in their father’s care and moved into Annie Penn’s basement to wait out her delivery.¹⁰ To pass the long hours that followed on her hospital cot, Annie Mae conversed with her nurse, Margaret Ware, through gestures and lip-reading.¹¹

The odds that all three of Annie Mae’s triplets would survive were slim. Although any mother expecting triplets must come to terms with multiples’ low survival rate, Annie Mae confronted more obstacles than most. Advances in modern medicine that could have eased the birth process had yet to reach the basement. The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.¹²

100 Years from Nankana

Remembering interfaith activism in South Asia

KATE IMY

"Monochrome photograph showing Sikh soldiers in a Gurdwara (a Sikh shrine) in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion. Taken during its use as an Indian military hospital, 1915." Public Domain. Via Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

 

In early 2020, Muslim protesters flooded the Nankana Sahib Sikh gurdwara, a Sikh holy space, in Pakistan. For some Indian observers, this provided evidence of the harassment that non-Muslims faced in modern Pakistan and justified the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in India in 2019. The CAA facilitated the easier migration into India of religious minorities from neighboring countries. However, it excluded Muslim refugees and migrants, including those fleeing India’s ongoing military occupation of Kashmir. Protests against CAA erupted across South Asia and the world, as activists condemned what they believed to be a discriminatory, anti-Muslim policy. Yet 100 years ago today, Sikh activists occupied Nankana Sahib for very different reasons. Hindu and Muslim leaders would pay tribute to this holy place to signal their shared fight against colonial rule. This earlier occupation of Nankana reveals a history of interfaith collaboration, rather than division, in South Asia that the CAA, and other exclusionary definitions of national identity, hope to erase.

The story of Nankana is rooted in the specific anti-colonial context of the First World War and the impact of military culture in the Punjab province more broadly.

On February 20, 1920, India included the modern nation states of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and was governed and occupied under British colonialism. On that day, a group of “130 Sikhs” attempted to inhabit the courtyard of the Nankana Sahib gurdwara but were “brutally massacred, the bodies being afterward burnt with kerosine [sic] oil.”[1] Allegedly, Narain Das, the manager (mahant) at Nankana, hired a private guard of Muslim Pathans—armed by the British Government of India—to defend the property. Yet the issue was certainly not a Muslim-Sikh struggle. According to the Punjab government the Nankana gurdwara was “one of the richest in the Province” but Narain Das was “a notorious ill-liver,” condemned by many fellow Sikhs.[2] Sikh activists tried to occupy the property to wrest it from his control and use the profits from the property for the betterment of the community. However, after the tragedy at Nankana, police arrested Narain Das and sent troops onto the site. The Punjab government condemned the ensuing protest by claiming that it was led by “extreme and fanatic Sikhs.”[3] Indian leaders clearly did not view things this way when Mohandas Gandhi and the pan-Islamic leaders the Ali brothers visited Nankana.[4]

The story of Nankana is rooted in the specific anti-colonial context of the First World War and the impact of military culture in the Punjab province more broadly. By the early twentieth century, Punjabis were overrepresented in British colonial forces. Sikhs famously made up 20% of soldiers in the colonial army despite being less than 1% of the population. Yet Punjabi Muslims were often regarded as the true “backbone” of the Indian Army and were the majority population of the providence. Muslim soldiers –recruited mostly from Punjab and other parts of northern India – made up roughly 30-35% of soldiers. Punjabis – whether Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh – enjoyed a reputation for being strong in body and steadfast in their service to the British, making them ideal soldiers in British minds.[5] Although discriminatory recruiting practices encouraged the selective recruitment of religious minorities like Muslims and Sikhs, service in the Indian Army was always an interfaith enterprise. Anti-colonial movements often built on the interfaith potential of the army.

Little Heart-Shaped Pills

The fiction of love potions and the reality of neurotechnology.

BRIAN D. EARP and JULIAN SAVULESCU

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

We're pleased to present this excerpt from Chapter 4 of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships» by Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu.

If you’ve been alive sometime in the last thousand years, you will be familiar with the idea of a love potion—a magical liquid that when quaffed or applied makes a person fall passionately in love. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a love potion is introduced as a weapon in the marital war between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. To humiliate Titania, Oberon drizzles juice distilled from a “love-in-idleness” flower on to her eyelids as she sleeps, causing her to “madly dote” upon the first creature she sees—the donkey-headed Bottom. The flower’s magical juice also causes a tumult for the play’s mortal lovers; administered by the mischievous Puck, it makes Lysander and Demetrius both fall in love with the formerly spurned Helena, much to the dismay of Hermia, who was in the process of eloping with Lysander.

After many chases through the enchanted wood, all is set to rights, as this is after all a comedy. In Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, a love potion is substituted for a death potion to avoid the demise of the romantic leads—but not until Act 3, as this is Wagner.

In both stories love potions force characters to assume emotions that are not their own. In many popular depictions, the effects of a love potion are often undesirable, even if the person deliberately seeks it out. Consider the 1960s chart-topper “Love Potion No. 9” by the legendary songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In this song, the narrator, a self-described “flop with chicks,” visits Madame Ruth, who doses him with a black, turpentine-smelling potion brewed up in her kitchen sink. He’s suddenly disoriented and starts impulsively smooching everything and everyone he sees. This includes, as you might remember, a police officer who subsequently smashes his precious “little bottle.” Presumably, none of this improved the narrator’s luck with “chicks.”

Is He a Sociopath?

Why the principal question we ask about Bernie Madoff is wrong.

COLLEEN EREN

Bernard Madoff, painted portrait by Thierry Ehrmann. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In light of Bernie Madoff's recent request for compassionate release we are republishing this entry from 2017.

In May, HBO’s The Wizard of Lies brought in the largest premiere audience that the network has seen in four years. The film, an adaptation of Diana Henriques’ journalistic account of Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, saw, 2.4 million viewers, the weekend of its release—a sizable audience, especially considering that actors Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner headlined Madoff, a four-hour ABC miniseries on the same subject, only a year prior. Perhaps as a way to seize upon the renewed interest generated by the film, which cast Robert De Niro in the lead role as Bernie and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, the New York Post ran a lengthy article, “The sad new life of exiled Ruth Madoff,” with paparazzi-style photos of Ruth, her preferred bagel shop, dry cleaners, local clothing shop, and other quotidian details about a no-longer-privileged existence. The UK’s Daily Mail published a similar story with photos of the “recluse” Ruth emerging from a local CVS. With a distinct note of schadenfreude, the piece indicated just how far down the social ladder she had fallen. With the ten-year anniversary of Bernie’s arrest approaching, public appetite for this story and curiosity about its principal characters remains robust.

Whether or not Madoff fits the criteria of a sociopath (or a psychopath) has produced numerous conjectures.

The Changing Face of IRBS

Understanding the world of institutional review boards.

SARAH BABB

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Regulating Human Research» author Sarah Babb

What made you want to write about the history and the evolving role of IRBs?

I was the Graduate Director in the Boston College sociology department.  Sometime around 2006, I began hearing from many students encountering problems “getting through IRB.” In an attempt to tackle this problem, I volunteered to serve on our IRB at Boston College.  There I discovered that federal regulations were a great deal more flexible than our local Boston College IRB policies--for example, federal rules could allow most social research to be carried out without informed consent forms.  As a faculty board member, I tried to get the BC IRB to adopt more flexible policies, but was unsuccessful.

I suppose you could say that this project was born out of my frustration with that experience.  But once I started learning more about the IRB world, I began to see that there was something much bigger going on, and that this bigger thing was also happening in other areas of American regulation.  So my book attempts to capture this.

What was the research process like?

As a qualitative researcher, I tried as much as I could to immerse myself in the IRB world.  I became an avid reader of a trade journal for IRB administrators.  This helped me understand the issues (which are surprisingly complex), and also gave me the names of contacts to start interviewing.  It also allowed me to ask better, more targeted questions, and to connect more effectively with my informants (I ended up talking to about 50 of them).  I also started attending the annual meeting of the IRB professionals’ association.  This immersion made me sympathize with the dilemmas of these professionals, and I have tried to bring this out in the book. 

As I carried out my research, I added my trade journal articles, interview transcripts, and other sources into a file in the qualitative data analysis program Atlas.ti, and coded them for themes.  This process allowed me to be guided by what my data were telling me, and brought me to my final research question and arguments.

For scholars of regulation, I think the book speaks to the weirdness of the way we regulate in the United States. Instead of having strong federal bureaucracy, our system spins off thousands of locally financed compliance bureaucracies.