Although North Americans may not recognize it, Cuba has long shaped the German imaginary. Sun, Sex, and Socialism picks up this story from the early 1960s, detailing how the newly upstart island in the U.S. backyard inspired citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

By the 1970s, international rapprochements and repressions on state levels were stirring citizen disenchantment, discontent, and grassroots solidarities in all three nations. The Cold War's official end generated waves of politicised nostalgia and prescriptions for the newly configured Cuba and Germany, as exemplified in films like Buena Vista Social Club. Meanwhile, from the New Left movement to today, revolutionary compatriots Ché Guevara and Tamara Bunke continued to be icons of youth resistance, even while being commodified globally.

Sun, Sex, and Socialism illustrates how Germans identified with transnational communities beyond the East-West binary. Through analysis of cultural production that often countered governmental intentions for official diplomacy, Jennifer Ruth Hosek offers a broad-reaching history of the influence of the global South on the global North.

Jennifer Ruth Hosek is an assistant professor in the Department of German and the Cultural Studies Program at Queen's University.

Jennifer Ruth Hosek's profile page

‘Well researched, theoretically sophisticated, and a welcome break from studies that focus on the Northern Hemisphere and its superpowers… Hosek’s study can be strongly recommended to those with an interest in identity formation in the German states of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.’

German Studies Review; vol 36:03:2013

‘Sun, Sex, and Socialism presents an ambitious and well-accomplished analysis of representations of revolutionary Cuba in German cultural production from the 1960s to the present… An important contribution to the literature on the connections between the island and the Eurasian bloc.’

New West Indian Guide vol 88:2014

‘The monograph is an excellent example of cultural critique that combines historical depth with analyses of a breadth of cultural artifacts to make a sophisticated and complex argument.’

Seminar, A Journal of Germanic Studies vol 51:01:2015