Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters

Based on unprecedented access to both Cuban and American officials, a book that offers fresh insight into one of history's most enigmatic relationships between nation-states-from one of America's best-known voices of political and social activism. Listen, Yankee! offers an account of Cuban politics from Tom Hayden's unique position as an observer of Cuba and as a US revolutionary student leader whose efforts to mobilize political change in the US mirrored the radical transformation simultaneously going on in Cuba. Chapters are devoted to the writings of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, and C. Wright Mills; the Cuban missile crisis; the Weather Underground; the assassination of JFK; the strong historical links between Cuba and Africa; the Carter era; the Clinton era; the Cuban Five; Elián González; and the December 17, 2014 declaration of normalization by presidents Obama and Castro. Hayden puts the present moment into historical context, and shows how we're finally finding common ground to the advantage of Cubans and Americans alike.

Primary author of the famous Port Huron Statement, TOM HAYDEN was a leader in the student, antiwar, and civil rights protests throughout the 1960s. He took up the environmental cause in the 1970s, leading campaigns to shut down nuclear power plants and serving as California's first solar energy official. He was elected to the California legislature in 1982, serving for eighteen years. He continues to write as an editor of the Nation, and has taught at universities across the country-from Harvard's Institute of Politics to the UCLA Labor Center. He is currently the director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in California.

About Tom Hayden