Oscar Adolfo Zanetti Lecuona

Oscar Adolfo Zanetti Lecuona

Fellow: Awarded 2009
Field of Study: History

Competition: Latin America & Caribbean

Universidad de La Habana; Academia de Ciencias de Cuba

 

Born in Havana in 1946, Oscar A. Zanetti Lecuona received his doctorate in history in 1986. His thesis, about Cuban commercial policy in the first half of the twentieth century, was published in 1989 under the title Los Cautivos de la Reciprocidad. His subsequent research regarding Cuba´s external commerce in its transit from a Spanish colony to an independent country received the Casa de las Americas award in 1998. It was published by that institution as Comercio y Poder. Relaciones cubano-hispano-norteamericanas en torno a 1898.

Mr. Zanetti, a full professor in Havana University for more than three decades, is also a researcher and was research director in the Instituto de Historia de Cuba from 1989 to 2005. His studies about Cuban economic history have been focused on the sugar industry in the Island, mainly during the twentieth century. His researches range from the enterprise history of the United Fruit Sugar Company, published in 1976, to his most recent monograph, Las manos en el dulce, an analysis that shows the regulation of sugar production and commerce by the Cuban state from 1926 to 1940. Another extended monograph on a collateral but very closely related theme—the history of Cuban railroads—was published in collaboration with Alejandro Garcia, as Caminos para el azucar. This book received the “Elsa Goveia” award given by the Association of Caribbean Historians as the best book on Caribbean history (1986-1989) and was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1998 as Sugar and Railroads. A Cuban History, 1837-1959. Currently Mr. Zanetti is developing a comparative history between the sugar economies in the Hispanic Caribbean.

Oscar Zanetti has worked as visiting professor in the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, as well as in the universities of Alicante, Santo Domingo, Universidad Veracruzana, Universidad de San Martin in Argentina, and other institutions of higher education. In 1995 he received the Hispanista fellowship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Spain and has obtained fellowships from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas of Spain, Rutgers University, and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.

 

 

1
2016
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016
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