María A. Cabrera Arús
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Education
2016 Ph.D., Sociology, The New School for Social Research
2009 M.A., Sociology, The New School for Social Research
2004 M.Sc., Social Psychology, University of Havana
1996 B.Sc., Psychology, University of Havana
Books
Dressed for the Party: Fashion and Politics in Cuba, 1959–1989 (under contract with Bloomsbury Academics).
El eco de las cosas II: Los años setenta en la colección Cuba Material (Rialta / Fluxus, 2026), with Xavier Tavera.
El eco de las cosas: Los años ochenta en la colección Cuba Material (Rialta / Fluxus, 2025), with Xavier Tavera.
La Merma: Un producto en existencia (Rialta, 2024), with Legna Rodríguez Iglesias.
Academic Texts
“The Names of the Clothes: Cuban Fashion Brands, 1959–1989,” in The New Latin American Fashion Reader, edited by Regina A. Root and Stephanie N. Saunders, 73–89 (Bloomsbury, 2026).
“Symbols of Power and Resistance in Cuba: A Sartorial Journey,” Cuban Studies 54 (2025): 83–99.
“Un mundo figurado de poder de color verde olivo,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudio de Diseño y Comunicación 24, no. 52 (2022): 135–55.
“The Matter of Things: A Material Turn in Cuban Studies,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Travesia 30, no. 2 (2021): 163–73.
“Dirty Money? The Politics of Representation in Cuban Revolutionary Banknotes,” Visual Studies 35, nos. 2–3 (2020): 124–35.
“La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1970: tejiendo y destejiendo al hombre nuevo,” Cuban Studies 47 (2019): 195–221, with M. Suquet.
“Beauty and Quality for All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak, 455–74 (Oxford University Press, 2019).
«Fashioning and Contesting the Olive-Green Imaginary in Cuban Visual Arts,” in Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora, edited by Jorge Duany, 155–74 (University Press of Florida, 2019).
“The Lives of Others: Collecting and Archiving the Cuban Surveillance Regime,” in International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text, edited by Megan Forbes, 133–50 (Routledge, 2019).
“The Material Promise of Socialist Modernity: Fashion and Domestic Space in the 1970s,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba 1959–1980, eds. Michael Bustamante, and Jennifer Lambe, 189–217 (Duke University Press, 2019).
“Thinking Politics and Fashion in 1960s Cuba: How not to Judge a Book by its Cover,” Theory & Society 46, no. 5 (2017): 411–28.
“Pañoletas y polainas: Dinámicas de la moda en la Cuba soviética,” Kamchatka, Revista de análisis cultural 5 (2015): 243–60.
Other Texts (selected)
“Genio y Figura,” column of interviews at El Estornudo (2020).
“El ropaje del silencio y el traje nuevo del emperador,” El Estornudo (September 6, 2022); also published in La opinión independiente, edited by Mario F. Ramírez Mendez, 79–92 (Ánima, 2024).
“Ciudadanos, no exiliados,” El Estornudo (November 23, 2021).
“Invadir Cuba,” El Estornudo (October 1, 2021); translated by Havana Times and No Country Magazine.
“Una sociedad civil transnacional,” El Estornudo (July 17, 2021).
“The Cuba I Knew Was Always Alive in Color. Interview with Margaret Randall,” No Country Magazine (April 12, 2021).
“Criticar y castigar: La academia, los fondos para la democracia y la prensa no estatal,” El Estornudo (January 13, 2021); translated by No Country Magazine.
“No existía un gran esquema,” interviewed by Elvia R. Castro for El Señor Corchea (April 5, 2020).
“Una plantilla de zapatos y el Vuelo Conjunto Cubano-Soviético: un pequeño relato,” in El fin del gran relato, exhibition catalogue and Hypermedia Magazine (January 24, 2019).
“Clothing Resistance,” Contexts 17, no. 4 (2018): 62–64.
“For Sale: Cuba’s Revolutionary Figured World,” Age of Revolutions (January 22, 2018).
“Cuba Material: A Collection of Objects from Cuban Socialism,” Art OnCuba 13 (2016): 82–85.
Podcasts
“Friends of Haptic and Hue,” Podcast (May 2025).
“Politics and Fashion in the Revolutionary Cuba,” interviewed by Richard Snyder, Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University (October 30, 2019).
Exhibitions
El eco de las cosas, University of Miami (March 2025), pop-up with photographs of Xavier Tavera
Fashioning Cuban Socialism, Carleton College (October 2023)
Cuban Revolutionary Fashion: With objects from the Cuba Material collection, Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University (December 2019)
Cuban Finotype and Its Materiality, Cabinet magazine (October 2015), with Jacqueline Loss
Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons School of Design, The New School (September–October 2015), with Meyken Barreto
Courses
“Fashion and Socialism: The Politics of Dress in the Cold War Era,” New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
“Dress and Society in Latin America,” New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
“Globalization and Society,” Ramapo College
“Consuming the Cold War in the Caribbean,” Brown University, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
