These days the Queen of Englewood, Nikki Lynette, actually lives in Wicker Park. And those two Chicago neighborhoods are planets apart: Englewood is deep South Side, colorful but deadly, while Wicker Park is multiculti and so hip it hurts. But 27-year-old Nikki, who dropped the boundary-breaking EP The Strong Survive a month ago, isn’t feeling…

Dr. Carlos Moore is an ethnologist and political scientist specializing in African, Latin American and Caribbean affairs. Frequently controversial in his views, he is the author of Fela: This Bitch of a Life and Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba: A Memoir, among others. Following exile from his native Cuba, Moore has lived and…

In 1998, when President Bill Clinton was allowing Cuban artists to travel relatively easily in and out of the United States, I invited a well-known Cuban visual artist to visit my graduate class at Columbia College in Chicago. I wanted her to show the students her work and talk a little about what it was…

The Committee on Agriculture in the U.S. House passed legislation on Wednesday that suggests a possible lifting of the travel ban to Cuba, but Americans shouldn’t make plans just yet. For starters, while H.R. 4645, aka the Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act, is a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by 62 members of Congress and…

You’ve seen ‘em: the crazy Cubans, the flag and placard-waving anti-Commies who shout down any and all opposition, the red-faced exiles who cluster outside Versailles Restaurant in Miami—the epicenter of Cuban-American mayhem—whenever Cuba’s in the news. TV stations love ‘em: They provide great footage of grown men and women screaming, giving each other the finger…