Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

Description

Castro Speech contains the full-text of over 2000 English translations of speeches, interviews, and press conferences by Fidel Castro from 1959 to 1996. The database is based upon the records of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), a U.S. government agency responsible for monitoring broadcast and print media in countries throughout the world. These records are in the public domain. Castro Speech is part of the Etext Collection at the Latin America Network Information Center.

Women's Studies Content

The documents pertaining to women in this database present Castro’s specific views. It is valuable data on women’s issues in Cuba, as expressed by its leader. Searching the title field for "women" (use Advanced Search) will retrieve speeches Castro made to women's groups in Cuba, a Latin American Women's seminar in Chile, and the Vietnamese Women's Congress in Hanoi.

Searching

The database lacks a controlled vocabulary. Search terms are not highlighted within results and the header of each record contains minimal information (date, document type, title, place), so it takes persistance to determine relevance of results for searches.

The advanced search option offers three search fields (title, text, and source) and the ability to limit searches by decade. It's also possible to limit by type of speech with options such as conference, interview, appearance, etc. given in a drop-down menu. The search interface is easy to use, but there are no help screens.

Archive Review:
Kayo Denda
Rutgers University