Beyond Cuban Waters. Africa, La Yuma, and the Island’s Global Imagination by Paul Ryer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Cuban Waters. Africa, La Yuma, and the Island’s Global Imagination by Paul Ryer Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Ryer, Paul. Beyond Cuban Waters. Africa, La Yuma, and the Island’s Global Imagination. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2018. 226 pp. Beyond Cuban Waters provides an ethnographically informed study of interactions among ordinary Cubans, foregrounding Cuban ties with the United States and Africa. Paul Ryer’s book, which draws upon fieldwork from the first half of the 1990s, explores these interactions through a number of interrelated notions: La Yuma (a colloquial Cuban term for the United States) and circuits of transnational remittances; Cubans’ relationship with Africa (through the internationalist program), the experiences of African students in Cuba (through the educational program), and its interplay with issues of race and development; and, finally, contemporary Cuban racial categorizations and definitions of the self. In the introduction, “An Antillean Archipelago,” Ryer discloses some of his ethnographic experiences amid a major Cuban economic crisis, referred to as the special period: “I first went to Havana during the rafting crisis of 1994,” he writes (6). The reader learns of the author’s prior experience living in different archipelagic Caribbean settings in his childhood and youth. The introduction also includes a useful mapping of major ethnographic and anthropological approaches to Cuba. [End Page 878] These encompass a variety of traditions, schools of thought, and scholarly contributions, from Fernando Ortiz, to Oscar and Ruth Lewis in the aftermath of the revolution (1969–70), to “clusters of contemporary ethnographic work” on race, gender and sexuality, religious practices, consumption, exile and the Cuban-American experience, and Cuban cultural production. In my view, this lengthy section on the Cuban scholarship corpus is to be read both within the historical frame of larger Caribbean and Atlantic frameworks. Chapter one, “The Rise and Decline of La Yuma,” engages with western material goods and symbols of capitalism, and their role in post-Soviet Cuba, as well as the island’s later entry into the remittance economy and new world order. It considers the appropriation, idealization, and domestication of symbols and goods from the United States (primarily by younger Cubans and African students) and looks ethnographically at Cuba’s distinctively Caribbean socialist parallel economy. Three categories of US cultural products conjured desire in the Cuban imagination of the 1990s: Nike merchandise, the US flag pattern printed onto clothes and other consumer items imported from abroad (typically by visiting relatives or tourists), and the broadcasting of the Oscars and Grammys ceremonies on a non-State-run TV channel. The author is specifically concerned not with La Yuma as a form of resistance, defiance, and domestication through consumerism—although those do play a role—but rather with “the Cubanization of yumanidad.” Moving towards a popular geography of the imagination in everyday life, chapter two, “África in revolutionary Cuba,” focuses on Cuban ideologies of and about the African continent vis-à-vis racial constructions, categorizations, and comparative status. It does so through two points of reference: the experiences of Cuban internationalists in Africa and their relationships and entanglements with Africans, and those of the Africans residing in Cuba (for study or other purposes) and their own relationships with Cubans. Cuban professionals temporarily deployed to Africa (in the fields of health, education, and engineering, among others) typically brought back with them an evolutionist description of Africa marked by ideologies of development and underdevelopment, situating Cubans in a position of relative privilege. For their part, Africans temporarily residing in Cuba (mainly students in the African education program) developed a strong sense of solidarity articulated as a “Pan-Africanism Made in Cuba,” and simultaneously negotiated a position for themselves in Cuban society. They held positions in the parallel market as middlemen or brokers, not just as strategies for a survival economy, but also by shifting their position from underdeveloped origins to one of partnership in a globalized economy, becoming facilitators in the Yuma exchange in the process. “Color, Mestizaje, and Belonging in Cuba,” the title of chapter three, engages with racial dynamics as displayed in daily interactions in contemporary Cuban society, the foreignness of the term “Afro-Cuban” (commonly used in English-language scholarship outside the country but one with little currency...