Cartooning Pre-revolutionary Cuba: The Animated Exoticism of Time and Place in Vampiros en la Habana (1985) and Chico and Rita (2010)

Abstract

This article discusses exoticism and self-exoticism in the representation of pre-revolutionary Cuban musicianship in two animated films: the 2010 Spanish/British co-production Chico and Rita and the 1985 Cuban film, Vampiros en la Habana. Within the similarly constructed animated archetypes on display, these films generate vastly different discursive outputs. Both texts are more interested in musicians as mythical figures than as comprehensive subjects, but where the mythology of Vampiros offers a dissenting, self-defined cultural identity, that of Chico and Rita employs a mythology of Otherness to reaffirm the cultural protagonism and hegemony of Eurocentric discourses. Although these films engage with similar archetypes, localities and representations of the exotic, the ways in which they do so evidence disparities in terms of intended audience, artistic intent, relationship to Cuba’s revolutionary project, and perspective towards Cuba’s cultural identity—all within the highly flexible, but highly codified and stigmatized, medium of animation.