Consuming Slavery?

Abstract

Introductionalong one of Santiago de Cuba's busier avenues lies a restaurant that is at once ordinary and extraordinary As is the case with many restaurants in Cuba's second city, the front doors remain open during business hours, and above them, painted on the facade, appears the name of the restaurant. It is not long, however, before we gain a glimpse into the restaurant's extraordinary qualities. On either side of the front doors is a life-sized statue: on one side, a man, and on the other, a woman, both of a dark copper hue. In their physical appearance, the man and woman seem Afro-Cuban; in addition, they are dressed in simple garb, like fieldworkers. These statues are, in fact, representations of enslaved Afro-Cubans.This essay examines the racial, historical and ideological nuances of this particular restaurant, El Barracon, in operation in Santiago since 2008. Established through an initiative of Cuba's Ministry ofTourism, the restaurant seeks to introduce its patrons (foreign tourists, primarily) to specific features of the island's nineteenth-century, colonial period: specifically, the era of slavery. El Barracon, in short, is an imaginative, consumer-oriented and profit-driven recreation of life in a barracon (barracoon), or slave barracks. The physical structure of the restaurant is meant to resemble such a slave barracks; the Afro-Cuban staff is dressed in period costumes; and the artwork and decorations similarly depict the activities of enslaved persons on a nineteenth-century Cuban sugar plantation, or ingenio. My aims in the essay are, on the one hand, comparative and interpretive, in that they entail reflections on my own visit to the restaurant in 2010: as I ate the restaurant's ajiaco, I could only speculate on the improbability of a similar, slavery-themed restaurant being established in the United States, where I live. Indeed, tourist-driven establishments in the United States do not depict and memorialise the era of slavery in ways that approximate the directness and nonchalance of El Barracon. Part of my objective is to outline in general terms and in a comparative context (as opposed to, for example, an anthropological ethnographical approach that lies outside my disciplinary training) these variable, nation-specific approaches to the memorialisation of slavery (in terms, primarily, of the United States and Cuba). On the other hand, my larger aim here is to seek answers to the following questions: How, within a Cuban cultural and historical context, is a place like El Barracon possible in the first place, and how is it capable of receiving official federal sanction? Furthermore, what does an analysis of El Barracon contribute to an understanding of how Cuban culture, broadly stated, and Afro-Cubanness, more specifically, are understood at present on the island?Comparative memorialisations of slaverySlavery has occurred in numerous societies around the world and across multiple historical epochs; furthermore, slavery is a term applied to varying kinds of forced labour that can differ sharply in many ways, including degrees of brutality Similarly, the ways different societies choose to historicise and memorialise slavery can vary dramatically Given the profoundly adverse effects slavery has on a society that sanctions it, it is no surprise that, in general terms, the ways in which slavery is memorialised has posed difficulties for societies with slavery in their past. In the United States, for instance, there is nothing resembling an agreedupon approach toward the memorialisation of what has commonly been referred to in that country as the 'peculiar institution of slavery. If there has been an overall historical tendency, it has been in the direction of silence and neglect. Documented organised tours of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1998 and 2000, for instance, contained very little information about enslavement. These tours followed the traditional focus on architecture, famous white men and their family lives, and politics. …