Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts , and: Cuba on the Edge: Short Stories from the Island (review)

Abstract

Flora Gonzalez Mandri. Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and Arts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. xii, 232pp.Mary G. Berg, Pamela Carmel!, and Anne Fountain, eds., Cuba on Edge: Short Stories from Island. Nottingham, UK: CCC Press, 2007. 238 pp.Yoruba soy,cantando voy,llorando estoy,y cuando no soy yoruba,soy congo, mandinga, carabali.Nicolas Guillen, Son 16Is Cuba a color-blind society? Or does race still exist as a legitimate category on island? Certainly color lines are blurry in Cuba, with 2002 census data contradicting figures provided by CIA Factbook and estimates of an Afro-Cuban majority (60 to 70 percent) suggested by several scholars of Afro-Cuban studies.1 The Cuban Revolution of 1959, whose tenets included a commitment to equality of all citizens, regardless of gender, race, or previous class status, was assumed to have corrected any discrimination that may have existed after Cuba achieved its independence from Spain slightly more than six decades earlier. After all, national hero and beloved poet Jose Marti had advocated racial equality as early as mid-nineteenth century, going so far as to promise that independent Cuba would reward black revolutionaries with full entry into political and socioeconomic spheres. Stock responses to allegations of racial tensions include proverb, Quien no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabali, meaning that everyone has a drop of African blood and that precludes racism (Hernandez-Reguant 255).2 Yet a burgeoning scholarship on race and identity in Cuba makes argument that even though racial mixing is the principal signifier of Cuba's national cultural identity, myth of Cuban mestizaje can be utilized to erase still-existing tensions and divisions (Kutzinski 5).3 The unfortunate reality is that race-based discrimination still exists in Cuba, while argument about validity of racial divisions rages on, which makes particularly compelling emerging voices that comprise debate (Sarduy and Stubbs; Smith).4Gonzalez Mandri's contribution is distinctively different from other recent works by Fox and Sawyer, also investigations of race and culture in Cuba, despite sharing several primary sources with each.5 Much more centered on cultural expression, book demonstrates how contemporary Afro-Cuban women writers and artists engage in a historical dialogue with images of blackness, and especially women of color, that appear in Cuban letters since prior to independence. Throughout, Mandri traces connections among Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdes, Guillen's poetic oeuvre, Lydia Cabrera's El monte, and creative voices of Afro-Cuban women today. She argues that novel's characters embody sexist and racist mores of day, especially internalized racial hatred (a denial of blackness that leads to insanity) of eponymous heroine, against which younger artists like Belkis Ayon and Gloria Rolando set expressions of rebellion, empowerment, and pride. In contrast, negrista poetry of Guillen and Cabrera's ethnographic research explicating male-privileged Abakua traditions offer a legacy of powerful cultural knowledge, language, imagery, and symbolic codes (with which Excilia Saldana disidentifies, in sense of Jose Munoz) that enrich increasing body of Afro-Cuban women's work.Mandri opens with an initial introduction to me antislavery narrative generated in Domingo del Monte circle in first half of nineteenth century and me Afro-Cuban movement of 1920s to 1940s, both of which figure critically in her analysis of more recent cultural expression. Following is a comparison of mulatta image in Cecilia Valdes and Sergio Giral's 1990 film Maria Antonia, with a strong theoretical debt to Fanon.6 The next chapter, a detailed discussion of Cabrera's life and works, prepares reader to understand symbolic complexities of newer works to be studied. …