North Florida in the Cuban Literary Canon: Contact Zone, Chronotope and Liminal Space

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Florida and Cuba are culturally and historically connected by two bodies of water, beyond questions of political geography. The Ocean links cultural groups of Atlantic creoles characterized by linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility, according to the historian Ira Berlin (263). At the same time, the Gulf Stream current shaped the location of fortified cities founded throughout the colonial Hispanic Indies to support the return voyages of the Spanish treasure fleet to Europe via the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, a network completed with the founding of Saint Augustine, Florida in 1565. As a result, the approximately eighty-mile length of northeast Florida referred to as the First Coast--comprising Fernandina/Amelia Island, Jacksonville, and Saint Augustine--developed as a historically-unified region under the colonial governance of the capital in Havana. As observed by Keith Cartwright, this micro-region bridges Caribbean and North American cultural space and constitutes the oldest enduring contact zone between Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples in the United States (188). The Tallahassee-based, U.S. Cuban writer Roberto Fernandez alludes to a similar connection between Florida and Cuba in the title of his first book published on the in 2004: Entre dos aguas [Between Two Waters]. In light of such linkages, and given the fact that Cuba has been imagined in much U.S. public and literary discourse as an object of desire, fear, and exotic fascination, this article proposes to investigate ways in which Florida's First Coast appears in noted works of Cuban literature. This article will analyze comparatively the representation of and narrative uses for the geography and history of North Florida in three major works published in Cuba during the twentieth century. The first is Jorge Manach's frequently cited 1933 biography of the eminent nineteenth-century Cuban patriot and poet Jose Marti, Marti, el apostol (Marti: Apostle of Freedom). Manach completed the book in Havana in 1931-1932 (248), a critical period of national political crisis and revolution against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (Perez Cuba 258-268). The second is Jose Lezama Lima's 1966 novel Paradiso, which has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of ambition, research method, and canonical status in Cuban and Latin American literature (Salgado). The third, Antonio Benitez Rojo's historical novel El mar de las lentejas (The Sea of Lentils), was published in Havana in 1979, a year before the influential theorist of the Caribbean as a repeating island left Cuba for Massachusetts. While none of the three authors knew northeast Florida first-hand, the portrayal of the region in their works give some insight into how part of the southeastern United States, beyond Miami, is reflected in the Cuban cultural imaginary. Such portrayals reinforce connnections by which major Cuban literary texts configure northeast Florida as a poetic terrain and amphibious space, where the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Gulf constitute fluid zones of contact. North Florida as Contact Zone The idea of Florida in the context of recent Cuban history may evoke stereotypes of Cuban Miami from the 1960s through the 1980s: an ideologically-conservative voting bloc and moral community in a contested, binary relationship with Havana (De La Torre 22, Portes and Stepick 37). However, scholarship on the Cuban presence in Florida encompasses a broader geographical area and has focused on a time frame reaching further back than the 1959 Cuban revolution. Historians like Louis A. Perez, Jr. characterize the relationship between residents of Florida and Cuba dating back to the 1850s as one of fluid, two-way migrations and binding familiarities facilitated by ease of travel, short geographical distance, commercial ties, and shared histories (On Becoming Cuban). For example, Perez documents the impact of Cuban emigre communities (and the cigar trade that they established) on the development of both major cities and small towns throughout Florida: Key West grew from a population of less than 700 residents in 1840 to more than 28,000 by 1890 as the value of its cigar manufacturers soared from $20 million in 1882 to $100 million in 1892. …