Remembrance as a Tool for Reflecting a National Identity: A Cuban Punk Approach

Abstract

This paper takes several examples from the work of one Cuban punk band – Porno Para Ricardo – to assess the use of memory as a tool for reflecting fragments of a national identity which is both quotidian and contemporary. This singular case study is chosen not for their pertinence within Cuban culture, or even within Cuban alternative music, but rather as an exemplar of the assertion that popular music, rather than changing identities, often reflects aspects of identity and how they manifest in the everyday. Porno Para Ricardo are one such point of reflection. However, their remembrances often stray into areas too traumatic or politically admonished to be ‘remembered’ as part of a more rigid revolutionary history. By remembering the cultural (and thus, vicariously, the political) legacy of the Soviet Union within Cuba, and by re-personalising (or personifying) the traumas of mass generational exodus experiences in the early 90s, Porno Para Ricardo both augment the space of collective Cuban memory, and thus identity, but also attempt to reconnect the slabs of Cuban history often cleaved into evental epochs after which a ‘new way of being’ is constructed, as a means to better make sense of, and better reflect, contemporary Cuban identity.