Abstract
This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan (born 1957) and Pitbull (born 1981), each of whom represents different generations, immigration statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the 90-mile distance between the US and Cuba. Their musical and political commentary parallels the evolving attitudes and identities of the Cuban-American community towards Cuba and its politics. Each successive artist is a little more ambiguous about his or her political leanings in the American political sphere, but all of them continue to oppose Cuba's Communist regime while trading in the musical currency of nostalgia for the Cuba of yesteryear. In the vein of Gustavo Pérez Firmat's watershed analysis of Cuban-Americans' hyphenated identity, these artists demonstrate how Cuban-American identity exists in a liminal cultural space that lives in the present and plans for the future with one foot planted firmly in the fantasy of an Edenic past.
Highlights
This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan and Pitbull, each of whom represents different generations, immigration statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the 90mile distance between the US and Cuba
In the vein of Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s watershed analysis of CubanAmericans’ hyphenated identity, these artists demonstrate how Cuban-American identity exists in a liminal cultural space that lives in the present and plans for the future with one foot planted firmly in the fantasy of an Edenic past
The musical politics of Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan and Pitbull are heavily indebted to the Cuban-American immigration narrative that took place after 1959’s Communist Revolution
Summary
This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan (born 1957) and Pitbull (born 1981), each of whom represents different generations, immigration statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the 90mile distance between the US and Cuba. As years of exile became decades and a new century ushered in a younger generation of Cuban-Americans less concerned with ousting the Castro regime, Cruz’s outlook on returning to Cuba grew more pessimistic.
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