Contemporary Cuba Research Articles

Intergenerational Conflict in Contemporary Cuba: Rivalry within Las Congas Santiagueras

The current article reflects on the topic of intergenerational conflict between those Cubans who lived closer to the beginning of the Castro-led Revolution of 1959, and those who were born closer to the beginning of the 1990s, during the fall of the Soviet Union, now referred to as the Special Period in the Time of Peace. In the documentary Lázaro and the Shark: Cuba under the Surface (2022), Cuban exile director William Sabourin O'Reilly showcases this national conflict. Through the screen, O’Reilly highlights the beauty of the Afro-influence combined with the intimate and lively rivalry between Santiago’s local Conga groups in a country riddled by harsh conditions to dive deeper into the ever-growing intergenerational conflict. Within this current conflict, Cuba’s generations are separated into Fidelists and Oppositionalists; in opposition to the Pragmatist and the Disengaged generation (Krull and Kobayashi). With recent restrictive legislation for Cuban filmmakers, the director’s ability to make a controversial documentary of this nature is only possible from outside of Cuba as an exile.

Conditional Freedoms: Non-State Labour in Cuba between Institutional Delegitimisation and Civic Recognition

AbstractDuring the height of its power over everyday life, between 1968 and 1993, the Cuban Communist Party outlawed virtually all non-state labour and exchange. Since then, however, its continuity in power has increasingly depended on devolution: shifting responsibility for the provision of basic goods and services from failing state enterprises back to the self-employed. The latter now produce the majority of food and basic products; receive most of the national income from tourism, remittances and foreign investment; and generate most new jobs. Nevertheless, they subsist under a subaltern regime of fragile and conditional freedoms. The article adapts James Scott's consideration for the subaltern's ‘hidden transcripts’ and agencies to contemporary Cuba. It analyses the unavoidability of informal and illegal practices for daily subsistence; their naturalisation in society in contrast with their delegitimisation as opportunistic self-enrichment in party-controlled media; and how the self-employed resist such judgements in favour of more conciliatory civic visions.

Spectator as Witness: Trauma and Testimonio in Contemporary Cuban Art

The current scholarship on testimonio largely focusses on its application in literature, failing to address the genre’s possibilities beyond written and spoken narratives. However, voices that exist outside of the literary realm have employed testimonio-driven strategies to produce witness accounts of events and experiences that were previously ignored by or erased from the collective consciousness. Broadening the genre’s scope, this article examines visual manifestations of testimonio in contemporary Cuban and diasporic art, focusing on works by Coco Fusco, Felix González-Torres, and Ana Mendieta that speak to personal and collective experiences of trauma. Experiences associated with exile, displacement, and erasure are particularly relevant to this article, as the artists in focus identify as dissident, immigrant, Latinx, queer, woman, and/or Other. Given the growing interest in accessible approaches to reworking trauma, this article contributes towards the current scholarship on nuanced understandings of healing, ultimately participating in uncovering the complexities of living through and with trauma. The works discussed offer critical reflections related to the AIDS crisis, colonization, and violence against female and Latinx bodies, which have produced personal, collective, and generational traumas that are rarely acknowledged by Western societies. Therefore, by employing a framework centered on testimonio, this article reveals possibilities for marginalized and minoritized spectators to partake in the reworking of trauma through witnessing, while also illuminating, the limitations of art’s healing capabilities for victims.

The Vulnerability of Cuban Banana Production to Fusarium Wilt Caused by Tropical Race 4.

Bananas are major agricultural commodities in Cuba. One of the main constraints of banana production worldwide is Fusarium wilt of banana. Recent outbreaks in Colombia, Perú, and Venezuela have raised widespread concern in Latin America due to the potential devastating impact on the sustainability of banana production, food security, and livelihoods of millions of people in the region. Here, we phenotyped 18 important Cuban banana and plantain varieties with two Fusarium strains-Tropical Race 4 (TR4) and Race 1-under greenhouse conditions. These varieties represent 72.8% of the national banana acreage in Cuba and are also widely distributed in Latin America and the Caribbean region. A broad range of disease responses from resistant to very susceptible was observed against Race 1. On the contrary, not a single banana variety was resistant to TR4. These results underscore that TR4 potentially threatens nearly 56% of the contemporary Cuban banana production area, which is planted with susceptible and very susceptible varieties, and call for a preemptive evaluation of new varieties obtained in the national breeding program and the strengthening of quarantine measures to prevent the introduction of TR4 into the country.

Writing Instruction: A Reflection on the Demands of Teacher Training in Cuba from a Didactic Perspective

The objective of this article is to show how to train future foreign language teachers on aspects related to the teaching of writing, as way to enhance in trainees an appropriate mode of action to assume the teaching and learning processes of English as a foreign language, paying attention to accurate techniques and procedures for doing it, through the micro level of the academic curriculum of Foreign Languages Didactic, to learn how to teach in contemporary Cuban society. This practice is focused on the gradual development of appropriate actions and intellectual skills for the teaching profession. This article discusses some general aspects to be taken into account for the planning, implementation and evaluation of the micro-curriculum through tasks, exercises and activities in micro-teaching that teachers-in training develop in the subject lessons, as part of their process of education, with the professional knowledge teachers must have to fulfill the tasks and duties of the profession in different educational levels, focused on teaching writing mainly for communicative purposes, as learners go through the different grades, taking into consideration the forthcoming tendency for writing instruction in Cuba and what it ought to be. Different methods were used for the inquiry, which had a qualitative perspective that included using criteria from the products of the results of the pedagogic process to assess the theoretical arguments that deal with the viability of actions carried out.

Water and Quality of Life in Contemporary Cuba: Contending Issues and Implications

Water and Quality of Life in Contemporary Cuba: Contending Issues and Implications

Castroism in Crisis

Since the middle of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro has cast an outsized shadow over all things Cuba, as if the Cuban leader and the communist Caribbean nation were one and the same. Yet, as veteran New York Times correspondent Anthony DePalma contends in his book The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, this reflex obfuscates the complex society that is increasingly at cross purposes with all things Fidel. The author’s keen profiles of ‘ordinary’ citizens give readers an unvarnished entry into the so often unimaginable, surreal or heart-breaking realities at the core of contemporary Cuban life.

Introduction

Introduction Aisha Z. Cort (bio) The articles and interviews of this Close-Up interrogate the numerous dimensions of Contemporary Cuban cinema. The pieces included endeavor to explore the use of film not only as a narrative mode for the official voice of the Cuban nation but also a narrative tool for counterhistories. The authors of the investigations that follow have centered their projects around an exploration of major sociohistoric and sociopolitical developments in the revolution and their intersection with themes of identity politics, counternarratives, and techniques of film production. The cultural currency of film in Cuban revolutionary society has provided for a uniquely crafted and skilled film culture in Cuba. It is rich in not only nuance, but also inventiveness and interpretational innovation. Nationalized in 1959 with the formation of Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, commonly referred to as ICAIC, through over sixty years of the revolution, Cuba's film industry has long held a privileged position within Cuban and also global society, serving as an informal measuring stick for the nation's progress. The early years of the revolution produced seminal films from directors such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Julio García Espinosa who inserted themes of race, class, and gender into the revolutionary dialogue. Alternative voices such as Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Sergio Giral, and Sara Gómez served as a warning to those who would posit in their works serious questions regarding the incongruities that existed between the tenets of the Cuban Revolution and artistic and racial dialogue and expression. Contemporary directors such as Gloria Rolando, Eric Corvalán Pelle, Miguel Coyula, and Damián Sainz utilize a variety of genres, embrace new filmic techniques and resources such as international partnerships to develop and distribute their films globally and also to more freely interrogate the themes in their films that might have been considered controversial and antirevolutionary within contemporary Cuban society, which, coupled with various [End Page 174] instances of sociohistorical and political change in Cuba, has furthered the evolution of Cuban cinema in more recent years. Within the context of debates around the relationship between art and revolution, it is critical to examine Fidel Castro's 1961 meeting with intellectuals, during which he launched a phrase that defined Cuban cultural policy for years to come, "Dentro de la Revolución todo; contra la Revolución nada" (Within the Revolution everything, against the Revolution, nothing). "Palabras a los Intelectuales" (Words to the Intellectuals) (as they have been known from then on) was an intervention delivered at the conclusion of three days of meetings whose goal was to discuss and define the boundaries of artistic creation within the Cuban Revolution. They were inspired by the tensions between two artistic organizations of the early years of the Cuban Revolution, Lunes de Revolución and the ICAIC.1 In this speech Castro not only laid the groundwork for the cultural aesthetics of the revolution, but also set the precedent for future conflicts, which would inevitably arise between the tenets of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban artistic expression. The tensions between Lunes de Revolución and the ICAIC originated largely from the censoring of the 1961 film P.M. and, on a smaller scale, from debates over which organization should be entrusted with disseminating cinematographic criticism. P.M. was a short film directed by Saba Cabrera Infante (brother of Lunes de Revolución's editor, Guillermo Cabrera Infante) and Orlando Jiménez-Leal. In this film, the directors portrayed Havana's nightlife from the point of view of the city's Afro-Cuban population.2 ICAIC, the official organization of Cuban film workers, supported the revolutionary government's decision to ban the film, while Lunes de Revolución did not. The positioning of these two groups on opposite sides of the fence with regards to the issue of artistic censorship helped to transform Lunes de Revolución, previously an ally of the revolution, into an enemy. Pitted against each other in this manner, the tensions between ICAIC and Lunes de Revolución brought to a head the previously veiled issue of the limits of artistic expression within the Cuban Revolution...

Swap It on WhatsApp: The Moral Economy of Informal Online Exchange Networks in Contemporary Cuba

AbstractThe inhabitants of Cuba's capital, Havana, are using semipublic group chats on messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram to access food, hygiene products, medication, and other basic necessities during times of scarcity. This has been especially prevalent during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Such chat groups created digital spaces in which locals swap scarce goods and share vital information about the availability of products in the government‐run shops, creative entrepreneurs offer online delivery services, and black‐market vendors sell commodities that are in short supply. We examine the conflicting value systems that shape the interactions on these messaging apps, where solidarity and sharing as well as market‐mediated exchanges come to coexist and must be negotiated on an everyday basis. The article is accompanied by a series of “screen walks”–that is, short mobile phone videos, in which research participants explain the dynamics of the groups they participate in.

Challenging Theater in the Special Period: A review of Bretton White, Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba

Challenging Theater in the Special Period: A review of Bretton White, Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba

The History of the Transformation of Cuban Socialism in the Context of Contemporary Reforms: A Political Economy Perspective

The paper explores transformation of the contemporary Cuban model of socialism. The purpose is to ascertain the dynamics of the interpretation of socialism as a mode of production in three different stages. It draws on crucial sources such as the 1976 Constitution of Cuba, its 1992 amended version, and the 2019 Constitution. Each corresponds to one of the three models of development identified in the article: the Marxist-Leninist model, the special period model, and the model of actualisation process. The author also takes a more detailed look at the official documents of the First, Sixth, and Seventh Congresses of the Cuban Communist Party, reflecting aspects of socialism as a mode of production and the role of Marxism-Leninism. The paper examines issues such as forms of ownership of the means of production, changing attitudes towards exploitation, the operation of the socialist principle of distribution “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work”, and the role and scope of the planning sys-tem. The author's methodology rests upon the historical-genetic method and comparative analysis. The study indicates that Cuban socialism as a mode of production has undergone considerable changes over the course of its history. The planning system has lost its scale and short-term planning is being trans-formed from directive to indicative, while general economic policy is moving away from instruments of administrative intervention towards indirect regulation. Mid and long-term planning gets closer to the models of strategies. The actualisation model also legalises private ownership of the means of production, while the special period model views cooperatives as a socialist form of economic management. Although exploitation is condemned, the actualization model integrates it into the social system having legalised wage labour. The socialist principle of distribution is regarded only as a desired principle, but not as a functioning one. Thus, changes in the interpretation of socialism as a mode of production have been enshrined at the official level. Contemporary Cuban socialism has moved away from the Marxist-Leninist model adopted in the 1960s.

Fashion in Cuba as Revolt, and the Horror of the Nonproductive

This paper will show how fashion practice in contemporary Cuba plays out as revolt in the face of two productive axes: the mythological machine of the Cuban Revolution, and that of capitalist accumulation. After establishing how the revolt is formulated within historical materialism, pointing out the need for its demythologization, the shared ontological foundations of the capitalist and the socialist models in their horror of the nonproductive are established, in order to show how this ethos is articulated with the revolt, a figure which guides our approach insofar as it differs from dissent. Once the framework is outlined showing how the Cuban State’s sartorial socialization mechanisms contributed to the making of the symbolic-mythological machinery, the groundwork is laid for the socio-historical elements that enable the emergence of a new subjectivity traversed by the representational-specular intersectionalities which are key to our analysis. From the radical perspective of uselessness, waste and potlatch, this essay will then go on to situate the Cuban fashion praxis as destructive revolt that subverts and breaks with the historicist narrative of both capitalism and the Cuban Revolution. In order to illustrate this argument, the paper examines specific examples from among contemporary Cuba’s fashion practitioners in 2019.

Black Feminist Rumba Pedagogies

AbstractRumba guaguancó, a sub-genre of Afro-Cuban popular dance, has been widely defined as a dance of courtship, characterized as a male pursuit of a woman's sex. The article analyzes alternative meanings of the sub-genre articulated in the pedagogical practices of black women rumba dancers. Insights were gleaned from the author's own dance training in Havana while conducting original ethnographic research between 2009 and 2018. What the author terms “a black feminist choreographic aptitude” taught by rumberas (women rumba dancers) speaks to the pointedly gendered valances of worsening racialized class inequality in contemporary Cuba. Building on Blanco Borelli's theory of “hip(g)nosis,” the article interrogates the racialized and gendered discourses historically reproduced through dominant definitions of rumba, limiting women of African descent to sexual objects. The study argues for increased critical attention to pedagogy as a hermeneutical tool, centering those subjects historically marginalized from the production of knowledge about their bodies.

We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World

From the moment that Cuba passed into the world at large as a subject deemed worthy of sustained scholarship—which is to say, ever since January 1, 1959—the topic of Cuba developed into something of a Rorschach blot: Cuba as a point of view. Cuba as a politics. Cuban studies—what was once upon a time known as “Cubanology”—emerged out of a charged environment of polemics—that is, a politics—with defenders and detractors of the revolution in robust dispute about almost all facets of the Cuban condition, past and present. Disinterest and dispassion have rarely been hallmarks of Cuban studies. Objectivity—perhaps. Neutrality—never.Much has changed in the intervening decades. Cuba has changed. The literature on Cuba has changed. Social scientists have introduced complexity. Humanists have offered subtlety. Detachment has reduced engagement. Mostly. Traces of the politics persist, of course, inscribed in new paradigms of scholarship, precisely within the very narratives rich with complexity and subtlety.It is in this sense that one welcomes the appearance of Helen Yaffe's We Are Cuba!, a spirited defense of the Cuban Revolution that, as Yaffe indicates in the opening sentence of the acknowledgments, “owes its existence to the Cuban people whose principled intransigence and revolutionary resilience sustained their system into the post-Soviet world” (p. vii). The defense of Cuban socialism is unabashed and unambiguous; it is all-encompassing and well documented. The years of the Special Period serve as Yaffe's point of departure, nearly a decade during which Cubans experienced daily life as a vertiginous free fall into an incomprehensible abyss. Yaffe is indeed correct to celebrate the resourcefulness of the Cuban people and the resolve of the Cuban leadership at a time of withering adversity—all in all, achievements properly recognized and correctly acknowledged, a tribute indeed to the genius of Cuban pragmatism. And throughout the book Yaffe chronicles the country's well-known advances in biotechnology, health care, and education.But all is not well, Yaffe understands. There are incalculable moral costs and enduring psychic consequences to decades of “principled intransigence and revolutionary resilience,” of unrelieved struggle and unending sacrifice for a future that never arrives. Vast numbers of Cubans continue to experience the circumstances of daily life with a grim resignation. Yaffe is correct to note that “the prospects for the revolutionary people of Cuba are deteriorating”—an observation offered before COVID-19 arrived to the island (p. 277).In what is otherwise a most complete book, some lapses rise to the level of glaring omissions. The failure to address the subject of race relations in post-Soviet Cuba is inexplicable. The silence on the economics of immigration is similarly perplexing. Any discussion of the solvency of vast numbers of Cuban households—and to a large extent the Cuban economy itself—must acknowledge the extensive support networks from abroad. The importance of remittances cannot be exaggerated, presently an estimated $4 billion annually and constituting one of the principal sources of foreign exchange.We Are Cuba! makes for good reading. It offers an important point of view through which to engage the subject of contemporary Cuba. It will no doubt provoke lively debate, all in the spirit of the polemics of old: a reminder of the very things that made Cuba so interesting in the first place.

Cartas para minha mãe, de Teresa Cárdenas: racismo e resistência na voz de uma literata negra

The aim of this work is to analyze racism from the perspective of the main character —a child, black and orphaned— from the novel Cartas para minha mãe, by contemporary Cuban writer Teresa Cárdenas. The narrative develops around a character who did not have what we call childhood today, and who thus enters adolescence. However, our focus will be on the black condition of the narrator, who at all times suffers from the most diverse types of prejudices, in addition to having to deal with a difficult phase: the transition from childhood to puberty. In this way, this work intends to discuss the issues involving childhood surrounded by prejudices of the main character of Cárdenas' novel, while we will observe the reactions and perceptions of the child in face of racism. For the analysis of the novel, the narrator's childhood, the historical contextualization of the colonization process in Latin America and the psychosocial process of the feeling of inferiority of blacks and of superiority of white, we will use the texts of the following scholars: Cabo Aseguinolaza (2001); Ariès (1981); Fanon (2008); Gates (2014) and Souza (2015), among other theoretical texts. In the end, we realized that in the novel by Teresa Cárdenas the weight of racism leads the narrator to seek help in the letters she writes to her dead mother. The racism present in the text builds as a sample of what several people go through every day of their lives.

La presencia de la narrativa cubana contemporánea en la prensa escrita en húngaro durante el comunismo (1959–89)

RESUMEN El artículo presenta la recepción húngara de la narrativa cubana contemporánea en diferentes tipos de publicaciones de la prensa escrita en húngaro entre 1959 y 1989. Después de presentar en breve el establecimiento y el desarrollo de las relaciones diplomáticas y bilaterales húngaro-cubanas, el artículo ofrece una sucinta descripción del paisaje cultural del período comunista en lo que respecta a la prensa y las editoriales, y, a partir de aquí, examina las similitudes y diferencias entre los principios de la política cultural de Hungría y Cuba. Para evidenciar el hecho aparentemente paradójico de que, a pesar de los estrechos lazos político-culturales entre los dos países, la recepción de la literatura cubana en Hungría fue bastante reservada, se comenta las reseñas y las críticas que salieron a la luz en la prensa húngara sobre las antologías, los volúmenes de cuentos y las novelas publicadas en las editoriales de Hungría. El artículo se detiene especialmente en las ediciones húngaras de las obras de Alejo Carpentier.

Dancing the Butterfly: Trans-Caribbean Cultural Consumption in Special Period Cuba

This paper takes as its starting point memories of an encounter which saw a Jamaican dancehall queen perform on a locally produced television show in Santiago de Cuba at the height of the Special Period economic crisis. I propose that this encounter was a harbinger of subsequent experiences of popular culture consumption in contemporary Cuba, while also drawing from histories of regional connection that placed Santiago de Cuba in a constellation of trans-Caribbean exchanges. The moment shows how, during the Special Period crisis, media producers sought new paths through which to navigate the technological challenges of making television amidst material shortages, and in doing so created new imaginaries of a transnational consumer culture which featured (specific and appropriate) newly built spaces of leisure and distinctive brands of consumption. The television broadcast was a consciously crafted mediation of emerging consumer cultures that at once repudiated and represented the everyday experience of Cuban society as rooted in crisis, scarcity, and socialist taste hierarchies.

Socialism with Bling: Aspiration, Decency, and Exclusivity in Contemporary Cuba

This article engages a pervasive discourse on decency in twenty-first-century social mores and state prohibitions by examining artists’ work (2016–2019) that speaks to how material culture and aesthetic judgment feed into the aesthetic hegemony of the Cuban state. Attention is paid to three cases that unravel a national and international staging of a universal “decent” Cuban culture in the post-Obama era: (1) the 2017 intervention Where is Mella? by “amateur” artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who called attention to the Cuban military’s commercial alliance with Kempinksi, the Swiss/German hotel group, critiquing Cuba’s new landscape of luxury; (2) Pluto (2016), video art by Geandy Pavón that alludes to a chain of embezzlements and substitutions; and (3) the performances of two “amateur” musicians: Chocolate MC, who, though popular, is also deemed repulsive on both sides of the Florida Straits, and Cimafunk, celebrated as a cultural ambassador. A contemplation on “excess” – a 5-star hotel, junk jewellery, or bling bling – allows for questions of who the Cuban state recognises as an artist, how artists appropriate and expropriate ideas of luxury and refinement, and whether these substitutions can sufficiently erode colonial legacies that continue to contain those subjectivities perceived as excessive.

Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba By Bretton White. Gainesville: University of Florida Press; pp. xiii + 243, 10 illustrations. $85 hardcover.

Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba By Bretton White. Gainesville: University of Florida Press; pp. xiii + 243, 10 illustrations. $85 hardcover.

Sistema de superación para profesionales que laboran en la cultura física profiláctica y terapéutica

In contemporary Cuban society, university plays a leading role, because within its substantive processes, pre and postgraduate education is an important social responsibility in the training and improvement of human resources. In the career of physical culture from the university-community imbrication, it has allowed carrying out different actions of overcoming in a participative way. Where the discipline of Prophylactic and Therapeutic Physical Culture has been used as a vehicle for this purpose, since it has potentialities due to its object of study. The results obtained were positive because it allowed to elevate the culture of the inhabitants of the implied communities, achieving a better life style for the prevention and rehabilitation of diseases, in order to achieve a better life from the university.