Cuban Culture Research Articles

The Bay of Pigs: Revisiting Two Museums

The Museum of Playa Giron (the Bay of Pigs) in the region of Cienega De Zapata, Cuba, celebrates the repulse of Brigade 2506 as the first reverse of US imperialism on the American continents. The equivalent Brigade 2506 Museum in Miami, dedicated to and maintained by the members of Brigade 2506, celebrates defeat at the Bay of Pigs as moral victory for the Cuban exiles. The forces were indeed implacable foes. 
 
 Yet between the museums can be detected some curious similarities. Both present the common theme of the confrontation between forces of good and evil. Both celebrate the philosophy that dying for one’s country is the greatest good a citizen may achieve. Both museums fly the common Cuban flag. Both museums identify a common enemy: the United States of America.
 
 This article, by comparing the displays in the two museums, analyses some cultural elements of what, despite decades of separation, in some ways remains a common Cuban culture.

Sarita and the Revolution: Race and Cuban Cinema

In recent years, Cuban cinema has received increasing scholarly attention and, quite deservedly, accolades for decades of politically committed and stylistically innovative filmmaking as part of a committed project to undertake a 'decoloniza tion of the screens' (Chanan 1985, 275). This essay explores questions of race and ethnicity in relation to Cuban cinema during the height of the Revolution, focusing in particular on one filmmaker, the late Sara Gomez. In this essay, I argue that while contemporary filmmakers in Cuba have benefited from a growing acceptance of African heritage as an integral component of Cuban culture, Sara Gomez's in terest in exploring matters of racial inequalities in the Revolutionary Cuba of the 1960s and '70s forced her to negotiate a rather challenging political and social mi lieu in which official attitudes frowned upon the acknowledgement of racial dis crimination as a contemporary phenomenon. For many years, Cuba was the only Caribbean country with any kind of motion picture output of note. In fact, Cuba today has an established history of indigenous film production, resulting from the Castro government's active support of Lenin's notion of film as the 'most important art'. The Castro government set up the infra structure for the construction of a film industry to serve the needs of a Revolution ary Cuba in March 1959, less than three months after it came to power, by estab lishing the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematogrdficos (ICAIC), often referred to (in English) as the Cuban Film Institute. Over the next fifteen years, Cuban cinema produced a respected corpus of fea ture films, documentaries and shorts. Under the supervision of the ICAIC, Cuban cinema developed an aesthetic identity very much attuned to, and aligned with, the political and ideological developments of the early Revolutionary period. This in cluded the 'Imperfect Cinema' aesthetic, as espoused by Cuban filmmaker, Julio Garcia Espinosa, which argued against the dangers of attempting to imitate the elaborate production values of the First World's mainstream cinemas at the ex pense of content. The precise ethnic make-up of Cuba's 11 million population is uncertain, with sources varying considerably in their estimations, most indicating Cuba's popula tion as being predominantly (51 per cent) mixed race (black/white), but some showing it as predominantly white. Blacks are estimated to comprise 11 or 12 per cent.1 On the other hand, in 1990, 84 per cent of Cubans living in the United States classified themselves as 'white' (de la Fuenta 1995, 144). Whatever the precise demographics, there appears to be a consensus that Cuba is not a 'white' society. Scholars such as Lourdes Casal have argued that Cuban 'culture is [...] undoubtedly Afro-Hispanic', noting the influence of African and black cultural elements in Cuban music, proverbs and sayings, religion, poetry and

Baseball in the breach: Notes on defection, disaffection and transition in contemporary Cuba

This article explores the popular ambivalence permeating contemporary Cuban socialism as Cuban citizens struggle to reconcile a deep sense of pride and accomplishment in the revolution with the need for political, economic and social reform. I focus on the everyday lives of Cuban baseball fans attempting to make sense of the deprivations and distortions of an economy and cultural order in crisis that is made all the more real for them in the emergence of baseball player defections to play in American professional baseball. Through an analysis of these defections as well as Cuban baseball fan responses to them, I argue that the context of economic crisis in contemporary Cuba has entailed a dynamic rethinking of Cuban culture and political economy, a process that is intimately bound up with American cultural, political, and economic forms such as Major League Baseball, but that these Cuban transformations are never simply determined by them.

Cuba Through A New Lens

[First paragraph]The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Samuel Farber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba: A New History. Ric hard Gott . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 384 pp. (Paper US$ 17.00)Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Antoni Kapcia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. xx + 236 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95) Richard Gott, Antoni Kapcia, and Samuel Farber each approach Cuba through a new lens. Gott does so by providing a broad-sweep history of Cuba, which is epic in scope, attaches importance to social as much as political and economic history, and blends scholarship with flair. Kapcia homes in on Havana as the locus for Cuban culture, whereby cultural history becomes the trope for exploring not only the city but also Cuban national identity. Farber revisits his own and others’ interpretations of the origins of the Cuban Revolution.

Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (review)

Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (review)

The Rise of Son and the Legitimization of African-Derived Culture in Cuba, 1908-1940

The Rise of Son and the Legitimization of African-Derived Cult ure in Cuba, 1908-1940 Glenn A. Chambers (bio) The rise of the Afro-Cuban musical genre commonly known as son is representative of Cuban society's ability to affirm through art its primary cultural influences: Europe and Africa. Despite the successful transculturation within the music, however, the events surrounding the creation and acceptance of son reiterate the struggle between Cuban elites and the masses to define lo cubano.1 While elites were looking to Europe and the United States for representations of culture and modernity, the black and mulatto masses were constructing an art form that ultimately gained acceptance worldwide and became a defining symbol of Cuban culture and identity. In many countries with large Afro-descent populations, culture has been the primary means by which these marginalized groups have been incorporated into the mainstream. This has often come as a result of the appropriation of African-derived culture by those of European descent, through such categories as dance, music, food, and religious practices. However, such practices are by no means an indication that the people who created the culture have achieved political, economic, and social gains within their respective societies. In many instances, the cultural practices of the black masses are accepted, while the originators of the culture continue to exist in the lower stratum of society. In this essay, I will show how the social and political conditions under which son became a representation of popular culture in Cuba served as a catalyst for the affirmation of Cuba's African roots, despite attempts on the part of the elite to exclude Afro-Cubans from establishing any connection to Cuban national identity. The Roots of Cuban Son Son came to be regarded as a highly sophisticated and culturally expressive popular art form in twentieth-century Cuba, despite historically originating from the most marginalized and disenfranchised group in Cuban society: the black masses. While mulattoes and poor whites contributed to the development of the music on various levels, it is the African-derived traditions of the black masses that constituted the foundation and early inspiration of son. These traditions had their origins in the many African nations and ethnicities transplanted to Cuba against their will throughout the duration of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. African traditions were transformed within the plantation environment, and retained in the Afro-Cuban cabildos de nación. The historian Philip Howard affirms that [End Page 497] these mutual-aid societies met in private and, because of their spatial distance from church officials, became very attractive to Afro-Cubans. The cabildos allowed them the means to enjoy much more religious autonomy than the Catholic-controlled cofradías, or religious fraternities (Howard 27). This religious autonomy was in many ways synonymous with cultural autonomy, in that cabildos proved to be a fertile ground for the nurturing of the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. The enslavement of Africans in Cuba, as in most areas where the institution was prevalent, played a pivotal role in the development and retention of African culture among the enslaved population. Robert Jameson, in his Letters from the Havana During the Year 1820, writes: "none of the enslaved Africans have acquired an indigenous character; the African soil from which they were torn still clings to them, neither washed off in the font of baptism or stream of knowledge" (20). Jameson's observation, that Africans still clung to their traditions despite being enslaved, advances the notion that African culture was strong during the period. Apart from Jameson's questioning of the civilized qualities of Africans, the description of festivals is reminiscent of some African religious ceremonies. This is important in explaining the cultural retentions of Afro-Cubans, because through detribalization efforts the Spanish colonial government attempted to supplant African cultures with that of the colonizer (Smallwood 191–92). This led to a clustering of traditions in which various African cultures blended with European culture, and allowed for the maintenance of many distinctly African traditions, which manifested themselves most notably in Afro-Cuban musical traditions such as son. While the African ethnic groups represented in Afro-Cuban cabildos were numerous, four groups are recognized as having...

Strong and mild requestive hints and positive-face redress in Cuban Spanish

The study applies Blum-Kulka and House's (1989) and Kasper's (1989) categories of strong and mild hints and Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) classification of positive and negative politeness categories to a corpus of naturally occurring data from Cuban Spanish. It argues that the specific cultural norms of facework and face behavior in Cuban culture dictate a preferential employment of strategies aimed at positive-face redress. It concludes that there are no instances of hints performed solely with negative-politeness strategies, which are employed considerably less frequently. Therefore, hints in Cuban Spanish seem to be always either exclusively positively polite or simultaneously positively and negatively polite, but never purely deferential.

Havana: the making of Cuban culture

Introduction: The Havana Mosaic: Sweetness and Light * The Colony, 1550s-1902--Part I: The City in the Shadows - Havana before Sugar, 1550s-1760s / Part II: The Boom City: Sugar and the Evolution of a Capital, 1760s-1901 * The Republic, 1902-1958--Part I: A Nation without a Capital, and a Capital without a Nation, 1902-1933 / Part II: Havana as the Cultural Problem, 1934-1958 / Part II: Case study: Bohemia * The Revolution--Part I: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Revolution: A New Marginalisation of Havana, 1959-71? / Part II: The Grey City - Conformity, Stagnation and Brutalism in the 1970s and 1980s / Part III: Case study: Bohemia and Granma * Havana as a Living City, 1990 till the Present--Part I: The Rebirth of a Cultural Space / Part II: Case Study: the Casas de Cultura * Conclusion: Havana as Chiaroscuro

Contra las ficciones, la imagen. El oficio de perder, de Lorenzo García Vega

ABSTRACT - Lorenzo García Vega, member of Orígenes and in exile since 1967, reflects in his memories on the foundations of his own poetics as well as on Cuban culture in 20th Century. Putting in perspective the sources of Garcia Vega's images (cubism, photography, Joseph Cornell and pop art), the article studies the characteristics, functions and motivations of their use in this text in order to locate it in Cuban context. The basic claim is that the author is intent to «deconstruct» collective imaginary and the Utopian simulacra produced by national literature since independence.

Irreverent Humor in Postrevolutionary Cuban Fiction: The Case of Mirta Yáñez

In response to life’s tribulations, sometimes we laugh so that we will not cry. Even the most trying circumstances (and perhaps particularly these) are shaded with a sense of the absurd; when we can focus on the ridiculous, we can often transcend the most confining problems. In postrevolutionary Cuba, where the literary aesthetic during the 1960s and 1970s demanded a socially and politically committed prose, humor was not the order of the day. On the contrary, writers attempted to depict the decadence of the former dictatorships and the glory of the revolution in a style that has been called Cuban socialist realism. However, in the 1980s one literary voice emerges that challenges the necessary division between serious ‘‘revolutionary’’ literature and humor. In a prose that recuperates the complicated choteo of the Cuban neobaroque, Mirta Yáñez imbues even the most serious and compelling literary moments with irreverent humor. Yáñez’s ability to laugh at herself and at the inconsistencies of Cuban life has made her one of the most important contemporary writers on the island. This paper will discuss how Yáñez’s use of irreverent humor is critical of systemic problems without being censored as politically subversive. Resumen Cuando la vida ‘‘no es fácil,’’ a veces es necesario reír para no llorar, ya que hasta los momentos más difíciles (y quizás muy particularmente en el caso de Cuba) están matizados con un sentido de lo absurdo. Cuando podemos enfocarnos en lo ridículo, muchas veces trascendemos los problemas más graves. En la Cuba posrevolucionaria, donde la estética literaria de los años 60 y 70 demandaba una prosa social y políticamente comprometida, el humor era algo fuera de contexto. Los escritores trataban de retratar la decadencia de las dictaduras de Machado y Batista y la gloria de la revolución en un estilo que llegó a llamarse el realismo socialista cubano. No obstante, en los años 70 surge una voz literaria que desafía la división establecida entre la literatura revolucionaria ‘‘seria’’ y el humor. Usando una prosa que recupera el complejo choteo del neobarroco, Mirta Yáñez utiliza un humor irreverente para describir hasta los momentos más serios. La capacidad que tiene Yáñez de reírse de sí misma y de develar lo cómico de las inconsistencias de la vida actual cubana la convierten en una de las escritoras contemporáneas más importantes de la isla. En este trabajo crítico, exploraré cómo es que el humor irreverente de Mirta Yáñez contribuye a una narrativa irreverentemente revolucionaria.

Una literatura sin residencia fija. Insularidad, historia y dinámica sociocultural en la Cuba del siglo XX

From its very beginnings, Cuban literature has been a literature with no fixed abode: written between Cuba and Mexico (Jose Maria Heredia), Cuba and Spain (Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda), Cuba and the U.S. (Cirilo Villaverde), or between Cuba, Europe and the Americas (Jose Marti), but to mention the outstanding figures in Cuba's 19th Century. This article tries to unfold and develop the consequences of this new perspective by insisting on the specific «frictional» character of Cuban literature and culture today.

The Traumas of Unbelonging: Reinaldo Arenas's Recuperations of Cuba

Comparatists have recognized in recent decades a shift away from exclusively national literatures and notions of place-bound culture. Increasingly we are dealing with what Bruce Robbins calls different modalities of situatedness-in-displacement (250) as globalization, migration, and forced exile have separated people from places and made conceptions of ethnicity less static and more mobile, fluid, and hybrid as they are subject to a greater variety of cultural influences. (1) However, these conditions also raise the question of the relationship between culture and self, and feeling bound to a place remains an imperative for some, particularly if the separation from homeland is traumatic. While situations of displacement often foster survival through cultural adaptability, in the context of traumatic exile a lost home can remain not only psychically embedded as a place of origin and identity but also of an anguished dissolution of self. The case of contemporary Cuba and in particular the work of exiled Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) is exemplary, specifically in how the traumas of revolution, oppression, and dislocation produce a fragmented, isolated, and dissociated identity and an aesthetic sensibility compelled to both critique and reconnect to homeland. Arenas's estrangements from authorities and other Cubans both before and after he flees Cuba fuel his imagination, provoking recreations of Cuba through which he can revisit in some way his losses and hopes for his country and himself. His own displacement also mirrors other Cubans' fragmented political, cultural, and psychological life. Writing most of his work in exile in the US, (2) he chronicles his own persecution for being homosexual and uncompromisingly observes how in Cuban society a powerful, masculinized cultural order attempts to suppress other influences, more specifically, the nexus of art, gender, and sexuality that he associates with the feminine. Like many trauma writers, Arenas adopts a testimonial approach to bear witness for a suppressed past (Vickroy 5). His writing carries the imprint of overwhelming, psychologically disruptive events, and he attempts to reshape cultural memory of these events in his focus on artists' authenticity and survival, and in imaginatively revisiting emotionally over-determined contexts symptomatic of traumas. Art provides mediated structures by which he withstands attempts to obliterate his person and his work. This study will establish the traumatic contexts of Arenas's life and then will analyze how his imagination and art, especially through the lenses of gender and sexuality, become the means to express and, to some extent, overcome trauma. Trauma narratives, I contend, are personalized responses to this century's emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and oppression on the individual psyche. They are often concerned with human-made traumatic situations and are implicit critiques of the ways social, economic, and political structures can create and perpetuate trauma (Vickroy 4). They highlight postcolonial concerns with rearticulating the lives and voices of marginal people, and reveal trauma as an indicator of social injustice or oppression, as the ultimate cost of destructive sociocultural institutions (Vickroy x). Many of these narratives have characteristics of testimonio or testimonial narrative that seeks to create a feeling of lived experience and expresses a problematic collective social situation through a representative individual (Beverley 94-95). Testifying to the past has been an urgent task for many fiction writers in recent decades as they attempt to preserve personal and collective memories from assimilation, repression, or misrepresentations (Vickroy 1). Arenas exemplifies this approach in his recounting of the effects of Castro's regime, describing aspects of Cuban culture lying outside of official versions, and revealing the follies of Cuban life and history as he sees them. …

Afro-Cuban religiosity, revolution, and national identity

Afro-Cuban religions - especially the practice of santeria, based on West African traditions - are an essential aspect of contemporary Cuban identity, Christine Ayorinde argues, and their existence has forced the current revolutionary state into bizarre and contradictory positions. Ayorinde's bold assertion confounds official pronouncements about the irrelevance of religion in a modern socialist state. The revolutionary leadership has acknowledged the centrality of Cuba's African heritage, while upholding the idea of a nationhood that transcends racial difference. Ayorinde proposes that the conflict between the desire to recognize the country's African roots and the offical commitment to a secular state has created a complex, often paradoxical situation. Despite an ideological campaign to create a new, rational society, African-derived religions are emerging today for the first time from a position of marginality. Cuba now is beset with a sense of disorientation as well as a return to old habits and patterns, including racial inequality. Based mostly inside Cuba, Ayorinde's research includes interviews and conversations with individual Cubans, including practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions from different ethnic backgrounds. Ayorinde also interviewed both religious and atheist commentators on Afro-Cuban religions and culture, including academics, journalists, party officials, and members of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, many at the forefront of efforts to give santeria greater recognition as a central component of the national culture. In addition, the book offers a fresh historical overview of changing religious forms and attitudes in Cuba, examining the encounter with European culture and the Roman Catholic Church, religious practice among slaves in the 19th century, the concept of racial fraternity articulated by Cuban patriot Jose Marti, and the witchcraft scares of the early decades of the 20th century, when religious practices were associated with criminality. Its emphasis on the period since 1959 and on the current decade places it on the cutting edge of studies that examine contemporary Cuban culture.

Cubanos, Americans and Modes of Being Between in pre-Castro Cuba

In pre-Castro Cuba cubanos familiar with American culture were part of a wider society that included cubanos who were also American and Americans familiar with Cuban culture. Familiarity, however, was not explicitly coded in national identity. A sense of being can depend on assumptions and practices that are common without being explicitly coded as collective, much less as distinctive of the collective. If we attend only to that which is explicitly coded as ethnic or national, we risk a very incomplete understanding of ethnicity and nationalism.

The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, and: The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition (review)

Linden Lewis, ed. The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. 328 pp; and James J. Pancrazio, The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004. 296 pp.Sexual and violent media content are often justified as financially imperative; sex and violence, it is argued, sell.1 Never has this adage seemed truer than it does now, when looking at trends in research and publishing in the area of historiography and cultural criticism. Particularly scintillating are the contemporary critical approaches based on the exploration of gender and sexuality. Nowadays, it seems, sex sells books to intellectuals and academics even when we don't have a dollar to spare, thus keeping in business university publishers who are in crisis. A quick glance at the new release lists of academic presses will verify the current popularity of and studies, queer studies (and queer theory), gender studies (especially the newer twists focusing on transgender, transvestitism, and constructions of masculinity), and studies of other non-normative sexualities.I'm not complaining; as a matter of fact, gender and sexuality are my favorite topics, particularly when studied in the context of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latina/o literature and culture. I am thrilled at the outpouring of titillating titles over the last fifteen or twenty years, luscious and provocative studies that provide a richer understanding of queer history, culture, and literature.2 Some of the books live up to their tacit promise to delve into the steamier side of culture, and others are regular scholarly fare that nevertheless extend our academic understanding of gender and sexuality. Several articles and a small number of books have begun to sketch out a picture of the complex tapestry of sexualities in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.1 One of the dangers faced by writers focusing on the centrality of sex and gender in the Antilles is the repetition of the historical sexualization, fetishization, and eroticization of these island nations. The proliferation of a Cuban literatura sordida, which may have begun with exile Zoe Valdes but that also has flourished on the island since the 1990s, makes this all too tempting. These super sexy and violent novels and short stories that focus on today's Havana as sort of a newly decadent Sodom and Gomorrah perpetuate old stereotypes and lend themselves to skewed, if interesting, interpretations of contemporary culture. Another critical hazard to avoid is the erroneous imposition of foreign sexual politics or mores when interpreting Caribbean culture; for instance, the terms gay and lesbian may not accurately describe same-sex desire portrayed in Cuban cultural production. In the recuperation of queer voices and rereading of cultural production, critics have had to tread a fine line in order to scrutinize what has not yet been seen, rather than inventing that which does not exist. Therefore, to find new books that manage to capitalize on current interest in gender and sexuality in Cuba without resorting to cheap or easy (and intellectually suspect) thrills is a distinct pleasure.Pancrazio's outrageous title, mirrored by the extravagant jacket art of Dora Ramirez (La mascara, 1980), suggest that his book will be both erotic and exotic. The more staid subtitle, on the other hand, prompts a questioning of whether the promise of sex and excitement will be fulfilled. Not that Carpentier's work itself is prim, boring, or even heteronormative. Rather, the subtitle implies a strictly bounded and literary focus that could limit the appeal (not to mention, sex appeal) of the book. Happily, the author is able to tease out enough transgression from the texts to delight most readers. Pancrazio may have focused principally on Carpentier's oeuvre as a way to provide focus, but he cogently argues that his observations about the nature of fetishism and transvestitism more accurately describe Cuban culture as a whole. …

'An All Too Present Absence: Fernando Ortiz's Work on Abaku? in its Sociocultural Context

Focusses on the Abukuá associations, Afro-Cuban male initiatory secret societies, as such originated in Regla, Havana in 1836. Authors describe how Abakuá titleholders gained powerful social and labour positions in the Havana area, and how they were eventually outlawed in 1876. They point out how Abakuá societies by and since then were designated as negative and criminal in the public sphere, and condemned by many writers and politicians. They show how published accounts of Abakuá since the late 19th c and early 20th c. were thus seldom merely descriptive, but were presented as proof of Cuba's lagging modernity, and of a for some undesired Africanization. They further relate how Fernando Ortiz's studies and work on Abakuá fit in this. They note how Ortiz' s earlier "criminal anthropology" work on Abakuá was in the same negative and criminalizing vein, yet they point at changes, as in time he described and evaluated Abakuá as more positive, and as part of Cuban culture. They describe how Ortiz dedicated much effort to studying different aspects of Abakuá, and that extensive notations on these became part of his archive, which, as he told fellow-scholars, he would work out in an eventual monograph on Abakuá. The authors deplore that this monograph was not only never published, but also seems to have been lost.

Cuba and its Deep Africanity

Cuba?which is not a Polynesian island, as a disoriented friend whom I met at a Cuban studies workshop in Halifax once believed?is more than an island, more than the Pearl of the Antilles, more than the largest of the Great Antilles; it is an archipelago whose waters still harbor ecological mysteries, and which modern anthropologists never tire of reclaiming in their research plans.1 The geography of Cuba is not what determines the essence of its culture. Praised for its beauty in the finest descriptions that the old chroniclers penned, especially Columbus's navigation logbook, Cuba has transcended history through its contributions to world art and literature, and also, at the end of the twentieth century, through its moral defiance and its defense of its right to survive in the middle of the Western Hemisphere?to which, of course, it has always belonged. A clear image of the Cuban character has circulated all over the world; yet images of Cuba and of Cuban culture have lately suffered the kind of adulteration that has become stock in trade for certain mass media. Such

Santería grand slam: Afro-Cuban religious studies and the study of Afro-Cuban religion

[First paragraph]Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. ix + 165 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. KATHERINE J. HAGEDORN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvi + 296 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00)The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. DAVID H. BROWN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. xix + 286 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.23)Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. DAVID H. BROWN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp. (Paper US$ 38.00)Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions,” field sites and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they factually undergo historical changes, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changeable epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe in writing from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping, historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the practical, but perhaps misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion,”1 and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to the study of it – cannot be easily separated: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this fact has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).

Prosperity, Progress, and Wealth: Cuban Enterprise during the Early Republic, 1902-1927

Many historians see the first decades of the twentieth century in Cuba as a time of frustration and failure. An unhealthy dependence on U.S. trade and investment distorted Cuba's economy, they argue, while the incessant barrage of U.S. goods and culture undermined its national identity. The business and political classes in pre-Revolutionary Republic of Cuba are portrayed as accepting the imposition of U.S. interests and the dictates of U.S. culture out of weakness, venality, or both. This article argues that native investment and entrepreneurship were crucial to Cuba's rapid economic growth during the first decades after the war for independence. As heirs to the liberal, Creole economic elite that had modernized the sugar industry in the nineteenth century, Cuban entrepreneurs during the Republic were more than capable of collaborating with and competing against foreign capitalists to create one of the world's most dynamic export economies. Según la perspectiva de muchos historiadores, las primeras décadas del siglo xx en Cuba fueron una época de frustración y fracaso. Una dependencia poco saludable del comercio e inversión de los Estados Unidos distorsionó el desarrollo de la economía cubana, argumentan, mientras que la afluencia de productos y de la cultura norteamericanos socavaron la identidad nacional. Según esta interpretación, la élite política y económica aceptaba la imposición de intereses económicos estadounidenses y de su cultura por razones de debilidad, venalidad o ambas cosas. Este artículo sostiene que el capital y la experiencia de los empresarios cubanos fueron cruciales para el rápido crecimiento económico de Cuba durante las primeras décadas después de la Guerra de la Independencia. Como herederos de la élite liberal criolla que había modernizado la industria azucarera en el siglo xix, los empresarios cubanos, durante la Republica, fueron más que capaces de colaborar y competir con los capitalistas extranjeros para crear una de las economías exportadoras más dinámicas del mundo.

Espacios de con-tensión: el Yo, la danza y la literatura a finales del siglo XIX en Cuba

As it is well known, the XIX century saw the expansion of the sugar industry in Cuba and the emergence of three very successful music genders: La Habanera, el Tango and el Danzón. It also brought a radical transformation of the cities all over the world. Since then, they were divided in different sectors, according to their occupants’ social condition. The article: “Espacios de contensión…” traces the representation of dance and literature in Cuba during the second half of the XIX century. It reads the location of movement in dance, as well as the representation of social gatherings and race in the same line. It questions the legitimacy of Cuban elites (white) to prescribe, forbid or critize this social manifestation. Since talking about dance granted them the opportunity to shape and/or reshape Cuban culture and their traditions, it also gave them the chance to talk about politics, race and the hegemonic/subaltern cultures that made up the nation. I illustrate this point with three different authors that have come to symbolize Cuba’s XIX century elite: Julián del Casal, Luis Victoriano Betancourt and José Martí.