Prerevolutionary Cuba Research Articles

Black left feminism in pre-revolutionary Cuba: the life and work of Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa (1901–1958)

ABSTRACT This article studies the life and political thought of the Afro-Cuban, communist, feminist activist and lawmaker Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa and her historical context. The article builds on the existing literature by using new periodical and archival sources from institutional collections of communist organizations and personal correspondence with feminist leaders. The paper’s main objectives are the following. First, to demonstrate that Sánchez Mastrapa simultaneously engaged with Afro-Cuban, feminist, and communist organizations. Second, to illuminate how these platforms offered a productive space for some women activists like Sánchez Mastrapa to conceptualize a simultaneous critique of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. And third, to analyze how she used these institutional platforms to articulate an early intersectional feminism as part of a growing transnational left-wing movement fighting in favor of Black, poor, women workers.

Race and Inequality in the New Cuba: Reasons, Dynamics, and Manifestations

Race and Inequality in the New Cuba:Reasons, Dynamics, and Manifestations Katrin Hansing (bio) INTRODUCTION Few social transformations have attacked social inequalities more thoroughly than the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and Cuba's subsequent economic crisis, however, the island's celebrated social achievements of equality, full-scale public employment, and high-quality universal education and health care have been seriously affected. Today, Cuban society is marked by rising levels of poverty and inequality, growing unemployment, dwindling social services, and continuous outward migration. Moreover, in the context of a changing economy, defined by the declining role of the state and the introduction of market mechanisms, new social stratifications are emerging—and doing so along clearly visible racial lines. Inequality and race, both dominant themes in pre-Revolutionary Cuba that the Revolution fought hard to eliminate, have once again become key overlapping issues. BEFORE THE 1990S Racial inequality and racism have been integral to Cuban society since the early days of the Spanish conquest. Africans were brought to Cuba as slaves as early as the sixteenth century, but they came in especially [End Page 331] large numbers in the nineteenth century when Cuba turned into a prosperous sugar colony. The introduction of the sugar industry permanently changed the social composition of Cuba, shaping everything from property rights, labor systems, trade, and foreign relations to the island's national culture and identity (Ortiz 1940). Above all, sugar influenced the formation of the island's race, class, and social relations. Slavery rested on a number of ideological formulations, all of which had as their central premise the notion of unequal social evolution: that whites were innately superior to nonwhites. Race served to justify not only slavery, but also the exclusion of people of color from political participation and the imposition of barriers to social mobility (Knight 1970; Moreno Fraginals 1978; Scott 1985). After the abolition of slavery in 1886 and in the subsequent republican period, race continued to establish people's legal and social rights, largely determined their economic situation, and played a defining role in how people were judged and treated (de la Fuente 1995, 1999; Helg 1995; Fernández-Robaina 1990). Afro-Cubans1 continued to be discriminated against and systematically excluded from higher positions in employment, public service, and politics and continued to make up the majority of the island's poor and working classes (McGarrity 1992). With the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, the race question was almost entirely subsumed under a broadly redemptive nationalist and subsequently socialist umbrella. The Revolution moved rapidly to dismantle institutional racism and other forms of socio-legal inequality. The 1976 constitution explicitly prohibited any discrimination based on race or skin color. Beyond this, the revolutionary government approached the issue of race from a strong structural perspective, coherent with its Marxist views of history and society. As such, it assumed that with the elimination of private property and class exploitation, racial discrimination would eventually disappear. Class privileges based on private property were eliminated in Cuba in the early 1960s. For the first time, the Afro-Cuban population [End Page 332] gained access to most workplaces and to education, as well as to recreational institutions. The economic, social, and political measures implemented mainly benefited people of humble origin and, thus, most Afro-Cubans (McGarrity and Cardenas 1995). Despite these achievements, the Revolution did not specifically target the society's deeply ingrained culture of racism. Instead, the ideological rationale and revolutionary rhetoric of unity and equality introduced an official silence toward race-related matters, which transformed the issue into a semi-taboo topic (de la Fuente 1998; Moore 1988).2 It is this silence that has, in effect, contributed to the survival, reproduction, and creation of racist ideologies and stereotypes. What disappeared from public discourse found fertile breeding ground in the private realm, where race continued to influence social relations among relatives, friends, and neighbors. Socioeconomically speaking, what this has done is turn race into a complex, often hard-to-pinpoint social phenomenon in which racial prejudices persist but are not openly acknowledged, whilst, at the same time, people of different colors mingle freely in many social and professional settings...

Calvert Casey's Wasted Narratives

In the 1960s, Calvert Casey wrote fiction and essays in support of the Cuban Revolution as a member of Lunes de Revolucion and Casa de las Americas before going into exile. This essay argues that he developed a revolutionary, though ultimately wasted, model by which individuals can form a political community despite the rigid social barriers that persisted from Cuba's colonial and neocolonial past. In his writings, Casey explores Havana's sewers and the forgotten stories of the capital city. His focus on literal and figurative waste is not an isolated moment in the history of Cuban aesthetics, but one that he locates in the works of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Cuban authors, including Cirilo Villaverde, Ramon Meza, and Miguel de Carrion. Casey critiques a certain Romantic vision of the past that, in his view, idealized pre-Revolutionary Cuba as a tropical paradise set for epic struggles and sublime realizations. Against this mythical, Romantic image of the Cuban nation, he proposes an aesthetics and politics without the lofty, normative values that exclude images of sullied objects, disreputable places, and people getting wasted. The essay concludes with an analysis of the film P.M. alongside Casey's posthumously published short story Piazza Margana to situate both of these seemingly aberrant texts within a long-standing, though infrequently celebrated, national tradition of reveling in filthy places packed with writhing, drunken bodies.

Autobiography of a Cuban Businessman in the 1940s and 1950s

Autobiography of a Cuban Businessman in the 1940s and 1950s Jorge J. Domínguez and Jorge I. Domínguez (bio) Jorge José Domínguez (1921–2012), hereafter JJD, served as executive vice president and de facto chief executive officer of a Cuban family's construction materials company. He began work at the family company in the early 1940s through July 10, 1960. In those years, the company was best known as Calera Santa Teresa, a lime factory. Its largest subsidiary would become Cemento Santa Teresa, the first wholly Cuban-owned cement company in Cuba and one of the country's three cement factories in the late 1950s, which upon expropriation in 1960 came to be known as Mártires de Artemisa. The company's founder was Manuel Domínguez Morejón, JJD's father, who served as board chairman until 1960. In time, JJD's brother-in-law (Rafael Puig) would become chief engineer, his brother (Manuel Domínguez Silveira) would become chief accountant, and his father-in-law (Antonio de la Carrera) corporate counsel.1 The starting dates of JJD's employment, and his eventual promotion to CEO, are unclear. In December 1941, he was a senior at Columbia University in New York.2 Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he sought to volunteer to join the US Armed Forces; he was rejected because he was not yet twenty-one years old (in the years ahead, the United States would change this rule). He asked his father for permission, but his father denied it. JJD returned to Cuba to wait for his twenty-first birthday on June 1, 1942. After some weeks of JJD not doing much, his father explained that the economic depression of the 1930s had badly hurt the business, and he asked JJD to work for a bit. JJD did, and he continued doing so uninterruptedly for twenty-five hours per day for the following eighteen years. As noted at the start of JJD's account, below, he wrote his memoirs in 1995 because one of his granddaughters asked him—she was age twenty-three; he was age seventy-four. He wrote for her in English and, to respect his choice of language, so too are these text and footnote annotations in English. These pages, now being published for the first time, are an extract (less than a tenth of the total) from that much-longer text. The remainder of the memoir tells stories of JJD's business experiences in South America, Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, and the broad Middle East. [End Page 345] JJD was a great storyteller who, among other traits, hated hypocrisy. In the years following 1960, he would become particularly upset upon hearing stories of prerevolutionary Cuba that, he thought, were airbrushed fantasies. He had no hesitation to challenge such accounts. Nor did he have any hesitation to use stories from his own professional life to make a point, even when some might be offended by the story. Some of these stories below will no doubt upset some readers, and JJD always understood that, but he believed that telling his truth as he saw it was intrinsically important as well as an act of personal integrity, even when the story might put him in a bad light in the eyes of others. In the late 1990s, his son (this annotator) asked for JJD's authorization to use the pages published here as one of the readings for a course on Cuban history. JJD agreed, and near the end of his life he also agreed to the publication of this text to assist readers in understanding aspects of life and business in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. The text appears as JJD wrote it, with slight stylistic corrections, always clearly marked. JJD did not date the stories in this publication. The tax inspector story is most likely from the 1940s. The labor union leader story's principal point is from the 1940s, and then the story jumps to well-labeled events in 1958–1959. The business opportunity story obviously dates from the early 1940s soon after the United States and Cuba enter the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The...

Anglicisms and calques in upper social class in pre-revolutionary Cuba (1930–1959): A sociolinguistic analysis

<p>The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902–1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, Diario de la Marina, and the corresponding elaboration of a corpus of English-induced loanwords. Diario de la Marina particularly targeted upper social class, and only crónicas sociales (society pages’ columns) and print advertising were revised because of their fully descriptive texts, which encoded the ruling class ideology and consumerism. The findings show that there existed a high number of lexical and cultural anglicisms in the sociolect in question, and that the sociolinguistic anglicization was openly embraced by the upper socioeconomic stratum, entailing a differentiating sign of sophistication and social stratification. Likewise, a number of the anglicisms collected, particularly those related with social events, are unused in contemporary Cuban Spanish, which suggests a major semantic shifting in this sociolect after 1959.</p>

Race to Cuba: Gerald Horne’s Race to Revolution

Among the strengths of Gerald Horne’s Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow is its timing; it arrives at the moment of the first real movement in US–Cuban diplomatic relations since the imposition of the blockade in 1962, and at the beginnings of what some are calling the third major US civil rights movement, in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. With his exigent, inventive research and his engaging, accessible voice, Horne argues that the arrival in Cuba of Made-in-the-USA Jim Crow at the end of the nineteenth century helped spark the organized fury and resistance that led to the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. The book was published in 2014, and Horne couldn’t have known during the writing that he was resting his fingers on the vital pulses of uprising and cross-Straits connection that August 9 and December 17 would bring into the open; but his historian’s sense of the incipient power in the patterns of the past has served him well here, and is a gift to his readers, whether seasoned observers studying familiar events in light of new information, or young activists looking for bridges of solidarity, where US policies like the blockade have attempted to wash them away. If the blockade has tried to insist that the USA and Cuba are not connected, this book provides ample evidence to the contrary: in its portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba as an outpost of UScontrolled race-based counterrevolution, and in its many descriptions of radical Black solidarity between the two nations.

Cartooning Pre-revolutionary Cuba: The Animated Exoticism of Time and Place in Vampiros en la Habana (1985) and Chico and Rita (2010)

This article discusses exoticism and self-exoticism in the representation of pre-revolutionary Cuban musicianship in two animated films: the 2010 Spanish/British co-production Chico and Rita and the 1985 Cuban film, Vampiros en la Habana. Within the similarly constructed animated archetypes on display, these films generate vastly different discursive outputs. Both texts are more interested in musicians as mythical figures than as comprehensive subjects, but where the mythology of Vampiros offers a dissenting, self-defined cultural identity, that of Chico and Rita employs a mythology of Otherness to reaffirm the cultural protagonism and hegemony of Eurocentric discourses. Although these films engage with similar archetypes, localities and representations of the exotic, the ways in which they do so evidence disparities in terms of intended audience, artistic intent, relationship to Cuba’s revolutionary project, and perspective towards Cuba’s cultural identity—all within the highly flexible, but highly codified and stigmatized, medium of animation.

Razing Cane: Making Sense of Arson in the Sugar Fields of Republican Cuba

This article explores the nature and meaning of sugarcane arson in Cuba during the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the scholarly literature as well as popular memory, the illegal burning of sugarcane has been seen as an important means by which marginalized groups, such as slaves, rebels, bandits, and striking workers, challenged the established order during times of political and social upheaval. Sugarcane arson, however, was not just a tactical measure utilized during extraordinary moments, but was intrinsic to the island’s sugar economy. Despite varied efforts by government officials and plantation managers to prevent cane fires, a number of groups— including colonos (cane farmers) as well as cane cutters—regularly ignited sugar fields for their own purposes. Using sugarcane arson as an analytical lens thus provides a more nuanced picture of agrarian relations in prerevolutionary Cuba.

Yesterday’s heroes, today’s villains: Ideology, corruption, and democratic performance

This paper develops a game-theoretic model for assessing the relationship between ideological divisions in a society and prospects for good governance. Synthesizing the insights of the literature on political career concerns with those from the literature on issue framing, the model emphasizes that ideological balance—rough equality in the ideological component of utility the median voter derives from government and opposition—is the key to good governance. Polities which are ideologically balanced are ruled by elites who attempt to impress their merit upon the electorate through the provision of public goods. Ideologically imbalanced polities are ruled by elites who use public resources for their own consumption and who court voters through socially unproductive issue framing. The cases of pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-apartheid South Africa, and post-Pinochet Chile are used to illustrate the crucial importance of ideological balance for good governance.

Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba by P. Sean Brotherton (review)

P. Sean Brotherton, Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 288 pp.In recent years, there have been a burgeoning number of ethnographic studies situated in Cuba. Sean Brotherton is one of the first generation of anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Cuba since Oscar and Ruth Lewis were (in)famously expelled from the country in the early 1970s. The opening of Cuba to foreign academic fieldwork is a direct result of the difficult political and economic circumstances in which the Revolutionary government found itself in the early 1990s. From the very beginnings of the Revolution, the Cuban state placed its domestic legitimacy on a tripod of interrelated institutional pillars: education, health, and sport. While education and sport have been addressed recently (Blum 2011, Carter 2008), Brotherton's study is a most welcome examination of this third leg of ideological legitimacy. Others have studied the Cuban health system, but no one has delved into the political dynamics of Cuba's universal health provision in the way that Brotherton has.Revolutionary Medicine constructs its own analytical tripod. In the first section, Brotherton addresses the biopolitics of the Special Period: how this radically transformative time, unwanted and threatening as it was, changed the ways that Cubans thought of their health, the health system, and their relationship with the state. The second section examines the same issues from the government's perspective as it tried to maintain its legitimacy. Instead of individualized biopolitics, this section examines how the state tried to produce a healthy social and socialist body by creating medicalized subjectivities in an attempt to heal the ills of prerevolutionary Cuba. In doing this, the government addressed social inequities but also engaged in strategic preventative measures to create a social body that would monitor its own condition and adjust accordingly to maintain its Revolutionary health. The third section examines how the state had to contradict and effectively undermine that revolutionary project by shifting some resources and priorities to attract foreign capital investment in order to keep the state and the fabric of society afloat. General practitioners became increasingly scarce as many went to work overseas for foreign currency salaries, and medical tourism developed as Cuban clinics recruited wealthy foreigners for specific procedures that also brought money to the health system's coffers.Brotherton's astute recognition of the links between everyday socioeconomics, discourses of governance, and the politics of health situates the conditions of health not only as a biological condition but as a social one, making his ethnographic study powerfully evocative as the contradictions of Cuban life come to the fore. His study situates the provision of Cuban health care in the swiftly shifting political and economic circumstances of the Special Period when the state could not meet most of its citizens' basic needs as it had in the previous decades. That fraught context forced Cubans, on an everyday level, to devise alternative and new means of meeting their health care needs. At the same time, Brotherton also examines how the changing global contexts at the end of the US-Soviet Cold War necessitated a reshuffling of priorities within Cuba's health care system. Chronicling both the government's continuing internationalist strategies and forays in the global health care business through the promotion of health tourism, Brotherton captures the multifaceted object that is Cuba's health care system from a number of nuanced positions.He argues that only by examining the interrelations of economic, ideological, and geopolitical discourses in the development of Cuba's contemporary public health system can one address the ways in which these discourses articulate and construct an image of a healthy nation. Specifically, one can see how Cuba's vital health statistics-as a reflection of the success of the country's socialist project-become part of a larger web of power relations. …

Is It Just about Love?: Filin and Politics in Prerevolutionary Cuba

This article examines the role of Filin music in processes of social and political change. It explains how Filin was constitutive of its historical context and consequently, how Filineros expressed their social realities in their songs. Many Filineros were associated with leftist organizations and underground activism. However, their songs’ lyrics seem to ignore Filineros’ political lives, and focus solely on romance. Drawing from Filineros memories, this article explains Filin lyrics’ detachment from the oppositional mobilization the musicians were involved in. First, the repression against communism that followed the post–World War II years in Cuba prevented Filineros from openly expressing their leftist views in their songs’ lyrics. Secondly, Filineros understood Filin as a creative outlet and artistic experience, and not as an instrument for political opposition. Thirdly, some of the Filin musicians interviewed believed that music was impotent to create substantial social or political change. Nevertheless, beyond Filineros worldview, I argue that the practice of Filin constituted them as political actors. It is through music making that Filineros’ ideas and values were stimulated. As such, Filin music constructed its political relevance more through the context of lived experience than through its musicological traits, its lyrics, or even its musicians’ intentions.

A Cuban Policy Approach to Sex Education

Las iniciativas en el campo de la sexología y la educación sexual en la Cuba prerevolucionaria apenas son conocidas, ya que no se ha investigado continuidades entre aquellas experiencias y el esfuerzo llevado a cabo en los años posteriores a la revolución de 1959. Sin embargo, hay que ver la fundación de la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC) como el producto de un largo proceso de madurez por parte de las mujeres cubanas durante la primera mitad del siglo xx, y en el contexto mas amplio de la FMC también hay que ver los acontecimientos en los campos de la sexología y la educación sexual de los últimos cincuenta años. Basado en materiales de archivo de la FMC, este artículo esboza una periodización de cuatro etapas principales en el período revolucionario en la institucionalización de la educación sexual en Cuba, a la vez que señala sus mayores desafios.

The Maids of Havana (review)

Pedro Perez Sarduy. The Maids of Havana. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2010.The Maids of Havana is a novel that tells the story of generations of women who are part of a diaspora within a diaspora: the Afro-Cuban diaspora moving between Cuba and the United States over a period of fifty years, within a larger black Atlantic diaspora of Africans transported to Cuba, where they migrate from the sugarcane plantations to the capital city and from there to Miami; Washington, D.C., and New York-with some of the slaves' descendents crossing back over the Atlantic two hundred years later. The Maids of Havana is less specific than the title suggests: we are taken on a tour of prerevolutionary Cuba and through the Cuban Revolution from the perspective of the least privileged, who find themselves caught up in events the significance and context of which some of them barely grasp. We are presented with a snapshot of the everyday life of provincial Santa Clara and on to Havana, where we can view the rich through the eyes of the poor as the protagonist, Marta, moves between her tenement rooms and the mansions and smart apartments where she works as a maid. Marta is tough, smart, enterprising, and dignified-granddaughter of a slave child brought from Africa-and poverty drives her to leave her small children in Santa Clara to seek work in the capital. This is in part the story of the recognition, and finally of the elevation, of black Cuba, the rural and urban underclass, whose spirit and resourcefulness take them from near destitution in the 1940s and 1950s to a better life in the 1990s through industriousness, endurance, and wit- with the revolution playing a supporting role. Marta uses her power as (excellent) cook and housekeeper (on whose services the white bourgeoisie depends for its survival) to dominate all those who come into her orbit, cowing her weak and vacuous employers into submission through devastating one-liners. In one episode, an employer forbids her maids to answer the telephone when they have a cold, for fear they will transmit their germs to her by touching the receiver; the tables are turned when Marta refuses to answer the phone when her employer has a cold, for fear of catching it.The mostly white bourgeoisie are vain, hopeless, and degenerate, some bankrupting themselves in attempting to pay for their daughters' fifteenth birthday parties; in needing to be seen and to impress in elegant outfits at smart social events; and in living in fear of their servants and of the barbudos, the bearded ones, who are on their way down from the mountains to end tyranny, injustice, and racial inequality. When her employers ask her whether she knows Fidel, Marta replies, ''I've told you already, that I'm not with any Fidel, and I don't understand politics, but I do have a niece who once told me that all these abuses will stop when the barbudos come down from the hills.'' What is made clear through the text, however, is that Marta's revolution is within her soul in her sense of injustice at inequality based on skin color: the revolution reinforces what she already feels.The Maids of Havana addresses the interwoven complexities of race, class, and gender in prerevolutionary and revolutionary Cuba in a study that is anthropological, political, horticultural, and culinary, leaving no herb, root, fruit, or Yoruba ritual unexplored, nor the subtleties of skin-color hierarchy in Santa Clara in the period before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, when town life was carefully segregated into white, colored, and black communities who compete to give the coolest parties that attract the most popular musicians. The novel is packed with carefully researched and remembered historical detail while maintaining a strong narrative line that engages the reader with the panoply of comic characters, such as members of the white middle class of Vedado and Miramar who chaotically make their way to Miami as the revolution approaches, leaving their precious Tiffany lamps and other treasures to be sold at bargain-basement prices to canny Russian foreign technicians who swiftly ship them back to Moscow. …

Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory , and: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern , and: Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (review)

Reviewed by: Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, and: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, and: Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage Audrey Thomas McCluskey (bio) Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 208 pp., $40.00 cloth, $25.95 paper. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern by Jayna Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 339 pp., $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paper. Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage by Susan Thomas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 264 pp., $40.00 hardcover. What these three books have in common is their intent. That intent is to bring new insights and fresh perspectives to topics that have not only influenced popular culture, but, in some instances, have become infused into our racial imaginary. Black women as mammies, international entertainers, and as the force behind the development of the most popular form of entertainment in pre-revolutionary Cuba are the subjects in these timely new tomes. Yet these works are also very different and deserve to be considered on their individual merits. When Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy, the devoted slave/servant in Gone with the Wind (1939), she said in her joyous acceptance speech that she wanted it to honor black womanhood and to be "a credit to her race." The twofold reaction of black leaders, who praised this breakthrough for a black actor but criticized the sassy though subservient character she portrayed, reflects the contradictions that are present in this weighted emblem of Americana. Who is Mammy and where did she come from? How did she come to embody the heavy burden of racial mythology and history? These are questions at the core of Kimberly Wallace-Sanders's Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory on this perennially haunting figure in the American imaginary. The staying power of Mammy's larger-than-life persona is fraught with all manner of psychological attachments and racial yearning. Her healthy pulchritude and happy visage have evoked both scorn and praise, while serving as an inspiration for visual artists such as Betye Saar, Murray De Pillars, and Andy Warhol, and as the subject of scores of literary renderings. The fixation on Mammy and its hold on the American psyche is a "troubled marriage of racial and gender essentialism," mixed with mythology and Southern nostalgia, Wallace-Sanders argues. A professor at Emory University in Atlanta, she has been collecting mammy stories for many years. Her book is an attempt to sort through the stories and images and show how this incarnation of myth, biography, fiction, history, and culture merge to correlate with phases of America's race consciousness. [End Page 213] More than a racial stereotype that simply offends right-thinking people, the mammy figure has served as the complex site of a Foucaultian contestation over the black woman's body—as mother and woman. Since "mammy" first appeared in Southern usage in 1810, the term quickly became the name that referred to all black women who cared for white children. Wallace-Sanders's research builds upon the work of K. Sue Jewell (From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond, 1993) and Michael Harris (Colored Pictures, 2003) and others who have distinguished between images of black women as Mammy and Aunt Jemima. These recurring figures in American popular culture have been examined by other scholars, including Patricia Hill-Collins and Deborah Gray-White, known for their prodigious work on black womanhood. Wallace-Sanders's very focused study extends this work and provides her most important point, which is that the omnipresent image of Mammy belies its changing nature. Using an approach she calls "literary archeology," the author presents a chronology of the mammy figure to deconstruct its shifting semantics from the early 1800s to the present. She also aptly summarizes the myriad black response and resistance to the mammy figure over time, including a discussion of Alice Randall's satiric and controversial novel The Wind...

Old Dog (review)

Reviewed by: Old Dog Karen Coats Cárdenas, Teresa Old Dog; tr. from the Spanish by David Unger. Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2007 [144p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-88899-757-9$16.95 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-88899-836-1$8.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Perro Viejo, a slave in prerevolutionary Cuba, has become too old to do any of the hard work in the sugarcane fields, so he spends his days as gatekeeper, waiting for his body to join his spirit in the endless death that has been his life as a slave. He shuffles through his memories as his tired, painful legs shuffle him through his days, recalling friends he has lost to the cruelty of white masters, and the heart he lost long ago to a woman he saw only once. He despairs that the thing he most wants to recall is the one thing he can't—the face of his mother. Old and soul-tired as he is, though, he experiences an epiphany when he realizes that he still has the capacity to love and even to act against all hope, as he and Beira, the woman who has found her way into his heart, work together to save a young runaway by taking her with them as they attempt to run away themselves. The story focuses preponderantly on adults, but it's written accessibly for a young audience. Students whose knowledge of slavery is limited to the U.S. will recognize familiar patterns of abuse and may well marvel and despair at their ubiquity, as well as their ability to crush the spirit of the enslaved and abused; Perro Viejo's story is not a unique one, but it is uniquely well told. In poignant prose with an emotional depth and lyricism that thrives even in translation, Cuban author Cárdenas maps the lonely fears and sorrows that haunt Perro Viejo as he plays his endgame and earns his spiritual, if not actual, freedom. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Cuban Music: A Review Essay

CUBAN MUSIC: A REVIEW ESSAY Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. By Ned Sublette. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. [xv, 672 p. ISBN 1-55652-516-8. $36.00.] Illustrations, index, bibliography. Cuban Music from A to Z. By Helio Orovio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. [xi, 235 p. ISBN 0-8223-3212-4. $24.95.] Illustrations, appendices, bibliography. Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba. By Leonardo Acosta. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003. [xvi, 288 p. ISBN 158834147X. $29.95.] Index. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. By Katherine J. Hagedorn. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. [xvi, 296 p. ISBN 1-56098-947-5. $24.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography, discography, glossary, compact disc. The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, which continues to thrive with every new solo release, has marked the latest Cuban music craze in the United States and internationally. In fact, for well over a century now Cuban music has continued to attain widespread dissemination and popularity, first through sheet music in the nineteenth century and then touring musicians and recordings beginning in the early twentieth century. The genres and styles that Cubans and others have popularized internationally have included the habanera (mid-nineteenth century), son (beginning in the 1920s), mambo (late 1940s through the 1950s), cha cha cha (1950s), charanga-based son music (1950s through the 1960s), and timba (1990s). These repertories, while firmly rooted in Cuba's musical landscape, also became transnational musics, contributing significantly to the formation of related musical styles such as salsa, soukous, and mbalax in other parts of the world. Given the tremendous impact that Cuban music has had internationally and, in particular, on popular music of the United States (e.g., Latin jazz), it is important to note that before the 1990s scholarly, let alone general books on Cuban popular music, were not readily available in English. Cuban historians, anthropologists, and others, of course, wrote extensively on Cuban music throughout the twentieth century. Alejo Carpentier's La musica en Cuba (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica), originally published in 1946, continues to be an important historical source for mostly pre-twentieth-century Cuban popular and art music. It was translated into English by Alan West-Duran and published as Music in Cuba in 2001 by the University of Minnesota Press. Cuban ethnologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz produced numerous works on Afro-Cuban music and culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century, yet his extremely important works remain untranslated. It was not until the early 1990s that North American ethnomusicologists and anthropologists began to research and publish critical and scholarly work on Cuban popular and folkloric music and dance. Peter Manuel's Essays on Cuban Music: North American and Cuban Perspectives (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) is particularly notable for bringing together the work and theoretical perspectives of Cuban and North American musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Robin Moore's Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) studies issues of race, national identity, music, and the arts in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, while Yvonne Daniel's Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) traces the development and social transformations of rumba music and dance in Cuba. In the last four years several more books on Cuban music have been published for scholarly and general audiences. Accordingly, the four works reviewed in this essay represent an increasing interest among North American publishers in providing translated editions of previously published Cuban books as well as historical and ethnomusicological work by North American writers. …

Mortality Decline in Cuba, 1900-1959: Patterns, Comparisons, and Causes

Revolutionary Cuba since 1959 has outpaced most other Latin American countries at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. Pre-revolutionary Cuba from 1900 to 1959 did even better, however, outperforming all other Latin American countries for which data are available. Pre-revolutionary Cuba became Latin America's unlikely champion of mortality decline despite experiencing slow economic growth and high income inequality, a record that is inconsistent with the wealthier is healthier interpretation of mortality reduction. It also achieved this distinction despite being ruled by governments that are sometimes portrayed as corrupt, personalistic, patronage-ridden, subordinate to U.S. business interests, and neglectful, at best, of the exploited and downtrodden. We attribute pre-revolutionary Cuba's rapid mortality decline to its health care system's accessibility to a large fraction of the poor and to features of the island's history, geography, labor union movement, and political system that contributed to this accessibility.

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.

Vers une nouvelle orientation pour l'agriculture cubaine ?

Pierre Raymond — Towards a new orientation for Cuban agriculture ? The typical character of pre-revolutionary Cuba was the agricultural worker, and not the peasant. The latter proved unable to affirm himself as the connoisseur of the milieu that he happens to be elsewhere. After 1959, the gigantism of State farms was preferred to the detriment of locally rooted peasant agriculture. This has not helped the country to free itself from external food dependency. An overview of the crisis of the 90s thus led to the transformation of State-farms into cooperatives, but the evolution toward veritable peasant agriculture, as wished by the author, still remains limited and incomplete.

A Note on the Relationship between Peasant Economy and Seasonal Wage Labour in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba

In the light of current theories of peasant economy and also of some contempory evidence from various Latin American countries, the agrarian structure of pre-revolutionary Cuba presents something of a paradox. We know of massive seasonal fluctuations in the demand for labour, especially in the cane sector, and we also know that of the people who worked in the peak seasons a high proportion were not by any means fully employed during the rest of the year;' on thq other hand, the smallholding units of production in agriculture did not exhibit the extreme fragmentation or the large numbers (compared to larger units) which we find in, say, contemporary North-East Brazil. Current theories,2 after all, would lead us to believe that there is a complementarity between the proliferation of non-viable smallholding units and the seasonal requirements of large-scale units-that is, that the 'peasant economy' acts as a reproducer of cheap labour for capitalist farms, and wage labour complements the meagre livelihood afforded by small units. Another view would explain the proliferation of smallholdings as a 'refuge against poverty'.3 The second, and related, point which arises concerns the source of seasonal labour in cane and other crops with highly fluctuating seasonal demand for labour. I will show that much of this labour must have come not from the