Sound recordings capture part of the excitement of oral history. By listening to the narrators' and the interviewers' voices, we hear their passions and their fears. And their deceits. We hear the mystery of their silences. Oral history interviews almost always contain passages that fit uneasily with a narrator's story. Recordings allow us to overhear how those in the room confront or ignore the frictions. Reading the transcript of an interview is akin to reading a musical score. The composition's richness is greatly diminished when all we have is the black and white of notes and words.In 2004, I organized a large oral history project in Cuba, the first of its kind since Oscar and Ruth Lewis's project was closed down in 1970.1 Our British-Cuban research team interviewed more than 120 women and men living on the island from different generations and walks of life.2 We asked them to tell us their life story.3 Many of them I interviewed again and again over the course of more than ten years.Working with a large research team taught me how hard it is to interpret oral evidence. Our discussions reminded me that listening to interviews is as subjective as reading historical documents, frequently more so. What each of us heard, or said we heard, was tempered by our politics, experience, and expectations, by the ubiquitous presence of the Cuban state, and sometimes by what we hoped that narrators would say.Full of enthusiasm, and naïveté, in the beginning the team listened to each recording in groups of three and four. It took a huge amount of time, but we imagined that collective listening would pay off, that the methodology would help us arrive at a common interpretation of the life stories.4 We were wrong. Listening together was an unhappy affair. Putting aside the difficulties of foreign tongues, unfamiliar slang, and unseasoned ears, we all heard the same words, spoken by the same voices. We all read the same transcripts. Yet each of us interpreted what we had heard differently. After several months, we agreed that either we had to abandon the practice or sacrifice the project. The project lived on.Click.You are listening to four passages about sex and race from an interview with Juan Guillard (a pseudonym), an Afro-Cuban who lives in Campo Florido, a rural township about 20 miles from Havana.5 That this interview sparked heated debates was by itself unsurprising. Race and sex tend to generate controversy. What we had not anticipated was that some of us would hear Juan's speech as straight talking, others as high satire.6Our disagreements, in this case, were pretty much split along national lines, between the Cubans and the foreigners. It was not always so. Frequently the Cubans disagreed among themselves, sometimes fiercely. We foreigners did too, but less often. In the case of Juan's story, the Cubans believed that he spoke literally. Some said that Juan's language reproduced the sexism and racism prevalent in the countryside. We British-cum-North Americans sensed that Juan was playing for laughs. My feeling (my hearing) was that when two white middle-aged academic women from Havana landed on the doorstep of his rustic house and questioned him about his love life, about whether he preferred white or black girls, he fell into a comic mode. Put simply, my sense was that Juan couldn't resist taking the piss.Juan had a reputation in Campo Florido. Rosa, our contact, a forthright, 70-something-year-old freethinking Fidelista, told us that we absolutely had to interview Juan. “He is a personaje,” a larger-than-life character. From the moment that I started listening to the recording, I had the feeling that Juan was giving the performance of his life.In the first flush of fieldwork, two Cubans on our team—I will call them Victoria and Elsa—traveled by bus to Campo Florido. By car it would have taken an hour; their bus ride was more than two. That evening, immediately after returning to Havana, Victoria dropped by my house. She was excited, bedraggled, and upset. She and Elsa had interviewed a man they had nicknamed Diskjoker because he had started a disco to give the youth of Campo Florido someplace to go. The disco had closed, temporarily, while the town council (Poder Popular) awaited spare parts for the loudspeakers. When Victoria and Elsa met Juan, he had lost hope; “temporarily” was going on two years.Victoria described Juan as loquacious, poetic, funny, charming, outrageous, and completely truthful about racism and sex, even about Fidel. Alas, when the interview was over and she hit playback, she discovered that they had not recorded a single word.7 Fortunately, Juan was eager to do a rerun. You may think that Juan sounds spontaneous in the recording. Remember, he had had several days to rehearse.Juan clearly enjoyed telling offbeat stories about sex, race, and politics. Our group listening to the recording of Juan's interview was exclusively female. Whereas the Cubans by and large heard a sexist and racist buffoon talking, we British heard a comedian-cum-homegrown philosopher. The group disagreed, among other things, about how to interpret Juan's replies to the questions relating to his love life. The Cubans took Juan's stories literally. He personified, they said, the sexism and racism of rural life. Sonia, among the youngest, said, “Juan es muy muy atrasado [backward], muy machista, muy sexista.”We foreigners suggested that Juan was intentionally subverting officialdom, propriety, and the invasion of his privacy. We felt that chunks of his narrative were meant to be humorous, black humor. His over-the-top stories were a parody of small-town life. Juan's frenetic delivery reminded me of Lenny Bruce, the notoriously brilliant stand-up I listened to back in the 1960s. I sensed that Juan, like Bruce, was using deadpan satire and a degree of vulgarity to shock us, his audience.Juan was snoozing on his tiny porch, stretched out in a rusty metal chair, when Victoria and Elsa arrived to rerecord the interview that they had bungled a few days earlier. As they pushed open the gate, they heard Elton John's “Sleeping with the Past” playing on Juan's boom box. (I kid you not. Was this life imitating art, or the other way around?) Juan was expecting them. He knew the score and launched into his life story in a jokey voice full of enthusiasm. Bang in the middle of explaining why he rarely sees his father, he says, “Here in this village I am like an idol.” Juan's voice drops in the next breath, his register flattens, his tempo slows. He says that he suffered a spate of mental instability in the army. Although Juan describes Obligatory Military Service as the high point of his life, his voice says something else, something darker: the pain of remembering. In the telling of his life story, frequently Juan shifts abruptly from exhilaration to despair:Aquí en el pueblo yo soy como un ídolo, ¡ay, no, bam, bam muchacho ese es el negrito bonito! Vaya soy bien llevado con todo el mundo, no tengo, no tengo peros ni porqués con la gente, donde quiera que yo voy, en cualquier lado de la Isla, tengo, na’ caigo bien, no sé que tengo, no sé que tendré. Pero por mi madre, mi familia, mi familia nunca fue. Estuve alejado un tiempo, en el Servicio Militar, sí estuve alejado un poco un tiempo, porque tuve el desbalance ese que, en cincuenta días que estuve pasando el Servicio, en previa, como se llama, no, no vi familiares míos, por x problemas, eh, no me gustaría hablar mucho esas cosas porque fueron tristes.8Half an hour into the interview, Elsa, probably because she is nervous, belatedly introduces her partner: “Victoria vive en Miramar, es la zona de la gente alta.” Juan responds with sardonic laughter, “Sí, de alcurnia [of rank].” I sensed that the exchange sparks a friction that never entirely goes away.When Elsa asks Juan, pretty much out of the blue, about his love life, I heard turmoil in his reply, and comedy. The Cubans heard mostly bravado (audio clip 1).Juan responds with a sort of patter song, à la Gilbert and Sullivan, in which he enumerates his many girlfriends throughout the island.10 Elsa interrupts to ask, “Volviendo a las parejas, ¿tus parejas son, eh, muchachas blancas o negras?” Juan replies, “Nunca he tenido de color. Siempre han sido trigueñas y mulatas.”11 Juan is speaking extremely fast, even by Cuban standards. The cadence and tempo and register of his voice to me sound like a revved-up comedian trying to shock his audience.Elsa traces a racial map of Cuba that is exclusively black and white. Juan portrays a society composed of blacks and whites, but mostly of browns. Intentionally or not, he subverts her representation of Cuban society. In Juan's next riff on black, brown, and white girls (chiquillas), he says that perhaps whites are drawn to him because of his ashé, his charisma. Elsa repeats (maybe she isn't sure what he had said), “¿Se te pegan las blancas?” (Do white women fall for you). Her question provides an opening. Juan grabs it and lets rip with a dizzying narrative that embraces the worldwide fashion for interracial couples—he calls them Dalmatians—and his preferences regarding girlfriends' skin color—his favorite shade is indeado (Oriental-ish), especially “for breeding.” For breeding, he repeats. The repetition is, to my ears, intended to shock. Juan employs the term criar, a word more associated with animals than with humans. Juan rushes on, though now in a pseudocontrite tone, explaining that no, he is not attracted to white women. Elsa and Victoria are white, remember. He knows, he says, that black men are supposed to fall for blonds, but he just doesn't fancy them. “Too white, too white,” he says. He does not like the sight of black men with white women. He is not sure why, he says, but it gives him the creeps.You don't need to be Malcolm X to figure out why seeing black men with white women gives Juan the creeps. He knows the history of violence against black men, false accusations of rape, lynchings. He has experienced en carne propia the taboo against interracial couples that endured long after Cuba's revolutionary triumph in 1959. It is not surprising that Juan feels uneasy when he sees black men and white women holding hands and kissing. Think Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Cubans felt that Juan enjoyed bragging to white women from Havana's intelligentsia about his sex appeal. Colleagues of Afro- and of white-Hispanic descent agreed on this. “He is a typical guajiro [country bumpkin],” one said. Where Cuban colleagues heard backwardness, Carrie and I heard parody, opéra bouffe. Juan portrayed himself as a Leporello of sorts, Don Giovanni's servant, singing the Madamina song (“My dear lady, this is a list of the beauties my master has loved”). I am not suggesting that Juan was familiar with Don Giovanni. No. Juan was giving his own performance: part angst, part bravado, maybe. But so over the top, I believe that he meant it to be satirical.When Elsa asks Juan if he has ever experienced discrimination, the tempo and tone of his speech change dramatically. Juan replies slowly and clearly, “Sí, sí, sí, como que no” (Yes, yes, of course I have). I hear no mischief here (audio clip 2). Cuban colleagues were surprised that Juan is so forthcoming. Talking about racial discrimination had been taboo in Cuba since the early 1960s. In the official narrative of the revolution, after the state eliminated capitalism, racism withered away.12 In a society in which no public discussion about race or racism was allowed, Juan lacked the vocabulary to describe his experiences. Out of habit, or caution, he refers to discrimination as “that idiosyncrasy” and “the pressure.” Neither Juan nor the interviewers use the word racism. In Cuba circa 2005, the word was rarely used.For oficialista types to go around asking people whether they have ever experienced racial discrimination was virtually unheard of. Yet here were two women from the prestigious Academy of Sciences breaking the taboo. Consequently, according to several Cuban colleagues, Juan would have presumed that Elsa and Victoria wanted to hear about his experiences of discrimination. And he obliged. But, as one teammate said, he soups up his stories; some examples are soft, others far-fetched. He implies that words that Cubans use every day, without giving a thought to racism, are racist. And he refers to his own friends as negro, negra, and negrito yet implies that these labels are discriminatory. He can't have it both ways, she argues (audio clips 2 and 3).But he could, and he did. Juan was, I felt, flustered and confused. Listening to Juan's race stories, we foreigners heard pain and nervousness and, again, a desire to get a laugh (audio clip 4).Our team listened over and over to Juan's story about dreadlocks (trenzas de chorongo), trying to come up with an explanation for his comment that they looked like they hadn't been brushed for a year. Sonia, who herself had dreadlocks, believed that the quip revealed his backwardness. I sensed that Juan was playing the line for laughs. Eileen Suárez Findlay proposed, in a seminar, that perhaps Juan found dreads unsettling because, like many Caribbeans of African descent, he was obsessed with cleanliness. Hypercleanliness is a conscious or unconscious strategy to combat whites' stereotype that they, blacks, are unclean, she said.13When Victoria asks how discrimination made him feel, Juan's response is not satirical. It sounds raw (audio clip 4). Some teammates heard Juan speaking poetically about the wounds inflicted by racism. Others heard a mad man talking.Juan ends the interview on a triumphant note: “I want the story of my life to be heard around the world. . . . I really like the idea that people will get to know me and wherever my words are heard people will say, ‘Listen to that hip black man’ . . . I wouldn't like it if they say, ‘Listen to that big black bore.’”We interviewed Juan two more times. A year after he first talked with Victoria and Elsa, Juan laughed with pleasure when I pinned a tiny microphone to his ironed T-shirt; “It's just like the one Fidel wears on TV,” he said.14 After some banter, he removed the microphone, pinned it to my limp, long-sleeved blouse, and said with a mischievous chuckle, “Okay, Liz, now tell me your life story from the very beginning.” For the next few hours, Juan questioned me about growing up in Brooklyn, moving to Great Britain, and why I was interested in Cubans' lives. Ostensibly quizzing me about London and the Beatles, Juan took pleasure in showing off his worldly knowledge—though Sancti Spíritus, in the center of the island, was the farthest that he had traveled. Juan joked a lot, I laughed a lot, and often the laugh was on me. Juan poked fun at my ignorance of pop music, European geography, and football (soccer). Interviewees rarely mentioned my garbled Spanish Brooklynese, but Juan joked about it, saying that it generated our mutual misunderstandings.Juan clearly enjoyed performing. After meeting Juan, it struck me that some of his stories may have been part of a canned performance. His lines about Dalmatians, indeados for breeding, and chorongo braids were, I felt pretty sure, part of an act designed to shock his audience. And what audience could be better than academic interviewers from the Academy of Sciences? Juan knew, of course, that he was taking a risk, yet he simply couldn't resist titillating us squares.Victoria and I interviewed Juan again in March 2015. He had just turned 47. Juan was more serious, and cautious, than the nipper we met ten years earlier.Why had I heard satire where my Cuban colleagues heard backwardness? This enigma continues to bedevil me. They are Cuban; they have lived their entire lives on the island; they know lo cubano, the Cuban way of speaking, far, far better than I ever will. It makes me wonder. Is Juan in fact an unsophisticated guajiro who parroted the racist and sexist chitchat of small-town life? Or is he a satirist who lampooned his community and himself, who couldn't resist taking the mickey when researchers from the august Academy of Sciences knocked on his door? If my interpretation of Juan's interview is more right than wrong, I believe that I heard Juan differently because I grew up in a culture steeped in satire. On Sunday afternoons, frequently my family sat around the record player listening to Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, and Woody Allen, the Catskill comedian, on 33s. I watched these virtuosos on TV, on The Steve Allen Show.My colleagues in Cuba are less familiar with satire. After 1959, satire was effectively banned. Cuban leaders believed that satire is subversive. It is, and they banished it from radio and TV. Top-level friendships and some smooth politicking managed to pry open a space for satire in cinematography, where the legendary Titón (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) and a handful of other directors poked fun at the government and prodded audiences to see things differently.The dusty streets of Campo Florido are a far cry from the big screen. When Victoria and Elsa showed up on Juan's doorstep, they expected plain talking. They might have anticipated that he would combine honesty with prevarication. But not satire. Not from a thirtysomething-year-old black man who had dropped out of school at the age of fourteen, a jack-of-all-trades from a rural backwater.