It was Cuba’s links with the ‘colossus to the east’[1] that was to herald the end of this five-year epoch of fixedness, and herald a new era in Cuba’s history. Much of the discourse surrounding Cuban studies focuses on apportioning the island’s history into distinct epochs, and in doing so tends to focus primarily upon the revolution of 1959 as the beginning of a ‘new chapter’. However, a second significant temporal dichotomy arose with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ‘período especial en el tiempo de paz’ (‘the special period in times of peace’), or special period for short was a time of near-famine, scarcity in all consumer goods, economic collapse and tremendous social upheaval beginning in the very late 1980s, and continuing in earnest throughout at least the first half of the 1990s. The traumatic upheaval devastated Cuba in the 1990s, rupturing established frameworks and impacting upon every aspect of Cuban life, from the most quotidian acts to the most profound level of identity. Louis A. Perez Jr. sums up the significance of the special period when writing it:
will no doubt be remembered as one of those temporal divides by which people experience the momentous transitions of a historical epoch. The período especial has served to demarcate the life of a generation, to persist hereafter as the reference point by which people often make those profoundly personal distinctions about their lives as ‘before’ and ‘after’. (Perez, 2006:xi)
The special period impacted not only the Cuban populace, but the highest echelons of the Cuban government. The vast political, social and economic upheavals forced the hand of an increasingly desperate and reactionary government. Previously sacred cows of Cuban political ideology were torn asunder in radical contingency plans that questioned the socialist rigidity of the political landscape, and thus certain tenets of this tightly defined Cuban identity (see Perez, 2006, Betancourt, 1991).
The result was the desire – the need – for a new narrative of Cuban identity, one which could help make sense of the traumatic changes the island was experiencing. As berg points out:
The rapid changes in the economy and social structure made the socialist narrative appear inadequate to many Cubans. It no longer held the appeal it used to, its explanatory powers in the present diminished... As Edward Bruner argues, new narratives emerge “when there is a new reality to be explained, when the social arrangements are so different that the old narrative no longer seems adequate” (Bruner, 1986:181-2) (Berg, 2005:133)
The special period, for many Cubans, made the old narrative of what constituted Cuban identity insufficient. In this sense I would argue the special period can be seen as an constituting an ‘event’ in Badiouian terms “compelling the subject[s] to invent a new way of being” (Badiou, 2001:42), one that perhaps bookends that other Cuban ‘event’; the Revolution of 1959[2] by highlighting the lack of fidelity in the old event, and exacting ‘traumatogenic change’ (Sztompka, 2004) upon all aspects of Cuban life, forcing Cubans to adapt in ingenious, often illegal, and occasionally drastic ways to survive, but also forcing many Cubans to redefine their relationship with, and the identity of, their nation.
However, as well as being defined as a more proactive ‘event’, the special period was certainly traumatic, with all the debilitating and destabalising issues that such a term carries with it. Kai Erikson’s assertion that “’trauma’ has to be understood as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event” (1995:184, emphasis original) provides an apposite model for understanding the grinding hardship of the everyday trauma of scarcity of almost all goods, punctuated by individual crises of personal trauma in the guise of political repression or familial exodus that constituted the special period. In a more abstract manner, the trauma of a severely shaken confidence in the established identity of a nation loomed.
The special period, splintered the homogenous definition of ‘authentic’ Cubanness as both the notion of national unity, and the fervent ideological rigidity of the revolution began to disintegrate. Previously self-evident (and unchangeable) policies were renegotiated as sweeping concessions were made to alleviate dire economic and social conditions. The reintroduction of the US dollar as legal tender, the reshaping Cuba’s economic landscape away from manufacture to tourism, providing a huge influx of tourists (see Gott, 2004), and, perhaps most traumatic of all, the decision to allow a vast exodus of ‘balseros’ (rafters) to leave the island on home-made rafts forced Fidel Castro to concede:
Today we cannot speak of the pure, ideal, perfect socialism of which we dream because life forces us into concessions (Castro speech, 26th July 1993, in Perez, 2006:305)
If concessions and traumatic events led to the necessity to re-narrated both Cuba’s history and identity, then one demonstrable avenue in which this ‘new Cubanness’ found expression was through a shift in both the listening and playing habits of Cuban contemporary musicians. As Vincenzo Perna attests in his work on ‘timba’ music[3], “the fall of the Soviet Union had unleashed in Cuba changes that have created a totally new social and musical environment” (2005:2). There was a noticeable rise in popularity (or at least a rise in prominence) of foreign musics as heard, but crucially, as played in Cuba (Sujatha Fernandes, 2003 and 2006). While there has perennially been a ‘foreign’ (notably United States) presence influencing Cuban music (Perez, 1999), by the mid-90s foreign musics began to be understood and co-opted as distinct ‘genres’. This move towards distinct genres of foreign music understood in their entirely contrasts with previous manifestations of American music in Cuba which were, as Pacini-Hernandez and Garofalo state “fragmentary... and highly de-contextualised” (1999:19). Hip-hop and various sub-genres of ‘rock’ music (punk, heavy metal, thrash metal) began to rapidly mushroom in popularity[4] (Sujatha Fernandes, 2003, Pacini-Hernandez and Garofalo, 1999 and 2004). New genres of music which staked a claim at being authentic interpretations of contemporary Cuba also began to emerge. Perna suggests that ‘timba’ began to incorporate “issues of race, class and gender that rarely surface in official discourses” into the narrative of Cuban society (2005:3), whilst musicians in other genres (such as Pedro Luis Ferrer) ‘revived’ “forgotten” genres from Cuba’s rich heritage to provide social commentary and thinly-veiled social criticism.
However, alongside these radical reinterpretations of Cuban music and identity, there came a distinctly nostalgic and benign reimagining of a golden past, indicated most overtly (and most popularly) by the ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ project. Cuba simultaneously reverted to the quasi-colonial image of itself; one at least partially defined from without (Perez, 1999) in an attempt to coax and reconfirm the benign, hedonistic stereotype of Cubanness to the huge influx of tourists now propping up the beleaguered Cuban economy. Finally, and with yet another wave – perhaps the most condensed – of migrants, the perennial boundary-made-geographical of Cuban identity – the straits of Florida – were called into question. Not only Miami, but the very act of crossing – that liminal oceanic space itself – began to be written into the narrative of Cuban identity. The special period made that act of crossing part of Cuban identity; one which every Cuban had at least some personal knowledge of.
However, although many have sought to emphasise the fractures temporal and cultural that occurred as a result of this traumatic time, others have begun to tease out the social and political threads that weave their way through the supposed clean break of the Revolution. Antoni Kapcia highlights the apparent paradox, and the necessity, of speaking of continuity in change when addressing Cuba’s history:
To talk of continuity, in the context of an apparently ever-changing Revolution, is inevitably to invite surprise among lay observers, used to seeing the process portryated as a zigzag trajectory... the ‘history by phases’ approach has also been tempting because it becomes easier to explain the contradictions that have characterized the whole process by categorising periods, hegemonies and directions. (2000:221)
Kapcia further notes that most significant of socio-political continuity of the special period: that it “proved not to be the end of the [revolutionary] system but its nadir” (2005:180). Despite the trauma of the special period, Castro, and the revolution, remained a central tenet of the Cuban identity, in discourse within and outside Cuba. Perhaps then a more moderate approach to the special period is required; one that treats it with the eventual magnitude it clearly had (and still has) in the national psyche, but also searches for the continued facets of this ‘narrow’ definition of Cuban identity. So, as Stephen Fay assesses Cuban identity through a framework “where the schism between antes and después is softened and the frontier between dentro and fuera becomes blurred.[5]”, I aim here to treat of the special period with a similarly liminal approach; between, or perhaps simultaneously, a schism and a continuum to blur the boundary between antes and después (before and after). Cuban identity was not rewritten, but reinterpreted in the confusion of the special period. In the following section, I wish to address some of these points of contestation and the way in which they impacted upon and renegotiated the above described version of Cuban identity. In doing so, I will conclude by addressing the state of Cuban identity at the moment – the beginning of a new millennium – that Porno Para Ricardo formed.
Traumatogenic change: The Negation of an Ally
Although the special period is officially the name given to the series of contingency plans drawn up by the revolutionary government, in colloquial discourse, the name evokes more immediately a force (or more precisely a removal of a force) from without; the withdrawal of economic and political support, and the eventual collapse of, the Soviet Union. The special period was, in many senses, done unto Cuba. Even before the Iron Curtain was fully torn down, Castro had warned the nation of the necessity to prepare for such an eventuality (Betnacourt, 1991). The disintegration of one of the two world superpowers, fulfilled the four criteria of Piotr Sztompka’s definition of “traumatogenic change” (2004) in a number of locations around the world:
The traumatogenic change seems to exhibit four traits. First, it is characterised by specific speed. The obvious case is that the change is sudden and rapid, occurring within a span of time relatively short for a given kind of process... The second trait of traumatogenic change has to do with its scope. It is usually wide, comprehensive, either in that it touches many aspects of life – be it social or personal life – or that it affects many actors and many actions...
Third, traumatogenic change is marked by specific context, particularly substance, either in the sense that it is radical, deep, fundamental – that is, it touches the core aspects of social life or personal fate – or that it affects universal experience...
The fourth feature... has to do with the specific mental frame with which it is encountered by the people. It is faced with an unbelieving mood; it is at least to some extent unexpected, surprising, precisely “shocking” in the literal sense of the word (2004:158-9).
These four elements – sudden, comprehensive, radical and shocking – sum up a Cuban experience whereby its sole link to global discourse and trade – the one pipeline through the US blockade - was rapidly and irrecoverably severed. Yet, where Soviet collapse may have been a celebrated form of traumatogenic change in many of the bloc countries of Eastern Eurpoe – that is, fulfilling the four characteristics laid down by Sztompka, but met in broadly positive terms - the trauma in Cuba took on a unique nuance, as Ernesto Betancourt notes:
We must remember that Cuba joined the Soviet Bloc of its own volition. The Soviet Army did not conquer Cuba as it did conquer Eastern Europe. Therefore, the analogy being advanced that the collapse of Communism there is a predictor of what may happen in Cuba is spurious. Nationalism is not working against Communism in Cuba, quite to the contrary nationalism works in Castro's favour. (1991)
As a result, the eventual collapse of the U.S.S.R. was met in Cuba by a confusing concoction of nationalist fervour which sought to reassert the previous omniscience the Cuban government had covered itself in, and often previously unthinkable concessions, made out of a basic need to survive, which led inevitably to the questioning of the rigidity and ubiquity of Castro’s government, (indeed, of Castro himself).
Though the economic and political changes wrought by the removal (and disappearance) of this world-power ally were profound, as traumatic were the cultural ramifications. For Cuba’s relationship, and identification, with the vast reams of imported Soviet culture was suddenly severed. What had been an ubiquitous cultural marker for a whole generation of Cubans, was suddenly, in adulthood, expunged not only from the contemporary landscape, but an effort was made to ‘forget’ this slice of Cuba’s history. ‘Russia’ was a clear and present influence and referent within Cuba throughout the 1970s, not only politically, but culturally. Soviet cartoons were a staple of Cuban television, as were Russian lessons in school. Though these factors may seem facile in the face of vast economic subsidies and staunchly defiant ideological alliance against the United States, they were significant for the generation of children who would reach adulthood during the special period, and as such must be considered a (potential) constituent part of a national Cuban identity. Soviet culture became a branch of Cuban culture for this generation; ‘Bolek and Lolek’[6] are as nostalgic a memory for Cubans as they are for Eastern Europeans of the same generation.
However, even before the Soviet Union dismantled, Castro was already seeking to distance the country from its former patron. As Ernesto Betnacourt notes, “Castro foresaw the present [i.e. 1991] situation in the Soviet Union. In his speech on July 26, 1989, Castro predicted that, as a result of the trends there, the Soviet Union could eventually disintegrate.” (1991[7]). Thus began the policy of “the "Zero Option", which means to adjust consumption to a level of zero Soviet supplies” (ibid.) which ran parallel to the increasing crisis of the special period. As well as economic reduction, the policy, either deliberately or vicariously, endeavoured to excise cultural imports and the place ‘Russianness’ had within the Cuban identity; denying its legitimacy as a fragment of an identity on the island. It is true that, whilst dogmatic slogans propounding Cuba’s fervent socialism and nationalism (made indistinguishable in many cases) still flourish on the omnipresent billboards, seldom can any reference to Russia or its legacy be found within Cuba. Culturally speaking, the Soviet Union was ‘written out’ of the notion of the ‘authentic’ Cuban identity. This is more than just a matter of ‘moving on’ from a now defunct past; there seems to be a deliberate move to disallow this thread of Cuban identity. It exists now as a tacit palimpsest; written over, rubbed out, or, in Orwellian terms ‘never having existed’.
This is one aspect of the Cuban identity that was not (could not) recontextualised, reinterpreted or renegotiated in the eventual tumult of the special period. There was no chance of doing so, as the cultural marker itself – the Soviet Union – ceased to be. So, while Castro it seems had forseen such traumatogentic change in the policy of ‘Zero Option’, the Cuban populace were not quite so prepared, and the excision, the denial, and enforced illegitimacy of what had been a significant remembrance of childhood for many Cubans, was a culturally traumatic experience.
Jeffrey Alexander writes specifically of cultural trauma, suggesting it occurs:
When members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways (2004:1)
Not wishing to overstate the impact of the denial as authentically Cuban of this singular facet of childhood remembrance, it is perhaps indicative of a broader series of cultural traumas experienced in the special period. Indeed it is worth remembering that Soviet culture in many of its imported guises were not selectively and actively ‘chosen’ by Cubans[8]; they were in many senses ‘enforced’ upon them as more of a political by-product that a cultural one. However, once engrained into remembrance, to have them suddenly removed – forcefully in the present, and surreptitiously from the past – could represent something of a cultural trauma, most notably as the ability to reclaim and recontextualise these cultural elements – and to have comparable cultural items from the present – was denied. Unlike the other aspects of Cuban identity renegotiated throughout the special period, notions of ‘Russianness’, it would appear, lay dormant and silent.
The pressures of economic collapse upon the Cuban government forced them to compromise a number of the socialist policies that had previously been held as non-negotiable and self evident; the ‘parentheses of iron’ that ‘Hermanos de Causa’ were to write about[9]. Most obvious to Cubans was the legalisation of the US dollar. “Ideological rigidity yielded to pragmatic improvisations” (Perez, 2006:303), leading
“Los Hijos de Guillermo Tell”: Social Commentary and Political Critique
As the crisis in all aspects of Cuban life increased throughout the early 90s, the “pure, ideal perfect socialism” Fidel Castro claimed was the revolution (in Perez, 2006:305) had been necessarily compromised by the often drastic concessions enforced upon it, leading to the previously omnipotent vision of the Castro regime being questioned. Although the role of musicians as cultural and political commentators was apparent in Cuba before this period – Carlos Puebla’s acerbic pro-revolution (and anti-United States) songs a case in point - unlike previous generations engaged in political music, the subject of criticism for this new vanguard of special period musicians was not overseas – it was not the ‘foreign goliath’ but much closer to home. The Cuban government itself was called into question, as was the tacit assumption, held since the 1960s, that the ‘Cuban way’ (significantly a singular way), both culturally and politically, was the ‘right way’, or the only way. The fact that Cuba now “found itself virtually alone and isolated, with few political friends” (Perez, ibid:292) made some question the previously unquestionable. Nowhere is this better demonstrated musically than in Carlos Varela’s ‘Guillermo Tell’ from the 1989 album Jalisco Park.
The song ‘Guillermo Tell’ is well known and well loved among many in Cuba. It provides an example of protest against the ageing government; a regime that young Cubans had experienced nothing but throughout their lives. Whilst the lyrics to the song may be poetic, couched in metaphor and allegory, listening to the live version of this song[10] shatters the illusion that these lyrics are a personal, hidden protests. It is interesting to note that this live version of the song is the one Varela included on his ‘best of’ album ‘Los Hijos de Guillermo Tell’ (The Children of William Tell). It is clear that he too realises the power in the communality of this performance. The live performance also appears on the Luaka Bop Cuban compilation ‘Cuba Classics 3 – Diablo al Infierno!’ (Nasatir, 2008). It is no exaggeration to suggest the live version has become more popular, more recognisable than the ‘original’ studio recording.
The song itself is superficially about the tale of William Tell and his desire to shoot an apple from the head of his son. However, Varela adds a potent twist to this familiar tale. At the climactic middle point of the song, Varela sings, with a buttoned-down calm that belies the significance and anger of the words:
Y se asustó cuando dijo el pequeño,
Ahora le toca al padre la manzana en la cabeza
And he [William Tell] was scared when the little one said,
“Now it’s time for the father to put the apple on his head”
The subtextual message is clear; it is time for the overbearing ‘father’ (read either Fidel Castro, or the wider regime) to step aside and let the younger generation assume the reins of power. Such a message, even one so disguised in metaphor would have been hard to imagine at the beginning of the 1980s, and it was in no small part due to the crumbling image of global socialism that this message found its way into a Cuban dialogue.
What is so important about this case study is that even though the lyrics of this song are couched in allegory – nothing overtly critical is said of the regime – there is an implied message delivered to the audience that is well understood; the veil of metaphor here is all but transparent. Also of note is the strong and irrefutable personal voice utilised here; the synergy of speaker and message; this is Carlos Varela’s song, his message, is critique. There is no attempt made here to obfuscate the singer. Perhaps this trope is indicative of a paradigm shift in Cuban musical practice, one in which singers themselves ceased the (enforced) self-censorship many theorists have noted exists in Cuba:
[band leader Giraldo Piloto suggests] that, in Cuba, singing a ‘problematic’ song in public, in theory, is not forbidden. What happens, rather, is that the media, by banning specific songs and marginalising certain artists on the airwaves, pressurize musicians into self-censorship. (Perna, 2005:92)
Artists found that in many instances [in the Quinquenio Gris] they could no longer voice their true opinions; as a result they began to censor themselves, avoiding controversial issues and choosing ‘safer’ subjects in order to avoid scrutiny. (Robin Moore, 2003:17-8)
Catherine Moses makes the same point of Cuban society in general, evoking the authoritarian omniscience the government purported to have, and suggesting that this trope of self-censorship is indicative of Cuban society in general, not just its music:
The Castro regime effectively uses blackmail to create fear and keep people from acting against the regime. If there is something that the state can take from an individual – a professional opportunity, a child’s position in a good school, permission to leave the country, a dollar earning job – it has power over that person. It is to that power that Cubans succumb. (Moses, 2000:18-9)
However, what Carlos Varela’s song shows is a negation of this self-censorship, a radical alignment of singer and song, and an unabashed, albeit poetic and thus ostensibly ambiguous, social critique of the stagnation and rigidity of Cuba’s political regime.
The power of the message is certainly not lost upon the audience in this live recording. Indeed, in many respects, the potency of the message is increased by the reaction and en masse singing of the assembled audience. As the above quoted line is delivered by Varela, there is an eerie, almost spectral, surge of noise from the crowd. Some whistle, others sing, others shout the lyrics back to Varela, still others simply scream, as if unable to voice coherently their emotion. This collective voicing of accord and outpouring of emotion dies down as quickly as it begins. It sounds hesitant, yet uncontrollable, as if the sentiment had been on the tip of the audience’s collective tongue, yet never voiced. As soon as if was, it was checked, self-regulated and suppressed in fear of retaliation from some unseen force. However, audience participation returns to the fore later in the song, as the audience engage in a slow handclap in rhythm with the song. The clap speaks of impatience, of an insistence, driving the song along, but existing alongside the music, as an expression in itself. The audience are applauding the song being played, but the clapping sounds ominous, as if it were aimed at another audience. This performance is an example par excellence of the concept of ‘musicking’ advanced by Christopher Small. Small defines the word as:
To take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practising, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing... In making no distinction between what the performers are doing and what the rest of those present are doing, it reminds us that musicking... is an activity in which all those present are involved and for whose nature and quality, success or failure, everyone present bears some responsibility. (1998:10)
there is no doubting that the audience have engaged in a performance within the context of this live recording, and this is something that one must assume Varela is aware of, having used the track on his compilation CD. Indeed the presence of the audience in the song is emphasised by the fact that Varela stands alone on stage, playing guitar and singing. He is both alone, yet transformed into part of the singing crowd at this salient moment. The effect is to make the message not only a collective, but also a collectively composed, one.
So the special period witnessed something of a negation of the self-censorship implicity imposed by the omnipotence of the state, and led to more overtly critical social commentaries in song. These commentaries were often voiced by single figures, who asserted that these were personal opinions and refused to shy away from their “true opinions” (Moore, 2003:17). It is a trait that lends further evidence to the notion of reinterpreting and renegotiating the notion of Cuban identity; one that took its cues from established tropes of Cuban identity, and renovated them to speak of special period Cuban society.
“Religion, ‘Africanness’ and ‘Blackness’”
The reclamation of race was another trope present in the special period that identified a renegotiation of assumed Cuban identity. As has been discussed above, though a notion of Africanness was extolled as being a ubiquitous marker of Cuban identity, this term was often more politically motivated that socially or culturally auctioned. As de la Fuente notes, the invocation of Africa served as a “formidable ideological weapon” (2001:18) against the United States in the construction of a unified Cuban voice that could be constructed as antithetical to imaginings of the US. However, behind the facade of ‘colourless nation’ united by an African past, many markers of Cuba’s link to the African continent were denied. Religion was subjugated and “because the revolution had supposedly resolved all questions of institutional discrimination, it was considered unpatriotic to speak of race, or to identify oneself in racial terms, rather than as just Cuban” (Sujatha Fernandes, 2003:584). Mette Louise Berg points to a continuation of this denial of contemporary links to Africa in the heritage of Havana – both in museums and city restoration:
The Musea de la Ciudad, City Museum [displays] objects [that] are important to the heritage narrative because they are seen to represent historic ties between Europe, in particular Spain, and Cuba. No objects representing historic ties between Cuba and Africa are exhibited in the museum. (Mette Louise Berg, 2005:139)
The restoration of Old Havana is bound up with constructions of Cuba as a white nation... the restoration process has constructed Afro-Cubans as outsiders, and white Cubans as insiders (Berg, 2005:140)
Though Berg is talking of a Cuba ‘post-special period’, both examples are indicative of the approach to ‘Africa’ as invoked in discourse around Cuban identity; present – omnipresent even – but relegated to some distant ‘past’ a root shared by all.
However for many Cubans, notions of Africanness, and particularly its collocation with race which, despite official discourse, was (and still is) of great significance in everyday life in Cuba, played a significant and active part in their individual identity constructions. And the special period saw moves to reclaim certain notions Africanness, often recontextualised as ‘Blackness’.
One particular way in which a distinct identity was claimed by Black Cubans was through a recelebration of African derived religious/spiritual; practice. As Louis Perez points out, the special period saw something of a renaissance in religion on the island, which the government could not cease:
Afro-Cuban spiritualism in the form of Santería flourished... The state could not but accommodate to the new stirring of spirituality... The government renounced atheism as an official creed. After 1991, it was possible to be both religious and revolutionary (Perez, 2006:297)
Thus many of the deities of this ‘ancestral Africa’ – Eleggua, Chango, Obatala, Yemaya – though never missing from Cuban discourse, were allowed to return to prominence and facilitate a redefinition of Cuba’s African identity. If the revolution was made to stand as the symbol of Cuban identity (as Castro’s infamous decree “within the revolution; everything, against it; nothing”) would tend to suggest, then the syncretism that Perez suggests took place between religion and revolution in the special period is a telling renegotiation of what constituted the Cuban identity. For now a recognition of difference – religious and racial – began to permeate the single voice of Cuba. Such syncretism is well known to Afro-Caribbean religion, so it is little wonder that it could have been used as a device to meld and mould representations of Africa and Cuba:
As [Lydia] Cabrera points out in her article ‘Religious Syncretism in Cuba’, what is practised in Cuba is a religion diversely called Lucumbí, Yoruba, or Regla de Ochoa the syncretically united Catholocism with the ancestral African traditions, thus creating a system of beliefs in its own right. (Lesley Feracho, 2000:53)
The very invocation of Afro-Cuban spiritual practices, and their flourishing in this period of extreme hardship and trauma, is indicative of in itself of this process of realignment and recontextualisation; of bringing together apparently antithetical shards (religion and socialism/ Yoruba and Catholicism/ Africa and the Caribbean) to create identity. As Feracho goes on to say, of the Afro-Cuban poetry of Nancy Morejón:
Morejón explores space as a site of contestation and imbalance between Adfrica and the New World... [T]he incorporation of Africa into a New World context – the creation and maintenance of the Cuban Homespace – is a complex process characterised by the constant interplay of displacement and relocation. (2000:57)
Perhaps the re-incorporation of active elements of an African identity into the traumatised special period Cuban homespace is indicative of a process or relocating Cuban identity, redefining it and reclaiming and renovating important aspects of identity.
This reaffirmation of Africanness as part of Cubanness was not exclusively confined to religious practises. Many musicians in the 1990s adopted and adapted new codes of representation surrounding notions of ‘Africa’ to construct a musical identity. However, whilst ‘Africanness’ was central to spiritual redefinitions of Cuban identity, many musicians were addressing the concept of ‘blackness’. The concept of Cuban musicians in the early 1990s negotiating musical routes that were ‘more African’ or ‘more Black’ seems at odds with the vision both the worldview and the view of officialdom in Cuba of Cuban culture. As discussed above, the prefix ‘Afro-’ seems inextricably linked to the suffix ‘-Cuban’ in relation to musical practice. However, it is precisely this perceived ubiquity that drove many black Cubans to search for a voice that could facilitate their own redefinition of identity. If, as Sujatha Fernandes notes, Africanness was adopted by all, then many black Cubans looked to race as a marker of the implicit differentiation that still pervaded Cuban society to identify themselves. If all Cuba was ‘Afro-’, they defined themselves as Black, and the most prominent black cultural expression globally in the 1990s – one that rang true to many young, black Cubans - came not from Cuba, nor even from Africa, but from the USA in the form of rap.
Along with rock music, rap and hip hop mushroomed in popularity during the special period, taking influence from the US, but crucially recontextualising the music to represent a distinctly Cuban identity (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, 1999:19). In this new genre, many black Cubans found a new vehicle to represent their identity, one that sought to derivate from the historical ‘root’ identity stemming from Africa. Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo ask the following question of special period rap: “to what extent... does embracing rap reflect young Cubans’ desire to go beyond (whilst not necessarily relinquishing) a more narrowly defined national identity and to locate themselves within a broader international cultural community?” (ibid.) It is a question Sujatha Fernandes goes some way to answering in noting that “given the lack of forums for young Afro-Cubans to voice their concerns, rap music provides an avenue for contestation and negotiation within Cuban society” (2003, p.584). It could be argued that many black musicians in the special period were attempting to reclaim a specific racial identity by adopting and adapting the voice of rap to reassert a facet of an identity of ‘difference’ denied to them by the homogenising effect of the ‘we are all African’ rhetoric of the Communist regime.
Such traits are illustrated by Vincenzo Perna in relation to that other burgeoning black music of the special period; timba. Perna suggests that “through its appropriation of foreign styles, timba challenges discourses that seek to construct a demonized image of capitalism, and evades notions of a narrowly-defined cultural nationalism.” (2005:4). Timba, and Cuban hip hop both seek to break the notion of tradition and folklore that pervade the presence of Africa in Cuban discourse. Perna notes that:
Musicologists tend to define as musica afrocubana folkloric forms of African dderivation such as the music of santería, palo monte and abakuá, but not styles with a clear black cultural matrix and audience such as... popular dance musics (ibid.:7).
In timba, perhaps one may discover another example of a reappropriation of notions of Africannness in Cuban identity; reclaimed and reconstructed to define those for whom it represents a contemporary facet of their identity. Perhaps too there is more evidence of a syncretism the special period facilitated. With narrowly defined notions of national identity severely shaken, many Cubans sought to meld cultural forms and aspects of identity – African and Cuban and ‘black’ and traditional and American – syncretised to form something of a individually applicable Cuban identity.
However, Perna warns of the danger of over using (or misusing) the term ‘syncretism’ when speaking of the reformation of ‘black Cuban identity’ in this fractious epoch. He notes that:
In Herskovits’ influential formulation, syncretism was based on a passive notion of cultural resistance, a somewhat mechanical blending of elements to two cultures into a third hybrid form, through which elements of African culture were retained in the Americas (Perna, 2000). What we actually have in a music like timba is an eclectic cultural mix, a stylistic and ideological bricolage... Rather than one of retention of African elements, the logic at work in timba seems to be that of a practice, a process of permanent re-appropriation and re-articulation. (2005:9)
Such an analysis makes an important distinction between notions of ‘preserving’ an African identity, and constructing a black Cuban one. ‘Africannes’ in the special period sought to break from the traditional syncretism model of fusing with a ‘dominant culture’ (Catholicism in the case of religion, or Spanish folk in the case of music) as a means of preservation which modulated both into a hybrid space. In this proactive moment of self-identification of timba and Cuban hip hop, aspects of identity were actively selected, brought together not as a means of preserving, but as part of a desired aesthetic; as representative of a wholly more disparate identity, one which, as with the music themselves, “resist[ed] being framed in nationalist terms” (Perna, 2005:8).
So as Sujatha Fernandes argues, the adoption of rap by Cuban artists in the special period represents “a gesture of defiance that signals a refusal to conform to the dominant society” (2003, p.600). It, along with timba, became an actively sourced bricolage, that revelled in global sources, but adapted them to forge and represent an active Cuban identity. Concomitantly, the voice of ‘Africanness’ was also given more specificity within this decade as well; made more specific, more personalised, more celebratory, more unique and more Cuban.
“Like Smoke Under a Door”: Tourism, Balseros and Musical Dissemination”
One mechanism facilitating this bricolage of global cultural sources was the opening up of channels of musical dissemination within Cuba. Although foreign musics had permeated the supposedly transported iron curtain of blockade and political recalcitrance in Cuba’s post-revolution-pre-special-period epoch, as many commentators have noted, these foreign sources were often “fragmentary, intermittent, and highly decontextualised” (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, 1999:19) and often considered ‘problematic’, or even as “enemy propaganda” by officialdom (Moses, 2000:14). However, these rivulets of cultural information, described by Pacini Harnandez and Garofalo as akin to “smoke seeming under a closed door” (2004:44) were to expand rapidly in the special period; swept up on the tide of human movements that both traumatised the nation and effectively saved the economy.
Those Who Came: Tourism
The cessation of Soviet subsidised trade to and from Cuba in the special period left a chasm in the Cuban economy that the government needed to fill. One of the central elements Castro opted for was tourism. Opening Cuba up as a tourist resort (albeit one still denied to American citizens) and promoting joint ventures with international businesses to construct luxury hotels provided much needed revenue. “Foreign tourists were to become Cuba’s principle source of foreign currency” (Gott, 2004:290) throughout the special period, and Louis Perez provides some interesting figures that demonstrate the rapid increase in tourism. Perez recounts that tourist numbers rocketed “from 350,000 in 1990 to more than 500,000 in 1992, and 620,000 in 1994 to 740, in 1995” (Perez, 2006:309).
However, the terms under which these tourists came to the island were more problematic. With their much needed investment came a new wealth of problems for the Cuban government. As Richard Gott notes, “the economic policy makers... wanted and ‘isolated enclave of foreign investment and tourism’ that would provide the hard currency needed to maintain the social structure without changes” (Gott, 2004:290). It was the intention of the Cuban government to keep tourists and Cubans as separate as possible, keeping tourists within the luxury resorts and exclusive hotels, whilst keeping Cubans out. “Virtually all Cubans were denied access to most dollar tourist hotels” (Perez, 2006:309), a theme picked up by Pedro Luis Ferrer in the song ‘100% Cubano’. Although recent changes to the country’s law now permits Cubans to stay in many of these hotels, this amendment was only passed in 2008 by Raul Castro[11]. Cubans still have to pay the extortionate (relative to national salaries) rates to stay at these hotels, meaning that, in reality, one is still unlikely to see Cubans staying in these hotels. The movements of tourists are similarly restricted by bureaucracy when visiting Cuba. Tourists need to apply, at the Cuban consulate, for a specific visa (at additional cost) to visit a Cuban house for example.
Yet, as Richard Gott details, this philosophy of inviting tourism but attempting to keep tourists and Cubans apart was “soon revealed to be wishful thinking” (2004, p.290). As many Cubans took (relatively) lucrative jobs working in tourist resorts, and tourists desiring to visit ‘the authentic Cuba’, it proved impossible to prevent contact between these two groups, and the “arrival of many tens of thousands of foreign visitors during a time of economic crisis served to set in relief the sharp contrast between deteriorating national standards and affluent tourists” (Perez, 2006:309). Thus, it could be argued, this influx of (relatively) wealthy tourists demonstrated, particularly to young Cubans who had not seen first-hand the benefits of the nascent years of revolutionary society, the sharp relief between their lives of austerity and others’ lives of relative luxury. Jaime Suchlichi suggest as much in noting that “foreign remittances and tourism have accentuated the differences in society between those with dollars and those without, and have increased racial tensions, since most dollars are received by Cuba’s white population.” (2000:58). This disparity in dollar acquisition, noted by other writers (???), may have also led to the reaffirmation of a separate, ‘black’, identity in the special period, as noted above. That this contributed to a feeling of resentment towards the Cuban government is undeniable and is, in part, a cause of the surge of critical music aimed at the government that the special period heralded.
However, I would like to posit yet another critical influence that came from this influx of tourist to the island. For with them, these tourists brought their own culture, their own music and, in many cases, fuelled by the desire to experience foreign culture on the part of the Cubans they met, tourists were instrumental in helping to disseminate foreign music across Cuba. Tourism increased the wealth of foreign musics available on the island, and helped to facilitate the dissemination of that music. As one example, the Cuban singer/songwriter Mariley Reinoso Olivera[12] spoke of her experiences of the ‘cultural tourist’ groups who would visit her university and of her experiences of working as a hotel entertainer in the special period. She remembers that these groups of tourists:
On special cultural tours, tourists would come into our university classes and talk to us for a while and give us books and CDs. Then you would make friends with them, many came back the next year and you could ask them to bring you certain music. That’s how I heard ‘The Cranberries’ and many, many rock bands (2010, interview with the writer)
Those Who Left: Emigration
The cultural flow was not only one way in the special period, as yet another vast wave of migration – the so-called ‘balseros’ (‘rafters’) – left Cuba in droves throughout the special period: “467 in 1990, 2,203 in 1991, 2,548 in 1992, and 3,656 in 1993” (Gott, 2004:299). The vast numbers of Cubans leaving the island – some 17,000 by the end of August 1994 (Maria Cristina Garcia, 1996:79)- were traumatic enough, as traumatic certainly as the two other incidences of mass migration Richard Gott suggests are the first ‘two exoduses[13]’ in Cuba’s post-revolution history; 1965 and the 1980 Mariel boat life. But the compound the trauma was the apparent acquiescence of the Cuban government in allowing this new “vintage” (to use Silvia Pedraza-Bailey’s adoption of Egon Kunz term) of migrants to leave. Amid seething discontent and riots in Havana, Castro effectively gave free reign to his dissenters to leave unhindered, as Richard Gott writes:
In the wake of the August riot Castro declared that his government would now officially relax its migration controls. Anyone who wished to leave would be allowed to do so... Hundreds flocked to the island shores, to embark of boats and rafts. (Gott, 2004:299)
The result was a devastating haemorrhaging of population that compounded the effects of the earlier Mariel exodus in driving Cuba’s younger generations from the island. It was a process that touched every family in Cuba in some manner. The exodus ceased “on September 9, [when] the [Cuban and United States] governments reached an agreement: the U.S. would accept a minimum of twenty thousand new immigrants each year... and in turn the Cuban government agreed to restrict illegal emigration. (García, 1996:80), but by that time, another of Cuba’s young generations had been dealt a severe blow to its physical location and sense of collective identity.
However, this ‘vintage’ of refugees arguably differed from its forbears – certainly from the politically motivated emigration of the 1960s. For this instance of physical relocation perhaps meant less than before the necessity to relinquish a claim to some form of ‘Cuban’ identity. In the immediate aftermath of revolution, those that left the island were, according to Pedraza-Bailey, predominantly those from the “upper and upper middle class” in Cuba (1985:9), to whom the revolution was abhorrent. Pedraza-Bailey speaks of these first two moments of mass emigration from Cuba as “distinct refugee “vintages”, alike only in their final rejection of Cuba” (1985:4). In these vintages of ‘exiles’, Cuba existed only in a pre-revolutionary nostalgic haze; the contemporary Cuba was wiped from the collective memory – an epoch which would have to be waited out until the nation, and thus its place within their identity – could be reclaimed. Such omissions from collective memory and identity are lamented by Ricardo Pau-Llosa:
Nowhere is the death of this once great nation [“precatastrophe Cuba”] more painfully evident that when talking to young Cuban Americans in Miami, the so-called capital de exilio. These children of exile seemed to have received little or no information about Cuba from their parents. Typically Cuban Americans have no idea who key figures in Cuban history and culture were... Cuban American ignorance of Cuba mirrors that of North Americans, for whom Cuban history began with the communist takeover in 1959... Like their North American counterparts, Cuban Americans latch onto talk about the embargo – regardless of the position they take on the issue – as an unconscious way of announcing that they know nothing (else) about Cuba. (Ricardo Pau-Llosa, in O’Reilly Herrera, 2001:221)
In these previous moments of refugee/ exile/ emigration, there is a distinct motif of severing all ties – geographical, and ideological – with Cuba, expressed by the writer Herberto Padilla as both a physical dislocation, but also by being physically dislocated, one’s identity being necessarily compromised and confused:
“When I arrived in New York March 17, 1980, I knew that I would be separated from Cuba forever. I no longer hoped that there would be substantial or immediate change” (Heberto Padilla, in O’Reilly Herrera, 2001:211)
In my opinion, exile is one of the biggest catastrophes of any age; however, it is worse for writers. You are disconnected for your natural environment or milieu and from your native tongue, and thus you are never the same again (ibid.:213)
Yet heralded by the dramatic events of the Mariel, the special period emigrations saw a distinctly different ‘vintage’ of emigrant. They were, by and large, younger, less politically ‘pushed’ from Cuba and more, Pedraza-Bailey argues, economically ‘pulled’ to the US. Talking of these later vintages, Pedraza-Bailey asserts that:
“increasingly, the emigration ceases to be a political act and becomes an economic act” (Amaro and Portes, 1972:13). Although de jure the new immigrants were considered political immigrants, Amaro and Portes affirm that de facto they increasingly came to resemble “the classic immigrant” (Pedraza_Bailey, 1985:17)
Also salient in the 1980s immigrants is their youth. Most of the immigrants were young male adults, single or heads of families who left their wives and children behind (ibid.:26)
These trends continued in 1994, with younger generations of Cubans seeking economic opportunities in the US. Such narratives abound in the poignant documentary ‘Balseros’ (Bosch and Domènech, 2002) in which the rafters themselves, though clearly frustrated by the social inequality and hardship in Cuba, tend to be more economically motivated that politically. This, of course is something of a false dichotomy; as has been seen throughout this work, all manner of social and economic practises in Cuba are at some level controlled and facilitated by the revolution, thus legitimate complaints about economic hardship necessarily are vicarious critiques of revolutionary policy. However, I would tend to argue that unlike the distinctly political miogration immediately following the revolution, the special period balseros, demonstrated less umbrage with the revolutionary usurpation of Cuban identity, and more with individual economic circumstances. Thus, once in the US, their vision of Cuba, and the place it perhaps played in their newly contextualised identity was significantly different from these older vintages. Pedraza-Bailey again provides apposite evidence for such an assertion, suggesting both a rift in the Cuban-American community based around generational and ideological differences in approach to Cuba:
Among other splits, such as social class and wave of migration, the Cuban community [in Miami] is certainly cleft by age, by generation... This gap represents more than [a generational gap]; it is the difference between political generations (Pedraza-Bailey, 1985:21)
and also differences in the remembrances of Cuba:
The early refugees’ nostalgia attached them to the Cuba they knew, that was. The Mariel refugees’ is for the Cuba that is. (Pedraza-Bailey, 1985:29)
These assertions would tend to suggest that there was less of an inclination to relinquish the Cuban aspects of identity upon reaching the US; that links not only of communication,. But also of identity stretched more easily across the Straits of Florida for this special period vintage. As a result, perhaps special period conceptions of the physical space of Cuba began to expand. Those who left were no longer written off as dissidents, gusanos, and, by virtue of their emigration, ‘non-Cuban’. Perhaps nationality as part of identity travelled with this vintage of Cubans in more applicable and pragmatic terms than it had before?
The geographical expansion of the space of Cuban identity could be one of the composite factors in the globalising rhetoric seen in the above discussion of timba and hip hop. If autochthonous, isolated musical materials were seen as something of an obsolete concept, and the boundaries between local and global influences were deliberately being blurred in these new Cuban genres, then perhaps this wave of migration, though traumatic socially, provided a much-needed expansion of geographical and cultural horizons, without compromising the authenticity of the notion of Cuban music.
Of course this influx of Cubans to the US provided more than just an ideological expansion of musical horizons. Again, to reference Pedraza-Bailey, this new vintage was predominantly young, and it takes little conceptual leap to suggest that their knowledge of “the Cuba that is” would wish to translate to the “US that is”, and that this newly acquired cultural knowledge would be shared with friends and family via gifts sent ‘home’. Evidence for the importance of this avenue of musical dissemination is anecdotal – referenced in passing by Vincenzo Perna (2005) and Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo in their account of Cuban hip hop (2004) – but the significance of ‘mix-tape’ culture; musics received through familial channels from the US[14] and then passed around friendship groups, is unquestionable. Such routes of musical dissemination question the imagery of ‘smoke under a door’ as voiced by Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, and throw up some fascinating questions about the renegotiation (and bypassing) of the conventional roles of musical and cultural ‘gatekeepers’, the establishing of channels of swapping potentially ‘problematic’ musical material, and the significance these new musical channels had in shaping the sound of ‘Cuban’ music. It is an area which requires discrete study, as it may shed much further light on the contestations, renegotiations and continuums of Cuban identity in this fractious period.
A Representation of the Special Period?: The Buena Vista Social Club
The ‘re-opening’ of Cuba physically to the mass influx of tourists served not only to reintroduce foreign cultural influences into the vocabulary of Cuban musicians, but it also served to ‘reintroduce’ Cuban traditional music back into the market place, securing a prominent place within the burgeoning market of ‘world music’. As with the hedonistic pre-revolutionary closeness between the US and Cuba (Perez, 1999) in the special period, with the vast monetary advantages that came with playing to (and appealing to) tourist audiences, Cuban musical identity began to be defined from without. This time it was nostalgic images of crumbling colonial edifices, 1950s Cadillacs and somehow ‘timeless’ yet forgotten musical masters plying the same wares unhampered and unhindered by the passing of traumatic time. This latter nearrative was cemented (and even invented) by the unexpected, and colossus, global success of one band: The Buena Vista Social Club.
It is hardly necessary to revisit the global success of this band here, nor to provide a critique of their ‘authentic Cubanness’, or lack thereof. For a succinct account of both these factors, I would refer the reader to the chapter dedicated to the Buena Vista Social Club in Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor’s “Faking it: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music” (2007) and to Vincenzo Perna’s discussion of the band in chapter nine of his work (2005). A brief account of the key moments will suffice here. In 1996, the end of the most severe part of the special period, and as Cuba had cemented its position as a world tourist destination, American guitarist Ry Cooder recorded a conglomerated mix of Cuban musicians and musics from different generations. In 1997, the album was released to critical acclaim and commercial success. In 1999, director Win Wendes travelled to Cuba to record a documentary featuring the members of the band, and in the same year, the Buena Vista Social Club performed in Amsterdam and New York’s Carnegie Hall, further increasing the acclaim (and) sales of the original album. In the interim fourteen years, numerous projects have been sold utilising the epithet ‘Buena Vista Social Club’. The band recently embarked on a European tour in which few of the original members performed. The name ‘Buena Vista’ now exists as something of a cultural short-hand for ‘authentic Cuban music’ rather than pertaining to that original recording or band. It has become a symbol of Cuba once more, partially at the behest of the tourist market, but partially as a response from Cuban musicians to what they believed tourists wished to find on their ‘return’ to the island.
When discussing the recording of ‘The Buena Vista Social Club’, Barker and Taylor provide a rather negative account of an unrepresentative musical fusion. “The ageing musicians’ natural styles came from various stages of the island’s past, and Cuban music had long since moved onto new styles” (2007:300), later adding “Cooder[15] was looking back to a golden age while disregarding more modern developments” (ibid.:304). Arguments surrounding ‘authenticity’ aside, these two quotes reveal something more pertinent to this discussion. The CD – and particularly Ry Cooder’s hand in it – represent perhaps the inevitable musical conclusion of the Cuban government’s partnership with private, foreign companies.
The Buena Vista Social Club could perhaps be represented as offering something of a musical equivalent to the opulent, colonial-esque grand hotels built by foreign firms to re-imagine a ‘golden’, hedonistic past in present day Cuba. It is not my intention to draw comparisons between Cuban builders hired onto hotel building projects at vastly reduced wages (as discussed by Berg, 2005) and the musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club; such a comparison would perhaps be an unfair one. However, whilst Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer et al were the personalities, Cooder was always seen as the architect that made the project possible. It is worth noting that both the large hotels and this CD were manufactured by foreign hands and both were manufactured for foreign ‘use’. As Barker and Taylor suggest (rather contentiously) “most Cubans have never heard the record” (2007:302); they were never meant to. The project was designed as a projection of Cuba to the outside world, rather than a reflection of it to those within. It was music for the tourists. It is not surprising that both the tourist industry and Ry Cooder’s production wanted to look back to create their new visions of Cuba. Both looked to the 1940s, Cooder “deliberately replicating... Cuban recordings of the 1940s” (ibid.:300) as this was the last great age of global tourism to Cuba; before the iron door of political isolation slammed shut. Buena Vista represent the effect of the special period and its compromises. Cuba once more had to negotiate its position in global consciousness; it had to present, as all nations do, a succinct portrait of its cultural heritage and identity to represent itself in the necessarily reductivist arena of ‘world music’. As this image of ‘golden era’ Cuba still loomed large in globally constructed narratives (and also because the still continuing revolution was perhaps a much more controversial and divisive narrative to present), it became the backbone of this construction of Cuban identity from global consumption.
However, if the Buena Vista Social Club were essentially a product aimed at the foreign market, seldom (if ever) heard by Cubans themselves, how do they represent an anathematic portrayal of Cuba to many of the island’s younger musicians? For the final time, I quote Barker and Taylor as they discuss the group’s final, joyous concert at Carnegie Hall in New York:
Old men often like to have fun. Looking back they sometimes like to simplify and parody their past, partly to remember what was best about it and party to tease the younger generation (ibid. p.314)
It goes without saying that young Cubans have had to endure the older generation ‘remembering what was best’ about a semi-mythical past that played itself out long before they were born. If the Buena Vista Social Club did indeed represent a backwards facing look at Cuba’s golden past, it rang hollow when viewed from the less than golden present it had created. What the reinvention of a nostalgic Cuba – one that had seemingly stood still or entirely circumvented the revolutionary epoch – again demonstrated was a definition of Cuban identity as defined from without, or certainly with ‘those from without’ in mind. It was a projection not of what Cuba wished to be, but what it perhaps thought ‘others’ wanted it to be, or what it needed to be to survive economically in the wake of the special period. Such definitions or Cuban music were, of course, anathematic and antithetical to the hybridised bricolage ‘global Cubanness’ young Cuban musicians were forging in the same period. It was seen as retrogressive, conservative and a deeply false projection of contemporary Cuban identity, denying the legitimacy of – indeed entirely excising - all that they had lived through, all that they had experienced. Once more, the old men were in charge, once more the father (or grandfather) was placing the apple atop Guillermo Tell’s head, once more Cuba’s youth were silenced, subjugated and denied entrance to the space ‘authentic Cuban identity’.
Conclusion: An ‘Archipelago of Individualism’? The Splintering and Re-coagulation of the ‘Cuban Voice’
The traumas and travails of the special period forced Cubans to redefine notions of Cuban identity on every level – from the grand, over-arching narratives of history, culture and politics, to the minutia of everyday life, to even the geographical boundaries of the nation. In concluding, I present the theory of Antoni Kapcia that in the special period, the notion of a unified Cuban voice; representative of the populace both spatially and temporally, with tendrils of authentic Cubanness reaching both through time and unifying space, was irrevocably fractured in the special period. “Cuban culture [became] ‘un archipiélago’ of individualism” (2005:191), claims Kapcia, in addition to which I would suggest that Cuban identity became a similar archipiélago; stemming from many of the same sources, but distinctly and individually defined and possibly even isolated from one another. Many commentators, Kapcia included (2000, 2005), have noted that participation in overt displays of national community diminished dramatically in the special period, and as Jaime Suchlichi notes, Cuban identity retrated back to the individual, familial scale (if ever it had existed in national(istic) terms):
Introduced by Castro in the 1960s, this concept [of the “new Cuban man”] called for a change in the values and attitudes of most Cubans. Allegiances would be transferred from the family to the party and the fatherland. The influence of the church would be eliminated. Devotion to the cause of communism would prevail. Man would consciously labour for the welfare of society, and the collective would supersede the individual one. (2000:78-9)
However, as has been demonstrated in this account of Cuban identity in the special period, many of these supposedly obsolete markers of identity were reclaimed and reused in a time of ideological and identity crisis; religion, the family and the needs of the individual were all facets of the special period, outweighing for many the rhetoric of socialism, the nation and the collective. “After forty years of education and indoctrination, the “new man” is nowhere to be found” claims Suchlichi (ibid.:57). Of course this is in part due to the very apparent economic and social crises of the special period which made scarcity an ever-present concern, and physically separated families. But in part, it represents a move away from the rigidified, collective definitions of Cubanness to more individually constructed definitions. Truly an archipiélago of ‘multiple Cubannesses’.
Examples of these independent Cuban identities are played out in music through the burgeoning ‘individual voice’ as opposed to the lager collective groups. Notable examples would be Carlos Varela, who shunned the ‘typical’ large band sound for a solo guitar (Nasatir, 2008). Similarly, Pedro Luis Ferrer’s established sound shifted from large ensembles to the small ‘bunga[16]’. Another example would be the rise in popularity of ‘niche’ musics; styles such as ‘timba’ which “resist[ed] being framed in nationalist terms” (Perna, 2005:8) and sought to relate to “the world of working class Blacks... [by bringing] to the fore previously marginalised aspects of Afro-Cuban culture” (ibid.:3). The individual voice of the singer, the genre that sought to speak for sections of a community, rather than purporting to represent the whole.
This retreat into individualism and fragmentation of the national voice, led Vázquez Montalbán to describe an environment in which “the newest Cuban art and literature ignore and sense of identification with the revolution” (1998:359-360). Cuban art, it seems, ceased to show fidelity to the ‘event’ of the revolution and national terms, and began to couch itself in the familial, the small-scale, the ‘everyday’ (removed from socialist idealisation), notions of hybridity and change, and the deeply personal. So in this traumatic era of uncertainty, mass exodus and fundamental changes to previously unchangeable signifiers of Cubanness, Arturo Arango’s assertion that Cuban ‘artists’ “have opted for [exile] far less than other sectors [of society]” (1997:122) takes on an added significance[17]. If Cuban culture had become individualistic, yet notions of Cubanness were still a central concern, then one must assume that there was a fundamental shift in what was seen as constituting ‘Cubanness’, at least in the world of the arts. In place of a singular ‘authentic Cubanness’ were smaller, distinct ‘authentic Cubannesses’, tentative steps towards subcultures even[18], which took their authenticity from the Cubanness of the individuals within them rather than some spurious historical lineage. Jennifer Hernández, keyboard player in heavy metal band ‘Escape’ perhaps sums up this sentiment best in the documentary ‘Cuba Rebelión’ (Cuomo and de Nooij, 2009): “the media don’t pay attention to us, but they have to realise, the music we make is Cuban music too”.
In addressing the above quote, it is necessary to examine the ‘space’ that is being contested. For here we see played out a ‘Secondspace’ Cubanness, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre; a Cubanness that is “primarily produced through discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial working of the mind. In its purest form, Secondspace is entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies” (Edward Soja, 1996:78-9). As opposed to the previously (ostensibly) ubiquitous ‘Cubanness’ that encapsulated ‘all that is Cuban’ into ‘one voice’ (a ‘Firstspace Cubanness’, again to use Lefebvre’s definitions), the ‘Secondspace Cubanness’ that many musicians in the genres of rock, hip hop and timba of the special period imagined was individually defined and deliberately personal. More accurately, a series of Secondspaces were imagined, each one different, each one an island in the chain of Kapcia’s archipelago. Yet, paradoxically, accompanying the negotiation of multiple ‘Secondspace Cubanness’ in music, a return to a ‘Firstspace’, authentic ‘traditional’ Cuban music emerged. Spearheaded by the global popularity of the Buena Vista Social Club[19] and engorged by the mass influx of tourists, who brought with them their own perceptions of and desires for Cubanness–– began to be re-imagined as a concession to these tourist perceptions (Barker and Taylor, 2007). The romantic image of 1950s Cadillacs and Buicks avoiding ocean spray on the pot-holed Malecón was recreated for this tourist market. With it, an ‘exotic other’ and a musical form to fit were re-imagined. Where many musicians were reconstructing their cultural identities to incorporate foreign musics, co-opting them to reflect a contemporary Cuba, the renewed pressure of tourist perception, and Cuba’s place within the world music circuit began to reshape a retro(gressive) Cuban identity that coincided with its own ideals. This Firstspace reimagining of Cubanness may have only represented one of the many Secondspace archipelagos – one of the potential definitions of Cuban cultural identity now – but it was certainly the most dominant on a global scale.
As the new millennium approached, and the nightmare of the special period receded, Cuban identity had been reclaimed by many, reshaped by some and changed by an epoch that made top-down, holistic authoritarian notions of what constituted a Cuban identity anachronistic and irrecoverable.
[1] As opposed to the “colossus to the north” (see Raul Fernandez, 1994:111)
[3] Timba is a genre of Cuban music, Perna argues, that grew out of, and thus represents, the special period and the impact it had upon Cuban identity.
[4] The logistics of such a mushrooming in popularity would, in itself, warrant its own discrete study. How rock and rap were heard and disseminated in a country in which all music is prohibitively expensive, and foreign music was illegal to own, speaks of a tacit communication across the Straits of Florida, and of hidden cassette-culture communities in Cuba. Sufficed to say here, Cuban rock musicians I have spoken to have all mentioned the importance of such avenues of music dissemination in the formation of their identity and the ‘rock scene’ in Cuba. Porno Para Ricardo, for their part, reference this culture, albeit in parodic form, in the song ‘Black Metal’ where the protagonist, on hearing a new metal band, runs to find ‘Toni’; the man who can burn CDs for the frikis.
[5] Taken from Fay’s PhD abstract: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/splas/research/pgforum/pgresearchinterests.aspx
[6] Bolek and Lolek was a Polish cartoon running from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s which was televised in Cuba, and became very popular.
[8] Although the extent to which any generation of children in any country actively selects the cultural materials delivered to them as a generation is probably a moot point
[9] In the song ‘Tengo’ – ‘tengo libertad entre un paréntesis de hierro’
[10] Available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y9nF9ssH9I
[11] The details (albeit from a partisan perspective) of this amendment can be found at the following website: www.msnbc.com/id/23878991
[12] I should point out that Mariley Reinoso Olivera, as well as being a Cuban musician is also my wife.
[13] Gott calls the 1994 balsero exodus the “third exodus” (2004:298), naming these two earlier events as the precursors to the special period migration.
[14] And, with increasing numbers, music from other locations important in the Cuban diaspora, such as Mexico, Spain and Venezuela.
[15] Ry Cooder was the American producer and sometime slide guitar player on the record
[16] ‘bunga’ is a Cuban words meaning a small, informal group of (usually rural) musicians ‘jamming’.
[17] It is worth noting that Arango’s assertion here is not backed up by any analysis of Cuban migration statistics. For such analysis, I refer to Aguirre (1976), Aguirre and Bonilla Silva (2002) and Pedraza-Bailey (1985). However, that Arango would make such a claim, albeit anecdotally, is a telling face, and one worth exploring in its own right.
[18] The question of subcultural Cubanness will be addressed in chapter three.
[19] A group that Barker and Taylor claim were not well known within Cuba itself (2007).
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