Alternative Geographies

Cubas Alternative Geographies
By
Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
universit y of califor nia, s an dieg o
The idea for this guest issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology
took shape during my post-doctoral employment search. Academic positions in North American anthropology departments often demand a certain regional focus and, as one of the rst U.S. graduates to have conducted extensive eldwork in postrevolutionary Cuba, I was eager to break new terrain and put this ethnographic frontier on the map. But invariably, where the position called for a Caribbeanist, I was asked to explain why Cuba should be considered part of the Caribbean, and where it called for a Latin Americanist, the same question popped with reference to Latin America. By the third time this happened, I was no longer taken aback thinking isnt it obvious why, havent you seen a map? By then I realized that the invocation of geographical truths would be of no help, and not just because Cuba is in the geological sense considered part of the North American plateau and not of the Caribbean basin, much less of Central and South America. I realized that the questions posed were about mappings only in so far as these corresponded with political and epistemological agendas. And so in one case, I launched into an exposition on Caribbean plantation economies and post-slave societies in the tradition of Raymond T. Smith, spiced with Benitez Rojos essentialist notion of the repeating island. Yet soon after, I found myself arguing the Latinamericanity of Cuba on the basis of both its Spanish colonial legacy and the symbolic power of the Revolution for the contemporary Latin American imaginary. Other times, in turn, I argued for Cubas inclusion in post-Soviet studies, for its unlocking from a U.S.-Cuban relations paradigm, and for its insertion in neoliberal globalization geographies. My multifarious efforts, however, often fell short. As a huge land mass, an independent country, lacking in indigenous population, and not yet post-socialist, Cuba always seemed peripheral to the concerns of various area and anthropology studies, perhaps because academic arrangements were made in her absence. And so the prevailing
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 10, No.2, pp. 275313. ISSN 1085-7025, online ISSN 1548-7180. 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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ideology of Cuban exceptionalismlinked to Cubas unique and conictive binomial history with the United Statesproved hard to overcome.1 This issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology examines some of this multiple past and present anthropological localizations of Cuba in light of the territorial and representational critiques brought about by post-colonial and post-modern theories. Geographical demarcations continue to be the basis for intellectual projects of comparison and generalization, which at times hinge on land mass boundaries, linguistic regions, intellectual alliances, and geopolitical borders. In anthropological discourse and its academic arrangements, there is still a tendency to sustain mappings derived from the international system in spite of the acknowledgment of transnational and other processes which both subvert and reify existing constructs. Disciplinary stereotypes no doubt colored the requests to make Cuba relevant to area anthropologies marked by distinct topical and theoretical concerns. On the one hand, a territorially-based anthropology posited on the relation between metropolitan scholars and non-Western peoples, however sedentary or migratory, is still dominant, despites critiques of the historical complicity between anthropology and the global designsto use Mignolos (2000) termof the colonialist states. On the other hand, in a meager academic economy, Latin Americanists are not willing to let go of a general focus on peasants and indigenous peoples, while Caribbeanistsdominated by scholars of the British Caribbeanhave only very timidly begun to open their arms to the former Spanish colonies in the region. The link between anthropology and imperialism is by now part of the disciplinary common-knowledge, as is the problematic relation between ethnographers and their native subjects-objects. Yet these reections have only marginally altered research agendas and research methods, instead acknowledged as a necessary consciousness of what ultimately are unsolvable dilemmas. As a glance at the AAA job placement section immediately reveals, the balkanization of knowledge is still commonplace. Even anthropologists of globalization have refused to let go of the local, stressing instead the grounding of both transnational processes and global imaginaries in localized domains of experience that are framed by nations and states. For instance, anthropologists working in the English and French-speaking Caribbean have emphasized the inherently global quality of the region from time immemoriala quality that validates the region as a current analytical unit (Mintz 1996, 1998, Slocum and Thomas 2003, Trouillot 1992). These anthropological reevaluations have occurred in light of the intellectual upheaval caused in the last two decades by post-colonial and feminist critiques, which have critiqued area studies with specic territorial underpinnings, exposing them, along with academic institutions, as complicit in empire building agendas both political and nancial (Dirlik 2004, Shohat 2001, 2002, Ydice 2003). Shohat, for instance, has denounced area studies as moves to gerrymander knowledge into
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J o u r na l o f L at i n A m e r i c a n A n t h ro p o lo g y
categories of imagined spaces corresponding to isolated regions and areas of the globe . . ., eras(ing) the historical and discursive links between regions (2001:1270). Most importantly, these types of spacial reorganization privilege the centrality of the United States the relative periphery of the various regional areas, even if not all area studies production is uncritical (Poblete 2003). Likewise, geo-historical categories such as Latin America and Third World, which imply a binary relation with a centered-West, have been exposed as products of an Occidentalist discourse that obscures hierarchies of knowledge and power, and which is linked to imperial projects and their global designs (Coronil 1996, Mignolo 2000). More to the point, Arif Dirlik (2004) has highlighted the connection between world cartographies and relations of inequality within national societies: between state majorities and what he and others refer to as the colonials within; particularly as imperial projects invariably result in heterogeneous populations at home at the same time that national ideologies continue to sustain the ction of internal homogeneity. From these perspectives, ethnographic representations of locality and community speak to a history of anthropology intertwined with the dynamics of international relations and, more precisely, with the history of Empire (Asad 1973, Said 1978, 1989). Globalization paradigms too initially questioned the validity of bounded regions as analytical units, proclaiming the instrumental decline of geo-political delimitations in the face of incessant and multidirectional and cross-border transits of people, commodities and images. Nevertheless, both deterritorialization and its opposite, hybridization, only became another phase in geographically grounded teleologies. Area studies expanded their reach, for instance, by incorporating to their jurisdiction the study of Diasporas and other transnational cultural processes; by giving way to new sub-areas like Latino studies; and by committing to new political goals, for example, as expressions of multiculturalism and democracy in the United States (Poblete 2003). In addition, particularly in post-socialist contexts, like China, area studies have experienced a culturalist bent in detriment of political and social history, thus privileging narratives that fetishize a global teleology of capitalism and the ideology of possessive individualism (Wang 2002). The same can be observed as a tendency in contemporary scholarship on Cuba. Even though a post-Cold War Cubanology still persists, particularly within economics, political science and international relations, cultural processes begin to be foregrounded by cultural anthropologists, literary and art scholars, and the rising eld of cultural studies. For instance, the reevaluation of Cuban migration beyond the exilenation binary, has resulted in a diasporization of Cuban migration and along with it comes a view of Cubanness as a cultural notion that transcends the island territory (Hernandez-Reguant 2005).2 Specically, the popularization of cartographies charted by relatively new paradigms like the Black Atlantic and post-Soviet studies have afforded the island increased scholarly visibility.
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However, for decades the political enmity between Cuba and the United States guided both international and domestic policy as well as academic research on both sides. As a result of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the ensuing U.S.-imposed embargo against the island, eld research in Cuba became nearly impossible for foreigners. In the United States, Cubanology was modeled after its Soviet counterpart as a kind of social science research geared to regime fall prediction. Within the narrow perspective of U.S.-Cuban relations and a Cold War framework, Cuba was often referred to as isolated, as if the break of relations with the United States would have been followed by the rest of the world or, alternatively, as part of networks determined by U.S. intelligence, such as the Axis of Evil, which linked Cuba to North Korea, Syria, Lybia and Iran.3 Likewise, academic works were colored by both partisan ideologies and exile politics.4 As far as anthropology is concerned, as the opening narrative suggests, Cuba remains peripheral to its geographies and consequently to its theory-building project, standing somewhat liminally at the edges of both Caribbean and Latin American studies.5 In the 1990s, Cubas opening to foreign research led to academic exchanges with the capitalist world and young anthropologists ocked there in search of eldwork opportunities. By and large, their work skirted the Cubanology tradition, and marked a transition that Damian Fernndez (2004) has described as moving from Cubanology to Cuban studies, and which is characterized by the opening of the object of study to a multiplicity of paradigms. Their goal was not so much a political analysis that would help the U.S. Republican and exile agendas but more often the contrary: through the understanding of the complexities surrounding post-socialist trajectories in a multi-polarized world, to bring hope for a peaceful world free of radicalism. Thus, over the years, as an object of intellectual and political discourses, Cuba has been both placed within and obliterated from various geo-historical categories of classication (the Hispanic world, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Black Atlantic, the Socialist bloc, the Axis of Evil, etc.). Placements have been guided at times by particular theoretical projects, epistemological designs, or ideological interests, all of which have often been identied as mutually exclusive, while being invoked at times by different parties with different agendas. In the 1990s, Cubas insertion in transnational academic networks effectively reshaped Cuban studies. But beyond the reshaping of Cuban studiesand as any event of such magnitude, from the Cuban Revolution itself to the end of the Cold Warit also forced a reorganization of the metropolitan cultures of scholarship and their assigned knowledge (Mignolo 2000). This process was further complicated by the contemporary upheavals in the social sciences and the humanities by post-modern philosophy and its deconstructive critique of master narratives and by postcolonial and feminist theory with both their attacks on the knowing subject and their Foucauldian approach to the analysis of power relations and globalization models of circulation
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and exchange. Together, these critiques of territorial cartographies have reected a broader crisis of representation as well as a renovated inquiry on the relation between subject and object. One goal of this volume is to expose the multiple Cubas on which various intellectual projects and political discourses are built in order to clarify the terms of a dialogue within and across the disciplinary and ideological boundaries that fragment Cuban studies. The multiple geohistorical and theoretical paradigms in which Cuba can be placed at once validate Foucaults idea that discursive elements that might seem at odds can coexist within a single strategy of power and vice versa (1990 [1976]). Thus with regards to any given object, there might not be a single dominant discourse, not even two or more in competition but multiple in coexistence. As Foucalt pointed out, and Bourdieu (1993) later demonstrated, discourses are tactical elements which need to be placed within elds of relations and institutional domains; vis--vis both the relations of power that make them possible, and those which they contribute to create. Thus discourses cannot simply be correlated to structural conditions. This is not to deny their historicity, but the challenge recalling Walter Benjamin (2002[1937]), the challenge consists in overcoming their historicism and explore not only the conditions of their genesis, but also their relation to our present condition, particularly as they continue to be relevant to specic intellectual and political agendas. For instance, competing congurations such as Latin America, Ibero-America, Spanish America, the Americas, etc. co-exist and might even be used interchangeably, even as they recall specic and mutually-exclusive political projects. Likewise, the cartographic congurations called upon earlier concern Cubas relative position vis--vis the rest of the world. In addition, as Dirlik (2002) suggests more generally, they also necessarily entail assumptions about the conguration of the Cuban polity which entail relations of hierarchy and difference. For anthropology, a discipline preoccupied with the production of locality and its corresponding cultural dynamics, this multiplicity of mappings poses an explanatory challenge in terms of both agency and authorial legitimacy. It is useful to recall here Fredric Jamesons notion of cognitive mapping and Arjun Appadurais similar denition of locality. Based on Althussers concept of ideology, Jameson (1984) dened a cognitive map as the representation of a subjects imaginary relationship to his real condition of existence within the framework of daily life in a physical space. That is, subjects chart situational diagrams of their relation to a bigger and sometimes unimaginable totality, which might include various levels of scale, from regional to global. These maps are therefore not xed, and require the coordination of existential data (the empirically perceived position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality. They express the individuals perceived relation to the collectivity, and therefore only an awareness of this mediatory cartography and its mystications can lead to liberation.
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As Jamesons (1984) interest is to elucidate the relation between art and politics, discourse and practice, awareness of subjects cognitive maps is a precondition for action. Ultimately, in his project, the goal is the subjects control over their representational world: the development of alternatives through the fragmentation of hegemonic narratives. Similarly, for Appadurai (1996), cartographies express relations between levels of social interaction. Particularly in a globalized world in which actual spacial localization, quotidian interaction and social scale might not coincide, locality becomes a phenomenological quality constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts(Appadurai 1996:178). Clearly, cartographic representations are relational, both a product and productive of social relations. They express as well as mediate a social distance between author-subject and object, and as Fernando Coronil (1984) pointed out, they turn hierarchical relations into geographical fetishes. But how do these representations become recognizable and eventually hegemonic to wider publics? While for Jameson (1984) that is a matter of political activism in Western societyafter all post-modernism has been accused precisely of Occidentalism for Appadurai (1996), inuenced by Indian subaltern historiography, there is an obvious dialectical relation between the (Western or Westernized) intellectual and the (non-Western or also Westernized) subjects. Thus, writing from the relativistic perspective of cultural anthropology, he is aware of the problematic relationship between subject and object, ethnographer and informants. For him, it is the ethnographer, in complicity with subjects, who has constructed the multifarious modes for the production of locality (Appadurai 1996:xx). Thus while Jameson (1984) remains trapped in the Frankfurt School pessimism in the sense that critique is the only possible action, even though it is sooner or later absorbed by and diluted into the system and therefore only a temporary x, Appadurai precludes critique altogether by allying subject and object. This alleged complicity, that is, the closeness between subject and object is at the core of subaltern claims to knowledge, authority and legitimacy, and, inversely, the impossibility of uniting subject and object entails that ultimately the subaltern cannot speak. The former position is however that taken by a great many Latin Americanists: they are the positions of both Walter Mignolo and his proposal for border thinking, and Roberto Fernndez Retamars for thinking history from the other side. 6 In short, the move to close the gap between subject and object by establishing a direct relation between their identity and the subjects legitimacy of representation is utopian at best, unless one takes the reductionist approach that only one can speak for oneself. A generalized claim to the complicit authorship of subject and objectother than in specic individual casesmight obscure the unbalance between the two. In the case discussed by Appadurai, it also silences the ethnographers own agendathat is, his or her adscription to a certain culture of scholarship
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which is both product and productive of specic cognitive maps. Mignolos (2000) recent work on border thinking seeks to take a step further. In his denition, border thinking is an epistemological perspective that brings awareness to the subjects position and explores the disjunctures of global designswhat Anibal Quijano (2000) called the coloniality of powerthat is, the inequalities that emerge as a result of modernity and other grand imperial and corporate designs. But the only fully legitimate border thinker is a very specic one: the Third World intellectual, member of a certain class, and familiar with both Western paradigms and local life. In the Latin American context, Rigoberta Mench and Jos Mara Arguedas, both of indigenous descent, are examples of intellectuals capable of border thinking, while Fernando Ortiz (much to Coronils dismay, one may assume) is not. The problem with this proposal is, again, that only the closing of the distance between subject and object is posited as truly legitimate. The result is that border thinking becomes an elite project because only birth and an acquired structural position in society allow it to happen. An additional problem consists in identifying for what groups, in what situations, and in regards to what issue each individual could legitimately speak for others. Unavoidably, any attempt at public discourse brings to the fore new layers of inclusion and exclusion, while not resolving the issue of legitimacyeven Rigoberta Mench has detractors among the people she might be identied with. Nevertheless, border thinking can operate as an awareness of the distance which leads to Orientalist positions, and therefore to the critique of the complicity between the process of othering and the subalternization of knowledge on the one hand, and imperial politics and corporate agendas, on the other. This is in fact the critical proposal of Fernando Coronil (1996) in Beyond Occidentalism. There, he suggests to go beyond an epistemological critique of Western knowledge, cast in its own termsof the narratives which posit the West at the center-, and also examine the categorical foundations of the political constitution of the West. Hence he calls for analyzing the modes of constructing cultural diversity that mystify the connection between Western and non-Western peoples (1996:73) and the associated processes through which binaries and difference (e.g., Occident versus Orient, Third World versus Developed World) acquire and lose currency. The added difculty is to discern not only the operationality and history of these binaries but the boundaries between their elements, which, as both Mignolo (2000) and Dirlik (2004) have pointed out, are both internal and external. For Mignolo (2000), in the modern world system there are two types of boundaries: boundaries between competing Empires (which he calls internal) and boundaries between cultures as cosmologies (which he calls external). As shown by the Nine Eleven attacks and their aftermath, after a period in which the former seemed to structure the contemporary world, it is the confrontation between cosmologies which has evidenced the alliance between socialism and
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capitalism as products of Western modernity. In addition, this distinction between internal and external can no longer be correlated with territory. Conicts between cosmologies are also internal to empires, despite colonial ideologies of containment. Thus external translates into internal hierarchies, whereby certain subjects are privileged and others are rendered either invisible or inferior vis--vis both the state and each other. At the same time, this internal externality is further legitimized through discourse alongside the consolidation of structures of power and government. Thus the identication of geocartographies of both knowledge and power not only point at the historicity of borders and related global designs (e.g., colonialis, capitalism, etc.), but also correspond to various forms of social inequality (Mignolo 2000). Furthermore, these various forms of inequality cannot be solely attributed to class as a structuring principle. In anthropological terms, this means examining not only the construction of the cartographic object but the assumptions of selfincluding the categorical foundations of the discipline and its theoretical paradigmsupon which such a construction is based. In this case, it means analyzing the relation between representations of Cuba as a unied entity vis--vis the international state system and European modernity, both in its capitalist and socialist expressions, on the one hand, and the assumptions about its politys homogeneity and difference that such representations carry along, on the other. The mapping of Cuba is therefore a mapping of both ethnography and politics. Precisely the goal of this collection is not to present a homogeneous totality, but a fragmentation of local histories such as that of the Abaku and of rural dwellers, and an examination of their links to grand designs both within the projects of the Cuban state and those of a metropolitan anthropology. Thus some of the papers presented here (Routons, Frederiks and Brothertons), follow Chakrabarty (2000) in recognizing that local histories cannot be extricated from global designs. The authors included in this special issue offer critical accounts of the agency of Cuban citizens in the crafting of representations, the asymmetrical relations they posit, and the sites from which they operate. They proceed from the conviction that a novel approach to the politics of geographic fetishism (i.e., the need to move beyond Occidentialism) must rst avoid the moralizing utopian fervor of those theoretical projects which tend to erase difference altogether by collapsing self and other, subject and object. A more viable approach would recognize their dynamic, yet preserving tensions and complex entanglements. It is important to note that some of these questions were anticipated by Cuban revolutionary intellectuals in the 1960s. The relation between Cuba and a world divided along Axis of power and difference was also a philosophical problem for the Cuban revolutionary intellectual elite who wanted to speak for the entire population of both Cuba and the Third World. Their identication with the West and
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modernity (and socialism was viewed as a dialectic of modernity and therefore as an alternative Occident) also served to deny internal difference in the name of national unity. The debates of revolutionary intellectuals concerning colonialism, Marxism, Occidentalism, race, class and nationwhich are worth summarizing here- constitute the shifting geo-cartographies of the Cuban revolution through the second part of the 20th century. In addition, they also informed the fate of anthropological studies in the island during the same period.
I am Cuba7 This is not a Cuban award: This is an award that is given in Cuba by Our America. With these words, the then minister of culture Armando Hart (1977:3) welcomed the members of the jury for the 1977 Casa de las Amricas literary award who came from all over Latin America, as did the contestants.8 The prize was an annual affair since the beginning of the revolutionary period, and had quickly become the continents nest. With these words, however, Hart framed not only the geographic reach of the program, but its political consciousness. As the minister stated, it was an award by and for our Americaa fuzzy concept introduced by Cuban founding father and independence hero Jos Mart to denote the peoples and cultures of the Americas united against North American imperialism. This nationalist concept was meant to be distinguished from what he called European America, which was favored by the colonial elites and which was alien to the victims of colonial oppression, particularly indigenous people. Marts Our America thus was not a strictly geographical notion but a political one, entailing resistance to structural inequalities and imperial policies. In Harts updated version, it included Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as the communities of brothers who live in the belly of the beast, like Chicanos and Puerto Ricans (1977:3).9 For the purposes of the Casa de las Amricas award program, it included authors from Latin America and the Caribbean writing in Spanish, Portuguese and Creole only. On the whole, the idea of Our America entailed a perspective, a position of opposition, and therefore the political necessity of all cartographic representations. The 1959 Revolution in Cuba sought to become the voice and vanguard of an America that was being appropriatedoursby the people in struggle for freedom and independence from the forces of imperialism. As Mignolo (2000) has pointed out, new discursive categories and new mappings are immediate outcomes of revolutionary change. The Cuban revolutionaries were determined to alter the balance of these forces, immediately ending the longstanding United States interference in Cuban affairs, extending the Iron Curtain to the Florida Straits, and inspiring liberation movements around the world. The revolutionary government
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portrayed Cuba not only as a model for the Third World but as identied with it. In Fidel Castros words (quoted by Fernndez Retamar 1971), the history of Cuba was that of Latin America, which in turn is that of Asia, Africa and Oceania; a history of exploitation by European imperialism. But rst things rst. Cubas insertion in new geopolitical cartographiesstemming from confrontation with the United States, the alignment with both the socialist bloc and the Non-Aligned movement, and the support of and solidarity with struggles against colonialism around the worldwas accompanied by philosophical reections on the themes of universalism and internationalism which situated Cuba at the center of the world. Cuban revolutionary intellectuals debated Cubas new geopolitical destiny, just like intellectuals throughout the continent did before and after independence from the metropolis. As Fernndez Retamar (1971) pointed out, at that time, reections on the countries relation to the world concerned mostly relations with both the metropolis and the new imperial power of the North, and hence with the Occident. This time, however, the debate included new terms, as the question of Latin Americas belonging to the Western world was asserted but only in a way that allowed for its abandonment; that is, only in so far as it became a new point of departure toward a new postOccidentalist moment. At the same time, the identication of the Occident with capitalism was no longer taken as the only historical alternative. The 20th century spread of socialism evidenced that history was indeed dialectic, and that capitalist modernity generated its own critical alternative in the form of socialism. These geo-cartographic reections required a certain view of the national polity. That is to say, Cubas new position as both a champion of the Third World and a socialist ally demanded a representation of a homogeneous Cuban nation. Specically, the adoption of Marxism as a guiding doctrine meant the sole attribution of social hierarchy to class inequality, which in turn meant that social restructuring, geared toward the vision of a classless society, would eventually produce a harmonious social body in which categories of difference would be neutralized. Indeed, new international alliances were accompanied by massive social reforms along with a nationalist discourse based on political community and cultural synthesis. Cultural community and social polity were merged into a national we, eventually agglutinated into an Ias in I am Cuba, the 1964 Russian-Cuban lm in which Cuba supposedly speaks, precisely, against colonialism. The character of political community was clear: it entailed support for the revolutionary government; but that of national culture required denition. For both the government and revolutionary intellectuals,culture was taken primarily as high cultural production; the afrmative European culture to which Cuba and the Third World rightfully laid claim with the argument that it was built on their sweat and tears, and which should be made available to all citizens.10 But at the same time, they recognized that there was another kind of culture, a less cultured culture that resided within the working masses, and
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which deserved protection so long as it did not contradict revolutionary morality. This type of popular culture consisted of the traditional cultural manifestations of the people, rural and urban, and it was understood in ethnic terms. Considered as folklore, these popular manifestations would be enriching of the nationthe classless nationas a whole, and therefore needed to be properly researched and studied by educated scholars, namely folklorists, musicologists and ethnologists. This was the culture that was constitutive of the mestizo nation that the Revolution claimed in order to further legitimize its standing vis--vis a (still) racialized Third World.
Cuba and the Occident Cubas geopolitical realignment in the 1960s occurred at the time of decolonization of much of Africa. The anti-colonial struggle effectively remapped the world and altered the balance of power, and the Cuban Revolution sought to inscribe itself in a tradition different from that of capitalist Europe. Colonial intellectuals engaging with the emerging Negritude movement were aware of the shortcomings of Marxist theory to account for the centrality of the anti-colonial struggleas opposed to class strugglein historical change in the mid-20th century. Csaire (2000 [1955]), in particular, stressed the need to account for a type of domination that was built on racist tenets and the thingicationof the native-workers. Furthermore, this critique coincided with Fanons recognition that domination involves two parties, however unequally, which cannot be seen independently: the history of the West could not be conceived without that of the colonies, for they were mutually constitutive. In Cuba, the relation between anti-colonial thought and Marxism became central to revolutionary intellectuals. While the debate on racism was quickly settled in favor of class, as explained below, the relation of Cuba to the world, colonialist and colonized, became fused with ideologies of nationalism and collective destiny. The old philosophical debate on Latin Americas relation to the Occident picked up new steam, but this time in dialogue both with anti-colonial positions as articulated primarily from the Caribbean and with Marxism.11 That is, Cubas problematic relation to the Occident was resolved dialectically. The Occident should not simply be equated with capitalism, but with its negation: socialism. The opposition was to the Occident as it had been known until then, but an alternative was in the works, creating world-wide networks that transcended the North-South division; the one between developing and underdeveloping nations. As further discussed in the next section, Cubas new and complex relation to the world was now inexorably linked to a reevaluation of social relations in terms of class. The journal of Casa de las Americas became the site for these debates throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, seeking to position the Cuban Revolution at the intersection
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of both the newly independent Third World and international socialism, and therefore at the intersection of an embryonic subaltern thinking and Marxism. The journal was rst to translate Csaire, whose 1955 Discourse on Colonialismpublished in Casa in 1966advanced the idea that colonial relations were as essential to the development of capitalism as they were intrinsic to Western culture and modernity; they were as much about economic prot as about cultural inevitability. Csaire stressed culture and ideology as determinant of the character of colonial relations and saw racist violence as fundamental to Western culture. For him, coloniality was a way of thinking intrinsic to European modernityfor example, for Csaire, the image of the barbaric negro was a European invention, a device to dehumanize the oppressedand which guided domination not only in the colonies but also within European soil, as the Holocaust had shown. Fernndez Retamar, director of the Casa de las Amricas journal, engaged with these anti-colonial views without abandoning a Marxist standpoint. For him, it was not so much Europe who invented its others as Csaire statedbut the capitalist system, in which both Europe and Latin America were integrated. That is, Retamar adhered to historical materialism and placed the material relations at the base and culture and ideology at the derived superstructure. In his essays Caliban (1971) and Our America and the Occident (1976),which are in dialogue with both Csaire and earlier Latin Americanist thought, from Sarmiento to Mart and to RodFernndez Retamar stressed three related points, which were at the core of revolutionary thought: (1) Latin America was inextricably linked to the development of capitalism and was therefore part of the Occident.12 From this it followed that Western culture is not only a European property: it should be claimed by all those on whose shoulders it was produced. To this effect, Retamar (1968) called the developed countries underdeveloping (subdesarrollantes), denouncing their own development as the product of their active role in keeping others underdeveloped. Western culture is, therefore, universal and accessible to all. (Retamar was referring here to high culture, for mass culture was viewed in the Frankfurt School line, as ideologically perverse for its ability to convincingly spread the values of post-industrial capitalism). (2) The obvious association of the Occident with capitalism was incomplete. Modernity gave rise to its own critique, and that was socialism. There is a noncapitalist West to be claimed; an alternative to capitalist modernity. Marxism constitutes a critique from within, and provides the tools to understand and overcome structural oppression: it is both an epistemology and a political practice (Congreso Cultural de la Habana 1968). For those reasons, Marxism is not alien to Latin Americaor no more alien than capitalism. Socialisms past Fernndez Retamar states in Caliban (1971), is also Cubas past. Cuban cultural production should figure at the intersection of Latin America and the socialist world, fostering a subaltern solidarity between former colonies and victimized nation-states, rather than
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vertical relations with former metropolis, while claiming an international socialist alliance as a vehicle for such solidarity. This is a step toward a new moment, which Fernndez Retamar associated with both Marxism and anti-colonialism, and which he termed post-occidental. This moment would ag the end of the hegemony of capitalism and of its naturalization of imperial cartographies. (3) Revolutionary Cuba constitutes a post-Occidentalist alternative, and opens the vision of a utopian moment when categories such as the Occident and the Orient will lose their implicit and symbolic meanings and become mere cartographic names void of meaning in terms of power relations: cardinal points in mans planetary adventures (Fernndez Retamar 1971). This post-Occidentalist moment still encompasses the West and its categorical foundationsit is not beyond Occidentalism by Coronils (1996) standards, but to an Occidentalism identied with capitalism. To that effect, and building on Jos Marts maxim Fatherland is Mankind,the Cuban Revolution is disengaging the country from the capitalist Occident of which it has been a part, and situating it at the planetary vanguard of the world, along with the other socialist countries. Thanks to the Cuban Revolution, and particularly at a time in which the [capitalist] West has relapsed into barbarismhe concludedOur America thinks of itself and the world from a universal perspective (Fernndez Retamar 1976:57) The theme of Cubas universalism was never abandoned: it was embodied in the politics of internationalism, and, in the 1990s, refashioned by Fidel Castro as a globalization of solidarity to counteract the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. But his universalism required a unied Cuban nation in both political and cultural terms, a discourse which did not recognize internal differences and where dissent led to expulsion from the polity. It did not recognize binaries other than those derived from borders between empiresMignolos internal borders. Paradoxically, the denunciation of borders between empires at the same time silenced those Mignolo (2000) referred to as external, that is, differences between cosmologies as well as those expressed through race and sexuality, to name a few. The adoption of a Marxist perspective both in theory and practice created a blind spot to difference other than class. If in Occidentalist discourse as dened by Coronil (1996), difference would continue to be constructed as otherness, in the revolutionary type of post it was constructed in terms of nothingness. Difference made no difference. For Cubas revolutionary elite, overwhelmingly white, middle class, urban and male, the imperative of a single national we led to reclaiming the ideology of mestizaje. Thus mestizaje continued to be, during the revolutionary period, the foundational myth of the nation. And, instead of subjecting the notion to critical scrutiny, it was embraced as a positive and profound ongoing process. As Roger Bastide (1969:16) put it, Cuban mestizaje was no mere sexual intercourse, but a
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marriage of both esh and culture. Unlike Vasconcelos notion of a cosmic race, the ideology of mestizaje did not obscure class conict (Fernndez Retamar 1971). On the contrary, it moved violence to the class arena, eliminating the need to address racial inequality independently from class.
One Nation, One Culture The victorious government situated itself in a historical genealogy that went back to the wars of independence: the Revolution was the culmination of the anti-colonial project, this time freeing the country from the neocolonial intervention of the United States, and serving as an example for the entire Third World. This discourse required that the polity be represented as united behind the new government, since its legitimacy in speaking for the Third World rested in its legitimacy in speaking for the previously oppressed nation. Hence, revolutionary discourse forged an absolute identication between nation and revolution, positing political community as the locus of national allegiance and rejecting parallel loyalties and identities. Potential signiers of difference like race, gender, sexuality and generation which could weaken national unity would be neutralized through ideological education. To that effect, the Revolution requested the cooperation of artists and intellectuals, purporting to permit a loyal critique but equating dissidence with treason (Castro 1961, Guevara 1965). The monolithic ideological unity of the people was a pressing goal, along with the construction of a society void of class contradictions (Congreso 1971:10). 13 It was the source of legitimacy for a government which sought to speak not only for its people, but for the entire colonial and post-colonial world. The implicit link between Cubas position in the world and its national character was the subject of Fernndez Retamars most popular essay, Caliban, published in the aftermath of the 1971 Congress of Culture and Education, where the revolutionary leadership closed ranks vis--vis ideological deviationism.14 In the essay, Fernndez Retamar (1971) identies revolution with both national destiny and international struggle. In dialogue with both the Uruguayan Jos Enrique Rod (1988 [1900]) and the Martinican Aim Csaire (1969), he also refers to the characters of Shakespeares The Tempest as an allegory for colonial relations. Following Csaire, Retamar claims the vindictive and violent servant Calibn as a model of subaltern resistance and strugglethus diverging from Rod, whose kind and reconciliatory Ariel stood, for over half a century, as the symbol of Latin Americas insertion in the Occident. If Ariel represented the creole and bourgeois Latin American elites of the turn of the century, Caliban represented the angry and dispossessed masses ready to confront, rather than accommodate, the imperialist masters. But most importantly, Caliban is Cubarevolutionary Cuba, which is the
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only one possibleand that has implications: to assume our condition of Caliban means to rethink our history from the other side (Fernndez Retamar 1971: 242). But who is the other side? And can the other side include us? Following Jos Mart (1979 [1891]) in Our America, the other side is that of the indigenous and mestizo people whose past has been forgotten. It is also that of those forgotten even by Mart, and to whom Alejandro Lipschutz (quoted by Fernndez Retamar1976:40) refers as indigenous importedthe Africans brought to America in chains. That side of theirs needs to become ours and be claimed by todays Latin Americans united against imperialism and capitalism, as Jos Mart put it, their history needs to become our Greece, for the past is chosen from and for the present and not on the basis of geneticsas Fernndez Retamar will retort, neither the Gales were in that respect the antecessors of the French but yet proudly considered as such. Mart, a Spanish-American intellectual, like the Cuban revolutionaries in the next century, claimed an America that was not to be European but the product of a cultural mestizaje. But what for Mart was a matter of solidarity with the disenfranchised and a political basis for the new nations, for Fernndez Retamar it is a matter of identity. Marts proposal to form common cause with the oppressed, his suffering with them to the point that he proclaims to feel their blood in his veins, is taken by Fernndez Retamar as providing legitimacy to speak in their name. In Caliban, Marts solidarity and emotional identication becomes cultural synthesis: our culture is that of the mestizo people and the oppressed classes (Fernndez Retamar 1971:260). In Fernndez Retamar, as in Cuban ofcial discourse, the construction of the polity results in a homogeneous identity, in the cultural sense, for all Cubans. For instance, at the end of Caliban, Fernndez Retamar urges intellectuals to follow Ernesto Ch Guevaras request to paint themselves as black, as worker and as peasant, and go down with the peoplea request which assumes a distance between intellectuals and blacks, workers and peasants, which needs to be consciously bridged. However, for Fernndez Retamar, this bridging will lead to a homogeneous national we. No matter that the clothes do not make the priest, as the proverb goes. But while Mart was careful to support the association of the working class, the elite and the indigenous people in the political project of the nation-state without essentializing this unity, in Fernndez Retamar, as will be further the case in ofcial cultural discourse in the 1990s, differences have disappeared into a single national character. Thus in painting himself or herself black and peasant, the intellectual acquires the ability to describe and dene the national we, and therefore be able to think history from the other side. However, Cuban revolutionary intellectuals were far from acknowledging the persistence of racism in their midst, let alone paint themselves black. Following governmental directions, race was conated rst and foremost with classracial domination was considered a mystication of class oppression- and secondly with culture. 15
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A 1966 issue of the Casa de las Americas journal entirely devoted to Africa in Americathe rst of its kindwas a case in point. The volume included pieces from both Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire, which sustained the class thesis of racial discrimination (see Fanon 1966, Csaire 1966).16 In Csaires 1950 manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, translated here into Spanish, Csaire linked the barbaric relations of domination taking place in colonial settings to class relations within the metropolis, and concluded that the liberation of the working class would also end racial oppression.17 He saw racism as a Western modern phenomenon related to capitalist expansion, and believed that revolution would bring about a new society based on fraternal harmony between men. By the time this text was published in Cuba, Csaire had renounced this idea to emphasize racism as a unique phenomenon of Western modernity (Depestre 2000 [1967]). Nevertheless, at the time it served well the revolutionary position that social redistribution alone would take care of racial inequality and no further measures were needed. Then, once class contradictions were leveled, cultural elements would only enrich the ongoing national synthesis. Thus in the same volume, pieces by Cuban intellectuals Fernando Ortiz, Lain Entralgo and Nicols Guilln downplayed racial inequalities and praised mestizaje as a process of both natural miscegenation (improvised and precipitated love) and cultural synthesis which resulted in a mulatto nation void of racism (Guilln 1966, Entralgo 1966:78). For instance, Ortizs (1966) article Afrocuban Cooking, on the Afro-Cuban contribution to the Cuban kitchen, provided a detailed enumeration of the foodstuffs brought by Africans to Cuba. As he put it, the contribution of the Negroes to the Cuban nation is not so much in the ethnic composition [meaning phenotype] but in the personality, costumes, music, chants and dances, religious beliefs, and also, the food (Ortiz 1966: 63). In short, this particular article by Fernando Ortiznot so a lot of his other work on Afro-Cuban religion and folkloresuggested that the components to the cultural mestizaje were not necessarily obvious as they had successfully blended in, but that they were present in the humblest acts of the everyday, and identiable through painstaking research. Overall, the double strategy of presenting race as both class and culture allowed to downplay racial conict and violence as related to class and occurring, if at all, during the colonial past. This view of race as class was further developed by revolutionary historiography in the 1970s and early 1980s, and presented in a number of popular lmslike Gutirrez Aleas The Last Supper (2003[1976])which revisited the slave past in terms of class relations and implied a parallel between slave resistance and the revolutionary struggle.18 At the same time, a view of Cuban culture as the product of racial violence, as introduced by black intellectual Walterio Carbonell (1961), was adamantly rejected (Hagedorn 2001). For decades, public acknowledgement of racial hierarchy was generally avoided, and at best deected as cultural misunderstanding.19 In a classless society, cultural differences were blamed
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on the pre-revolutionary past and were to be reduced to anecdotal idiosyncrasies which, if coherent with socialist ethics, could be viewed as positive and enriching elements of the nation as a whole. Ortizs theory of transculturation as the foundational process for Cuban national culture became common knowledge as explained in his 1940 article The Human Factors of Cubanness and, more briey on the second chapter of his Counterpoint (1995 [1940]). There, he also introduced his metaphor of Cuban identity as an ajiaco (a stew). For him, the Cuban nation was akin to a dynamic and ongoing process of transculturation in which multiple ingredients contributed to create a constantly-developing novel avor (Ortiz 1973 [1940]).20 But as J. M. Portuondo (1977) noted, even though this notion was useful to understand cultural change, it lacked materialist and historical specication as well as class analysis. To that effect, the work of Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1969), The Americas and Civilization, was often cited as providing a specic model (Fernndez Retamar 1976, Portuondo 1977). Ribeiro traced four strata of population in the Americas according to their respective relation to the Occident: the testimonial, made out of the indigenous peoples with which Europeans clashed in their initial expansion; the new, including the Creole populations who later became the agents of European expansion in the colonies; the transplanted (immigrants from overseas who arrived after independence in search of economic opportunity); and the emergent (which did not apply to Latin America, but to the tribal societies of Africa coming to terms with their new national condition). This framework was compatible with both Marxist historical materialism then in vogue and with the emerging anti-colonial thinking, and it provided a specic historical narrative in which to superimpose the idea of transculturation (which Ribeiro termed cultural transguration).21 This model allowed for reconciling both class and culture as constitutive of race, and therefore as its eventual neutralizers. The peculiarity of the Ortizs ajiaco model, more so than a mosaic-type of metaphor which might result in the adoption of a politics of multiculturalism, is that it attributes cultural elements not to specic populations, but ultimately to the entire Cuban nation. This move, akin to Fernndez Retamar 1971 s as explained earlier, from solidarity to identity, from political alliance to cultural identication, culminated in the 1990s generalized preoccupation with cultural identity on the part of the revolutionary intelligentsia. In the meantime, both constructsinequality as class, difference as culture- coexisted as historically complementary in the creation of a national we and to the exclusion of alternative voices and identitiesof external borders withinwithin the revolutionary polity. If the ajiaco was everyones culture, Caliban stood for the whole of the Cuban population, now revolutionarythe nation agglutinated in one: one ideology, one class, one culture. But what kind of culture? Fernndez Retamar (1967:15) cautioned against discarding
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bourgeois culture in favor of a retreat to quaint and deplorable folkloric expressions. Following Mart, who wrote that in order to have a Hispanic-American culture you need to have a Hispanic America, Fernndez Retamar nailed down the revolutionary project concerning the construction of a common identity based not only on the political project but on a common culture. For him, Cuban national culture was an offspring of the Revolution, of our centuries-old rejection of all sorts of colonialism (Fernndez Retamar 1971:277). Thus the revolutionary take-over preceded the development of a truly representative national culture which would incorporate all matter of cultural expressions, whether bourgeois or proletarian, as long as they were in line with its principles (Castro 1961, Guevara 1965). In this view, therefore, national culture was a work in progress, and neither the class division between bourgeois and proletarian, nor the racial baggage in the differentiation between high culture and folklore were never bridged. In regards to bourgeois culture, there were many reasons to endorse it. According to Fernndez Retamar (1968:123). Western bourgeois culture is universal, for the science and art of the exploiting countries also belong to the exploited countries on whose shoulders they have been built. Revolutionary intellectuals, it followed, had the duty to appropriate the conceptual apparatus of the metropolis in order to generate new visions. In fact, there was no other way, because as Calibn evidenced, subaltern groups must use the language given to them by their oppressors, but they will do so in order to break their chains and ght that oppression (Fernndez Retamar 1971, Mart (1979 [1891]). Culture was not just a legitimate aspiration of the spirit, but an indispensable weapon in the struggle (Congreso 1968). Furthermore, not all bourgeois culture was negative. Occidental culture was inherently dialectic and, as mentioned earlier, it periodically gave birth to its own critique, as had been the case with avant-garde art in early 20th century Europe. In consequence, artistic experimentation would be encouraged as long as it furthered the critique of capitalism and not that of socialism. The best of the West should be accessible to all. To that effect, a network of art and music schools, galleries and performance spaces promoted high art to the exclusion of popular forms, while the professionalization of the arts ensured that only those with the proper training performed in the proper spaces (Hernandez-Reguant 2004). Culture, in the sense of cultural production, was geared to the formation of the new man in the new society (Partido Comunista de Cuba 1975:5). The production of culture of universal artistic value became, as in the former socialist bloc, a matter of national pride and a measure of revolutionary legitimacy both domestically and abroad. Revolutionary culture, it followed, should express a national tradition while aspiring to a universalist quality. In practical terms, cultural policy sustained the separation between high European culture (alta cultura) and popular culture (understood as traditional).22 Commercial (mass-) culture was rejected altogether as serving the capitalist class.
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Folklore, as the authentic manifestations of the masses, could be more revolutionary than the so-called intellectual art, for two reasons: it had historically resisted foreign penetration, and it allowed for the participation of the population instead of condemning it to passive spectatorship (Martnez Fur 1997 [1973], du Maulin 1961). Indeed, folklore was the expression of the workers, of blacks and peasants who, in their illiteracy, passed on their socioeconomic and historical experiences through oral tradition, popular knowledge, music and dance, among other ways. However, as with bourgeois art, questions arose as to what elements deserved support and which ones conicted with the construction of the new socialist man.23 Good folklore, consistent with socialist ethics, was to be encouraged, while bad folklore (e.g., superstition) would be eliminated. Folklore too was, in the words of a reputable folklorist, a powerful weapon of liberation: it should not be marginalized as something quaint. Furthermore, as serious art forms like opera and ballet, which used to be the privilege of the oppressor class and a tool of conservative ideology but had now become the pride of the Revolution, so folklore could become universal (Martnez Fur 1997[1973]). However, there was a catch. Whereas high culture needed proper educational training, so that artists and intellectuals could build upon it and then mediate it for the enjoyment of the masses, folklore needed the stamp of authenticity through investigation and research, so that it could be preserved in pure form and hence enjoyed by urban educated audiences too removed from its milieu. This enjoyment, however, was different from the aesthetic pleasure reserved for art, although it also assumed a distance and required a certain training and acquired taste. It also became an afrmation of national identity, since the expression and knowledge of folkloric traditions, particularly Afro-Cuban, was integral to the idea of cultural mestizaje. In addition, it was in tradition where the historical essence of Cuban culture resided and, as marker of singularity vis--vis other American republics, it required a selection process which would eliminate spontaneous expressions deemed disruptive, like cock ghts or certain religious ceremonies (see Frederik, and see Routon, this issue). In addition, folklore became increasingly identied with lo negro, even though to a small extent it also concerned rural traditions of Spanish inspiration. But it was its almost exclusive dedication to Afro-Cuban folklore, following the tradition of Fernando Ortiz, which made the guardianship of folklorists a national imperative.24 Thus while high art needed the endorsement of the criticsin turn authorized by the revolutionary cultural apparatusso folklore needed a stamp of approval, and this approval did not hinge in more or less subjective appreciations of artistic value. The evaluation of folklores authenticity and revolutionary relevance was a scientic task, and it fell on the growing body of folklorists and musicologists, who, as traditional anthropologists elsewhere, became the guardians of the nations purity.
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Ethnography, not Anthropology Fernando Ortizs body of work aside, socio-cultural anthropology has had until recently little hold in Cuba. Its visibility in, and contributions to, the making of a revolutionary society have been marginal at best; rejected and vilied at worst. In the 1960s, the revolutionary regimes distrust of the social sciences was not unusual. In Latin American leftist circles they were often seen as complicit with the metropolitan imperialist and neocolonialist projects. The marginalization of sociology in the Cuban academe, with the exception of its application to government-sponsored survey and opinion research,25 eliminated any opportunities for the growth of a socio-cultural anthropology in the Durkhemian tradition.26 The notorious scandal surrounding Oscar Lewis research in 1969 and 1970 is one example of the bad press that the discipline had in revolutionary circles, even though Fidel Castro himself having read The Children of Snchezwas at one point inclined to allow it, and even requested that Lewis train a group of Cuban students in anthropological methods (Lewis 1977).27 Lewis wanted to study the impact of the Revolution on the culture of poverty, comparatively on the everyday life of both urban and rural dwellers. However, the extensive involvement of Lewis team for over a year in marginal Havana neighborhoods, entailing participant observation and oral histories, led to less than attering portrayals of daily life under the new regime, and ultimately to the conclusion that the culture of poverty was not easily eradicated. However, the study was never nished, as the team was abruptly summoned to leave the country in mid-1970, at a time in which the distrust of foreign intellectuals peaked.28 Lewis was later critiqued from the pages of the Casa de las Americas journal for his complicity with the U.S. establishment and its imperialist goals, for his culture of poverty transferred responsibility for the misery of those at the lowest social stratum to themselves, therefore exculpating the magnates of such responsibility (Grigulevich 1976: 60). According to the writer, anthropologists were zealous agents of imperialism, willing to obtain information at any cost, even by using hidden microphones and infrared cameras, and by submitting their interviewees to hypnosis and drugs. He advised that developing countries do not trust them. (An idea already introduced in the same journal ten years earlier by Csaire).29 The author of the article, Dr. Joseph Grigulevich presumably knew. Not only was he an ethnographic researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences and vice-president of the Soviet-Cuban Friendship Society, but, signicantly, also a former Soviet spy in Latin America and Europe, known for his participation in assassination attempts against both Trostky and Tito on behalf of Stalin (Andrew and Mitrokhin 1999). In his very comprehensive piece, he provided an overview of the complicity of Western anthropology with both European colonialism and United States imperialism, echoing critical works being published in the United States at the time. He denounced
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anthropology for its inability to understand revolutionary change in the Third World, and anthropologists for belonging to the dominant classes and therefore being blind to class conict. Anthropology, he stated, is the hobby of the wealthy, and anthropologies are dilettantes who reject a primitive life for themselves while romanticizing that of others, and who justify injustice in other societies in the name of cultural relativism. Anthropology results in the perpetuation of the status quo: at best, it achieves nothing of signicance to the plight of oppressed peoples. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a neutral social science, and not even an activist anthropology could overcome its structural handicap, for: there is a symbiosis between scientic knowledge and the dominion of the West over the rest. To this infamous history and agenda of Western social anthropology as a classist science, Grigulevich contrasted Soviet ethnography and more generally an anthropology done from Third World and anticolonial positions for the benet of Mankinds peace and welfare. Further elaboration on Soviet ethnography was provided by another piece, also published in the Casa de las Americas journal and authored by Yulian Vladimorovich Bromlei (1978), then director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Bromlei, a reputable Armenian scholar known for his prolic work on ethnicity, proposed ethnography in lieu of social anthropology as the study of culture as constitutive of ethnicity. Because in a post-class world cultural difference does not lead to hierarchy but rather to the enrichment of the community, the object of an ethnographic science under socialism is not the processes of social inequality but rather the cultural traits that make up the different ethnic groups which integrate the political community. Hence while socio-cultural anthropology originally studied non-Western peoples in prior phases of development, the Soviet ethnographic school treats human communities as equals, without placing them in a developmental scale, and valorizes their cultural contribution to the whole. In addition, in a classless society, ethnic specicity is perfectly compatible with the socialist lifestyle, as its expression is reduced to the sphere of traditional culture in both its materials and spiritual dimensions. Thus ethnography concerns itself with the study of the various components of the ethnos through the lens of their function (Bromlei 1978:16). That is to say, ethnography studies the function of various cultural components in the ethnic group. To that effect, it closely collaborates with kin disciplines such as archeology, history and folklore. This was indeed the direction that Cuban anthropology took during the revolutionary period, culminating in the 1990s, when some of the works on Afro-Cuban religion and traditions by Fernando Ortiz and others like Rmulo Lachataer were republished and popularized among younger generations of scholars. Throughout the period, the rescue and study of Afro-Cuban traditional culture t perfectly with the Soviet ethnographic tradition, and was supported though under funded.
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Remarkably, both Cuban and Soviet scholars shared a preference for the terms ethnographyto signify not a method but a science: the study of ethnicity and cultureand ethnology over anthropology, which was mostly left for its physical branch.30 Thus the Cuban Academy of Sciences, modeled after its Soviet counterpart, included during the 1960s both a division of ethnology and folklore and a department of anthropologythe later devoted to physical anthropology and archaeology (Alvarez Sandoval and Alvarez Hernndez, n.d.). These convergences between the Cuban and the Soviet traditions, however, were not coincidental, but stemmed from a shared genealogy. Cubas own history of anthropology developed after that of Spain, whose 19th and early 20th century anthropological societies, which included the Cuban, were very much inuenced by the German volk tradition, and therefore entangled in the making of a modern ethnic nationalism.31 Indeed, Spanish nationalism, and its regional counterparts like the Basque, similarly to the German and also the Russian, was based on the notion of the volkthe people in an ethnic sense. That is, the people signied a national community sharing heredity, and consequently, culture. On the basis of a type of social Darwinism, its purest elements were to be searched in rural peoples, those close to the land and unspoiled by urbanization and industrial societywith which nevertheless they stood in dialectical relationship. In the Germanic world and much of Europe, ethnology grew out of this search for the essence of the ethnic nation as unique and different from all others. In the newly independent nations of Latin America, many of them sharing one ofcial language (Spanish) while containing multiracial populations, this type of ethnic nationalism did not seem feasible. Still, intellectuals, mostly of European descent, turned to the rural and disenfranchised masses (whether indigenous, African, or mestizo) in search of distinct cultural traits which, once cleansed and anesthetized, could be incorporated into a differential nationalism.32 However, doing that while sustaining the much-accepted myth of mestizaje or racial mix as distinct of Spanish colonialism required two additional argumentative moves. First, it required the location of the purest and most traditional cultural elements in the pastor if in the present, in line with the aforementioned social Darwinism, they would be considered exceptional cultural survivals requiring extensive research. And second: it demanded theorizing the mix and transformation of these elements into something new and, in their synthesis, constitutive of the national (see Frederik, this issue). That was precisely Fernando Ortizs project, particularly from the mid-1930s onwardsa project which, unlike his political and social commentaries, found enthusiastic recognition in the early years of the Revolution. Despite his advanced age and failing health, Ortiz guided and inspired a new generation of folklorists to carry on his lifelong scientic enterprise.33 Fernndez Retamar (1967) considered him Cubas foremost intellectual gure, and Juan Marinello (1969) gave him the
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appellative of Cubas Third Discovererafter Colombus and Humboldt, both of whom discovered the islands natural elements- presumably for discovering the cultural components of the Cuban nation.34 His 1940 Cuban Counterpoint was reprinted, but, aside from the one chapter where he introduced the notion of transculturation, it was his works on the African elements of Cuban popular culture which obtained further circulation and acclaim. Ortizs query, and that of his disciples, was to elucidate the character and evolution of the various ingredients of the ajiaco-in-progress, always from a scientic viewpoint (Guilln 1969:6) particularly those least-known of African extraction, also differentiating the contributions of the different African ethnic groups to both Afro-Cuban manifestations and Cuban national culture. Ortizs research on Afro-Cuban folklore, music and religion was considered by Marxist scholars as a model of scientic rationality which paved the way for Marxism (Portuondo 1969). In these works, Ortiz typically presented ethnographic and material description as if in translation for a lay audiencepresumably a non Afro-Cuban audience unfamiliar with the topic who would need the exotic rituals and related objects to be made intelligible. The goal was not to highlight the inequities surrounding their incorporation and position within national culture but their cultural and artistic values as elements in the transculturative process (Bronfman 2004, Rodriguez-Mangual 2004). But, as Rodriguez-Mangual 2004 has shown, Ortizs efforts seemed to defeat the purpose, for his descriptions pointed more to a mosaic than to an ajiaco. His notion of cultural synthesis, theorized in his 1940 works, appeared more like a wishful thinking than as a fait accompli. Nevertheless, Ortizs views on the origin and evolution of the nation served the new governments public relations, particularly as it reached out to the African American and pan-African movements with a rhetoric of subalternity which included race, while eluding concrete policies to address racial inequality at home. Confronted with increasing opposition from the white middle class with any type of afrmative action policies, the governments approach to race relations shifted to the more palatable cultural arena. Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, isolated from their conditions of possibility, became projects in historical recovery and ethnographic preservationtreasures to be rescued from the people. In Nicols Guillns words (1969:5), thanks to Ortiz they were now objects of knowledge and research. Both Fernando Ortizs legacy and the Soviet tradition of ethnology joined and folklore studies and ethnographynot anthropologywere the disciplines in charge, calling for a non-Eurocentric approach to the study of popular culture (Martnez Fur 1973). Journals like the Actas de Folklore and Etnologia y Folkore were devoted during the 1960s to disseminating research on mostly Afro-Cuban cultural expressions.35 Likewise, new cultural institutions such as the National Institute of Ethnology and Folklore and the National Folkloric Ensemble sought to recuperate and perform
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Afro-Cuban music and dance under the watchful eye of Ortizs folklorist and musicologist disciples, even though the daily operations of these institutions preserved a hierarchy of class and color that contradicted their very mission (Hagedorn 2001).36 The notion of transculturation gained popularity in literary and artistic circles as discussed in the previous section. The success of testimonio literature in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, owed its genesis precisely to the merging of historical ethnography and ction. Miguel Barnet, disciple of Ortizs, made it his life project to uncover the different cultural layers of the Cuban nation though a biographical exploration of ideal types. Based on his early research for the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, when he conducted oral histories with a former slave, he published Biography of a Runaway (2005 [1966]).37 The text, considered today a cross between chronicle and ction, pioneered the testimonio genre in Latin America, and eventually became inuential in cultural anthropologyrecall I, Rigoberta Mench (Mench and Burgos-Debray 1984). But like Burgostranscription and later works of this kind, the truth claims of Barnets Biography have stirred heated controversy on the question of authorship and legitimacy (Childs 2004). In the books original afterword, published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, Barnet proclaims to give a voice to the ex-slave Esteban Montejo, and views the slave experience of resistance and survival as akin to the revolutionary struggle for national liberation.38 Following from this, Barnet credits the Revolution with legitimacy to speak on behalf of those previously silenced. Barnet locates himself within a revolutionary polity in which the question of representational authority is invalid because in a true democracy subjects may alternatively speak and listen. As described earlier, revolutionary intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s tended to identify themselves with subaltern populations both within and without the national polity, taking the categories of center and periphery as absolutes rather than as relative perspectives. By the same token, the distance between subject and object, when involving them as the subject. Yet, post colonial theorists in 1990s Europe and North America, while sharing many premises with their Cuban predecessorslike, in many cases, the absoluticization of centers and peripheriesextended their distrust t grand political project and economic designs not only to processes associated with capitalism, but also to socialism. Over the next two decades, ethnographic-type research dwindled as the government was faced with more pressing tasks as the institutionalization of the new state and the Communist Party, the rm alignment with the Soviet bloc, and the need for ideological unity. During the 1970s, the Academy of Sciences, which included the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, listed no active projects in ethnography and related disciplines, and only in the mid-1980s the Cuban Ethnographic Atlas was initiated fullling a call by Fernando Ortiz and the Soviet method. Also in the 1980s, research lines prioritized projects related to the construction of socialism,
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communist personality,high cultural forms of leisure, and consumption patterns. Only toward the end of the decade, coinciding with the Cuban version of perestroika, there were calls for social research to address social problems (e.g., youth) and therefore contribute to the improvement of social policy. At the same time, there were plans to initiate ethnographic studies of material and spiritual culture in rural areas (Alvarez and Alvarez, n.d.). This timid opening also facilitated ethnographic research by foreign folklorists and anthropologists, like Helen Safa (this issue).39 But it was not until the 1990s, that the resurgence of cultural nationalism, along with the inux of foreign anthropologists as visiting scholars in Cuban academic institutions, led to the rehabilitation of the discipline of anthropology. Since then, Cuban anthropologyand the anthropology of Cuba, for that matter has come to be largely identied with one name: Fernando Ortiz.
Now That The Maps Are Changing Colors40 In the early 1990s, singer and composer Carlos Varela emerged as the spokesperson for the children of the Revolution, the generation born after 1959. In his song Now that the maps are changing colors (1992), he reected on the changing cartographies following the demise of the Soviet bloc, proposing a turn inward: now that the colors of the maps are changing, embrace your faith. Not quite so literally, revolutionary intellectuals and artists took a turn inward in search of national identity and destiny in the distant past. Faced with a crisis of both political community and international legitimacy, the government preoccupation with national identity reached unprecedented levels. Conferences, publications, talks, research projects and artistic works reected the anxiety toward the future of the collective self. Culture and tradition, once again, were dened as the essence of Cuban identity.41 The consensus was that national sentiment was not just anchored on the existence of a homeland, but on a common culture, understood both as cultural production and as forms of social interaction. The states duty to defend the identity of Cuban culture and look after the preservation of the cultural patrimony was made explicit in the constitution for the rst time. 42 A rehabilitated anthropology, along with other disciplines like social psychology, was put to the task of proving the existence of a single Cuban national identity (Martin 1995, Martnez Heredia 1995, de la Torre 1995). For instance, Jess Guanchean ethnologist trained in the former Soviet Union, recipient of the 1997 National Social Sciences Award, and foremost contemporary exponent of the cultural nationalist historiographyfollowed Fernando Ortiz in claiming the unity of Cuban culture as the main attribute of a Cuban ethnicity still in the making, and product of the centuries-old process of transculturation. This Cuban ethnic group was dened as multi-racial, and sharing a culture, language, psychosocial
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personality, national sentiment, territory, mode of production, and an aspiration for political and economic self-determination (Guanche 1996, 1996b). By then, Guanche had become principal investigator at a new semi-independent institute lead by Miguel Barnet and devoted to Fernando Ortizs research legacy on cultural identity. Since 1995, the Fernando Ortiz Foundation agglutinated research on Afro-Cuban folklore, in addition to publishing works by Ortiz, Guanche and other scholars along these lines, and produced a weekly radio show entitled Arte y Folklordevoted to the solemn presentation of obscure local traditions.43 At the same time, a renovated Anthropology Center at the Academy of Sciences initiated research projects on new topics such as popular religion and cultural patrimony, altogether without neglecting its traditional concern with the ethnic composition of the Cuban people (Zito 2004). Both institutions, the Fernando Ortiz Foundation and the Anthropology Center collaborated in a magnum project which embodied the convergence of the Soviet and the Ortiz schools: Cubas Ethnographic Atlas, in CD-Rom. According to its publicity, the Atlas traced the ethnic components of the Cuban nation in 238 maps, and through a systematic study of the ethnic history and popular culture of the Cuban people in its material and spiritual expressions. Both the Anthropology Center and the Fernando Ortiz Foundation also became homes to a renovated anthropology, afliating the majority of incoming foreign anthropologists (some included in this issue) who, in turn, contributed to their hosting institutions nancial operations and insertion in transnational academic networks. These young scholars brought with them the concerns of post-colonial theory, postmodernism, feminist and queer theory, cultural Marxism, and globalization paradigms. For the most part, their distrust of grand narratives, whether pro-socialist or pro-capitalist, coupled with a critical detachment from either prorevolutionary or exile politics, directed their attention to issues of representation and ideology, subjectivity and citizenship, social difference and cultural circulation within the framework of the new economic reforms. Their work disrupted revolutionary silences concerning racial and sexual inequality as well as U.S. claims of capitalist teleology, painting a nuanced picture of life on the island and offering alternative readings of polarized historiographies. To them (to us) the gure of Fernando Ortiz represented the native interlocutor every metropolitan anthropologist should engage with in pursuit of a transcultural anthropology (Coronil 1995). Fernando Ortiz appeared to be uncontroversial on all fronts. Although he came from a middle class family from Spain and was educated in Europe, his privileged background was overlooked by all. As a moderate liberal in his day, little was also made of his extensive political and civic career. Furthermore, at the time of the Revolution his age and ailments impeded him from active engagement: he was then considered an elder who stayed outside present controversies (Fernndez Retamar 1967).44 In the mid-1990s, the appreciation of his work extended beyond Cuba to
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transnational anthropological circles, but not exactly for the same reasons. In Cuba, he was primarily valued for his contributions to research on the ethnic components of the nation, namely for his metaphor of the nation as a stew in which different ingredients change the whole without disappearing, and for his painstaking research in the 1930s and onwards on Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions and music.45 In the United States and in the European academes, while his early work on the inherent criminality of Afro-Cubans was excused as the product of an era and the accidental beginning of a fruitful intellectual path, his later Afro-Cuban work was of interest only to experts. In addition, while his notion of transculturation, along with his metaphor of Cuban history and society as a stew, wasas mentioned earlierfoundation to a discourse of cultural nationalism within Cuba, in U.S. anthropological circles the same notion was void of obvious ideological implications and incorporated into the curriculum in contrast and dialogue to the classical and narrower anthropological concept of acculturationwhich Ortiz intended to correct. More broadly, it was the theoretical implications of his 1940 Cuban Counterpoint which called the attention of cultural anthropologists at the end of the century. Thereafter, he emerged as a discipline visionary precisely at a time when post-colonial theory was shaking both anthropology and Latin American studies, bringing a sensibility toward subaltern knowledge and narratives constructed from outside imperialist politics, which allegedly destabilized occidentalist master narratives. The 1995 publication in English of Cuban Counterpoint, by Duke University Press and with an introduction by Fernando Coronil, sealed Ortizs currency in the North American academe, launching him to the anthropological hall of fame and making his name a must-know for at least Caribbeanists, Latin Americanists, and scholars of the African diaspora. Furthermore, according to the introduction, the book had a more contemporary than historical relevance, and can inform debates shaped by feminist theory, Gramscian Marxism and post-structuralism (Coronil 1995). Hence U.S. anthropology focused almost exclusively on Ortizs Cuban Counterpoint, a treatise which, over half a century after it was written, was said to inform contemporary post-colonial debates concerning Latin America, to anticipate post-modern deconstruction and narrative fragmentation, and to craft globalization-type models of commodity and cultural circulation. Fernando Coronil was instrumental to Ortizs newfound popularity. In his 1995 introduction, he criticized Malinowskiauthor of an introduction to an earlier editionas well as the metropolitan academe of the time for their shortsightedness and little appreciation of both Ortizs insights concerning transculturation and his unorthodox narrative devises which distanced him from prevailing positivist writing. Precisely it was his writing which, from Coronils perspective, demystied the claims, chronology and borders between modernity and post-modernity. That,
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along with his vision in revealing the colonial geohistories of dependency and the resulting transculturation of both commodities and culture affecting both colonies and metropolis made Ortiz a precursor to post-colonial thinking. Furthermore, Coronil considered Ortiz, in the big scheme of things, as a subaltern, and situated him on the same plane as Fanon, Csaire, and other Caribbean thinkers who left their homelands and gure as foundational gures of post-colonial discourse and who were critical of Eurocentric paradigms (Coronil 1995:xiv). In so doing, Coronilunlike Mignolo (2000) later in his denition of border-thinking intellectualdid not consider the inuence on Ortizs outlook of his privileged upbringing, education, class and race in the specic context of early 20th century Havana. Instead, he judged his contemporary relevance on the basis of this specic work. According to Coronil (1995), Ortizs signicance lied in his mapping the geographies of capitalism, showing the links forged between distant localities on the basis of commodity circulation, and exposing subsequent boundaries as artices of power (Coronil 1995:xiv). His oblivion, in turn, lied in his position at the periphery of knowledge-producing and consuming networks. A different view of things emerges when the focus of Ortizs writings shifts to those on Afro-Cuban traditions in order to subject them to similar post colonial validation. If instead of placing these works in relation to their contemporary AfroCubanista movement, they are critiqued from a perspective informed by postmodern and postcolonial theory, predictable questions of authority and representation arise (Rodrguez-Mangual 2004). Despite the great and undisputed informational value of Ortizs painstaking research on Afro-Cuban music and ritual, his authoritative voice in making the exotic intelligible coupled with his positivistic approachwhich revolutionary intellectuals applauded for its objective scienticitystand in stark contrast to the Counterpoint (1995[1940]) that Coronil reads. Ortizs research on the elements of the Cuban ajiaco, which both preceded and continued well after the publication of his Cuban Counterpoint (1995[1940]), in fact contradict many of his theoretical insights, revealing instead a Cuban society separated along race and class lines and looking more like a mosaic than like a stew.46 Ortizs own social position at the center of Cuban societyas an urban intellectual, as a political activist, and as a result of his family backgroundwas not ignored, neither by him nor by his informants, during the commission of his research. In sum, Ortizs falling in and out of the spotlight politely ignored by Malinowski, enthroned by Cuban revolutionary intellectuals as Afro-Cubas discoverer, revered by Coronil as a post-colonial precursormust be both historicized and placed in relation to the present. Ortizs intellectual travels from center to periphery, like Cubas multiple geographies, might be endless and are both the product of its time and the product of our times. In the case of Cuba, mappings from the North American academe have been inuenced by Cold War geopolitics, the dynamics of U.S.-Cuban relations, the
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geographies of academic area studies, and as of late, by post-colonial cartographic arrangements. Perhaps unwittingly, the latter have many points of convergence with those proposed by Cuban intellectuals during the early revolutionary period. For them, placing Cuba in a post-colonial landscape that highlighted networks across peripheries entailed, rst of all, legitimizing the revolutionary leadership at home, and it therefore implied a project of identity construction alongside political consciousness. Hierarchy was equated with class, and once class was superseded, all that could remain was inconsequential cultural difference. The discipline of anthropology was marginal to this project precisely for identifying markers of stratication not solely based on class but, specially, on race. Consequently, the guardianship of the nations culture fell on ethnography and folklore. It is the goal of this introduction to think of past and present localizations of Cuba in light of post colonial critiques of representation by holding the premise that cartographies of power correspond to particular representations and models of social stratication and difference. In anthropology, localizations are key and their stability is often reied, as they allow for cultural demarcation at the basis of the comparative method project of the discipline. Theoretical, epistemological, and nationalist including trans-nationalistagendas of anthropology are predicated on assumptions of locality that tend to overlook the ethnographers own cognitive mapping and culture of scholarship (as in the notion of ethnographic complicity). The articles in this volume exemplify various contemporary approaches within the anthropology of Cuba. Together, they put into perspective the taken-for-granted cartographies in which Cuba is often located and the epistemologies that guide such localizations. For instance, Safa, as one of the foremost exponents of a Caribbeanist anthropology rooted in concerns generated in the comparisons between the British Caribbean and North American colonial societies, focuses on matrifocal families in contemporary Cuba. She argues for a Caribbeanist perspective to shed light in a phenomenon whose academic understanding often privileges globalizing views of economy and culture and neglects regional histories. Similarly, Routons piece is based on the Black Atlantic/African diaspora model of cultural circulation, which informs this authors critical undertaking. Routon examines the Abakus identication with Africaboth symbolically, as a mythic homeland, and phenomenologically, as an ordering principle of contemporary urban spaceto argue that the appeal to historical roots leads to ritual claims of autonomy in the context of late socialist Cuba. Frederik and Routons articles, inuenced by both Foucault and Gramsci, examine the production of ofcial discourse vis--vis the relation between citizens and the late socialist state. Specically, they both examine state projects which concern geo-historical localizations of the national polity as well as the agency of ordinary people in the construction of such grand designs. Thus Frederik analyzes the agency of intellectuals and artists, including herself, the foreign
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anthropologist, together with their rural clients in promoting an ideal of the national polity, which is in crisis, not around images of urban prosperity, touristdriven desire for socialist exotica, Afro-Cuban folklore and salsa dancing, but around the image of the noble and hard-working campesinoan ideal who is thought to be found in remote rural areas untouched by the incoming capitalism. Similarly, Brotherton highlights popular participation in the construction of grand narratives. He shows the complicity of urban citizens in the reication of international health indicators which position socialist Cuba as the leader of the Third World. Their engagement in an underground trafc of pharmaceutical products contributes to the maintenance of a development fetish, while disproving the often assumed connection between national wealth and welfare. This collection, in sum, shows the multiple political cartographies in which contemporary Cuba might be located at the same time by a variety of parties, from anthropologists to governments to artists to patients. Cuba is not just in the eyes of the beholder. As a discursive construction, it simultaneously emerges in different forms out of unequal relations and agendas.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to Kenneth Routon for his patient reading and helpful feedback. My thanks also to Jean Rahier, Ivor Miller, Paul Ryer and Alfredo Alonso for their input.
Notes
1Damian Fernndez (2004) has noted that over the last decade there has been a move from Cubanol-
ogy to Cuban Studies. He identies as Cubanology a large body of scholarship produced both in the United States and Cuba during the second half of the 20th century mostly in the social sciences, and whose main premise is that of Cuban exceptionalism. In contrast, contemporary Cuban studies is predicated in comparative studies, in which Cuba appears as a case for comparison or illustration of broader processes. 2A similar move occurred earlier in the passage from immigration to ethnic studies in the United States (Poblete 2003). 3Cuba, Lybia and Syria were added to the Axis of Evil in May, 2002 (see BBC News 2002). 4That is not to say that all U.S.-based work was ideologically hostile to the Cuban Revolution. However, the ideological leaning of the scholar, his or her position vis--vis the Cuban revolution, U.S-Cuban relations, and U.S. ethnic, exile and party politics, often determined employment, publication and scholarly communitysomething unimaginable in other area studies. 5While Caribbean Studies have tended to focus in the English-speaking Caribbean, Latin American Studies have mostly built on the continental Spanish and Portuguese-speaking areas of the continent As far as the discipline of anthropology is concerned, no classical anthropologist ever worked in Cuba. 6These two positions, the critical and the subaltern, along with a third one that can be labeled as the nationalist, are relatively common in post-colonial contexts, as Prakash (cited by Mignolo 2000:189) observed for India.
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is the title of a famous 1964 lm made in Cuba by the Russian Mikhail Kalatozov. 1959, Casa de las Amricas, encompassing also a cultural center in Havana and a journal, was the intellectual agship of that America, providing a voice for critiques of colonialism and capitalism from unique Latin American and Caribbean perspectives. 9All translations are my own. 10Signicantly, intellectual property laws were modeled after Soviet law, and did not recognize authorial economic rights within Cuba (Hernandez Reguant 2004). 11The Latin Americanist project of the 19th century, debated by intellectuals such as Sarmiento, Rodo, Vasconcelos, etc. was rst and foremost about Latin Americas relation to the Occidentto Europe, and later, to the United States (as an outpost in the continent of European hegemony). 12This would be an argument later developed in the Latin American context by both Walter Mignolo (2000) and Anibal Quijano (2000), which saw Latin America as constitutive of the modern world systemsince the 16th century, when it was mapped as an extension of Europe. 13Cuban intellectuals for the most part rode with the tide, providing supportive arguments for policies in progress and fullling the research needs outlined by the government, and as of 1975, by the Communist Party. They did not constitute a revolutionary vanguard because their their intellectual trajectory followed revolutionary developments (Fernndez Retamar 1967). In fact, Fidel Castro in his famous speech, Words to the Intellectuals (1961) set the space for expression and critique, and although he allowed for the possibility that not all intellectuals would actively support the regime, the disgruntled ones clearly would be marginal in (if not absent of) the new society. Intellectuals had choices to make, and for those who stayed in Cuba, their path was clearly marked by the revolutionary leadership. In addition, their increasing professionalization and insertion within the cultural bureaucracyas decreed by the governmentand the parallel marginalization of those not politically trustworthy hindered the voicing of critical views. For the most part, they endorsed governments decisions, despite calls for friendly criticism in arenas other than culture and the arts (Navarro 2001, Fernndez Retamar 1967). 14The Congress symbolized the closing ranks of the revolutionary intelligentsia vis--vis any foreign or domestic critique. The leadership demanded total loyalty in the ght against imperialism and rejected any deviationism from prescribed socialist morality (notoriously rejecting alternative youth styles and homosexuality). The Congress also called for a national culture based on both Cubas own uniqueness and on socialist and internationalist solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world (Casa de las Amricas 1971). 15For a history of race relations, see De la Fuente (2001). See also Hernandez-Reguant (N.d.). 16In other issues, articles by Afro-Caribbean authors such as C. L. R. James (1968) and Ren Depestre (1968) sustaining the class thesis of racial oppression were commonplace. For instance, the Haitian Ren Depestre (1968), then a resident of Cuba, analyzed the Duvalier regime in Haiti to show that, despite color being an important category of identity and difference on the island, this was so because of its fetishistic character, which hid the real causes for oppression. Furthermore, the development of a Haitian bourgeoisie that was black only showed that class oppression was still at work within people of the same race. Depestre concluded with a sweeping critique of Negritude as an ideology of mystication of class conict used by the black Haitian bourgeoisie to legitimize their rule. 17The Discourse was not reproduced in its entirety. For some reason, the last third was omitted. 18See also the lm El Otro Francisco (Giral 1975), and the historical treatise El Ingenio, by Moreno Fraginals (1978). 19A later example of this turn was the lm Plaff (1988) which for the rst time considered the problems of an interracial relation as problems of cultural misunderstandingultimately resolved in favor of white scientic culture which overrides black magical irrationality. 20He defended his thesis in numerous articles, but most precisely, in his Los Factores Humanos de la Cubanidad, rst published in 1940 and again in 1976, in a compilation by historian Julio Le Riverend.
8Since
7This
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21As Fernando Coronil (1995) mentions that Ribeiro did now acknowledge Ortizs work and downplayed the importance of the African population. Perhaps for these reasons, Ribeiros work was better known in Cuba among literary critics than among ethnographers. 22The gap was only bridged, at times, by Afrocubanist expressions and by the commercialization of folklore, particularly in the 1990s. 23In reference to bourgeois art, see the Thesis of the 1st Congress of the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Cuba 1976[1975]). 24The term Afro-Cuban introduced by Fernando Ortiz, never gained much ground over negro except among internationally-bent intellectuals. Like African American in the United States, it was meant to emphasize ethnicity over race, and therefore culture over nature. 25Ernesto Ch Guevara, was a big proponent of survey research during his tenure as head of the Cuba Ministry of Industry. See Hernandez-Reguant 2002. 26For more information on the fate of sociology as a discipline during the revolutionary period, see Nez Jover 1997. 27According to Ruth Lewis (1977), the Cuban Instituto del Libro had published in 1968 Oscar Lewiss study of a Mexican village. 28For an account of Lewis experience in Cuba, see Ruth M. Lewis 1977. In a 1972 speech quoted by Ruth Lewis, Ramon Castro critiqued Lewis, to whom he referred as a sociologist. This reference evidences the regime identication of this kind of social anthropologyof the anthropology of complex societiesas sociology. 29In his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, partly translated into Spanish in a 1966 issue of the journal, Csaire denounced ethnographers and agrarian sociologists, along with journalists and others, as tools of capitalism and therefore complicit with the colonial enterprise. In an untranslated segment, he further. spoke of the betrayal of Western ethnography, which, with a deplorable deterioration of its sense of responsibility, has been using all its ingenuity of late to cast doubt upon the overall superiority of Western civilization over the exotic civilizations (Csaire 2000: 68). 30Indeed, the Cuban Anthropological Society was concerned with the physical manifestations of racial difference, which in turn would determine psychological and cultural trends (see Bronfman 2004). Fernando Ortiz named his famous 1942 seminar at the University of Havana about the various cultural elements of the Cuban nation Seminar on Cuban Ethnography. 31For more information on the Cuban Anthropological Society, see Bronfman (2004). 32See Lomnitz 2001 for an account of the Mexican case and also Robin Moore 1997 for an account of the Afrocubanista movement in Cuba. 33A new edition of Cuban Counterpoint was issued in 1963 by the Consejo Nacional de Cultura. 34The name was given to him by University of Havana professor and intellectual of his same generation Juan Marinello in 1969, in the posthumous homage published by the Casa de las Americas journal (Marinello 1969). 35These journals published and reprinted the work of folklorists and musicologists specialized on Afro-Cuban manifestations like Romulo Lachataer, Argeliers Len, Peres de la Riva, Miguel Barnet, Pedro Deschamps, Rafael Lpez Valds, Rogelio Martnez Fur, etc. 36See also Duany 1988, Guanche and Campos (1993), and Linares (2005) for a more detailed account of this period. 37Later, Miguel Barnet Rachels Song (1969), based on the life of a European vedette in early 20th century Havana, and Gallego (1981) on that of a Spanish immigrant. 38Up until the 1990s, in addition to Oscar Lewis and his team, only a very small number of anthropologists had been able to conduct research on the island. Verena Stolcke, a doctoral student of Raymond T. Smith at Oxford went to Cuba in 1967 accompanying her husband. She was interested in furthering
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anthropological theory on kinship, race and class and conducted two months of ethnographic eldwork in a rural community. However, she turned to archival work because of difculties securing permission to continue, producing a pioneering historical ethnography on race relatins in colonial Cuba (MartnezAlier 1974). Anthropologists could not carry out extensive eldwork in Cuba again until the mid-1980s, when Rectication allowed for a limited glasnost both in the media and in the academe. In 1986, U.S. anthropologist and former president-elect of the Latin American Studies Association Helen Safa (in this issue) was able to conduct research on gender and family under the auspices of the Federation of Cuban Women, on condition, like Lewis, that she train Cuban students (see Safa 1995). Shortly after, both North American ethnomusicologist, Yvonne Daniel and Swedish anthropologist Mona Rosendahl conducted eldwork outside Havana. While Daniel (1995) did a study of rumba in Matanzas, in the tradition of folklore studies, Rosendahls project was informed by Gramscian Marxism, and looked at local responses to ideological hegemony in a village in Oriente (Rosendahl 1997). 39This comparison was not unique to Barnet but commonplace in revolutionary circles. According to Perez Sarduy and Stubbs (2000), ever since Fidel Castro compared Cuba to a Baragu in 1961, in reference to black independence ghter Antonio Maceos refusal to sign peace with Spain during the War of Independence, that Cuba has been likened by the government to a maroon nation. I owe this point to Kenneth Routon. 40Title of a song by Carlos Varela (1992). The song refers to the international changes following the demise of the Soviet state. 41This move allowed for the inclusion of the much vilied diaspora into the nation, and the disentanglement of nation from territory and from polity (Hernandez-Reguant 2005). 42Patrimony included both tangible and intangible manifestations (e.g. stories, dances, etc.). In addition, by 1995, October 20th, Cuban Culture Day, had become an annual celebration of the nations cultural melting pot even though the holiday had been established in 1980 to commemorate the birth of the nation as a political project during the First War of Independence (Hernandez-Reguant 2005). 43http://www.fundacionfernandoortiz.org/origenes.htm. For more on the radio show see Hernandez-Reguant 2002. 44Fernndez Retamar (1967) considered him Cubas foremost intellectual gure, and in his classication of intellectual trends by generation, he left Ortiz out as older than any of the active and semi-active generations. Ortiz published his last book, Una pelea cubana contra los demonios in 1959, and did little after that, due to his old age and his extremely precarious health. 45Beginning in the mid-1980s, his work on the cultural components of the nation and Afro-Cuban folklore and traditions, along with his Cuban Counterpoint, was reprinted by the state press for social sciences (Editora de Ciencias Sociales). After 1995, the Fernando Ortiz Foundation reissued some of Ortizs work also in those areas, as well as studies that furthered his project in this regard. 46Ortiz himself was aware of the social distance between him and his subjects. In his posthoumous eulogy, Miguel Barnet (1969) recalls how in his deathbed, Ortiz, who never lost his Catalan accent, requested to listen to folkloric music from his native Spain.
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