Isles of Noise

Sonic Media in the Caribbean

Alejandra M. Bronfman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469628707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.

1 Signal

Sometime in the spring of 1905, Frank E. Butler boarded a train traveling from Havana to Santiago with so many suitcases full of “a great quantity of wire, equipment, etc.,” that his sleeper “resembled a baggage car.”¹ The cargo raised suspicion. During a rest stop on the twenty-six-hour journey, the crew removed a large coil of wire they had found in Butler’s compartment. As passengers gathered to stare, the crew interrogated him as to its purpose and demanded a fee for not confiscating it. Once he arrived in Santiago, Butler needed help transporting the equipment. He asked a Cuban army officer he had befriended to find a few boys to help him carry the suitcases and coils to the steamer that would take him to Boquerón, in Guantánamo Bay. In Boquerón, he found a Jamaican man, George Morehead, to assist him. They strapped the equipment on the backs of two horses and began their hike through the jungle to their destination. Butler soon discovered that a clearing in the jungle was his destination; he described the proposed spot for the first wireless station in the Caribbean as “dense undergrowth . . . interspersed with low, arid, sand flats: a paradise for mosquitoes, snakes, horned toads, scorpions, tarantulas, wild cats, and all other kinds of tropical creatures, flying and crawling.”²

The insects and snakes plagued Butler and his coworkers for a year as they built the station. Swathed in kerchiefs to keep out the swarming mosquitoes, they laid concrete foundations and constructed timber towers that they draped in 45,000 feet of seven-strand, phosphor bronze wire. With romantic flourish, Butler described the completed tower as a hybrid of nature and technology, awash in beauty: “The huge cage resembled a giant goldfish globe two hundred feet high, and months afterwards, when the station was in operation, the mesh of wires would emit a bluish brush discharge at night which was beautiful beyond description, and always proved of unending awe to the natives who would stand off from afar and gaze in open mouthed wonder.”³ Most often, however, the sublime barely surfaced in the battles with nature that dominated daily life. Lightning struck the station three times. A wildcat fell into their well, compromising their only source of fresh water. Yellow fever spread through the camp. Not that the technology cooperated particularly, either. As if mimicking the dramatic environment, the motor and transformer exploded at least four times between June and December that year.

Butler narrated the establishment of the wireless station in Guantánamo as an adventure, a journey into the tropical wilds in order to fulfill the mission of expanding the reach of wireless throughout the Americas. Guantánamo would serve as a laboratory to test and perfect the equipment and to understand how it responded to a tropical climate. The ubiquitous mosquitos and scorpions constantly threatened to do in Butler’s project of converting his strange luggage into a tower that would send signals to faraway places. What for? In December 1905, ten days after Butler wrote in his journal that the “big two-ton transformer blew up,” he was able to respond to a “Merry Christmas” message sent from Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C., with his own “Same to you, and many of them.” For Butler, these bland exchanges across hundreds of miles marked the end of his story.⁴ His work was done.

When Butler arrived home, he received a note of thanks from his employer, electrical engineer and self-proclaimed inventor Lee de Forest, who noted that he had worked “for tedious months . . . in climates scorching and unhealthy, distressed but not baffled by static unknown to other wireless workers.” Despite those conditions, Butler had managed to “force new secrets from Nature” with the new station.⁵ De Forest’s gratitude was tinged with relief that his new wireless communications system had proven viable. De Forest had been tinkering with the possibility of wireless communication in competition with Guglielmo Marconi, who also understood the potential of using the air as a medium rather than telegraph cables, which were too easily subject to political control and sabotage.⁶

Both inventors competed for contracts to extend wireless to a region well connected with telegraph cables and already experiencing the latter’s shortcomings. Initially the Caribbean Sea itself posed an obstacle. According to Charles Bright, who directed the effort, the cables had been laid on “what was undoubtedly the worst bottom that any submarine cable has ever been deposited on.” Coral reefs that ringed the islands repeatedly cut the thick cable covered with gutta-percha, making the extension of telegraphy to the region an arduous and delicate battle with the sea.⁷ Even as those cables landed, political struggles to control communications were well underway. In conjunction with Western Union, the West India and Panama Telegraph Company had been founded with the intention of connecting the Caribbean islands to points in Latin America as well as the United States in the 1860s. Soon after the first anticolonial conflict in Cuba erupted in 1868, the Cuba Submarine Telegraph Company, also under the auspices of Western Union, had formed in order to avoid dependence on Spanish land lines.⁸ De Forest and his rival Marconi sought to persuade communications companies and governments to support their supposedly less vulnerable wireless communication.

The battle to control and extend communications was thus driven partly by military concerns. In the aftermath of the Cuban Wars of Independence (1868–98) and the U.S. intervention in Cuba (1898–1902), the United States had acquired a bit of land at the far eastern tip of Cuba, intended as a naval base.⁹ Frank Butler had been sent to Guantánamo as part of a contract de Forest had secured from the U.S. Navy in 1904.¹⁰ Butler’s mission was to bring de Forest’s pioneering efforts in wireless communication to the base under construction. This was the third of four stations that would mark the Caribbean expansion of communication networks in an increasingly bellicose period. Stations in Pensacola, Key West, Guantánamo, and Puerto Rico would eventually enable the Navy to send signals from ship to land, facilitating a sense of control over the area. De Forest’s Cuban station was completed just in time. Not long after the holiday greetings traveled across the air from Guantánamo to Washington, D.C., wireless messages confirmed President Theodore Roosevelt’s orders to invade Cuban soil once again, in the wake of a political crisis in 1906. Once the marines had landed, reports of the first skirmishes arrived via wireless.¹¹

Butler has faded from the historical record, and de Forest would go on to a long career marked by battles over patents, lawsuits, and the creation of key technologies that enabled broadcasting and film sound.¹² This forgotten episode in their careers does not fit easily into Cuban or North American narratives of U.S. expansion accomplished with technical certainty or clear-eyed domination over people and environments. Instead, it renders visible the uneven and multidirectional qualities of imperialism.¹³ The United States was a late arrival to the region, and Butler entered a context already saturated with overlapping British and Spanish imperial presences. Indeed, he depended on them, hiring Jamaicans as assistants and translators, and drawing on Cuban and Spanish expertise with regard to the terrain and remedies to alleviate the bug bites, disease, heat, and other discomforts. At times these overlaps laid bare the improvised qualities of the scheme. Butler had hired Joe Francis, rumored to be a murderer, to splice cables 200 feet in the air. When Francis threatened to stop working if his pay was not doubled, Butler held him to his task at gunpoint. A week later, a Spanish surveyor was found stabbed to death on the path near the wireless station. Butler noted that the dead man was very close to his own height and build, and Joe Francis disappeared and was never seen again.¹⁴ This was, in Fred Cooper’s formulation, “lumpy” imperialism, also itchy, sweaty, and at times, alarming.¹⁵

Mapping Wires and Waves

As Sidney Mintz has succinctly put it: “Caribbean people have always been entangled with the wider world.”¹⁶ If Mintz and many others dwelled, for good reason, on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery and commodity production as a way to understand those enduring connections, this book brings a concern with those crossings and interlacings into the twentieth century. The construction of a wireless station in Guantánamo is part of a longer story of the entangled relationships linking communications technologies, nature, empire, and the poetics of listening. The divergent imperial trajectories of Spain, the United States, and Britain slid past each other in the early twentieth-century Caribbean. Spanish possessions, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the eastern half of Hispaniola, were emerging from distinct processes of decolonization. Yet even as Spanish colonial governments departed, thousands of Spanish immigrants arrived in the region. Britain had established its earliest colonies in the seventeenth century and marked the region in important ways. By the early twentieth century, however, imperial expansion marginalized the British Caribbean in relation to the more absorbing potentials of India, Africa, and the Middle East.¹⁷ Labor rebellions of the 1930s resulted in a degree of attention to this region, as colonial officials sponsored a flurry of analysis and social reform projects intended to quiet the unruly subjects who had incited those rebellions. But in some ways it was too late, as another war and increasingly vocal anticolonialism pushed British rule toward obsolescence.¹⁸

At the same time, the U.S. presence in the Caribbean greatly expanded in the early twentieth century. If Puerto Rico was the only official U.S. territory, Americans insinuated themselves into Caribbean economies and cultural practices and used military occupations to wield power. Throughout the region, residents encountered U.S. expansionism in different ways. The United Fruit Company and the Panama Canal spurred the movement of thousands of workers throughout the region. In 1917, the United States purchased the Danish Virgin Islands.¹⁹ Cuba developed various “ties of singular intimacy” with its northern neighbor: occupied from 1898 to 1902 and 1906 to 1909, it also witnessed expansive U.S. investment in sugar and other industries. Baseball, cinema, and consumer goods circulated freely.²⁰ Haiti was subjected to a longer occupation (1915–34) and received considerably less investment.²¹ Marines were a stronger presence there than businessmen, and while U.S. film stars flocked to Cuba’s swanky hotels, American anthropologists roamed Haiti in search of exotic forms of blackness.²² By World War II, when it built military bases in Trinidad and Jamaica, the United States was a voluble presence and the source of ambivalence, as Caribbean people both acknowledged its appeal and worried about its increasing clout.²³

The early and relatively widespread acquisition of radio technologies both propelled and enabled these shifting geopolitical concerns. The region served as a laboratory for trials in technology, format, and content. Following Butler’s efforts, the U.S. military quickly recognized the utility of wireless communications, and Guantánamo became a point through which information about various military ventures flowed. Occupying marines transported radio equipment along with guns to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Intensified commercial ties stimulated plantation owners and emerging enterprises such as the United Fruit Company to implement radio technology to administer their expanding Caribbean ventures.²⁴ Amateur radio operators fanned out in the region, many as employees of sugar plantations, and began tinkering with their equipment to see how far their signals could reach. Between transmitting sugar prices and transport information, they experimented with broadcasts of concerts and sports events. During this period, communications between the islands and New York or Key West were faster and more frequent than those between the East and West Coasts of the United States. Along the way, radio broadcasting inserted itself into those circuits. The New York–based station WEAF opened sister stations in Havana in 1922 and San Juan in 1923. As a result of this early phase of experimentation in which producers and consumers of radio in the Caribbean proved essential, a nascent, unreliable medium became the ubiquitous and enduring global phenomenon.

Mapping wires and sound waves as they revised sonic spaces requires attending to shifting notions of the region itself. The Caribbean is not a firmly bounded place but rather a set of claims about space.²⁵ As soldiers, colonial officials, anthropologists, students, planters, merchants, writers, musicians, ham radio operators, engineers, and laborers moved around the Caribbean and North America—Havana, Port-au-Prince, Santiago, Cap Haïtien, Kingston, New York, Washington, Key West—they traced the outlines of a territory with the Caribbean Sea at the center, a region dense with military, commercial, and cultural circuits. None of these would have been possible without the spatial reimagining afforded by wireless and broadcasting assembled alongside, and as part of, changing geographies of power.

The narrative of this book follows the commercial, political, and military concerns that shaped the material transformation of electronic communication. In addition, it attends to the implications of those material transformations for ordinary people. Conceiving of listening as an active rather than passive pursuit enables a quotidian understanding of how Caribbean people might have experienced broadcasting as denizens of neighborhoods, cities, nations, empires, or transnational commercial and military cultures. The analysis takes its cue from Mintz’s observations about the Caribbean’s connections to the wider world, but it also offers a genealogy of those spatial categories. People experience the “wider world,” after all, in part through the mediated information to which they have access. How did the media in question participate in the production of knowledge about shifting relationships to the “wider world”? Under what material circumstances did this occur, and who consumed this knowledge? I argue that wireless and broadcasting helped generate the very idea that the Caribbean and the wider world ought to be imagined as distinct and distant ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Isles of Noise
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Figures
• 1 Signal
• 2 Circuits
• 3 Receivers
• 4 Resistors
• 5 Voice
• 6 Ears
• 7 Sign-Off
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index