Geographies of Cubanidad

Place, Race, and Musical Performance in Contemporary Cuba

Rebecca M. Bodenheimer

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626746848
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic national discourse. Given that the music is a prominent symbol of Cubanidad, musical practices play an important role in constructing regional, local, and national identities. This book suggests that regional identity exerts a significant influence on the aesthetic choices made by Cuban musicians. Through the examination of several genres, Bodenheimer explores the various ways that race and place are entangled in contemporary Cuban music. She argues that racialized notions which circulate about different cities affect both the formation of local identity and musical performance. Thus, the musical practices discussed in the book—including rumba, timba, eastern Cuban folklore, and son—are examples of the intersections between regional identity formation, racialized notions of place, and music-making.

Chapter One

Regionalism and the Intersections of Race and Place in Cuba

I just bought a pair of gym shoes, Nikes. Because I am black and an Oriental, everyone will call me a hustler. . . . I work hard for my money, but people think I am a pimp because I am black and from Santiago de Cuba.

—Mark Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba

My introduction presented an overview of racial politics in Cuba, emphasizing how the recognition of racial difference has been considered to be detrimental to a unified national identity. This chapter posits that in a similar fashion, regionalism—constituted by both a centuries-long history of regionalist antagonism between the eastern and western parts of the island and contemporary regionalist sentiment among the population—contests the notion of Cubanidad that has been hegemonic for over a century. My secondary goal is to elucidate how race and the politics of place historically and currently intersect with each other. I will ultimately argue that the racialization and regionalization of Cuban society, which are reflected in a variety of musical practices that I will discuss in subsequent chapters, challenge the nationalist notion of a hybridized and unified Cubanidad.

My interest in investigating the politics of place in contemporary Cuba stems from observations since my first research trip to the island in 2004 that expressions of regionalism are longstanding and pervasive. I employ “regionalism” and its related terms to refer to popular discourses that assume a set of naturalized distinctions between Cubans from different provinces of the country. Although there is a distinction to be made between regions and provinces within Cuba—in that each region is made up of various provinces—I use the term “regionalism” in a broader manner that sometimes glosses over the differences between the two geographical categories. Acknowledgment and examination of this issue is largely absent from both Cuban and US academic scholarship, a lacuna that is surprising given the frequency of assertions of regionalist sentiment in both popular discourse and music. Such assertions are evident mostly in the arena of popular, mass-mediated music, but also in rumba songs, as will be demonstrated in the following chapter. Despite the revolutionary government’s official rhetoric, which stresses national unity and celebrates the population’s ongoing dedication to socialist ideals of egalitarianism and cooperation, many Cubans cling tightly to their regional identities. This means not only a fierce loyalty to one’s province of birth but often an explicit antagonism toward people from other provinces, particularly between habaneros (people from Havana) and orientales (people from the eastern provinces). As will be evident, these regionalist antagonisms are often entangled with racialized discourses. Thus, I want to examine the ways that race is mapped onto different regions and cities on the island. My analysis in this chapter foregrounds the importance of what cultural geographer Don Mitchell terms the “spatiality of identity” (2000, 62), which recognizes the powerful effects of space and place on the production of social identities.

A Genealogy of Regionalism in Cuba

In order to contextualize my discussion of the politics of place in contemporary Cuban society and its relation to musical performance on the island, this section performs a genealogy of regionalism. Michel Foucault (1977) elucidates his analytic of “genealogy” in contrast with traditional historiography, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of “wirkliche Historie” (effective history), which emphasizes the discontinuities and ruptures in the development of humankind. Foucault states, “The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (1977, 147). In this vein, I aim to offer a rather detailed summary of regionalism in Cuba in order to disrupt the narratives of national unity that have been so pervasive not only since the revolution but since the birth of the island as an independent nation.

Cuban Historiography and the Significance of a Regional Perspective

Published histories of Cuba have been fairly silent on the issue of regionalism. While there have been regional histories written about various provinces on the island, I am familiar with only one Cuban scholar, Hernán Venegas Delgado, who has framed the issue as a more fundamental problem in terms of the historiography of the nation. In La Región en Cuba (2001), Venegas Delgado points out a number of underlying assumptions within Cuba historiography, most notably the fact that historians have neglected to consider the histories of all regions beyond western Cuba. Speaking about one of the first histories of the island to be written (during the colonial period), he states: “His homeland is not Cuba, it is Havana, and more than the province [of Havana], the city” (Venegas Delgado 2001, 60; my translation). In a similar critique, Cuban American historian Miguel Bretos begins his book chronicling the history of Matanzas thus: “Over the years, the allure of the Cuban capital has seduced all comers to the point of nearly subsuming the nation’s identity, as if Cuba were the hinterland of Havana instead of Havana the capital of Cuba” (Bretos 2010, xiii).

Among Venegas Delgado’s more significant critiques, he discusses the impact of the development of the sugar industry on national history, noting that because the largest sugar mills during the boom of the nineteenth century were in the west, colonial economic conditions in the central and eastern regions have been ignored. In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century, the bulk of sugar production had moved away from the province of Havana and toward the western-central region, concentrated in the provinces of Matanzas and Las Villas, and by the early twentieth century it had moved further east, coming to be concentrated in Camagüey and northeastern Cuba (Venegas Delgado 2001, 103). Venegas Delgado’s larger point is that if the history of sugar was so crucial to the economic foundation of the nation, it should also take into account regions beyond western Cuba. He also repeatedly stresses that the provinces of the western region tend to be lumped together and discussed as one entity, meaning that Matanzas and the westernmost province of Pinar del Río tend to be discussed as extensions of Havana, despite the fact that they have their own historical processes and events (99–101). The history of Pinar del Río is particularly neglected, even though it is characterized by unique agricultural conditions—it is the primary tobacco producer on the island and was never a center of sugar production.

One other major critique by Venegas Delgado concerns the birth of nationalist sentiment—often attributed to Havana—and the role of the independence struggles in its development. Referring to the fact that the large majority of combat during the thirty-year independence struggle took place in the east, he states: “In those eastern and central regions the emergence of Cuban nationalism has occurred with the most strength, and this requires a very serious foundation in national history” (Venegas Delgado 2001, 117). Finally, he finds that regionalist antagonism was one of the primary reasons why the Ten Years’ War (the first sustained independence struggle) failed to succeed in liberating the island from Spanish control (141); in other words, the east and west were too divided to wage a successful war. Venegas Delgado’s critique of Cuba’s rather myopic historiography is an important one, as it comes from an intellectual on the island who has experienced firsthand the hegemony of Havana and western Cuba in nearly all aspects of life.

Historic Differences and Tensions between Eastern and Western Cuba

Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, who currently holds the distinguished title of historian of the city of Santiago de Cuba and has written extensively on the history and culture of the eastern city, asserted in a conversation that regionalist sentiment dates back to the early colonial period and is related to how Spain founded the different villas, or cities, on the island (pers. comm. 2011). In fact, Columbus first arrived in the east in 1492, coming from the nearby island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), and Cuba’s easternmost city of Baracoa was the first Spanish settlement to be established, in 1512. After its founding in 1515, Santiago de Cuba, currently the island’s second-largest city and de facto capital of Oriente (eastern Cuba), became the home base of the colony’s first governor, famed Spanish conquistador Diego Velásquez, and thus the first capital of the island. In 1553, the Spanish Crown ordered the governor to relocate to the villa of Havana, which grew in significance throughout the sixteenth century, and the western city was formally established as the capital of the island in 1607 (Louis Pérez 2006). During the first century of colonization, the island was considered to be one province, but in 1607 a royal decree split Cuba into two halves—Havana and Santiago de Cuba—each with its own independent government.¹ In 1774, there was a new geographical demarcation, with the Departamento Occidental o de La Habana (Western Department or Havana) constituting almost three-fourths of the island’s land mass and the Departamento Oriental o de Santiago de Cuba (Eastern Department or Santiago de Cuba) making up the rest. By 1827, the population growth on the island necessitated a division of the island into three departments: occidental (western), central (central), and oriental (eastern). Since then, there have been several divisions of the island into varying numbers of provinces, with a current total of sixteen (see figure 1.1). Nonetheless, the island is still discussed, both by the government and within popular discourse, as having three principal regions, with each containing five or more provinces.

Portuondo asserted that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, western Cuba came to be the focus of the colonial government and its commerce, and the Departamento Oriental began to be marginalized, resulting in a tendency to segregate the two regions and the growth of autonomous sentiment in Oriente (pers. comm. 2011). She thus documented a long-standing precedent by the colonial government of privileging Havana and western Cuba in resources and technological development, a dynamic that continued after independence into the period of American occupation (1898–1902). Portuondo further asserted that even within colonial-era Oriente there was a tendency toward localist sentiment: planters in the cities of Bayamo and Holguín routinely opposed the centralization of power in Santiago. Joel James, José Millet, and Alexis Alarcón (2007, 39) attribute the historic rivalry between Holguín on the one hand and Santiago and Bayamo on the other to a large influx of Spaniards into Holguín that created differences in racial composition. Santiago and Bayamo were thereafter composed of a more mixed-race population, while Holguín has long been considered the “whitest” city in Oriente.

Figure 1.1: Map of Cuba’s sixteen provinces after the most recent administrative division in 2011. Occidente is composed of La Habana, Pinar del Río, Artemisa, Mayabeque, Matanzas, and Isla de la Juventud. Centro includes Cienfuegos, Villa Clara, Sancti Spíritus, Ciego de Ávila, and Camagüey. Oriente is made up of Las Tunas, Granma, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo. Source: http://d-maps.com/carte.php?&num_car=38497&lang=en.

Cuba historian Louis Pérez also discusses the growing isolation of Oriente after the establishment of Havana as the capital of the colony, asserting that colonial officials rarely traveled to the east, leaving it somewhat defenseless against incursions by other European powers, including several attacks by the French and the English in the seventeenth century (2006, 30). Ironically, this colonial neglect set the stage for an increase in contraband and illicit trade with other Caribbean colonies, such as Jamaica and Barbados. Pérez states, “The distinctions between east and west would deepen with the passage of time, but already at the end of the century of conquest, both Havana and Santiago de Cuba occupied sharply different places on the social continuum of colonial Cuba. From these two contrary points would emerge competing views of cubanidad, of what it meant to be Cuban. The west flourished as a result of the official presence, in defense of colonial policy; the east flourished as a result of official absence, in defiance of colonial policy” (31). Pérez paints Oriente as “Cuba’s frontier land,” noting of its distinct geography, “Oriente appeared too remote, the terrain too inhospitable, to justify large-scale settlement and extensive commercial exploitation” (8), and arguing that its remoteness made it “the most Cuban region of all of Cuba, less susceptible to outside influences, more committed to ways local and traditional” (9). Considering the history of migration from other parts of the Caribbean to Oriente since the early nineteenth century (see below), I view this as a somewhat essentialist statement that seems to romanticize Oriente as a pristine outpost, immune to foreign influence. In fact, the diverse histories of migration to the two regions can be viewed as another important factor that contributed to divisions between east and west: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw not only a major wave of Franco-Haitian migration to eastern Cuba but also a huge growth in the importation of African slaves primarily to western Cuba.

Historian Ada Ferrer’s Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (1999) also discusses the historical tensions between Havana and Oriente as a result of the distinct social and economic conditions of the two regions under Spanish colonialism. In the mid-nineteenth century, while central and western Cuba were enjoying the economic boom produced by high levels of slave-driven sugar production, eastern Cuba was suffering from an economic downturn and the effects of harsh taxation by the colonial government (Ferrer 1999, 18–21). In contrast to the monocrop nature of western-central Cuban agriculture, dominated by sugar plantations, eastern Cuba’s agricultural production had always been more varied—including coffee, tobacco, and cattle in addition to sugar estates.² Furthermore, the eastern plantations were generally smaller and less technologically advanced, with a significant percentage of free workers of color (18–21).³ Louis Pérez asserts that the free population of color constituted 63 percent of the total nonwhite population in the east, but only 32 percent in the west (2006, 66). These social and economic conditions contributed greatly to what Ferrer terms the “geography of insurgency” (Ferrer 1999, 17), or the fact that eastern Cuba was the site of the first rebellion in 1868 that began the thirty-year struggle for independence.⁴ Pérez states, “Already politically marginal, in varying degrees of economic decline, not as burdened by the weight of slavery, they [easterners] had less to fear from disorder, more to gain from change. The economic problem was seen as an aspect of the political problem: if the eastern zones were poor, backward, and miserable, it was because of the malfeasance and misgovernment by Spain. The only solution was a political one” (Louis Pérez 2006, 89).

In contrast to the spirit of rebellion characterizing nineteenth-century Oriente, Havana and much of western Cuba remained loyal to the Spanish Crown until 1895, three years before independence. The Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara) on October 10, 1868, in the southeastern jurisdiction of Manzanillo constituted the first call to arms against Spanish rule, thus beginning the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878). The rebellion was led by plantation owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who freed his slaves on that day and invited them to join the independence struggle.⁵ Ada Ferrer suggests that the initiative taken by white eastern elites in advocating abolition and armed struggle against Spain was more about their adverse economic situation and resentment of colonial taxation laws than it was about humanitarian ideals of equality and freedom (Ferrer 1999, 17–23). Notwithstanding the white planters’ intentions, another major chasm between east and west was created with the terms of the Pact of Zanjón, which ended the Ten Years’ War and reestablished Spain’s hegemony: de facto abolition was decreed in the central-eastern region of the country (where the war was based), and a continuation of slavery in all the provinces west of Camagüey (James et al. 2007, 41).⁶

Historian Aline Helg’s Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (1995) also foregrounds regional differences as they impacted the Cuban independence struggle, viewing them as an important factor that hampered Afro-Cubans from presenting a united front in their demands for equality after emancipation in 1886. Like Ferrer, Helg emphasizes the distinct socioeconomic conditions in different regions, illustrating the particular patterns of land ownership by blacks and mulatos⁷ in different provinces. In the western province of Matanzas and the central province of Santa Clara, the sites of the largest concentrations of slaves, Afro-Cubans owned or rented land at a much lower percentage than whites. In Oriente, where a large rural free population of color had been concentrated before emancipation, the two racial groups owned land at approximately equal rates (Helg 1995, 26). Correspondingly, racial barriers were stronger and more rigid in Matanzas and Santa Clara than in Oriente, where, in addition to having twice the proportion of a free population of color, slaves had been more widely distributed on smaller plantations (32). Support for the mambises (insurgents during the independence struggles) was always strongest on the eastern end of the island. Not surprisingly, Cuban plantation owners in the western and central provinces were firmly opposed to abolition, and by extension the independence struggles, which were led primarily by a mulato native of Oriente, Antonio Maceo.

Arguably the most effective tactic used by colonial authorities to keep white Cuban planters loyal to Spain was the specter of a race war led by black Cubans, in the vein of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to conveying a racial threat, this propaganda also included crucial dimensions of regional host...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Regionalism and the Intersections of Race and Place in Cuba
• Chapter Two “La Habana No Aguanta Más”: Regionalism in the Lyrics of Cuban Popular Music
• Chapter Three “Conciencia de Caribeñidad”: Regionalism, Folklore Oriental, and Santiago’s Caribbean Connection
• Chapter Four Racialized Discourses of Place and Rethinking the “Cradle of Afro-Cuban Culture”
• Chapter Five Localizing Hybridity
• Chapter Six The Politics of Place and National Traditions: Race, Regionalism, and the Relationship between Rumba and Son
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index