Cuba

A Cultural History

Alan West-Durán

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780238609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As American-Cuban relations begin to warm, tourists are rushing to discover the throwback tropical paradise just eighty miles off of the American coast. But even as diplomatic relations are changing and the country opens up to the Western world, Cuba remains a rare and fascinating place. Cuba: A Cultural History tells the story of Cuba's history through an exploration of its rich and vibrant culture. Rather than offer a timeline of Cuban history or a traditional genre-by-genre history of Cuban culture, Alan West-Durán invites readers to enter Cuban history from the perspective of the island's uniquely creative cultural forms. He traces the restless island as it ebbs and flows with the power, beauty, and longings of its culture and history.In a world where revolutionary socialism is an almost quaint reminder of the decades-old Cold War, the island nation remains one of the few on the planet guided by a Communist party, still committed to fighting imperialism, opposed to the injustices of globalization, and wedded to the dream of one day building a classless society, albeit in a distant future. But as this book shows, Cuba is more than a struggling socialist country—it is a nation with a complex and turbulent history and a rich and varied culture.

ONE

Building a New Cultural Foundation

(1898–1930)

Freedom? In the clouds. Equality? Underground. Fraternity? Nowhere to be found.

Enrique José Varona, 1927

In 1900, Cuba was in a unique and ambiguous situation. The island had been Spain’s last colony in Latin America, its independence coming some eight decades after Mexico’s. It had just concluded a second war of independence (1895–8) only to see the U.S. step in and deal the final military blow to Spain, then militarily occupy the island for four years before turning the country over to a civilian administration and its first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, sworn in on 20 May 1902. The war had devastated Cuba: it lost some 300,000 people, though not all on the battlefield – many perished due to disease and starvation; 100,000 small farms were destroyed, as well as three thousand livestock ranches and seven hundred coffee fincas. The number of sugar mills had decreased by 80 per cent, coffee production was down by four-fifths of 1894 levels, and 90 per cent of the island’s cattle and livestock had been lost. Half the schools had closed down, illiteracy was at 60 per cent and only 1 per cent had a higher education. Overall, over 50 per cent of whites could read, but for people of colour the figure was 28 per cent. Slavery had ended in 1886, less than twenty years before independence.¹

Cuba was faced with the daunting task of rebuilding its economy, creating a new political system and repairing its fractured society. Unlike other Latin American countries, Cuba received enormous help from the U.S. and the Spanish population of the island, who did not leave when colonial rule ended. In fact, Spanish immigration to Cuba was constant and significant: some 300,000 between 1880 and 1910 and more than 400,000 between 1914 and 1930. This immigration not only formed part of Spain’s colonial policy before 1898; it was also the desire of Cuban elites to whiten the country. The Spanish dominated in the areas of small commerce and the U.S. began to take control of large sugar estates, infrastructure, banking and communications.

One of the key elements of the new relationship with the U.S. was the Platt Amendment (1901) and other treaties (1903) that permitted the U.S. to lease Guantánamo, where a naval base was built; it is still currently under control of the U.S. The Platt Amendment was an amendment included in the Cuban constitution that allowed the U.S. to intervene – including militarily – if its interests were threatened. The U.S. did intervene on several occasions until the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934.

Cuba began its new life as a republic with great aspirations of fulfilling its hopes as an independent nation, wanting to build a society that Antonio Maceo, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Máximo Gómez and other pro-independence patriots had dreamed about. One of those patriots, who had spent many years in exile, was a gifted poet, José Martí.

José Martí: Myth and Messiah

Cuba lost its two greatest poets before the turn of the twentieth century – José Martí in battle, Julián del Casal to tuberculosis. Martí was 41, Casal thirty. Cuba’s other great poet of the nineteenth century, José María Heredia, died at 36. Martí (1853–1895) is probably the best-known figure of Cuba’s history, a poet, journalist, polymath, fiery orator, political activist, revolutionary and one of the great fighters for Cuban independence. Despite having Spanish parents, at a very young age Martí grew to abhor slavery and the colonial regime that shackled Cuba’s freedom. Imprisoned for his political beliefs at sixteen, he was deported to Spain where he studied, while keenly following the events of the Ten Years War (1868–78); then he went to Mexico and Guatemala before returning to Cuba in 1878. His political activities landed him in prison the following year and he was again deported to Spain. He escaped, and finally made his way to New York (1880). Martí did not return to Cuba until 1895, as political head of the Cuban independence forces, and tragically died in his first battle, only a month after returning from many years in exile. His first book of poems, Ismaelillo (1882), written in Caracas, is one of the first books of the modernista movement, not to be confused with European-U.S. modernism. Latin American modernismo was a cosmopolitan, highly aesthetic, deeply musical (especially the poetry) movement that lasted roughly from 1880 to 1918. The modernistas, almost all from Latin America, renovated the Spanish language and gave Latin American literature an ascendancy in Spanish-language letters which persists until today. Among its exemplary writers were Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), Manuel Gutiérrez Najera (Mexico), Amado Nervo (Mexico), José Asunción Silva (Colombia) and Martí’s compatriot Julián del Casal.

Martí wrote tirelessly for newspapers, the bulk of his work being for this medium, but his language was a rich, highly metaphorical cultural journalism that is rarely practised today. From his exile in New York he sought to unite all the forces to bring about Cuban independence. Wherever there were Cubans, be it New York, Tampa, Mexico, New Orleans, Caracas or Costa Rica, Martí spoke to them and helped fundraise for the liberation of Cuba. By 1892 he had created the Cuban Revolutionary Party (CRP) as the political instrument to lead the independence struggle. Martí, along with veteran generals from the Ten Years War such as Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez, launched a new war of independence, which began in February 1895. Martí arrived in April and was killed in his first skirmish on 19 May 1895.

When Martí died, he was not well known in Cuba, having been in exile for the last fifteen years, with virtually all his publications printed outside Cuba. His reputation grew after his death and continues to do so. His mythic stature began to spread quickly and a Cuban song from the early 1900s poses one of the great what-ifs of Cuban history: what if Martí had not died in 1895? The core lyrics state the case forcefully:

Martí no debió morir

Ay de morir

Si fuera maestro del día

Otro gallo cantaría

La patria se salvaría

Y Cuba sería feliz

Martí shouldn’t have died

Oh! Not have died

If he were in charge now

It would be a different tune

The fatherland would be saved

Cuba would be happy.²

There is no doubt that Martí should not have died so young – his literary and political talents were desperately needed by the young republic – but what about the ‘what if’? If he had lived, would Cuba’s fate had been radically different? Would the fatherland have been saved? Would Cuba be happy? Cuba was a society fractured along lines of class, race and gender. Would Martí have been able to resolve those divisions? What about the military and economic presence of the U.S. in Cuba? Could that presence be willed away by Martí and his followers? Cuba was a mono-product economy with the sugar industry in the hands of large landowners, many of them foreign: would Martí have curtailed their influence or nationalized them?

As Lillian Guerra has pointed out, the Martí myth has created a sacrament for Cuban society, a civic religion if you will, depicting Martí as mystic, messiah and mediator. His mysticism is that of patriotic duty and a vision of a free country, messiah because he is a selfless leader who will deliver Cubans to a better future, and mediator because he unites all Cubans, which he stated famously in a speech as ‘with all and for all’. Martí’s comments were made with Cuba’s racial history in mind, something that had caused divisions within the separatist movement and ultimately defeat in previous failed efforts. Martí’s appeal to all Cubans still holds, and Fidel Castro and his bitterest enemies all rally to the Martí banner.

There are many different Martís according to political orientation. There is a liberal Martí who is a pluralist, seen to be above class and race, pragmatic, nationalist and secular (believing in the separation of Church and State), perhaps leaning towards social democracy. Some martianos are more centrist-conservative, saying that Martí was protective of social hierarchies, defended private property (and small business owners), was pro-capitalist, respected religious belief and was also a nationalist. Then there is a liberal revolutionary Martí who is resolutely anti-imperialist, nationalist, identified with the people (‘con los pobres de la tierra quiero mi suerte echar’; I cast my lot with the poor, as he said in his ‘simple verses’), but not necessarily socialist or Communist, with a strong social democratic component. Finally, there is a revolutionary Martí with all the previous revolutionary traits, but further radicalized in support of a utopian classless society, with little private property, a powerful state and a highly unified political system, who has been greatly popularized since 1959.

Throughout the twentieth century, when social observers, politicians and activists – whether in government or in opposition – wanted to lament the island’s economic, social and political problems, they usually evoked Martí, claiming those they were criticizing, whether oligarchs, politicians, journalists or ideologues, were betraying Martí’s ideals. Those claims were made from the different political orientations described previously, but usually centred around issues of sovereignty, which under the Platt Amendment was a constant refrain in Cuban discourse for over three decades.

Julián del Casal and Art as Transfiguration

There are few statues – if any – of Casal (1863–1893) in Cuba, and certainly not one in every school, as is the case with Martí. Casal died younger than Martí and not in battle but due to illness. His mother died when he was five, his father when he was 22. Some say he never recovered from his mother’s death, and death is a recurrent theme in his poetry. He was sickly and reclusive as a child, adolescent and adult: poetry, art and beauty became his only refuge and salvation. Considered ‘queer’ in the current meaning of the word, Casal was an introvert and given to gloomy, nihilistic observation; his work does not revel in nature, patriotism or political struggle, but focuses on art and beauty, and also suffering, loneliness, the bewitching and dark elements of desire, dreams and the lure of faraway places. Because of his health (tuberculosis), he could ill afford the demands of political activism, much less the rigours of armed combat.

It is tempting – and easy – to set up Martí and Casal as polar opposites, and many have done so. If Martí lived in exile, Casal lived as an internal exile; if Martí was a public intellectual and a political figure, Casal was a private aesthete. One could continue this set of differences: Martí was a political activist, exhibited traditional virility and was heterosexual; Casal was more private, ‘feminized’ and queer. Martí believed in transparency, worshipped nature and transcended the literary, becoming a national hero: Casal was oblique, loved masks, treasured art over nature, was a poet maudit and totally embraced the literary and artifice. Martí eagerly sought sacrifice (in the patriotic sense), duty and health; Casal was enthralled by sensuality, pleasure, and was sick most of his life. Martí had a family, is almost always depicted as serious, and is popular; Casal was an orphan, cultivated frivolity and was seen as somewhat elitist.

While this binary schema simplifies matters, it does offer a rough outline of how Cuban cultural life has emerged from the tension of these binaries over more than a century along the lines of ethics versus aesthetics, politics versus art (or the nature of political art), national expression versus personal authenticity, public discourse versus individual creativity. These threads, or obsessions, crop up again and again in Cuban society. From the perspective of queer studies and their reading of Casal, one can establish an entire genealogy that begins with Casal and continues with the likes of Emilio Ballagas, Mercedes Matamoros, Hernández Catá, Carlos Montenegro, Ofelia Rodríguez Castro, Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, José Rodríguez Feo, Lorenzo García Vega, Antón Arrufat, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas and more recently writers like Abilio Estévez, Ena Lucía Portela, Norge Espinosa, Elías Miguel Muñoz and Achy Obejas, among others. This queer perspective (on Casal and others) has been joined by alternative analytic approaches (race, women/gender, youth subcultures, Cubans abroad) as the island delves into more inclusive and complex attempts at defining cubanía (the epitome of Cuban-ness), nationhood and culture.

One of Casal’s most cited poems contains the following quatrain:

Love, fatherland, family, glory, status

Dreams of flaming fantasy

Like open white lotuses in the mud

You dwelled in my soul only for a day.³

These verses could never have been penned by Martí, and the poem, appropriately enough, is titled ‘Nihilism’. If Martí exalted in the simplicity and charm of nature – in an Emersonian sort of rapture – Casal spoke of the city, beautiful clothing, preferring the glitter of diamonds to the light of the stars (‘I have the impure love of the cities’).⁴ Casal’s work expresses the unambiguous notion of the autonomy of art, a love of the artifice (and artificiality) of human creativity as embodied by the artist, and it is linked to pleasure, sensuality and the dark side of the psyche. His poetic mentors were Baudelaire, Huysmans, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Lautréamont. He carried on a correspondence with Gustave Moreau (1828–1898) and the French painter’s lush, symbolic style, laden with mythological references, appealed to the young Cuban’s imagination. His second (and last) book published while he was alive, Nieve (Snow; 1892), includes a cycle of ten poems called ‘My Ideal Museum’, all based on paintings by Moreau, mostly works of the 1860s based on mythological figures (Prometheus, Galatea, Hercules, Venus, Jupiter and so on).

Casal used two different pseudonyms, Hernani and Alceste, for his prose work, which he published in different periodicals. The first is a character from a Victor Hugo play, first staged in 1830, and subsequently made into an opera by Verdi, Ernani (1844). Alceste was a Greek princess, and also the subject of several operas, the most notable by Glück (1767) and Lully (1674). Hernani, a male character, was a bandit, Alceste a woman who is willing to sacrifice herself for her husband. Both Hernani and Alceste are willing to die for love (Hernani actually does), but what is important in the case of Casal is that Hernani is a social outlaw, albeit with noble intentions towards Doña Sol, the woman he loves; as for choosing the name of a woman (Alceste), it makes Casal a gender outlaw, so to speak.

Many scholars have written about the unequivocal erotic references in Casal’s work. Lezama said the following: ‘Sexuality in Casal is urgent and decisive.’⁵ Some critics have pointed out that Casal’s erotic poetry contains few references to women, and s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Building a New Cultural Foundation (1898–1930)
• 2 Curses, Myths and Longing (1930–1959)
• 3 A Revolution in Culture (1959–1980)
• 4 From Mariel to the Special Period (1980–1990)
• 5 From the Special Period to Obama (1990–2014)
• 6 Concluding Remarks (2014–2016)
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index