Abstract
This article discusses representations of the “Afro-Cuban-occupied house” in Cuban-American autobiographical narratives of a 1990s return to Cuba. A trope in which island Afro-Cubans inhabit houses once owned or lived in by white Cuban-Americans, the Afro-Cuban-occupied house appears repeatedly in Cuban-American literary and film texts during the period. The article argues that the trope, more than another example of “literary Afro-Cubanness,” discloses Cuban-American whiteness and its constitutive element, privilege, thus inviting Cuban-American literary and cultural studies to engage in conversations along the lines of a critical Latino whiteness studies.
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Notes
Large-scale returns to revolutionary Cuba date from 1978, when the Carter administration and the Cuban state reached détente, leading to the release of island political prisoners and the return, through 1979, of many thousands of Cuban exiles in a process of family reunification. Relations would deteriorate again after the Mariel boatlift in 1980. A notable earlier return was the Afro-Cuban Lourdes Casal's 1973 voyage back; see Casal (1974). For examples of a late 1977 return by members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, see Otero et al (1978). See De los Ángeles Torres (1999, 84–126), for a discussion of the Maceo Brigade in particular, and the 1970s and 1980s returns in general, in the context of Cuba–US relations.
Corral (2004) addresses the still unsettled nature of Cuban property considerations among Cuban Americans.
On the transformation of vivienda during the Special Period, see Henken (2002).
DeGuzmán (2005) shows how the Spanish “fiction of the hidalgo with sangre pura (pure blood), untainted by the blood of moros (Moors) or judíos (Jews),” ironically encouraged Anglo white supremacy “to do ‘the Spaniards’ one better” by elaborating “a fantasy of [Anglo] racial purity through the representation of Spaniards as figures of morally blackened alien whiteness or off-whiteness and doomed hybridity” (xxiv). Buscaglia-Salgado (2003) links both Anglo- and Hispano-white fears of “doomed hybridity” to the mulatto cultures of the African-slavery Caribbean.
Pew states that “Cubans are far more likely than other Hispanics to identify themselves as white when asked about their race. In the 2004 Census data, about 86 per cent of Cubans said they were white, compared with 60 per cent among Mexicans, 53 per cent among other Central and South Americans and 50 per cent among Puerto Ricans” (2006, 3). Given that recent “maximalist estimates of 60 to 70 per cent of the [island Cuban] population are considered, broadly speaking, to be black” (Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs, 2000, 6), a striking racialization contrast thus emerges between a white Cuban America and an Afro-Cuban Cuba. A watershed in white Cuban-American demography was the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when over 120 000 Cuban marielitos from “working-class and agrarian backgrounds … [as well as] Afro-Cubans and mulattos” arrived in Florida (Grosfoguel and Georas, 2003, 170–171).
Pérez Firmat, de la Campa, and Behar were prominent academics in the emergence in the 1990s of Cuban-American literary and cultural studies – especially Pérez Firmat's (1994) Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, de la Campa's essays on Cuban Americans and Latino/as (for example, de la Campa, 1994), and Behar's (1995a) edited collection, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba. A context for their autobiographical texts is the 1990s culture of the institutional-academic personal narrative (Simpson, 1995).
An index of privilege is the “more than one billion dollars” that pre-1980 Cuban exiles received from the US Cuban Refugee Program, a form of cold-war “privileged treatment” separating Cubans from the “racialization of Puerto Ricans as inferior ‘Others’ […] entangled with the racialization of African Americans,” thus “‘whitening’ the perception of [the Cuban-American] difference in the imaginary of ‘White’ America.” In the case of the Small Business Administration in Miami, Cubans received “66 per cent of its total loans between 1968 and 1979, compared to a mere 8 per cent of loans given to African-Americans during that same period” (Grosfoguel, 2003, 112, 113, 163, 169).
Ferrer (1998, 1999) discusses the nineteenth-century discourse of the postracial, in which a post-independence Cubanness “comes after” race and therefore renders unnecessary (and, indeed, unpatriotic and potentially treasonous) Afro-Cuban public self-identifications. Moore (1997) and Kutzinski (1993) chart Cuban mestizaje, a highly eroticized and gendered ideology of the nation as a mixed-race construction developing in tension with the postracial over the twentieth century; see also Helg (1995) and de la Fuente (2001). Fernandes (2006), Sawyer (2006), and Hernández-Reguant (2006) discuss Afro-Cuban self-identifications and Cuban state responses in the 1990s.
Texts for a multidisciplinary discussion of Latino whiteness from early-modern Spain and post/colonial Latin America to the post/modern United States may include Piedra (1987), Yúdice (1995), G. Martínez (1997), Quijano (2000), Mignolo (2000), Rodriguez (2000), Buscaglia-Salgado (2003), and DeGuzmán (2005). For Mexican-American and Chicano Studies contributions, see Padilla (1993), Almaguer (1994), Sánchez (1995), Meyer (1996), Luis-Brown (1997), Foley (1997), Chabram-Dernersesian (1997), Menchaca (2001), M. Sánchez (2001), and Chvany (2002). See also Álvarez (1998) and Torres-Saillant (2000) on the Dominican Republic and its US diaspora and Aparicio (1998), Grosfoguel (2003), and Vidal-Ortiz (2004) on island and mainland Puerto Ricans. On critical Anglo whiteness studies, see Fishkin (1995) and Hill (2004).
See Barreda (1979), Jackson (1979), Luis (1990), Kutzinski (1993), Marrero (1997), and Rodríguez-Mangual (2004) for a range of criticism on Afro-Cuban literary figures in white Cuban and Cuban-American texts.
Texts for a multidisciplinary discussion of Cuban and Cuban-American whiteness may include Opatrný (1994), Naranjo Orovio (1996), Ferrer (1998, 1999), Martínez (2000), Flores (2000; 167–188), Castro (2000), Ojito (2001), Lane (2005), Mirabal (2005), and Brewer Current (2008). Like the Anglo-US critical academic tradition on whiteness, critical Cuban/Cuban-American work on the topic draws on earlier Afro-Cuban literary and intellectual production by such figures as Gustavo Urrutia and Nicolás Guillén in the early to mid-twentieth century – and, earlier still, on the writings of Juan Gualberto Gómez, Rafael Serra, Lino D’Ou.
All translations are mine.
Matters of race and space converging in figures of the house also inform my discussion. See Kawash (2001) and Bishara (2003) for African diasporic and Palestinian postcolonial revisions of the house as a “body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (Bachelard, 1964, 17).
The song in question is almost certainly the renowned Afro-Cuban composer and flutist Eduardo “Richard” Egües' “El bodeguero,” composed in 1956, played by the Orquesta Aragón (of which Egües was a member), and later that decade, in an instance of African-American revision, covered by Nat King Cole in the album Cole Español. As the metatextual composers of the song and of Vargas’ dance performance of Cuban-American whiteness, Egües and Cole represent an African diasporic subtextual authorship in the cosa de blancos text, with Cole's use of the song opening up another question: the reception of the bodeguero figure of Latin-American whiteness, here performed by Cole, among Anglo-white and African-American audiences.
An earlier critique of race and gender vis-à-vis Pérez Firmat's critical work is Kutzinski (1993), Sugar's Secrets (172, 176), which focuses on his readings of Guillén's poems. Pérez Firmat's discussion of Desi Arnaz in Life on the Hyphen never engages its subject's Cuban-American whiteness – and the same can be said about the afrocubanidad of Dámaso Pérez Prado in Hyphen's chapter on that famous Cuban singer's work in the mid-twentieth-century mambo cultures of the United States. However, in an earlier work, The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (1989), Pérez Firmat frames the early works of Nicolás Guillén as “white poetry” and acknowledges guajiro figures as whiteness in the Spanish-born Cuban poet Eugenio Florit.
See de los Ángeles Torres (1999, 89–100), for the Antonio Maceo Brigade, Areíto, and young progressive Cuban-exile politics in the 1970s. de la Campa (1978) is an important account of the late 1977 return that features his first re-encounter with what would become the Afro-Cuban-occupied house in Cuba on My Mind. de la Campa has published many articles on Latin American and US Latino culture, theory, and politics, and his books include Latin Americanism (1999) and Nuevas cartografías latinoamericanas (2006). Contra viento y marea (1978b), emerges from the Maceo brigade and Areíto experience. de la Campa's “An Impossible Commute,” a chapter of Cuba on My Mind published earlier in Public Culture, recounts this period of his life, marked by critical, complex shifts between identification and disillusionment with Cuba's revolution and diaspora in personal and institutional terms. Another important difference is the circumstance of his white, middle-class departure from Cuba shortly after the revolution: de la Campa was an adolescent in the Peter Pan program, in which Cuban parents, fearful of state intervention into the family, drew on Catholic church support to send thousands of Cuban boys and girls alone to the United States. He devotes a chapter of Cuba on My Mind – “A Peter Pan Story” – to this experience. See also María de los Ángeles Torres (2003).
In addition to Bridges, Behar has published Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993); Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (1996); and An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (2007). Her recent volume, The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World (2008), co-edited with Lucía M. Suárez, reflects on Bridges, moving with it – and beyond it – into a discussion of Cuban globality that departs from the earlier volume's need “to close the gap between Cubans ‘here’ and ‘there,’” a project that was undertaken by Behar and her contributors in both discursive and material ways; Behar (2008, 5). See especially Part III of Portable Island, “Regresos: When We Return,” particularly Behar's own “The Woman Who Wanted Bridges.”
de la Campa's observation of a “complex transformation of property holding – and, in some cases, affective structures” – resonates with queer diaspora linkages “based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments” (Eng, 2003, 4).
See Lane (2005, 124–125) for gallego and Buscaglia-Salgado (2003, 195) for guajiro types in Cuban culture.
Behar embarked on the film with little prior training in filmmaking, assisted by two graduate students, Gisela Fosado and Umi Vaughn. There have been several cuts of the film, each, it seems, with a slightly different way of stressing its various sub-themes – including, of course, Cuban race. One of these earlier versions “premiered at the Havana Film Festival in 2001” (Behar 2005, 229, 233).
The original narrator was Behar herself. “Initial versions of the film used my voice. When WMM [Women Makes Movies] became my distributor they asked me to get an actress to do the voiceover. I asked Peña and she agreed to work on the film. In the Spanish version of the film I kept my voice.” E-mail from Ruth Behar, 7 April 2009. I thank Ricardo Ortiz for putting me in contact with Behar.
El súper is set in upper Manhattan, between the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and Washington Heights, which the Cuban Americans then – resident had translocalized with the name “el Escambray,” after the Cuban mountain range; the film thus locates a post-1959, pre-Mariel Cuban exile (and Cuban-American whiteness) beyond Miami, in a Manhattan area in close proximity to African Americans and Puerto Ricans in Harlem (and to a rising Dominican-American population in the Heights itself).
Peña's own biography is relevant, too, in that it describes a very different form of Cuban-American return: “[F]our months after Peña's birth” in Elizabeth, New Jersey, shortly after the Cuban revolution, Peña's family “went back to Cuba […].” However, Peña would return to the US in 1968, in the aftermath of her father's political arrest on the island; García-Johnson (1993, 314). For the early “illegal” domestic-worker and nanny roles, see the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) and the television series I Married Dora (1987).
Another return to a former Behar apartment in Adio Kerida, one that would carry the discussion toward constructions of Jewish-Americanness, occurs in Queens. “In New York, their former apartment is now inhabited by a recently-arrived family from Uzbekhistan who also happens to be Jewish, and in whose house Behar lights a menorah to honor their common diasporic experience” (Hernández-Reguant 2004, 498).
Since 2000, the video has been screened in film festivals in Cuba and New York: the First International Low-Budget Film Festival in Gibara, Cuba in April, 2003; Cinema Tropical, Americas Society, New York, February 2002; and the 22nd Festival of New Latin American Cinema, Havana, December 2000. The video has a website, www.cubanroots.com.
The biographical information in this paragraph comes from www.cubanroots.com.
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López, A. Cosa de Blancos: Cuban-American whiteness and the Afro-Cuban-occupied house. Lat Stud 8, 220–243 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.23