Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sujatha Fernandes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York.

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"As a work that comes out of the discipline of political science, "Cuba Represent!" is extremely brave and original. Sujatha Fernandes manages to offer a language that is truly interdisciplinary, moving successfully across the boundaries of the social sciences and the humanities."--Ruth Behar, author of "Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story"

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Cuba Represent!

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.......................................................................................................xiPreface.....................................................................................................................xvAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................1Introduction: Artistic Public Spheres and the State.........................................................................231. Remaking Conceptual Worlds: Changing Ideologies in Socialist Cuba........................................................422. Old Utopias, New Realities: Film Publics, Critical Debates, and New Modes of Incorporation...............................853. Fear of a Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings, and State Power..........................................1354. Postwar Reconstructions: State Institutions, Public Art, and the New Market Conditions of Production.....................181Conclusion..................................................................................................................191Notes.......................................................................................................................199Bibliography................................................................................................................213

Chapter One

Ordinary people share certain languages, symbols, and discursive frameworks for describing and perceiving change in their realities and for making sense of the world and their place in it. Discursive frameworks are shaped by the broader political and economic orders under which people live, but these frameworks can also be undermined, reworked, and overcome by counterhegemonic movements and orders. A radical ideological vision gave people the tools to analyze their existing realities and at the same time retained the power to reincorporate their alternative and oppositional ideas. The values and beliefs coded in that vision now shape people's efforts to come to grips with a tragic dismantling of the world as they knew it.

The revolutionary movements of the 1950s and 1960s in Cuba popularized such values and ideas as collectivism, work, and egalitarianism. These values had been implicit in the activities of certain groups and had some historical resonance within sectors of Cuban society as a result of nationalist and anticolonial struggles dating back to the nineteenth century. The revolutionary leaders used these new values as they attempted to remake the political, economic, and social worlds of ordinary Cubans and to win over large sectors of the population to their project of social reconstruction. The increasing gap between the rhetoric of socialism and the reality of everyday life produced an ideological crisis for the Cuban state of the kind that proved detrimental to the socialist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But the emergence of new modes of incorporation in Cuban society has allowed the state to manage the crisis as it attempts to rebuild its cultural legitimacy.

Hegemony as Partial Reincorporation

The concept of hegemony as it has developed within the social sciences and humanities has tended to focus on the cultural and discursive elements of power and domination. Drawing on Gramsci, cultural studies theorists and anthropologists such as Stuart Hall and Jean and John Comaroff argue that culture constitutes a crucial terrain in the war of ideas, as dominant groups attempt to gain popular support for their particular ideology or worldview. According to Hall, the ideology of a historic bloc becomes hegemonic when it becomes the "horizon of the taken-for-granted" (1988:44), when it "shapes our ordinary, practical, everyday calculation and appears as natural as the air we breathe" (1985:8). However, dominant values in contemporary Cuba are not "taken-for-granted" in the sense of constituting a set of shared values or a naturalized social order. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic crisis have revealed the contradictions between lived reality and dominant socialist values such as collectivism or the communal solidarity of the Cuban people, egalitarianism as the ideal of a community undivided by class or social distinction, and work as the voluntary labor necessary to overcome the nation's dependency. Individualism has become more marked, the introduction of a dollar economy has given rise to growing inequalities in Cuban society, and work is no longer remunerative.

A range of theoretical interventions in the social sciences have sought to challenge the account of hegemony as ideological incorporation or shared values. The political scientist James Scott (1990) claims that the subversive jokes, folktales, and other forms of hidden resistance that have always been a part of popular subaltern life prove that most subordinates have never been invested in the ideas of ruling elites to the extent claimed by Gramscian-inspired theories of hegemony. In contrast to the idealist interpretation of hegemony prevalent in cultural studies and anthropology, Derek Sayer (1994:375) also argues that domination is less about inculcating beliefs or securing consent than about inducing compliance by means of bureaucratic regulations and routines, such as licenses, censuses, and registers. Scholars have extended these insights to socialist and authoritarian systems, suggesting that citizens do not believe the claims of official ideology; rather they pretend to uphold official slogans and ideologies while privately maintaining a cynical distance (Zizek 1989, Wedeen 1999). People's cynicism toward dominant values of work and collectivism does not matter; what is important to the maintenance of domination is that citizens participate in rituals that give the appearance of public consent. This interpretation does have some applicability in the Cuban context. Citizens see the contradictions between official ideology and lived reality, but they continue to participate in what Michael Burawoy and Jnos Lukcs (1992:20) have called "ritual activities," such as production conferences and brigade competitions, which give official ideology a structuring reality of its own. Cubans use the term doble moral, or duplicity, to refer to this up-holding of official rhetoric while privately holding other views.

But even if dominant values are not "taken-for-granted" by ordinary Cubans, in my field research I found that many people are invested in and recognize certain meanings, images, ways of understanding their world, and articulating their concerns. This is not, as Roseberry (1994a) notes, a "shared ideology," but rather "a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination." On the one hand, the material realities of power shape and constrict the kinds of frameworks and languages that are available, as Gramsci (1971:184) himself noted: material conditions such as economic crises can "create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions." Consciousness is shaped by broader, often contradictory, material forces...