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 such as a socialist political economy, a growing tourist sector, and foreign investment, as well as by more local processes such as state censorship and systems of production. But on the other hand, people retain some agency to interpret, challenge, and reinvent the ideas and values that inhabit the public sphere; ideological struggle remains an important part of the way hegemony works.

I propose a notion of hegemony as both the cultural elements of values, images, and ideas that are broadly disseminated in a given social order and material practices such as regulation, censorship, and institutional control that may serve to inscribe meanings in everyday life. This concept of hegemony can help us to map the shifts in power that Cuban scholars identify as important in a moment of crisis and transformation, particularly as the Cuban state yields space to a range of actors and modes of governance become more dispersed. In the contemporary period, in areas such as the arts, Cubans question the values and meanings that have motivated the Cuban revolution since 1959. However, beliefs are often reconciled or resolved in ways that bolster the power of the Cuban socialist state: this is how hegemony operates in Cuba. Instead of accepting the idea that an ideology achieves hegemony when it is taken-for-granted, I suggest we conceive of hegemony as a process of partial reincorporation, or the efforts of actors at various levels to assimilate counter-dominant expressions and practices into official discourses and institutions. Hegemony is always being made and remade, but in a moment of crisis when the system faces challenges from a variety of groups, we can see the process of reincorporation much more clearly.

By bringing a revised notion of hegemony back into our analysis of power and change, we can begin to theorize the complexity of ideological fields and their development over time. How are dominant discourses formed? How do ordinary people reimagine and reinterpret discourses in ways that are important for them at moments of crisis and change? How do diffuse and newly emerging values influence the ways in which official discourses are constructed?

Social Values in Prerevolutionary Cuba

There is a tendency within Cuban studies to see socialism as a set of foreign values that were attached to Cuban nationalism. For example, Tzvi Medin (1990:53) claims that Cubans were far removed from the conceptual world of Marxism-Leninism: "Cuban revolutionary leaders introduced Marxism-Leninism into the Cuban revolutionary message by grafting it onto the images, symbols, values, and concepts of Cuban nationalism." Antoni Kapcia (2000:6) sees the Cuban socialist values of collectivism, egalitarianism, and work as part of an ideology of cubana, or Cubanness, that had been the basis of nationalist movements from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. The values of collectivism, egalitarianism, and voluntary effort that were to become the basis of state ideology in the socialist period were embedded in prerevolutionary Cuban society through the experiences of the Cuban nationalist movements, religious and other forms of social organization, and even paradoxically as a result of the contradictory impact of such North American cultural influences as baseball, Protestantism, and consumer culture. According to Louis A. Prez (1999), such agents as missionaries, conservative politicians, revolutionaries, and North American capitalists competed to appropriate alternative values for their own particular projects of transformation. But by the 1960s, the revolutionary leadership had gained considerable ideological ground as the force capable of restoring the utopian vision of Cuban nationalism.

Collectivism was linked to the desire for equality in the experiences of the Cuban nationalist movements during the nineteenth century. Ada Ferrer (1999:4) argues that the joint political action of armed white, black, and mulatto men in Cuba's anticolonial war created a tangible basis for cross-racial alliance and national unity, in contrast to the spatial segregation of North America and the promotion of miscegenation in such countries as Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela. In the struggle against Spain, nationalist ideology produced the vision of a free, equal, and inclusive republic (De la Fuente 2001:12). The notion of a unified community that was forged across racial and social lines, as envisioned by the Cuban nationalist leader Jos Mart, helped to foster strong traditions of collectivism and egalitarianism in Cuban popular consciousness (Kapcia 2000:86). On the one hand, as Ferrer (1999:135) notes, unity implied silence in regard to race; to speak of race was seen as compromising the nationalist project. But on the other hand, black and mulatto activists and intellectuals such as Juan Gualberto Gmez and Rafael Serra were central to the construction of an ideology of racial unity along with the white independence leaders Jos Mart and Manuel Sanguily (Ferrer 1999:133). Notions of a raceless Cuban community and collective national belonging were present in the writings and speeches of black Cuban intellectuals, insurgents, and journalists during the struggle for independence.

The emphasis on voluntary labor was also established during the nationalist movements of the prerevolutionary period. Matilde Molina Cintra and Rosa Rodriguez Lauzurique (1998:71) argue that the work ethic had specific roots in an ideology promoted by Mart. According to Mart, "Man grows with the work that comes from his hands. Creating the habit of an intelligent force emancipates the personality and disciplines the character" (quoted in Molina Cintra and Rodriguez Lauzurique 1998:71). The level of voluntary effort required by the anticolonial movements during the wars of independence gave further impetus to an ethic of work discipline.

The values that were nurtured by the anticolonial movements of the nineteenth century both conflicted with and found curious expression in various strands of North American culture that spread in postindependence Cuban society, as Cuba was increasingly drawn into the United States' orbit. Prez (1999) argues that the growth of North American Protestantism after independence was partly a reaction against the Catholic church and its association with the Spanish colonizers. Protestant missionaries attempted to integrate Cubans into a new culture that emphasized the market as a means of well-being. Protestantism and the new market culture, represented also by the influx of North American motion pictures, advertising, fashion, and consumer goods, introduced values such as free will, individual responsibility, hierarchy, and consumerism, which stood in contrast to the notions of cooperation, collectivism, equality, and work that had been developed through the experiences of anticolonial organizing. But in other ways, Protestantism and market culture themselves promoted and reinforced the anticolonial values: the evangelical churches' ethic of hard work and helpfulness to others encouraged perseverance and cooperation. Quakers and Methodists organized programs to teach schoolchildren a "cooperative spirit" and promote crafts and cottage industries. Even baseball, popularized by an expanding North American presence, served in some ways to foster solidarity and an ethic of work and discipline among Cubans (Prez 1999:250-259). But during the mid-twentieth-century years of revolutionary activism, new cultural visions led to a reconfiguration of ideological fields as they had developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Many factors led to increasing disillusionment with the North American cultural presence and the promises of the market in the 1950s. Washington's support for Fulgencia Batista's military coup of 1952 estranged Cubans from North Americans (Benjamin 1990:121). The decline in profits from sugar and broader structural adjustments produced unemployment and uncertainty, and the cost of living rose sharply (Prez 1999:449-451). The promises of access for all and material well-being based on a prosperous market economy derived from U.S. models were giving way to a reality of privilege, hierarchy, and indifference to inequality (Prez 1999:467). In this context, the unrequited aspirations and consumerism originally fostered by the market were transferred to the growing revolutionary movements that sought to challenge the authoritarian government of Batista.

The movement that toppled Batista's regime on 8 January 1959 joined guerrilla rebels, politicians, activists, supporters of the Cuban Socialist Party, students, workers, and intellectuals. As Kapcia (2000:99) states, this movement had a "visibly broad base of active and passive support" that crossed regional and social boundaries, including Havana's middle classes and elites, as well as the poorest peasants in the Sierra. The euphoria generated by the triumphant entry of Fidel and his forces into Havana in January 1959 and the participation of large sectors of the population in subsequent activities carried out by the revolutionary leadership-the literacy campaign, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRS), cooperatives, brigades-produced a sense of solidarity that had a profound influence on Cuban social consciousness.

(Continues...)

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