iVenceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
256
iVenceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822393801 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/12/2011 |
| Series: | Perverse modernities |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 417 KB |
About the Author
Jafari S. Allen is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University.
Read an Excerpt
¡Venceremos?
The Erotics of Black Self-making in CubaBy Jafari S. Allen
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4950-1
Chapter One
Looking (at) "Afro-Cuba(n)"
YOU HAVE LANDED in Cuba—for whatever reason. Undaunted by the noise and gas fumes, the mysterious condensation wafting up from the floor ... the out-of-fashion costumes of the flight attendants on your Cubanacan flight from Toronto, Nassau, Madrid, or Mexico's District Federál, you have arrived, to see for yourself. If your flight is directly from Miami, you look, too, with suspicion at these cousins, nephews and nieces, old friends, old enemies, and the Old Man himself. They regard you likewise, even as they are thrilled to witness your return. Your gaze must also be fixed on what you think of as personal property, which your uncles and grandparents have told you is rightfully yours.
On the long, winding road full of schoolchildren and workers hitching rides and of vecinos (neighbors) talking among themselves, you pass a convention center where international fairs host businesspeople from around the world—promising profitable business in this socialist country—and you go by a specialty hospital where individuals come from first-world nations for medical treatments. Perhaps you yourself have come for such cutting-edge therapy. You may notice that you also pass a number of clinics where Cubans attend free of charge, but with little of the diagnostic equipment or cutting-edge technology available in the specialty hospital. The same is true if you are a fan of seafood; the lobster and shrimp you eat at the restaurant or small paladar (home restaurant) has been reserved for you—not for Cubans. But, farther along the road, green greets you again and your reverie is broken. You see a few cows, and you also see some wagons—which may have parts used and reused for generations—carrying anything from produce to a volleyball team. And yes, there are the old Chevys and Cadillacs from the 1950s that speak of one bygone era, as well as the old Russian-made cars, Ladas, and heavy Chinese bicycles that recall another. Certainly, some buildings crumble, or seem to. Once-vivid blues and vibrant yellows now in turn are grayish, white, and ochre, battered by sea winds and gas exhaust. But Cuba is not a place in a timewarp, no matter how many times that travelers, exiles, and politicos echo this hackneyed phrase. More accurately, it is the perception of Cuba that is warped.
Then, very suddenly, you see the city of Havana. Avenues widen, and there are more tourist taxis and rented Mercedes. More schoolchildren dressed in their gold, blue, or red uniforms. As you pass the famous obelisk monument to Martí you should start counting, since there are hundreds of busts of Martí in the city. Everyone from communist hardliners to dissidents—in Cuba and in Miami—claim him as their own. You get a bit of a thrill when you catch a glimpse of the sculpture of Che's face on the front of the Ministry of the Interior, with serious-looking young black and brown men and women in faded-green uniforms guarding it.
No matter what has brought you here—socialist solidarity, scopophilic drive, erotic imperative, racialized longing—seeing Cuba is more than merely gazing from the windows of a tourist taxi, classroom, or an air-conditioned Mercedes imported expressly for the comfort of foreigners. To see Cuba, and especially its capital Havana, one has to walk. And look—like a friend or foe, CIA agent, meal ticket, solidary compatriot, potential lover, exile, escapee, or expatriate.
Not waiting to be discovered; not unaware of its position in the vast sea; too busy resolving the issues of the hour to be on watch for the "last days": this is another way to see Cuba, a view that is in sharp contrast to the pretension to panorama in which texture, color, sound, and contradiction blur into totalized nothingness. This is the Cuba in which antiphonies do not necessarily happily resolve and where serious games most often have no clear winner—a place that is peopled by folks whose style and politics are confounding to those unfamiliar with the riddles of black diaspora. In this chapter, we analyze and theorize the constitution of space in Cuba, demonstrating de Certeau's contention that space is constituted by individuals' practices within particular places (1984), walking street by street in the city of Havana.
Attempted Flânerie
This notion of walking in the city, of gazing upon the city's landscape and human interactions within that landscape, owes much to de Certeau, who held that walking, gazing, and tracking city paths well worn by others helps us to more deeply read and experience the various rhythms of human interaction. The notion also owes a debt to Walter Benjamin's wanderings through the arcades of Paris. Still, not all flâneurs (and certainly no flâneuse) have unlimited access to gaze—though the city of Havana has long boulevards and promenades that have also inspired poets, novelists, and lovers. This is, therefore, also to say that some walkers are looked at very differently. Some look differently, too. My own practices of looking, for example, fit uneasily within anthropological traditions in which the privilege to look is assumed and the ways that research subjects look at the researcher are mostly ignored. It may seem to some that late capitalist subjects have all become flâneurs in some ways—cruising the great suburban arcade, the shopping mall, looking. Susan Buck-Morss, for example, argues that the flâneur is no longer a singular figure because of the "look but don't touch" (1986: 104) illusions in mass consumer culture, to which Cuba is certainly not immune. If the flâneurs, like the sandwich man and the streetwalking sex worker, survive as ur-forms, as Buck-Morss argues, their enduring significance emerges from the ways in which they are constituted and reconstituted, recognized and misrecognized. Frantz Fanon has already illuminated how troubling this is for the black male subject, and various critics, artists, and policy analysts have further elucidated the ways in which gender and sexuality effectively and affectively limit movements of black bodies through public space.
Men predominate on the streets of Cuban cities and towns. They joke, talk, and play games in plazas, on street corners, and in parks, while women are mostly seen en route to some appointment indoors. Women and girls have less access to life en la calle (in the street), which is where money is made luchando (struggling or fighting, but most appropriately in this instance, hustling). For women, the street is fraught with contradiction. The double and often triple duty of women who are caring for households, working at state-sponsored jobs or enrolled in classes, and perhaps engaged in other (possibly "unofficial") money-making or money-extending opportunities seem to conspire with historical cultural values to keep all but teenagers and jubiladas (pensioners) indoors, if not purposely moving between one point and another, in contrast to the andanderia (strolling) of men. While it has been widely held in Latin American and Caribbean literature that masculinity is made en el calle, the street is more productively thought of as the public sphere, which while including the actual streets is constitutive also of state rhetorics and practices and interaction with disparate elements of the plural culture. This is distinct, but not opposite to la casa (literally house, but more to the point, the private sphere), which has been said to constitute the realm of feminine interest.
HOW DOES IT FEEL to be an object, looking, like a subject? What is the best way to see, and understand, the complex interplay of power in the context of "consciousness, culture and material conditions" (Safa and Nash 1986)? During my preliminary field trips to Cuba, I was intrigued by the ways that I was constantly recognized and misrecognized—thereby requiring my own performance of identification and "disidentification" (Muñoz 1999). The ways I was looked at on the streets of Cuba led me to improvise new ways of seeing and being seen. As a student of anthropology, cultural studies, and Latin American studies, which suggest that it is class that matters in this region, not color or race, I was anxious to finally more fully experience the privileges of my class position during my initial fieldwork in Cuba. At home in the United States, I am aware that my middle-class status is mostly illegible to nonblacks (and I am especially painfully aware that my status as law abiding is invisible to the police). As a young black man in Cuba I was constantly mistaken as Cuban and therefore subject to police surveillance. Every day, near a tourist area on my way to various appointments and errands, I was stopped and commanded: "Dame carnet!" (Give me your id!). Curious about the treatment of the "profiled" during these encounters, I answered police hails of head gestures, hand motions, and "psssst" in various ways. Sometimes I waited to see if I would be pursued. My performances of WWB ("walking while black") were motivated by my youthful zeal to participate while observing, certainly, but also by my desire to play a different racial game than at home in the United States. In Cuba, we "talked back" to the police by attempting to cajole, shame, or playfully tease these young men who could easily be our cousins (or country cousins—guajíro-guajíro! my cosmopolitan friend Ulísis would add). One day Ulísis provided one of the number of extemporaneous performances or creative interpretations I was to hear of segments from Nicolás Guillén's famous revolutionary poem "Tengo." In questioning the young police officer from Oriente who had pulled us over on our way to Guanabo beach because there was a white woman who appeared to be a tourist in the car with us, Ulísis boomed: "Is this not my road? ... my air ... sky ... my beach, my police ... my country?" Although his performance was entertaining to us, it fell flat for the police officer. In my own experience with the Cuban National Police, my protests were heard until the conversation got involved enough to reach the end of my stretched linguistic ability to sound like an angry Habanero, then dismissed. Still, the game of comparative police surveillance must be more fully qualified and pushed further. There is a wide gulf between the terror one feels and remembers while driving, for example, from graduate school's ivy-covered gates to a tenure-track job in the deepest part of George Bush's Deep South—pulled over at seventy-five miles per hour on a seventy mile per hour road. I know the routine "down South." And following Malcolm X, everything south of Canada is down South. Say as little as possible. Call him or her "officer," "sir," or "ma'am." Move slowly. Try to show your university id or business card as you slip your driver's license out of your wallet—ever so slowly. To be pulled over by the Cuban National Police on the way to the beach with friends or while interviewing respondents on a street corner or a bar was to be annoyed by the interruption, and saddened by the reminder that the Revolution has yet so far to go. On occasion, I violated the law and good sense by purposely not carrying my identification card or passport and visa. I often dressed like a Cuban. Secure in my exceptional privileged status as a foreign researcher, the chance of unfortunate repercussions following disobeying the police was much lower than in my home country—land of the ubiquitous "stop and frisk" and of multiple blows, multiple shots, irrespective of occasion, nationality, temperament, or status. Yet after several recurrences of this hailing during each research trip, the novelty of being taken for a "native" wore off, and by my next extended trip the weariness of being constantly "profiled" had set in. When I was walking or hanging out in public with black Cuban men I was conscious of having to comply with their personal strategies for dealing with police aggravation. But when alone, I simply refused or disrecognized the hail. I ignored the signals, pretended I did not understand Spanish, or merely cheerfully waved "hello" when officers of the Cuban National Police attempted to make eye contact or wave me in. On one or two occasions, on the way into a hotel, I simply flashed my United States passport—ashamed, as if passing for a Yuma (American), but having saved a bit of energy. In this instance, my attitude of mutual misrecognition and performance of ignorance, coupled with what an especially savvy Cuban described to me as the distinctive walk of a Newyorquíno (New Yorker), marked me as a privileged foreigner and therefore outside of the purview of certain types of police discipline. This was both a matter of consternation and humor for my black Cuban friends. One night, as we contemplated being approached, yet again, by the police who were watching us, my friends Liolvys and Gerardo expounded theories of their own that were parallel to Louis Althusser's formulation of how ideology makes individuals legible to authority—thereby constructing certain types of persons. Liolvys began by stating, "They think they know you are Cuban so they call out to you 'Hey, give me your carnet [id],' but if you do not look back or act like you know it is you they are calling, they will most likely not bother you." Gerardo, however, adds a critical piece, which makes this a risky enterprise; namely, the force of the state apparatus associated with interpellation or hailing. As he notes, "Well, yes, but if they do catch you, you have really made them angry because you have had a lack of respect for their right to call you." Laughing, he continues, "Jafari can do this because we will call [our New Afrikan sisters] and Fidel will deliver him back to them. You are our brother, but we are not so lucky. Maybe in New York, you can do the same for us!"
My respondent Arturo, who is thirty-four years old, has also tested the disrecognition of hailing as part of his overall self-making strategy to avoid the inconveniences of being interpellated as black Cuban. When we went out for an evening together in tourist-oriented places, he would borrow my clothing or wear one of the gifts that he had been given by foreign acquaintances. As a French teacher, he also has access to linguistic alterity unavailable to most Cubans. He uses it by speaking French when in the earshot of hotel clerks, bartenders, police, and women he wishes to attract. Arturo instructed me to speak English. One day he joked that I should "try an English accent" to enhance our status. When I replied, "I have an English accent," he corrected me by saying, "Not American [mocking my Queens, New York, nasality] but English. British." Instead of being taken as jineteros (hustlers) and rudely asked to leave bars, Arturo and I became targets for jineteros, high-priced drinks, and various forms of entertainment. Louis Althusser hopes to convince us that individuals are abstract with respect to the subjects they already are. He sets up a condition that he believes to be commonsensical: "Before its birth, the child is therefore always already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected' once it has been conceived" (1968: 699). Not only do the police, as agents of the state, scrutinize and interpellate but also tourists, as agents of global capital, do likewise. And families, religious authorities, and cultural gatekeepers also seek to make individuals subject to their regimes of control. However, although these expectations and "places" are determined by history and political economy, the individual's arrival to the determined place is not. Individual subjects do not always accept this interpellation. They do not always answer the hail, or may do so strategically or with a particular tactical logic to meet short-term or long-term goals. Strategy, to follow de Certeau, is an action occurring with an already determined sphere of governmentality, as opposed to tactics, which are more clearly done on the fly or in situations where the rules may be more flexible or dynamic. These infrapolitical moves do not constitute revolution or even a movement, certainly. But in any case, the individual's concrete, material behavior is, to the contrary of Althusser, precisely not "simply the inscription in life in lieu of the admirable words of prayer—Amen, So be it" (1968: 701).
Black Cubans and Afro-Cuban "Folklore"
Callejón de Hamel, or the Hamel Alleyway, is fraught with contradiction, complexity, and ambivalence. A two-block alleyway in the mostly black Cayo Hueso section of Havana, Callejón de Hamel functions as a tourist attraction for more intrepid visitors who prefer to experience the "reality of Cuban rumba" over the overtly folkloric or "canned" versions of rumba at the Tropicana and other famous performance spaces. This multidimensional multimedia outdoor art space with live music is an important site for the production and practice of "authentic" black Cubanidad on the stage, on the walls, and off of the stage among the young men and (fewer) women who hang out there. Cayo Hueso has for many years been a center of popular African practices in Cuba. One can hear the music of toques (Regla de Ocha ceremonies with drums) during several nights of the week, along with popular Cuban music—son, songo, charenga, and timba-global pop, reggaetón, and rap. There is an active and historic Ñañigo potencia (chapter) here, and some families maintain ties to Cabildos de nación (African ethnic associations), going back several generations. Callejón de Hamel is recognized as special because of its intentional and spectacular marking as an Afro-Cuban space. Salvador Gonzalez, the muralist and sculptor who created the Afro-Cuban religious themed murals in the area, describes it as
a heavy load of poetic images and sculpture ... Its walls express in one form or another, the feeling of ... African culture in our country. You will find here pieces of sculpture, overhanging roofs with many colors, poetry, images. A house that could be a temple or that is a temple for this community ... it preserves those values which for many are archaic, primitive, but which nevertheless have their origin in one of the oldest cultures on earth—... a living ritual, with living consecrated drums, with living elements of a strong cultural identity. (Gonzales cited in Sarduy and Stubbs 2000: 115)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ¡Venceremos? by Jafari S. Allen Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Invoking "A larger freedom" 1
1. Looking (at) "Afro-Cuba(n)" 19
2. Discursive Sleight of Hand: Race, Sex, Gender 41
3. The Erotics and Politics of Self-making 74
4. De Cierta Manera . . . Hasta Cierto Punto (One Way or Another . . . Up to a Certain Point) 100
5. Friendship as a Mode of Survival 129
6. Hagamos un Chen! (We Make Change!) 157
Coda: Vamos a Vencer! (We Will Win!) 186
Notes 195
References 211
Index 233