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Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World
Rituals and Remembrances
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-07096-1
Chapter One
The Economic Vitamins of Cuba: Sacred and Other Dance Performance
YVONNE DANIEL
INTRODUCTION
Dance practices are targeted economic commodities within the societies that I study. Although I am not an economist, I have had to account for the economic use of dance performance throughout my circum-Caribbean investigations over the past three decades. Particularly, African-derived religious performance has been included in and successfully promoted as tourist entertainment.
In Haiti, for example, the religious rituals of Haitian Vodou have been promoted in urban hotels and other tourist venues almost every night since the U.S. occupation in the early 1900s, and they continue today. In the states of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro of Brazil, spectacular ritual dancing from the Candomblé and Angola religions are offered as part of Brazil's African heritage, acquainting eager tourists with at least two cultural elements of Brazil. Tourists are shown dynamic, African-derived dance practices of the coastal north and south in order to capture the exciting and exoticized image of the "brown dancing body"; however, in fairness, tourist directors use dance performance to broaden outside understanding of Brazil's diverse cultural palate. In Cuba as well, religious dance performance is presented with other types of dance as "cultural artifact" beneath the umbrella of atheistic, secular ideology, or Cuban communism/socialism.
In these circum-Caribbean locales, worshipers from the African-derived religions are not particularly upset with the transport of religious dance performance to the secular setting. They are quite used to the inclusion of sacred performances among secular, popular dancing in tourist enterprises. They conclude that the economic domain of the state or island nation indirectly supports African-derived religions and their dances. In Cuba, the geographical focus of this essay, worshipers know fully of the government's interest in their religions and utilize the national "guardianship" of the orichas, the inclusion of African dance practice in tourist settings, as their own public display, spiritual offering, and economic opportunity. They shrewdly suggest that their religious practices are support for good citizenship. They know that sacred dance, as well as secular forms of dance performance, gives small but continuous contributions to the economic health of the nation, as well as to their family congregations.
In this essay, I liken the linkage of dance performance and the economic situation of the Cuban nation to the role that vitamins play in the human body. Accordingly, I reexamine my Cuban dance data from the tourist setting, particularly sacred performance, and test my original findings from between 1985 and 1990. Early findings indicated that dance serves as "economic vitamins" to Cuba's ailing economy and as "aesthetic vitamins" and "spiritual vitamins" for hard-pressed international dance and music students.
VITAMINS AND DANCE PERFORMANCE
Vitamins are small amounts of complex organic substances that act as support elements and nutritional supplements for the healthy human body. As a minuscule economic product relative to other commodities, dance has emerged as a curious but supportive element for the health and well-being of Cuba's economy. Tourism is the most viable economic enterprise that the majority of Caribbean islands have at their disposal. As economic vitamins from the Cuban aesthetic system, dance performance has given vitamin-like nourishment to the Cuban economy, to Cubans, and to tourists alike. Cuba's difficult economic situation affords an example of how this happens—that is, how aesthetics and economic concerns interact.
Cuba's economic strategy has focused on cultural, ecological, and historical tourism, but since the 1990s, it has had to contend with the return of commercial, entertainment-focused tourism. Cuba has concentrated on the personnel and accoutrement of dance and extravaganza styles, and interestingly, this has included sacred dance. Yet economists and other observers of Cuba have generally neglected the effects of dance performance in terms of its contributions to Cuba's economy. The Cuban tourist industry has had to manage serious "rough spots" in its development, and dance performance has provided a buffering balm. In comparison with world tourist destinations, the Cuban tourist industry has had to confront limited goods, low levels of service, and aging or waning facilities. With the inclusion of a commodity that is literally "in motion" and formidably within Cuba's human resources, Cuba's competitive position and exchange potential have been augmented. My anthropological observations of dance in Cuba since 1985 have shown that dance performance has given "nourishment" to conventional economic and tourism development.
A VIEW OF CUBAN ECONOMICS IN RELATION TO TOURISM
Cuban tourism has been inexpensive for tourists relative to other Caribbean destinations, and Cuba has tapped a rather large European, Canadian, and Latin American market. Cuba's beaches, particularly Varadero in the northwest and Bacardi in the southeast, supply major percentages of tourist income. Joint ventures between Cuba and Mexico, Canada, Spain, and Japan, among other countries, have improved the Civil Aeronautics Institute, the hotel industry, and auxiliary service organizations, including hotel, road, and airport construction, as well as development of tourist management training. In fact, Cuban tourism grew from the 1970s to the 1990s. By 1991 reports, tourism had equaled its formidable numbers in the Batista regime of the 1950s, when Cuba was the "backyard" of the United States and the "playground" of Europe and Latin America.
Between 2000 and 2006, estimates for visitors to Cuba were projected from 160,000 to 200,000 visitors per year. Professor William LeoGrande, a specialist in international studies and Cuba, suggests that about thirty thousand of these were legal entries with U.S. licenses while twenty to fifty thousand were illegal U.S. entries through Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean nations. These estimates show that even with renewed and even more rigid restrictions from George W. Bush's administration (e.g., on cultural exchange in 2003 and education exchange in 2004), Cuban tourism has not been gravely affected by the ban on travel for U.S. citizens. Additionally, Professor Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section and present senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has stated that "while the new restrictions on the travel of Americans and Cuban-Americans to the island have of course reduced revenues from that source, overall revenues from tourism have not fallen, since Canadians, Europeans, and Latin Americans have continued to travel in even greater numbers."
Heavy student travel from the United States to Cuba has diminished; in fact, only one of over thirty study abroad programs for U.S./Cuba exchange was in operation as of 2006. Again however, there does not seem to be a diminished interest in Cuba. "Cuban tourism has been thriving without us ... The number of visitors has grown ten-fold since 1985, topping two million this year, and the revenue from tourism has grown twenty-fold," continues Professor LeoGrande. Indeed, revenue from tourism has seeded the tremendous growth in restoration and renovation projects throughout Cuba. Within these projects, dance has been incorporated into pivotal tourist shows and routine nightly socializing.
Tourists—called "special visitors" or "guests" in Cuba—have always found dance interspersed within eco-, historic, and cultural tourism. The Castro government has utilized its natural resources in ecotourism development, for example, in the lush Sierra Madre mountain range of the east, in the fishing industry along the north-central and eastern coasts, in the contrasting desertlike central region of Camagüey, and in the "country" ambiance of Pinar del Rio and Isla de la Joventud in the west. Additionally, the government has poured some of its profits into the restoration of historic structures, as well as whole districts of its historic capitals in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. By 2000, plans to restore architectural treasures from the Cuban colonial period (from the 1500s forward) were in full swing. Regardless of the reasons why tourists travel to Cuba, whether for urban conferences, symposia, and festivals or for mountain, beach, or country treks, they expect dance and music.
Cuba is struggling to maintain its socialist principles in a capitalistic world order. The remaining global superpower is determined to neglect, isolate, and thereby suffocate Cuba's political structure. Simultaneously, Cuba is defiant in its sovereignty, to the point of causing severe health and economic crises for its population. It has turned to and relied on tourist enterprises that reduce its financial dilemmas and theoretically give relief to the Cuban population. In recent years, these efforts have also placed some of postrevolutionary Cuba's goals in jeopardy. Nevertheless, the Cuban government has organized and regularly promotes dance for the indirect economic benefits it brings. Like vitamins, Cuban dance provides small but consistent stimuli to Cuba's conventional economic development.
DANCE IN THE CUBAN TOURIST SETTING
Since 1979, dance performance has been prominently identified as a marketable attraction within the Cuban Ministry of Culture. The ministry has worked with the tourist bureaus of Cuba (CubaTur, HavanaTur, and InTur), as well as the tourist bureaus of Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas and Marazul Tours in the United States, among other international tourist bureaus, to supply performances mainly but also dance workshops for a steady stream of tourist groups. Perhaps because there is little world interest in two of the three commodities that are in abundance inside Cuba—sugar, rum, and tobacco—the Castro government has developed its human resources as its "cultural capital," in order to maximize limited economic opportunities and to accumulate foreign exchange. It has used what has existed in abundance continuously on Cuban soil; it has publicly presented what is carried inside the Cuban body and in the Cuban air with few encumbrances: Cuban dance. Cuba has displayed its dance in public, cultural, and historical frameworks within casas de cultura (district culture houses), hotel lobbies and nightclubs, theaters, patios, and poolside entertainment bars.
Historically, tourists came to know about Cuban dance as its forms spread internationally via the film and recording industries and the international arts market during the 1930s. Later, from the 1970s forward, Cuban dance was used like the Cuban education and medical systems were used, as cultural capital that provided domestic economic advantage but also international publicity (e.g., "health tourism" and "biotechnological tourism"). The latest example of Cuba's musical prowess at the international level occurred during the U.S. Grammy Awards in 2000, with the nomination of Buena Vista Social Club (Ry Cooder, producer), by a renowned group of soneros, for Best Latin Tropical Music Album. The album was inspired by the award-winning film in 1999 by the same name (Wim Wenders and Ry Cooder, producers/directors).
Due to the political circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s, dance workshops and music festivals developed within Cuba more than international touring of Cuban musical groups or award-winning dance choreographies. Festivals and workshops registered significantly among international visitors, and gradually a domestic awareness of the economic value of these universal practices—dance and music—took hold. The small but enduring consequences of dance performance were realized in the danced journey from Cuban streets to the national and international stage, as well as from small family "houses" and neighborhood religious "temples" to professional and community theaters.
Beyond the magnificent beaches and splendid nightclubs that dominate Cuba's tourist market, all types of dance and music performances gained prominence as desirable products in the tourist industry, but few were as successful as sacred dances. Several types of sacred dance are usually presented: Yoruba oricha dances, Kongo-Angola Palo dances, Abakuá secret society masked dances, and Arará or Fon-based dances. Most often, the sacred dance traditions are woven into a secular array of dances called Sábado o Domingo de la rumba (Saturday or Sunday rumba). Although Cuban rumba is the most emphasized dance, tourist versions of sacred performance are prominently featured also, as a series of dynamic solos or as stimulating ensemble works that depict specific African traditions and divinities.
Dance performance generally and sacred dance in particular have activated a resourceful tourism and economic strategy for the Cuban nation. Despite the discomfort of small, tightly packed chartered planes and the extra expense of traveling to manageable entry points for Cuba, and despite the tedious bureaucracy, sometimes inadequate services, and the grim difficulties that are observed daily, Cuba has reaped the benefits of dance performance and has profited in terms of a healthier economic base. It would be advantageous to have data on the relationship between dance performance and tourist enterprises from economists working on Cuba; however, from the dance and anthropology perspectives, Cuba, like nations everywhere and especially in the Caribbean, is utilizing local dance and music to augment, regulate, stabilize, or at the very least influence the tourist setting and tourist enterprises.
TOURIST VIEWS
Special visitors, guests, or tourists in Cuba have popular dance on their minds when they first arrive. They cannot help but be bombarded with dancer images and musical sounds that entice them to travel and encourage them to move rhythmically. Dance and music are the lures for eating, drinking, gambling, and socializing profusely—for a price. Tourists are attracted to and often mesmerized by "the tourist show," which is eventually used to justify the extravaganza stylization of sacred dance traditions within patio theater, cabaret, and hotel programming. There is no question that Cuban dance is riveting, and many tourists in Cuba take part in festive dance and music-making all day and all night.
Travel to Cuba is not simply for pleasure, relaxation, or leisure dancing, however. The Cuban tourist experience resembles the liminal world of ritual. It separates the tourist from the normal, everyday patterns to which she/he has become accustomed and immerses him/her in the fullness of an extraordinary experience, whether the framing is diplomatic, scientific, or aesthetic (i.e., whether the tourists have come as part of diplomatic congresses and meetings; for scientific conferences; or for film, music, or visual arts festivals). Visitors leave worlds that are comparatively affluent and, consequently, once in Cuba, they limit their diets (due to what foods are available), augment their exercise (due to the transportation limitations of a "third world environment"), prioritize their foci, and return to their foreign destinations, usually rejuvenated.
Like many Caribbean nations, Cuba has invested in tourism as one of its most viable commodities. In the light of severe sugar and other losses in the "special periods" that have marked the Cuban economy for the past fifteen years, the Cuban government has apparently risked the drain of energy resources in order to secure a booming tourism industry and accommodate tourist facilities, interests, and necessities. First by word of mouth, then in Caribbean travel magazines, and later on the Internet, Cuba has promoted its uniqueness, including its incredulous and diverse beauty, endearing hospitality, and relatively safe environment.
In the past, even if Cuba's tourists intruded on scarce resources (housing, water, telephone services, electricity, gas, etc.), they simultaneously advertised Cuba as a unique tourist destination. On their return home, tourists were able to counter travel warnings about Cuba by referring to Cuba's enviable tourist position and pronounced distinctiveness. Cuba does not have the huge numbers of homeless people, street crime, and drugs that the rest of the world sees on a daily basis in other tourist sites.
Between 1959 and 1990, brigada recruits (volunteer, politically motivated international workers), scientists, artists, economists, and so on from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, France, Finland, and parts of Latin America fathomed the arduous journey through bureaucratic papers to reach Cuba for one or two weeks. These curious travelers witnessed the warm and cordial realities of daily existence in a small island nation, and travel to Cuba grew. Then, commercial sex tourism resurfaced in the mid-1990s and provided its guaranteed source of foreign currency reserves. "Sun, sand, and sex" became the apparent motivation for travel to over two hundred beaches throughout the island.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World Copyright © 2010
by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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