Cubanos, Americans and Modes of Being Between in pre-Castro Cuba

Abstract

In pre-Castro Cuba cubanos familiar with American culture were part of a wider society that included cubanos who were also American and Americans familiar with Cuban culture. Familiarity, however, was not explicitly coded in national identity. A sense of being can depend on assumptions and practices that are common without being explicitly coded as collective, much less as distinctive of the collective. If we attend only to that which is explicitly coded as ethnic or national, we risk a very incomplete understanding of ethnicity and nationalism.

Notes

It is perhaps worth remembering that etymologically ‘family’ is not about kinship or marriage. Derived from the Latin for ‘slave/servant’, it refers to a relation of intimate inequality.

AC Taylor, ‘The soul's body and its states: an Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2 (2), 1996, p 211.

JR Corbin & MP Corbin, Urbane Thought: Culture and Class in an Andalusian City, Aldershot, England: Gower, 1987, p 5.

LA Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pérez scrupulously qualifies ‘American’ with ‘North’ when he refers to the people, culture or society of the United States, but in ordinary usage in Cuba ‘americano’ and ‘American’, sufficed because the terms did not normally refer to the whole of North, Central and South America. I have followed that ordinary usage when speaking of Cuba rather than of Pérez's argument.

Ibid, pp 504 – 505.

Even so, it begs a question about Cuban identity. Identity produced by economic consumerism, by the acquisition of material goods, may be generally ‘modern’ but is hardly nationally specific. How, then, could anyone ‘become’ Cuban by such means?

‘Que paquete! Solo a los americanos les ocurre encerrar una mujer sola en un submarino lleno de hombres!’.

Pérez's discussion of prostitution therefore needs some modification. One can easily understand Cuban dismay at foreign representations of Cuba as a den of vice. ‘José Montó Sotolongo denounced North American images of Cuba as a place of “prostitutes and easy women”. “Cuba is a nation of decent women”, he insisted, “young women cared for by their parents and who know well how to take care of themselves” (ibid, p 471). Montó was quite right, but the tourist would have little, if any, access to the social worlds of these women, whereas the world of commercial sex actively sought their participation. That tourists used prostitutes and that prostitution expanded with the growth of the largely American funded tourist industry is undoubted, but to jump from this to the assertion made repeatedly by Pérez that prostitution was a North American creation is simply wrong.

D Fernández, Cuba and the Politics of Passion, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Pérez reports that ‘the Mother's (sic) Club sponsored an annual Halloween party attended by hundreds of Cuban and North American children’ (op cit, p 398) to support the argument that associations served as ‘sites and sources of North American ways that could not but implicate a great many Cubans'. I attended many Mothers' Club Halloween parties, as well as the weekly sports days and the occasional dance organised by the Club, and can recall no occasion when any substantial number of Cuban children were included. Possibly policy became more inclusive at other times, perhaps under pressure in the early years of the Castro revolution. Possibly Pérez has been misled by the surnames of members, for some were American women married to Hispanic men, so they and their children had Spanish surnames.

Ibid, p 403.

Ibid, p 404.

Information about them could be misleading. Pérez refers to an item in the Times of Havana, one of a 1957 series of teenage portraits. ‘The García Carratalá family lived in Alturas de Miramar. Sixteen-year-old Sandra—known as “Sandy”—was bilingual: she had studied for three years in Miami and attended Cathedral and Ruston Academy. Her favorite recording artists were Pat Boone and Bill Haley; her favorite movie star was Gregory Peck. Her pets included two dogs, Smokey Joe and Tag-along Joe. As she contemplated her future educational plans in 1957, she affirmed her intention to attend Wheaton College or the University of Florida’ (ibid, p 387). Pérez treats this information as evidence for the Americanisation of a Cuban, presumably because the surname indicates a father named García and a mother named Carratalá. I can not account for the surname. In school she was known as Sandra Carratalá, and I always assumed that surname came from her Cuban father. Her mother was American, so Sandra was both American and Cuban by descent.

‘A mi no me mires, yo soy de aquí’.

I left Cuba at the age of eighteen so did not confirm my nationality on coming of age. Several years ago, wanting to visit Cuba, I was refused a tourist visa because I was born in Cuba. As the consulate official in London explained, ‘For us, you are Cuban.’ (‘Para nosotros, usted es cubano’).

Op cit.

M Rosendahl, Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997.