BETWEEN COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE NATIONAL SLOT: CUBA'S DIASPORIC CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

Abstract

Although cosmopolitanism used to be associated with Western, elite practices, it has in recent years been used to describe a wider array of practices by non-elite and non-Western groups. This article explores the cosmopolitanism of Cuba's “children of the revolution” living in Spain. They are those now young adults who were born in Cuba after the revolution and who were brought up to become the socialist New Man. Theirs was a world of socialist cosmopolitanism, which simultaneously was infused with commitment to a national, territorially-based political project: an independent, socialist Cuba. However, some of these New Men and New Women now embrace ideals of cosmopolitan individualism rather than the patriotic socialism with which they were inculcated as children. Yet the cultural tools that the children of the revolution make use of in their practices and narratives of cosmopolitanism paradoxically point back to revolutionary Cuba. The article argues that cosmopolitanism as a lived practice owes to experiences within the Cuban socialist-national project and is in effect a response to the ineffectiveness of this project, not necessarily a substantive opposition to it. Social capital and habitus deriving from Cuban socialism gave the children of the revolution the desire to attain cosmopolitanism as part of their life-projects. This finding suggests that the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism needs further rethinking.

Key Words:

• Cosmopolitanism
• nationalism
• migration
• diaspora
• Cuba
• Spain

Thanks are due to Ariana Hernandez-Reguant and Huon Wardle, both of whom encouraged me to think about cosmopolitanism. This paper was first presented at a workshop on the anthropology of travel organised by Fariba Adelkhah and Jean-François Bayart at CERI in Paris and then at a panel at the EASA conference in September 2006 organised by Karen Fog Olwig and Vered Amit. Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle kindly read and commented on a later draft. Thanks to all of them. The writing up of this research was helped by a Royal Anthropological Institute Sutasoma Award, which is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms, unless otherwise indicated. I interacted exclusively in Spanish with all my informants and have translated interview excerpts as well as written sources quoted in the text from Spanish to English. I was fluent in Spanish (both Cuban and Castilian) before embarking on the fieldwork.

2. Appiah distinguishes between patriotism as a sentiment and nationalism as an ideology (1998: 92), but as Hannerz has argued, there is a considerable overlap between the two in ordinary usage (2004: 72).

3. Harvey has discussed the paradox of Kant's bigoted and prejudiced views on “race” as expressed in his Geography compared with the views expressed in his essay on Perpetual Peace, which continues to inspire writers and thinkers on cosmopolitanism today (Harvey 2000). See also Pollock et al. for a comparative discussion of the role of “universalism” in feminism and cosmopolitanism (2000).

4. I use “diaspora” and “diasporic” rather than “transnational community” because it captures both the diversity of the Cubans living in Spain, not all of whom would be characterised as “transnational,” while also keeping open the possibility that Cubans living on the island may be part of this formation. Ruth Behar has stated it succinctly: By choosing diaspora I opt for undecidability, a refusal to submit to the tyranny of categories: Cubans outside Cuba are perhaps immigrants, perhaps exiles, perhaps both, perhaps neither, and Cubans inside Cuba are in certain ways perhaps more exiled in their insile than the so-called exiles themselves. Diaspora embraces all these possibilities and others, including earlier periods of displacement in Cuban history (1996: 144–145). For further discussion, please see Berg (2009).

5. Robbins defines “actually existing cosmopolitanism” as “not merely an abstract ideal, like loving one's neighbor as oneself, but habits of thought and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped by particular collectivities, that are socially and geographically situated, hence both limited and empowered” (1998: 2). In this instance I am referring to the socialist space of transnational education and studies, which gave thousands of young Cubans a chance to study and travel abroad in other socialist countries, and which brought other thousands of young people to Cuba to study.

6. For a semi-fictional account of one such story, see Jesús Díaz' novel Las Cuatro Fugas de Manuel (Díaz 2002).

7. From my observations, Cubans in strategically important sectors and former cadres of the Communist Party (i.e., those citizens who were most expected to embody the ideals of the New Man) are more likely to be labelled traidores than others. However, it has proved impossible to obtain any information on how many Cubans are officially considered traidores, what their professional and class profiles are, or what the gender distribution is.

8. It also bespeaks a fundamental ambiguity within the Cuban revolutionary project, namely, the aspiration to being both nationalist and socialist. An ambiguity relating to cosmopolitan aspirations is clear already in the Communist Manifesto, itself a cosmopolitan document sketched by “Communists of various nationalities” (Marx and Engels 1958: 33), which, while exhorting “working men [sic] of all countries” to unite, at the same time sees the cosmopolitan character of the bourgeoisie as exploitative: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (Marx and Engels 1958: 37).

9. There are no comprehensive records of how many Cubans live in Spain, partly because Spain did not keep accurate and complete records before the first laws covering asylum and refuge were enacted in the mid-1980s (Apap 1997: 142–143; Arango 2000). Furthermore, Spain has in periods been a transit country for Cubans en route to the United States or other countries (Colectivo IOÉ 1993: 234–235; Romano 1989: 17, n.1) so that the figures for how many Cubans reside there have fluctuated very considerably. In recent years, it has been difficult to estimate the size of the immigrant population accurately because of the large numbers of undocumented immigrants, the so-called sin papeles, “without papers,” as well as deficiencies in official statistics (Arango 2000). Furthermore, some individuals who self-identify as Cuban, but who hold Spanish citizenship, do not figure in relevant Spanish statistics. Cuban figures, although also inaccurate and not able to include those Cubans who have settled in Spain after prolonged stays in third countries, do however seem more accurate (e.g., Aja Díaz 2000). The figure of 50,000 plus is thus an estimate based on various Cuban and Spanish sources. My criterion for inclusion has been self-identification as Cuban. Although it would be very interesting to compare relative size and numbers of different groups of Cubans in Spain, this has proven impossible because of the above mentioned weaknesses in the statistics. Most Cubans in Spain are concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands.

10. Many diasporic Cubans in Spain have been able to claim or reclaim Spanish citizenship because they are descendants of Spanish migrants to Cuba. While this makes international travel a good deal easier, naturalized Spanish citizens born in Cuba can still only travel to Cuba on Cuban passports; the only exemption to this rule is pre-1970 émigrés (Eckstein and Barberia 2002: 811). Even when entering Cuba on a Spanish passport, however, such individuals cannot avail themselves of Spanish consular protection while on the island.

11. In 2000, only about 20,000 Cubans on the island had an Internet account. The number may have decreased since then because of government crackdowns (Duany 2007: 166).

12.http://www.lalenin.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=283 accessed 01/09-2006.

13. There are two reasons for this. First, ever since United States anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis were expelled from Cuba in the late 1960s and accused by Fidel Castro of being CIA agents (Lewis et al. 1977: xxiii), the relationship between Western social scientists and the Cuban government has been strained. It was not until the 1980s that Western anthropologists came back to Cuba for research. Yet in 1991, the Swedish anthropologist Mona Rosendahl found that her otherwise open-ended research permit was not renewed, and she had to leave (Rosendahl 1997: 24ff). Given the strained relationship between official Cuba and its diaspora, and the mistrust of Western researchers—which I experienced especially during my fieldwork in Havana in 1998—I did not even attempt to gain access to the consulate as a regular site of research and participant observation. Had I filed a request, I consider it extremely unlikely that a permit for such research would have been forthcoming. Second, presuming I had gained permission, doing research with Cuban consular officials would have compromised me irreversibly in the eyes of many diasporic Cubans because of their distrust of anything related to Cuban officialdom. I would simply have been labelled a government informer, and many doors would have been firmly shut. It was already a balancing act to maintain contact with differentsectors and groups within the diaspora, but a clear and visible connection with the consulate would unequivocally have labelled me.

14. Not least therefore, a gender break-down as well as a “race” profile of those considered traidores would be very interesting.

15. From Martí's ‘Yo soy un hombre sincero” in Versos Sencillos, first published in 1892, here in E. Randall's translation (Martí 1982).