Nostalgia, internal migration and the return of Cuban street-vendor songs

ABSTRACT

When evaluating contemporary pregones, or street-vendor songs, most Cubans tend to resort to comparisons between the sounds of the present and sonic imaginaries of bygone times, often describing the sound of current vendors as an impoverished version of what were once beautiful, unique songs. At face value, these assessments point to the formal features of street-vendor songs, crystallizing around what appear to be direct descriptions of sounds heard on a daily basis. After enough probing, however, an analysis of these judgments reveals how such aesthetic descriptions are layered with multiple meanings, pointing to questions which are not contained in their literal signification nor sufficiently interrogated through formal analysis alone. My research suggests that when Cubans say something like ‘present-day vendors have forgotten how to sing’, they are also tacitly enunciating, through musical discourse, opinions on adjacent, specific issues. In this article, I focus on a cluster of questions around the musicality of street vendors that is directly related to issues of gender, race, and internal migration from the Cuban Eastern provinces to the capital. My analysis includes literary and ethnographic sources, the latter derived from extended interactions with consumers and listeners of pregones as well as vendors themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Pregones
• street-vendor songs
• labour
• self-employment
• Cuba
• cuentapropismo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following ethnographic convention, names of interlocutors are anonymized. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine.

2 While some works have addressed Soviet nostalgia in Cuba (Loss and Prieto 2012; Muguiro Altuna 2015), this literature does not address cuentapropismo as an explicit concern.

3 For but a few of the numerous texts written about Trilogía sucia, see Cornejo-Parrego 2009; López de Jesús 2014; García-Reyes and Ruiz García 2017; Bravo 2018.

4 The same author presents a similar description in a journalistic note in Revista Bohemia (1995, 43).

5 For a historical background of the problematic of racism, anti-racism, and Cuban nationalism, see Ferrer (1999).

6 Perhaps the most canonical street-vending song, its origins have generated a series of myths and disputes from the likes of Fernando Ortiz (1954; see Díaz-Ayala 1988, 235–245 for an overview). The Cuban East also features prominently as the place of origin of pregones. Worthy of mention is the late Bertha Hechavarría Heredia, a renowned street vendor who has become a national figure. See Quintero Dip (2015) for a news article outlining her legacy.

7 There are notable exceptions, such as the case of Lysett Pérez, a famous street vendor-cum-performer who works in the Cuban historic downtown area, Old Havana, catering mostly to a tourist clientele (García Molina 2020).

8 For a creative exploration of the timbral and melodic makeup of Cuban contemporary vendor songs, see ‘Pregón’ (2015), a composition by Wilma Alba Cal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsRpPb_KPfg. I examine this composition, as well as the questions it raises about pregones as objects of aesthetic experimentation elsewhere (García Molina 2020).

9 Not explored here are the multiple descriptions of street vendors in Cuban literature and journalism, e.g. Cien botellas en una pared (Portela 2002) and El rey de La Habana (Gutiérrez 1998).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Andrés García Molina

Andrés García Molina holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. He is currently a SUNY PRODiG Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Fredonia. His current research explores the broad intersection between music and data science.