CUBAN LITERATURE

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Review: Cuban Literature and Culture: Critical Junctures Author(s): Carlota Caulfield Reviewed work(s): A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba by Catherine Davies Cuban Writers on and off the Island: Contemporary Narrative Fiction by Pamela Maria Smorkaloff Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures by Edward J. Mullen My Own Private Cuba: Essays on Cuban Literature and Culture by Gustavo Pérez Firmat Source: Latin American Research Review, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2002), pp. 231-246 Published by: The Latin American Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1512525 Accessed: 07/09/2009 07:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
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CUBAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE: Critical Junctures Carlota Caulfield Mills College A PLACE IN THE SUN? WOMEN WRITERS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CUBA. By Catherine Davies. (London: Zed, 1997, distributed by St. Martin's. Pp. 247. $65.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.) CUBAN WRITERS ON AND OFF THE ISLAND: CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE FICTION. By Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. Pp. 104. $32.00 cloth.) AFRO-CUBAN LITERATURE: CRITICAL JUNCTURES. By Edward J. Mullen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998. Pp. 238. $55.00 cloth.) MY OWNPRIVATE CUBA: ESSAYS ON CUBAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE. By Gustavo Perez Firmat. (Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish- American Studies, 1999. Pp. 251. $25.00 paper.) The last seven years have manifested an increasing interest in all things Cuban. Cuba has become the focus of the general public as well as scholars and translators. One can scarcely open any kind of review without finding essays on Cuba. The popular amazon.com website lists nearly three thousand titles under Cuba. Cuban music in particular dominates various works, leaving the impression that world markets are thirsty for works by or about Cubans. Some observers think that this passionate interest resulted from Wim Wenders's 1999 film, The Buena Vista Social Club. Others, particularly aca- demicians, have discussed the reawakening of interest in Cuban literature resulting from growing awareness of the universality of the Caribbean, stimulated by the works of writers like Antonio Benitez Rojo and Edouard Glissant. And the debate goes on. Aware of the many ingredients that make up this debate, I will leave the Cuban stew simmering to discuss four re- markable books that will facilitate a better understanding of everything Cuban. Cuban Women Writers Catherine Davies's A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth- Century Cuba is to be commended for reformulating the traditional literary Latin American Research Review volume 37 number 3 ? 2002 231
Latin American Research Review debate that usually keeps women at the margins of national discourses. A well-known specialist in Cuban literature at the University of Manchester, Davies has published many essays on Cuban women writers. A Place in the Sun combines documentation with in-depth observations to reveal the plu- rality of Cuban women's voices and present a well-elaborated theoretical discussion of debates about representation. Using feminist scholarship to deconstruct androcentric cultural par- adigms, Davies discusses how Cuban culture and history throughout the twentieth century was constructed by discourses of "modernity, as under- stood by Peter Osborne as a 'culture of time,' a distinctive way of tempor- alizing historical time informed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eu- ropean philosophy with a political agenda" (p. 5). The Cuban Revolution of 1959 did not mark a break from the totalizing and homogenizing con- cepts of modernity, keeping dominant versions of religion, racial and na- tional identity, private and public space, and gender and sexuality as well as political regime (p. 8). Contrary to some critics' comments and in spite of many accomplishments by women, patriarchy in Cuba has not been dis- mantled. As Ruth Behar observed recently, "In Cuba, feminism lives and breathes in the shadow of its great male heroes" (1998, x). Participating in a plurality of discourses that contest the ideological and cultural hegemony of the governing elites, women always have played an important role in constructing a collective Cuban identity. Davies offers a well-documented retrospective of the presence of women writers on the Cuban cultural map, thus contextualizing the work of the writers studied. For example, before assessing the women writers of neocolonial Cuba (1900 to 1959), Davies establishes essential links to two precursors: Maria Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Montalvo, known as the Countess of Merlin (1789-1832), and Gertrudis G6mez de Avellaneda (1814-1873). In A Place in the Sun, Davies shows how Cuban women voiced their discontent and asserted their differences through writing by discussing the literary production of writers such as Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta, Mariblanca Sabas Aloma, Nieves Xenes, Dulce Maria Borrero, Emilia Bernal, Dulce Maria Loynaz, and Maria Luisa Milanes. Literary essays, novels, and poems all have served to assert women's differences "in the fraught context of a dependent, postcolonial country undergoing rapid modernization" (p. 64). Although some women writers developed a revolutionary con- sciousness that forged connections among Cubanism, feminism, class poli- tics, and anti-racism, Davies observes how Cuban women poets in particu- lar created several textual strategies to subvert traditional myths of femininity (the Mother and the Domestic Bliss). In "refocusing" the female body and sexuality from a feminine perspective and undermining existing myths of "dominant masculinity" through irony, ridicule, and humor, "this kind of women's writing is perhaps the most radical as it involves the writer turning private subjectivity into the source of a collective, liberating 232
REVIEW ESSAYS discourse; it involves socializing the unconscious and the inner self" (p. 40). Exploring further the idea that a woman's text can be subversive without having a direct discourse of rebellion, Davies analyzes in depth the works of Maria Luisa Loynaz and Fina Garcia Marruz. Davies also extends the chronological perspective of women writers in postrevolutionary Cuba by discussing their literary production from 1959 to 1992. The genre in which Cuban women keep excelling after 1959 is poetry. From 1959 to the 1980s, more books of poetry were published than either collections of short stories or novels. A few well-known Cuban playwrights are also mentioned in these pages: Ingrid Gonzalez, Gloria Parrado, Flora Lauten, and Xiomara Leyva Ojito. Like poetry, the short story has always been a popular genre among Cuban writers and readers. More than twenty collections of short stories were published by women in Cuba between 1959 and 1986. Additional col- lections became popular after the 1990s, particularly Mirta Yafiez's Estatuas de sal: Cuentistas cubanas contempordneas, published by Ediciones Uni6n in 1996. In 1988 Cuban critic Luisa Campuzano published "Women in the Nar- rative of the Revolution: An Essay on Scarcity" (in Yaniez and Bobes 1996), a seminal essay that presented remarkable statistics: only 12 novels were published by women in Cuba between 1959 and 1983, compared with 170 novels by men. Contrary to what happened in the period covered by A Place in the Sun, the 1990s witnessed a kind of boom in novels written by Cuban women, which are attracting growing attention from readers and critics. The mid-1990s represented an important period in the quality and quantity of works published. Certain women writers enjoyed great editor- ial success. One was Zoe Valdes with her "erotic-dirty realist-testimonial" novels like La nada cotidiana (1995, translated in 1997 as Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada), Te di la vida entera (1996), and Sangre Azul (1996). Two women writ- ers now being recognized for the high quality of their writings are Daina Chaviano, with El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998) and Ena Lucia Portela, with El pdjaro: Pincel y tinta china (1999). The trajectory of these writers can be traced in Davies's study. Valdes and Chaviano began their literary careers in Cuba and had already published work before they went to live abroad in the 1990s (in Paris and Miami, respectively). Portela lives in Cuba and has become an internationally known writer after the publication of her novel. Other nonresident Cuban women writers who have won recognition for their novels are Julieta Campos (Mexico), Nivaria Tejera (France), and Mayra Montero (Puerto Rico). In spite of the quantity and high quality of the poetry written by Cuban women, few books have analyzed this body of work (Barquet 1995, 11). Davies recognizes this void. Without abandoning the study of novels and short stories, she pays more attention to poetry throughout A Place in the Sun. Two intriguing chapters are dedicated to poetry since 1959. Chapter 233
Latin American Research Review 7 discusses the presence of Africa in the poetry of Nancy Morejon, Georgina Herrera, and Excilia Saldaia. It occasions a rethinking of some of the most discussed theories about race and the construction of Cuban identity: the Cuban nation as Afro Spanish (Guillen 1930), the concept of a national Cuban identity as "whiteblack" (Ortiz 1961), and the questioning of Cuba's national ideology of mestizaje, with the Cuban mulatta as its most prevalent emblem (Kutzinski 1993). Identity politics has not been a burning issue in Cuba, and generally speaking, black writers have shown little interest in exclusively black themes (Perez Sarduy and Stubbs 1993). In contrast, white women (such as Minerva Salado) have made use of African themes and at times created a black persona (Davies, p. 141). Davies's discussion of female erotic desire in Cuban women's poetry is particularly significant (chapter 8). Nor was erotic poetry well accepted in the first decades following the Cuban Revolution, despite important women's voices in Cuban literature like Mercedes Matamoros (1851-1906) and Carilda Oliver Labra (1922- ). Erotic women's literature was not wel- come during the 1960s and 1970s in Cuba. Not until the mid-1980s were the erotic poems of Oliver Labra republished in Cuba, promoted by women poets themselves, especially the younger ones. Poets born after the 1950s have written a liberated type of discourse that "opened fissures" in Cuban revolutionary ideology: the frank poetry of Chely Lima and Zoe Valdes, the metaphorical poetry of Soledad Cruz Guerra, and the lyrical and ludic po- etry of Reina Maria Rodriguez. Two of the best exponents of black and mu- latto women's erotic poetry are Nancy Morej6n, who presents lesbian love, and Excilia Saldania, who explores the rejection-recuperation of the mu- latto female body. By inventing new spaces and asking different questions, women writers have not only questioned the discourses of the nation but left a significant imprint on Cuban culture and society. The three-page "final comment" that Davies adds as a sort of colophon for A Place in the Sun pro- vides a necessary overview of the many changes occurring in Cuban litera- ture since the 1990s at the international level: the forging of bridges between Cuban women writers in Cuba and outside Cuba; joint publishing ventures that are facilitating publication of Cuban authors in other countries; and the success of Cuban women writers around the world. Cuban Literary Dialogue: Canon and Diaspora A pioneering work in presenting transnational and interdisciplinary texts was Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (1994), edited by Ruth Behar and Juan Le6n. The anthology sought to stimulate an open dialogue with Cuba and its artists and writers on the island and beyond. Another anthology that promoted Cuban writing was Cuba, la isla posible (1995), published in Barce- lona and edited by Juan Pablo Ballester, Maria Elena Escalona, and Ivan de la Nuez. This anthology proposed more tolerance and understanding of 234
REVIEW ESSAYS Cuban artistic production outside the island and characterized "extraterri- torial Cuban culture as a multicultural and cosmopolitan body of writing that claims recognition outside Cuba" (Alvarez Borland 1998, 52). A third anthology published in 1995 in Mexico under the title Mas alld de la isla pre- sented a diverse body of texts by Cuban writers in exile. Edited by Jesus J. Barquet, this collection claimed that Cuban culture is a single entity, de- fending the idea of Cuban cultural continuity beyond the island of Cuba: Cuban literature as no longer confined by space, ideology, or language. Joining the publications that approach Cuban literature from an open perspective as a multicultural and cosmopolitan body of writing is Pamela Maria Smorkaloff's Cuban Writers on and off the Island. Her book breaks with all absolutes and situates Cuban and Cuban-American writers in a "shift- ing landscape." A specialist in Caribbean literature and literary culture, Smorkaloff also published Readers and Writers in Cuba: A Social History of Print Culture, 1830s-1990s (1997). Divided in four chapters, Cuban Writers on and off the Island takes a broad approach to Cuban literature, studying the Cuban twentieth-century literary canon from its origins to the present. Authors like Alejo Carpentier and Lezama Lima are linked to younger Cuban-American writers such as Achy Obejas and Oscar Hijuelos. Themes of the home and the world be- yond appear throughout the volume "as a framework for exploring the contemporary Cuban literary tradition in an inclusive sense, to acknowledge the blurring of boundaries and the fragility of borders" (p. 8). To understand Cuban novels of the diaspora, one must go all the way back to a body of works that should be considered foundational in forming the Cuban literary landscape. Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (1953, trans- lated in 1971 as The Lost Steps) was published before 1959 (unlike the rest of the novels Smorkaloff covers), but it becomes her point of departure in dis- cussing the role of "the quest" as a major literary theme in novels written on and off the island. The unnamed composer-narrator-protagonist of Carpentier's novel represents the displaced Cuban artist of the twentieth century. Alienated in his adopted New York, he looks to Latin America in search of authenticity. Cuban literature is full of characters in search of identity. Probably for that reason, the journey is often the organizing principle in many contemporary Cuban novels: a journey as a means of self-exploration, as in Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos; a journey as a search for meaning in the past and a quest for significance in origins, as in Lezama Lima's Paradiso (1966; Paradiso, 1974); or a journey as a metaphor for life and writing, as in Reinaldo Arenas's El mundo alucinante (1968; Hallucinations, 1971). Each text inscribes in its own way a quest or journey in search of origins, historical memory, and the pos- sibility of reclaiming such memory. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has pointed out that Cuban narrative, especially after 1959, "became obsessed with the relationship between the 235
Latin American Research Review individual life and historical change" (1987a, 569). Many autobiographical texts were published in Cuba in the postrevolutionary period. Diverse at- tempts were made to examine what it means to be Cuban in a shifting world, as Smorkaloff discusses regarding Renee Mendez Capote's Memorias de una cubanita que nacio con el siglo (1963), Pablo Armando Fernandez's Los ninos se despiden (1968), Edmundo Desnoes's Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965; Inconsolable Memories, 1967), and Reinaldo Arenas's El mundo alucinante (1969). Mendez Capote and Fernandez wrote poetic coming-of-age narra- tives based on materials from their childhoods linked with their Cuban past (the Cuban Republic and history before 1959). In Edmundo Desnoes's Memorias, "the vocation of writing and cata- clysmic historical change relate" (Gonzalez Echevarria 1987a, 568). Taking place at the beginning of the Revolution, the novel deals with issues of iden- tity and memory in a more realistic and piercing way. For the narrator- protagonist, memory plays a fundamental role in defining the idiosyncra- cies of a country. Being civilized means knowing not to forget. For Desnoes's narrator, Cubans are underdeveloped because they forget the past easily and live anchored in the present. Smorkaloff discusses how the narrator questions his Cubanness with existentialist cynicism. Feeling European, he views his birth on the island as an error (pp. 23-24). Reinaldo Arenas's El mundo alucinante examines the meaning of being American in a shifting world. The book is essentially a defense of the American identity and "authorial anxiety." Here Arenas, identifying himself with the radical and contradictory Mexican friar Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1763-1827), created an autobiographical "recounting" that parodies history via hyperbole. Official history is dismantled and memory trans- formed. Smorkaloff points out that through the friar, "We are exposed to all the forces of change in the air at the time, an apt venue for exploring the forces of change operating in the 1960s in Cuba, and throughout the conti- nent" (p. 25). She observes, "In literary terms, Arenas, with his Cuban be- ginnings and later off-island production, spans the distance from the canon to the diaspora, from Carpentier, to Obejas, to young writers whose work was never nourished by a Cuban landscape yet seeks to reconnect, free of the constraints of nostalgia and false memory, with the social, human, cul- tural, and historical experience of the island" (p. 9). Smorkaloff analyzes in detail the features that these novels share with the testimonial novel. In her view, Capote, Fernandez, Desnoes, and Arenas all escape from the official framework of history, blurring the boundaries that separate fiction from history and reality, to uncover new sources of meaning (p. 19). Memory, competing visions and versions of events in the narrative of a nation, and the tensions between home and world are prominent fea- tures of Cuban-American narrative. The tricks played by memory, when distorted and manipulated, and the possibility of reclaiming its more solid sources are the grounds for establishing a new literary dialogue between 236
REVIEW ESSAYS canon and diaspora. Juani Casas, the twenty-four-year old narrator of Achy Obejas's Memory Mambo (1996) meditates about memory and "the indis- oluble connection between memory and historical consciousness" (1996, 32). Having left Cuba as a child, she seeks to sort out "the truth" in the dif- ferent versions of the Cuban events that surrounded the exile of her family. According to Alvarez Borland, Obejas's novel "exhibits an affirmation as well as a critical relationship to questions of identity and self-definition" (1998, 120). Smorkaloff perceives Carpentier and Obejas as end markers on "a kind of transnational map." Obejas's writing constitutes "a marker of a spec- trum like the canonical master Carpentier, because her work takes on Cuban- Americanness, exploring actively and rigorously what it means to be Cuban-American in the United States today in much the same way that Carpentier's characters have shaped, from the 1930s to the present, ques- tions of Cubanness in the collective consciousness" (p. 2). Smorkaloff also analyzes, in the context of historical inquiry, dis- placement and memory in several works by Cuban-American writers Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina Garcia, and Roberto Fernandez. Cuban Writers on and off the Island concludes by evaluating Cuban-American writing in the context of Latino literature in the United States. In linking Cuban-American writers to other Latino writers in the United States such as Julia Alvarez, Victor Per- era, and Rolando Hinojosa, Smorkaloff discusses the current theoretical no- tions of "hybridity and in-betweenness" as a permanent state of flux in the culture of the Americas, as embraced by Guillermo G6mez Pena. Cuban- American writers are thus part of an inclusive phenomenon of "border cross- ing and inter-American cultural exchange." Smorkaloff's treatment of Cuban and Cuban-American literature is original, with some fresh insights but many digressions. Despite her ex- pertise, the critic's textual analysis becomes too sketchy in places. This study would have benefited from concentrating on fewer authors. Although some lists are necessary, as Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway would say, the reader of this work gets overwhelmed by the listing of names, bits of infor- mation, and plots of the novels. The spirit of Cuban Writers on and off the Island is well defined in the preface: "This work goes against the grain of purists and purity and toward a messy, hybrid sense of culture as universal voca- tion" (p. ix). Afro-Cuban Literature Recent critical trends among Hispanists in the United States reveal a keen interest in Cuba, especially regarding questions of race and nationhood. Worth mentioning for their original discussions of Afro-Cubanism are Vera Kutzinski's Sugar Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (1993); Juan Martinez's Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950 237
Latin American Research Review (1994); Robin Moore's Nationalizing Blackness: AfroCubanismo and Artistic Rev- olution in Havana, 1920-1940 (1997); and Between Race and Empire: African- Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution, edited by Lisa Brock and Digna Castafieda (1998). Other scholars providing new interpretations of Afro-Cubanism are William Luis (1984), Darien Davis (1997), Loma Williams (1994), and Gustavo Perez Firmat (1989). Edward Mullen's Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures represents an important addition to the studies just mentioned. A professor at the Uni- versity of Missouri-Columbia, Mullen has coedited the Afro-Hispanic Review and written on African American literature, particularly the work of Langs- ton Hughes. This well-structured study using both primary and secondary sources invites readers to analyze the development of Afro-Cubanism dia- chronically, from its roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain through the 1930s. In addition to offering a historical overview of the movement, Mullen discusses how notions of race coupled with emergent nationalism helped shape one of the most fascinating chapters in Cuban literature. The period following the "official independence" of Cuba in 1902 was one of skepticism and questioning. Under U.S. economic and political tutelage, Cubans began to search for methods of cultural survival (Davis 1997, 73). The early years of this era witnessed constant social unrest and racial problems. Marginalized from public and private employment and disadvantaged in Cuban society, blacks and mulattos formed their own political party called El Partido de los Independientes de Color. In 1912 they staged a rebellion that became known as La Guerrita de los Indepen- dientes de Color. The uprisings began in Oriente Province and Las Villas on 20 May 1912 but were almost completely crushed three months later by the government of Jose Miguel Gomez. Most of the blacks in the movement were killed, along with many other innocent persons. The theme of Cuban identity, which some Cuban intellectuals had tried to formulate since the nineteenth century, was being questioned (Thomas 1971, 514-23). During the 1920s, Cuban intellectuals wanted to revive Jose Marti's ideal of racial solidarity in Cuba, and this decade was central for black cul- ture in Cuba. Many writers, musicians, and artists focused on Cuba's African heritage and its significance. Mullen documents how Afro-Cubanism received an important stimulus from European artists and intellectuals (pp. 2-4). After the publication of Black Decameron by Leo Frobenius in 1910, African cultures began to be appreciated in Europe. By the end of World War I, many artists and intellectuals (especially those of the avant-garde) were exploring African art and music. In Paris, Pablo Picasso derived inspiration for his first Cubist paintings from African masks; Josephine Baker introduced black America's music and dance; Guillaume Apollinaire published his Album of Black Sculp- ture in 1917; and writers like Paul Morand, Andre Gide, Blaise Cendrars, Claire Goil, and Phillippe Soupault all flirted with black culture. 238
REVIEW ESSAYS In Cuba the Revista de Avance (1927-1930) became the main exponent of the European avant-garde. Its pages projected and reflected the urge for renewal in an era searching for social and political change. Some writers re- sponsible for this literary publication were Alejo Carpentier, Marti Casanova, Francisco Ichaso, F6lix Ichaso, Jorge Mafiach, Juan Marinello, and Jose Tallet. Although Afro-Cubanism was stimulated by European interest, it began much earlier. The interest in African themes that started with the ar- rival of slaves in the sixteenth century was expressed in anti-slavery novels in the nineteenth century, culminating in the publication of Los negros brujos in 1906. It was written by Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), often called the father of Afro-Cuban studies. Ortiz fostered the develop- ment of Afro-Cubanism in the 1920s and 1930s. He encouraged the pioneer- ing work of ethnographer Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991), author of Cuentos ne- gros de Cuba (1936) and El monte (1954), as well as Alejo Carpentier, whose iEcue-Yamba-O! (1933) resulted from his fascination with surrealism and African themes. Cuban composers also incorporated elements of African music into their work, as in Amadeo Roldan's La rebambaramba (1928) and Alejandro Garcia Caturla's Bembe (1929) and La rumba (1933) (Martinez 1994, 78). By the end of the 1920s in Cuba, a strong poetic movement based on Afro-Cuban themes had emerged. Among the initiators were Emilio Ballagas, Jose Manuel Poveda, Jose Z. Tallet, Ram6n Guirao, Nicolas Guillen, and Regino Pedroso. The poets developed two basic tendencies: a folkloric ten- dency of a musical and sensual nature, and a social tendency that explored human problems of the black race. Important anthologies and critical es- says on black poetry were published, and in April 1928, Gustavo Urrutia, one of the first proponents of the rights of blacks on the island, began to publish a Sunday literary page entitled "Ideales de una raza" in the presti- gious Havana newspaper El Diario de la Marina. Intellectuals of the caliber of Fernando Ortiz, Jorge Mafiach, Jesus Castellanos, and Jose A. Ramos re- flected in their essays a social and cultural reality that was undeniable. On that page appeared the first version of Nicolas Guillen's Motivos de son (1930). He said of "Ideales de una raza," "It represents an important step in black- white relationships and the search for adequate means to strengthen them" (Recopilacion, in Morej6n 1974,44). In this context, Mullen's Afro-Cuban Literature helps fill important gaps in the history of the development of the Afro-Cuban movement. First of all, Mullen discusses the cultural dialogue between the United States and Cuba. He asserts that an essential part of the interchange has been linked to questions of race and cultural identity. Mullen refers to U.S. literary models as a productive way to understand "the interpretive issues that have defined Afro-Cubanism" (p. 25). Mullen believes that Afro-Cubanism paralleled to some extent the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. Second, Mullen 239
Latin American Research Review places Afro-Cubanism in a wide historical context while tracing the literary portrait of Afro-Hispanism from the Arab conquest of Spain in the eighth century to the Renaissance. Mullen analyses Sime6n Aguado's Entremes de los negros, a seventeenth-century play, as a foundational work of Afro- Cubanism paradigmatic to future works by Afro-Hispanics. Aguado's theatri- cal work avoided the stereotypical presentation of blacks as monsters or quintessentially sensual and presented them instead as part of a complex interweaving of social relationships. Mullen also demonstrates with well- chosen examples how Afro-Cubanism entered the literary canon by examin- ing the role of various kinds of Cuban anthologies of poesia negra, focusing on Emilio Ballagas's Antologfa de poesia negra hispano-americana (1935), Idel- fonso Perera Valdes's Antologia de la poesia negra americana (1936), and Ram6n Guirao's Orbita de la poesfa afrocubana, 1929-1937 (1938). Publication of these anthologies signaled a change in the standards for selection of literary canons. Although compilers of earlier anthologies had considered it their duty to maintain tradition, these editors worked to show "the New World as a prod- uct of cultural syncretism" (p. 6). Mullen's Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures offers stimulating arguments on Cuban literature and expands ways of looking at Afro- Cubanism. Although it would have benefited from more checking of the spelling of Spanish names, words, and titles of works, the book remains a useful work that is not to be ignored. Rethinking Cubanness Writing about the importance of Fernando Ortiz in formulating the concept of cubanidad and the "complexity of his project," Gustavo Perez Firmat observes in his essay "Mr. Cuba": In the case of the black population of Cuba, deculturation involves the extinction of African culture as a signifying totality; acculturation involves the acquisition of fragments of the white man's culture; and neoculturation is the synthesis of the African with the European. Of the three stages, only the last can be said to desig- nate a vernacular or native culture, and one of the difficulties of "acculturation" is its ethnocentrism, since the term assumes an already existing cultural matrix into which outsiders are received. Instead, Ortiz stresses the creative leap, the quantum of novelty inherent in cultural shifts; it is not a matter of entering a stable, already existing culture but of creating a different cultural configuration altogether. By re- placing "acculturation" with "transculturation," he means to find a more compre- hensive and therefore more exact label for this phenomenon. (P. 31) Ortiz found that the new word transculturation was explicitly linked to the Cuban context: "We have chosen the word transculturation to express the highly diverse phenomena that originate in Cuba because of the very complex cultural transmutations that take place here" (1940a, 129). Accord- ing to Perez Firmat, the validity of neologisms is thus empirical and local rather than abstract and theoretical because the words develop out of the 240
REVIEW ESSAYS specific circumstances of cultural interaction in Cuba. Ortiz argued that the salient characteristic of this interaction was its unfinished nature. In his view, Cuban culture is "a vital concept of constant fluidity" rather than "a synthetic reality, already formed and known" (1939, p. 4). Cuban culture has not yet reached the state of neoculturation. Its distinctiveness derives from being ongoing, in process. Cuban culture is characterized by "muta- bility, openness, uprootedness": There were no more transcendental factors in the formation of Cubanness than those continuous, radical, and contrasting geographical, economic, and social trans- migrations of its inhabitants; the perennial transitoriness of purpose, that way of life always uprooted from the land it inhabited, always at odds with the society that sustained it. Human beings, economies, cultures and desires-everything here felt foreign, provisional, changeable, like "migratory birds" crossing the country at its expense, against its wishes, and to its detriment. (Ortiz 1940a, 133) For Perez Firmat, transculturation "properly designates the fermen- tation and turmoil that precedes synthesis. For this reason, transculturation, a coinage that denotes transition, passage, process, is the best name for the Cuban condition" (p. 23). The "processual view of Cuban culture" is further clarified in Ortiz's well-known essay, "Los factores humanos de la cubani- dad." In discussing transculturation, Ortiz added the household metaphor of ajiaco (a Cuban stew), analyzed here by Perez Firmat: First, since the ajiaco is made by combining a variety of meats and vegetables (whichever ones happen to be available), it conveys the ethnic diversity of Cuba. Second, the ajiaco is agglutinative rather than synthetic; even if the diverse ingre- dients form part of a new culinary entity, they do not lose their original flavor and identity. So it is with Cuba, where each ethnic or cultural component has retained its identity, where the mixture of cultures has not led to a neoculturative synthesis. Third, an ajiaco is indefinitely replenishable, since new ingredients can be added to the stew as old ones are used up. In this respect, this dish symbolizes the continu- ing infusion of new elements into the Cuban cultural mix, those "continuous trans- migrations" that he [Ortiz] mentions in the other essay. Lastly, ajiaco is itself an ono- mastic, since it combines the African name of an Amerindian condiment, the aji or red pepper, with a Spanish suffix, -aco. As an edible emblem of "cubanidad," the ajiaco criollo gives concrete shape to the abstract notion of transculturation. "Transculturation" is the theoretical name; "ajiaco" is the corresponding image. (Pp. 33-34) Perez Firmat's incisive reflections on Cuban culture are far-reaching and often controversial, but they always provide food for thought. He typi- cally combines scholarly pursuits with literary ambitions, using wit and humor to revitalize much of the existing criticism on the subject of Cuba. The resulting style can be seen in My Own Private Cuba: Essays on Cuban Liter- ature and Culture. Born in Havana in 1949, Gustavo Perez Firmat left Cuba when he was eleven and was raised in Miami. Today he is professor of Span- ish at Columbia University, a prolific writer, and a key figure in the field of Cuban studies. The first part of My Own Private Cuba contains nine essays from The 241
Latin American Research Review Cuban Condition (1989), three of them dedicated to Ortiz (including "Mr. Cuba"). Other essays analyze the work of Nicolas Guillen, Eugenio Florit, Carlos Loveira, and Luis Felipe Rodriguez. The second part of the volume brings together essays on Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, Jorge Mafiach, and Jose Lezama Lima. Here the propositions made in The Cuban Condition are dis- cussed and expanded. The epilogue, the essay "My Own Private Cuba," was first delivered as the keynote address at the Second Annual South Florida Symposium on Cuba in September 1997. The other essays in the second part were published previously in various journals (Diacritics, Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, and Caribe: Revista de Cultura y Literatura) or in Do the Ameri- cas Have a Common Literature? Perez Firmat asserts that My Own Private Cuba, his collection of essays entitled Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), and his autobiographical novel Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming- of-Age in America (1995) together form a trilogy "that develops a certain view of cubani'a, one way of understanding the island's literature and culture" (p. 96). My Own Private Cuba presents a brilliant analysis of the theme of cubanidad or "Cubanness." Perez Firmat argues that there are at least three different terms that define the Cuban condition: cubanidad, cubanta, and cuba- neo. Although all three are translated as Cubanness in English, can be taken "as markers of nationality," and sometimes mean the same thing, they really refer to "distinct areas of experience." Of the three terms, the most widespread is cubanidad, which dates from the nineteenth century and played an important role in the Cuban na- tionalist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Ortiz defined cubanidad as "the generic condition of being Cuban" (1940b, 166). This definition is generic rather than individual, uniform rather than idiosyncratic. In its limited sense, cubanidad designates the junction of nationality and citizenship. As such, the word basically represents a civil status that takes form based on docu- ments like a birth certificate, a passport, or a naturalization statement. For that reason, cubanidad is perhaps the most fragile representation of Cuban nationality. Cubaneo is also manifested externally but does not derive from official documents or government decrees. It is instead "a loose repertoire" of mannerisms, customs, and vocabulary. Rather than referring to a civil status, it names a state of mind, "a mood, a temperament, what used to be called 'national character."' As Perez Firmat explains, "Its frame of reference is not un pais-a political entity-but un pueblo-a social and cultural entity" (p. 231). In contrast to cubanidad, which is generally evoked in a positive way, the term cubaneo carries negative connotations. Perez Firmat considers that for Cubans like himself who live in exile, cubaneo is not necessarily a bad thing: "cubaneo may be the next best thing to Cuba, a buffer against loneliness and alienation" (p. 232). Ortiz defined cubanfa as a higher and more complete Cubanness, "a 242
REVIEW ESSAYS full Cubanness, felt, conscious and desired" (p. 233). Rather than "an accident of birth or a menu of manners and mannerisms," cubania for Perez Firmat is part of the interior life of Cubans-"it's not asserted" but felt and desired. It is not a reflex "but a choice." Cubanfa is something that cannot "be granted or taken away" (p. 233). Perez Firmat summarizes the differences among the three words: "Cubanfa finds expression not in a nation-un pais-and not in a people-un pueblo-but in something more abstract and ineffable-in a home- land, una patria. So: cubanidad, cubaneo, cubania-all are valid and valuable manifestations of 'lo cubano,' what is Cuban. Without cubanidad, civil society is chaotic; without cubaneo, social intercourse is lifeless; without cubania, cubanidad and cubaneo lose their spiritual mooring" (pp. 233-34). Perez Firmat returns repeatedly to Jorge Mafiach and Fernando Ortiz to analyze two contradictory foundational views of Cuban culture. Mafiach's writings exhibit a pronounced tendency toward logical thought, a distanc- ing and "magisterial" tone that make his writings read like a lesson. My Own Private Cuba analyzes Mafiach's Glosas (1924), Indagacion del choteo (1928), and Historia y estilo (1944). As Perez Firmat explains, Ortiz's works speak in an alternate voice, one that seeks knowledge but avoids "mastery." In Ortiz's work, "knowl- edge is supplemented not by wisdom but by savvy, a term that I connect not just to saber (to know) but also to sabor (to taste)" (p. 4). Perez Firmat's essays on Ortiz are more inclusive, with discussions of Los negros brujos (1906), Un catauro de cubanismos (1923), Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar (1940a; translated in 1970 as Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar), and the essays "La cubanidad y los negros" (1939), "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad" (1940b), and "Del fen6meno social de la 'transculturaci6n"' (1940c). The distinction made by Perez Firmat between Mafach's "knowl- edge" and the "knowledge-flavor" of Ortiz allows readers to understand much of the critiques of Cuban studies made by Cuban-born critics. Signifi- cant examples are La ruta de Severo Sarduy (1987a) by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, La isla que se repite (1989, The Repeating Island, 1992) by Antonio Benitez Rojo, and many essays by Perez Firmat, particularly those in The Cuban Condition, Life on the Hyphen, and most recently, My Own Private Cuba. The four books reviewed here offer a vision of Cuban cultural mul- tiplicity. Linked by the themes of cultural identity and the diversity of Cuban literature, these studies complement each other well. Davies's approximate analysis of the Afro-Cuban theme is masterfully developed by Mullen in explaining the origins and development of Afro-Cubanism. This study is closely related to Perez Firmat's My Own Private Cuba in its discussion of the formation of "lo cubano," particularly the seminal theories of Fernando Ortiz. Smorkaloff examines Cuban literature as currently expressed and discusses the theme of construction of identity in the context of nation and 243
Latin American Research Review national culture, while Davies places it in the context of Cuban women writers. Like Mullen, Smorkaloff includes Perez Firmat in her study and es- tablishes connections with the Cuban literary tradition. Echoing Edouard Glissant's observations about the Caribbean, it can be said of these four works, "Sameness is subliminal difference; diversity is accepted difference." REFERENCES ALVAREZ BORLAND, ISABEL 1998 Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ARENAS, REINALDO 1969 El mundo alucinante. Mexico City: Di6genes. 1971 Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Life and Adventures of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier. Translated by Gordon Brotherston. Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Ultramarine. 1987 The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Avon. BALLESTER, J. P., M. E. ESCALONA, AND I. DE LA NUEZ, EDS. 1995 Cuba, la isla posible. Barcelona: Destino. BARQUET, JESUS J. 1995 "Mas alla de la isla." Puentelibre 2, nos. 5-6 (Summer) (published in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso). 1999 Escrituras poeticas de una nacion: Dulce Marfa Loynaz, Juana Rosa Pita y Carlota Caulfield. Havana: Uni6n. BEHAR, RUTH 1998 "Foreword." In Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, edited by Mirta Yfaez, translated by Dick Cluster and Cindy Schuster, vii-xix. Boston, Mass.: Beacon. BEHAR, RUTH, AND JUAN LEON, EDS. 1994 "Bridges to Cuba." Michigan Quarterly Review 33, nos. 3-4 (Summer-Fall). BENITEZ ROJO, ANTONIO 1989 La isla que se repite. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte. 1992 The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James Maraniss. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. BROCK, LISA, AND DIGNA CASTANEDA, EDS. 1998 Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press. CABRERA, LYDIA 1936 Contes negres de Cuba. Paris: Gallimard. 1940 Cuentos negros de Cuba. Havana: La Ver6nica. 1954 El monte. N.p.: n.p. CAMPUZANO, LUISA 1988 "La mujer en la narrativa de la Revoluci6n: Ponencia de una carencia." Letras Cubanas, no. 7 (Jan.-Mar.):132-49. CARPENTIER, ALEJO 1933 iEcue-Yamba-O! Historia afro-cubana. Madrid: Editorial Espafia. 1953 Los pasos perdidos. Mexico City: Iberoamericana de Publicaciones. 1971 The Lost Steps. Translated by Harriet de Onis. New York: Knopf. DAVIS, DARIEN J. 1997 "%Criollo o mulato? Cultural Identity in Cuba, 1930-1960." In Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality in the Caribbean, edited by Juan Manuel Carri6n, 69-95. San Juan: Insti- tute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico. DESNOES, EDMUNDO 1965 Memorias del subdesarrollo. Havana: Uni6n. 1967 Inconsolable Memories. Translated by the author. New York: New American Library. FERNANDEZ, PABLO ARMANDO 1968 Los ninos se despiden. Havana: Casa de las Americas. 244
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Latin American Research Review THOMAS, HUGH 1971 Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper and Row. WILLIAMS, LORNA V. 1994 The Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. YANEZ, MIRTA, AND MARILYN BOBES, EDS. 1996 Estatuas de sal: Cuentistas cubanas contempordneas. Havana: Uni6n de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC). 246