Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1919068
Elzbieta Sklodowska
The disintegration of the Cuban sugar industry after the Soviet Union’s demise, as depicted in the film Melaza (dir. Carlos Lechuga, 2012 ), serves as a point of departure for a more general analysis of the materiality of Cuba’s post-sugar afterlife. Against the backdrop of sugar mills shuttered as a result of the 2002 “restructuring”, I analyse the film’s aesthetic rendering of the multilayered archaeology of loss: from the dissolution of the utopian dreams to the daily precarity of common livelihoods.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1937966
S. Palmié
Following the thematic arc of the essays in this collection, and adding the author’s own reminiscences about fieldwork in Cuba, this afterword reflects on what a material semiotic approach towards a world of things thrown into disarray can reveal about what Malinowski once called “the imponderabilia of actual life” in Cuba during the “Special Period in Times of Peace”.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1932443
M. Bustamante
In the mid-1960s, Cuban exiles in the United States devised creative means to send care packages to their relatives and loved ones on the island to alleviate material scarcities. In doing so, they circumvented the spirit, if not always the letter, of a broader US sanctions regime meant to deny material lifelines of any kind to the island's socialist economy. This essay uses promotional materials from and press coverage about this shipment business to illustrate one of the ways the ideological, diplomatic, and material “Sugar Curtain” dividing the “two Cubas” in the wake of the Cuban Revolution was more permeable than many realise. Notwithstanding the unavailability of pertinent Cuban government records, I also draw on the island press and a set of Cuban laws passed in 1968 to illustrate how political apprehensions over the fairly robust flow of parcels in the 1960s did eventually prompt a Cuban government response.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1966165
Fidel’s voice pervades the jewellery box, reminding us of a more general political intrusion in the supposedly intimate sphere, that “domestic” “interior” socialism. The video’s climax reveals the face that is attached to the sound; spectators glimpse a framed Fidel as if within a soapbox, adorned with the artifice that, the video suggests, sustained the Revolution (Figure 1). The hand packs them back into the box, but the jewels still do not fit, a fact that suggests the rhetoric is not an adequate exchange. The Revolution can keep its “recuperated” goods, as long as it covers up Fidel’s face. Is there wealth, perhaps, beyond the limits delineated by Pluto? Another possible interpretation of the video might echo this article’s epigraph “mucha tienda, poca alma”, that is, a hypocrisy beneath the strength in ideology. Finally, taking into account Pav on’s multiple artistic interventions critiquing the revolutionary government, the video might be implying that no amount of gold can change the present; that is to say, Fidel Castro’s imprint on Cuban reality.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1948822
María A. Cabrera Arús
This introductory article briefly surveys the most recent approaches to material culture in Cuban studies.
这篇介绍性的文章简要地调查了古巴研究中物质文化的最新方法。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1919607
A. Baldacci
This paper examines Nitza Villapol’s cookbooks, cooking show, and magazine columns as windows into how the political and economic policies of the revolutionary government affected the daily lives of average Cubans. By providing recipes and educational content about cooking and nutrition, Villapol played a crucial role as a mediator between state and citizenry. In the process, she taught generations of Cuban audiences how to reconcile their lived realities with the ideological imperatives of revolutionary citizenship, which included upholding nationalist ideals by combatting imperialism through an ethos of creativity and thriftiness in the kitchen. Comparative analysis of the 1960 and 1980 editions of Cocina al minuto illustrates the consequences that austerity and dependence on the Soviet bloc had on the options available to Cuban consumers, in terms of both goods and foodstuffs into the late 1970s, a period remembered for its relative abundance. Nitza Villapol helped Cuban women to navigate these consequences, offering solutions to the shortcomings of state economic policies and transmitting state values with regard to how home cooks should understand and experience those shortcomings.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1937084
A. Pertierra
This paper takes as its starting point memories of an encounter which saw a Jamaican dancehall queen perform on a locally produced television show in Santiago de Cuba at the height of the Special Period economic crisis. I propose that this encounter was a harbinger of subsequent experiences of popular culture consumption in contemporary Cuba, while also drawing from histories of regional connection that placed Santiago de Cuba in a constellation of trans-Caribbean exchanges. The moment shows how, during the Special Period crisis, media producers sought new paths through which to navigate the technological challenges of making television amidst material shortages, and in doing so created new imaginaries of a transnational consumer culture which featured (specific and appropriate) newly built spaces of leisure and distinctive brands of consumption. The television broadcast was a consciously crafted mediation of emerging consumer cultures that at once repudiated and represented the everyday experience of Cuban society as rooted in crisis, scarcity, and socialist taste hierarchies.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-10DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1937965
J. Loss
This article engages a pervasive discourse on decency in twenty-first-century social mores and state prohibitions by examining artists’ work (2016–2019) that speaks to how material culture and aesthetic judgment feed into the aesthetic hegemony of the Cuban state. Attention is paid to three cases that unravel a national and international staging of a universal “decent” Cuban culture in the post-Obama era: (1) the 2017 intervention Where is Mella? by “amateur” artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who called attention to the Cuban military’s commercial alliance with Kempinksi, the Swiss/German hotel group, critiquing Cuba’s new landscape of luxury; (2) Pluto (2016), video art by Geandy Pavón that alludes to a chain of embezzlements and substitutions; and (3) the performances of two “amateur” musicians: Chocolate MC, who, though popular, is also deemed repulsive on both sides of the Florida Straits, and Cimafunk, celebrated as a cultural ambassador. A contemplation on “excess” – a 5-star hotel, junk jewellery, or bling bling – allows for questions of who the Cuban state recognises as an artist, how artists appropriate and expropriate ideas of luxury and refinement, and whether these substitutions can sufficiently erode colonial legacies that continue to contain those subjectivities perceived as excessive.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-12DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1883571
Gabriel Gatti, David Casado-Neira
This introduction contrasts contemporary disappearances with the original disappearances typically framed by the state. With a particular focus on spatialities, the authors suggest that the contemporary disappearances can best be understood as part of an ecology. These reflections are a prologue to the dossier “Ecologies of Disappearance Today”.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-12DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2020.1839869
Gabriel Gatti, Ignacio Irazuzta, M. Martínez
The concept of state of exception has been key for explaining the spaces of enforced disappearances in the 1970s and 1980s in the Southern Cone, to the point that it has become a trope. This article takes up that concept, but revisits and alters it. It turns it around, proposing for what we call the “new disappearances” the concept of “inverted exception”. It does so through the examination of two concrete empirical situations – migrant houses in Mexico and the sanctuary movement in the United States – applying the same ethnographical observation approach to both and using the analysis of those situations to inform the theoretical reflection proposed here. The conclusion is that, while these “new disappearances” have, like enforced disappearances, a direct and close relationship with “spaces of exception”, that relationship now operates inversely: the space of exception is today sometimes the space of appearance, while the norm is widespread disappearance.
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