TRUMPETS IN THE MOUNTAINS

Theater and the Politics of National Culture in CubaBy Laurie A. Frederik

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5246-4

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….xiPrologue: The Red Blood of Cuban Identity…………………………………………………………………………………………………..xixIntroduction: More than Just Scenery……………………………………………………………………………………………………….11. Revolution and Revolutionary Performance or, what happens when el negrito, la mulata, and el gallego meet el Hombre Nuevo…………………………412. Artists in the Special Period, Option Zero, and the Hombre Novísimo or, the heroic rescue of Liborio and Elpidio Valdés………………….763. Creative Process and Play Making in Cumanayagua or, waiting for Atilio on the side of a country road……………………………………………1114. The Inundation of Siguanea and Cuba or, the near drowning and rescue of Cuba’s Godot………………………………………………………….1425. Cultural Crusades and the Unsung Artists of Guantánamo or, how Don Quixote saves humble Harriero from the devil……………………………..1756. Storytellers and the Story Told: Voices and Visions in the Zones of Silence or, who wins the wager if the cockfight ends in a draw…………………2187. Dramatic Irony and Janus-Faced Nationalism or, the triumphant stage return of el negrito and mister Smith……………………………………….259NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..279GLOSSARY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..291SOURCES CITED……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………297INDEX…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..325

Chapter One

REVOLUTION AND REVOLUTIONARY PERFORMANCE

or, what happens when el negrito, la mulata, and el gallego meet el Hombre Nuevo

The modern ancien régime is the comedian of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough, and it goes through many stages when it conducts an ancient formation to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical formation is comedy […]. Why should history proceed in this way? So that mankind shall separate itself gladly from its past.—KARL MARX (1844; in Tucker 1978:57)

Distinctions of cubania began, as in many nationalist movements, during the long fight for independence from colonial domination in the 1800s and focused largely on ideas of inclusion based on race and bloodlines, though it also related to economic class and one’s perceived level of education and civility. In the late 1800s, the Spanish sought to maintain control over the island, while criollos struggled to free themselves from this dominance and liberate the emerging Cuban nation. Public expressions of the desire for national independence were prevalent, but the separation of pro-Cuba and anti-Cuba was not as clear cut as in many other colonial situations that evolved around white European versus indigenous. Various analyses of Latin America and the Caribbean have asserted that the genetic and cultural roots of the Cuban people were Indian, Spanish, and African (Dâvila 2001; Weiss 1993). The situation in Cuba was distinct from other Latin American nationalist movements in that most of its true indigenous inhabitants (Taino, Siboney, and Arawak Indians) were extinguished through European disease, maltreatment, and slaughter. Thus, “indigenous” or “native” ceased to be a political player in Cuba, and as a result Cuban national consciousness was to be negotiated along different lines. Although there were arguably still descendants of the original Caribbean Indians in the rural mountainous areas of the Guantanamo during my time there, their images were more often found in the marketing of Cuban beer. After the conquest, what remained on the island were black slaves from Africa, white settlers from Spain, and brown-skinned mulattos. During the nineteenth century, there was also a growing population of Chinese immigrants, brought over by the Spanish between 1848 and 1878 to work as indentured laborers (see Yun 2009). While the Chinese were included as part of the national ajiaco (Fernando Ortiz’s stew metaphor for cultural and racial mixing, see Ortiz 1906, 1940) and seen on stage, they were not documented in the archives as politically active in the nationalist movement.

A century before Fidel Castro’s Revolution for social democracy and equality for all classes and races, Cuba was a society facing very different struggles. By 1868, Cuba had been under Spanish colonial control for 354 years and its population torn by racial and economic inequalities. The Ten Years’ War for Cuban independence from Spain began in 1867, but Cuba was not independent until 1898. In the late 1800s, Cuba had a marked class structure, plagued with racial discrimination against former African slaves, mulattos, Chinese, and other nonwhites, as well as scorn for the bianco sucios—poor and often so-called uncivilized classes of whites. Economic and political power belonged to the elites, while the lower classes struggled to survive as laborers on tobacco or sugar farms and worked as domestic servants to the affluent urbanites (Horowitz 1971; Mintz 1985; Ortiz [1947] 1995; Perez 1995). The last years of colonial Cuba were difficult for all of the island’s residents, but especially for those living in poverty. While plantation owners, successful merchants, and government oicials lived in relative comfort, the poor urban and rural masses were plagued by labor exploitation, unemployment, illiteracy, and sickness. Black slaves lived in even worse conditions, often struggling just to stay alive. The freeing of slaves in 1886 did not help to alleviate their hardships. And although nationalist cries for an independent Cuba were increasing and unifying those who were pro-Cuba, not all segments of society were included in this conception of “nation” in the nineteenth century. The end of the colonial era was a time of struggle by the groups who wished to be included in the process of national self-definition and identity building, particularly blacks and mulattos.

In order to understand Cuban national identity in the twenty-first century, it is important to take into consideration the history of its interpretation. This chapter describes the first declarations and definitions of Cuban national identity and examines the evolution of its cast of national characters as they developed on theatrical stages. Pre-revolutionary archetypes popularized in the nineteenth century were introduced—only to be forcibly erased in 1959 to make way for the Revolution’s Hombre Nuevo. Subsequent chapters illustrate how twenty-first-century perceptions of the Cuban character looked back, however unconsciously (or grudgingly), to images of prerevolutionary society, subverting more than fifty years of ideological education intended to eradicate racial and class-based social divisions.

Teatro Bufo and a Cuban Commedia dell’Arte

A type of theater called Teatro Bufo (Theater of the Buffoon) emerged during the busiest period of the Cuban slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century, when the island contained the highest percentage of black inhabitants: roughly 55 percent black versus 45 percent white (mulattos were included in the statistics for “black” in this data; de la Fuente 1995:135). Teatro Bufo (also known as teatro vernáculo, or comic theater) was a blackface theater in which white actors blackened their faces with burnt cork and painted their lips white. While similar to the American minstrels in style, the Bufo scripts, especially those in the early twentieth century, had more fully developed storylines and their content reacted to Cuban historicity and social issues of the time. The three main characters—el negrito (negro male), la mulata (female mulatto), and el gallego (white male Spaniard) —ultimately came to be seen as the three distinct social and ethnic groups of the new Cuban nation. The full history and analysis of Teatro Bufo are beyond the scope of my project here and have already been expertly investigated by the theater scholar Jill Lane (1998, 2005); the Cuban teatrista and sociologist, Esther Suárez Durán (1995, 2006, 2008); and ethnomusicologist Robin Moore (1997), but it is significant to my analysis of contemporary Cuban theater for its turbulent relationship with revolutionary ideology as well as its distinctive stage characters—a trio making up a genre that Cuban theater historian, Rine Leal, called nuestra Commedia dell’Arte” (our own Commedia dell’Arte) (Leal 1975a:17, 20). The stage versions of the trio disappeared when Bufo was ultimately banned, but they reappeared during the crisis of the Special Period.

Like most theater, Teatro Bufo was a genre that had to be experienced live in a public venue, not read in private, for without the interplay of accents (negrito, mulata, gallego), music (son, danzon, rumba, tambores), facial expressions, the timing of the dialogue, and the reactions of the audience (laughter, shocked gasps), much of its effect was lost. Indeed, I myself understood a great deal more about the genre and the relationship between the characters after I finally saw a live Bufo performance (sans blackface) in 1998, and again in 2000 when I knew more about Cuban culture. It was an artistic venue to share humor, voice complaints, collectively justify social mores, and publicly debate Cuban social types and their roles. Teatro Bufo had a dual role in colonial society: it derided the black and mulatto image, but at the same time popularized and bolstered members of these groups as having an identity, including it, for the first time, in a notion of Cuban nationality. It not only provided a new form of comic relief to Cubans weary of political struggles and economic hardships, but also began to provide an image of what the up-and-coming Cuba might look like. It created an understanding of who was part of the national picture, both powerful and powerless.

This theater form provided an important example of how social critique and public opinion were embodied in popular performance in the early Cuban Republic, and many historians believe it was the first time a distinctly “Cuban” character was represented on stage and written into dramatic texts (Leal 1975a, 1980; Suarez Duran 2006). This new Cuban was not the ideal citizen, not the imagined image of the future, or the celebrated national hero, as will be seen in later chapters. This citizen of the early Cuban Republic was powerful simply in the recognition of his distinction from colonial and Spanish culture. Although Bufo productions were originally intended to denigrate and ridicule the appearance and behavior of the black and mulatto, the inadvertent result was to put them into the national spotlight. The plays were comedic and entertaining, comedy being a crucial element in its increasing popularity. Audience members enjoyed going to them, demand increased, and the number of professional Bufo groups proliferated. Black music and dance became increasingly known and popular by their inclusion on public stages, and Cuba’s seemingly marginal black culture was slowly becoming associated with the national struggle for self-expression (Lane 1998, 2005; Leal 1975a, 1975b, 1980; R. Moore 1997. See also E. Robreno 1961 and Ayala 1994).

Another relevant component of Teatro Bufo was the extent to which rural guajiro music and dance came to play an increasingly important role in its content. Robin Moore describes how the vogue of a growing afrocubanismo, as well as alternative whiter-hued nationalisms of indigenismo (pertaining to native Indians) and guajirismo (pertaining to rural peasants), were evidenced by musical styles presented on Bufo stages and in popular culture (R. Moore 1997:122–32). But while images of the guajiro and rural music and dance were also portrayed on Bufo stages throughout their duration, it seems they did not have the same celebrity stage presence as the negrito and mulata. After all, most guajiros were white, and thus a reminder of what elite Cubans might have been or could still become (see Leal 1980:44–50 for a very brief discussion of the bufo-campesino).

The immediate goal of these early comedies was to entertain, and by going to them audiences were able to escape the drudgery of colonial administration and work on the sugar plantations and to socialize with acquaintances. With the instant popularity and growth of Teatro Bufo in the nineteenth century, called bufomania, the press attested that “no hay ciudad de alguna importancia en el interior que no tenga su compañía” (there is no city of any importance in the interior that does not yet have its own company. El País, November 8, 1868). Teatro Bufo’s surge in popularity was due to several factors. Consider Marx’s aforementioned theory about the relationship between history and comedy. Cuban Bufos show that an inherent social tension between Spanish colonialists and Cuban nationals was coming to a head. Bufos of the late 1880s and early 1900s not only degraded blacks; they also covertly targeted the colonial regime, confronting and challenging dominant Spanish and European traditions. Although the negrito character still appeared to be the primary comedic target on stage, it was his relationship to gallegos, mulatas, and the occasional norteamericano (North American) that stole the show. In fact, the negrito, however vulgar and ignorant he was portrayed, also appeared as the most cunning of the cast, making fun of the others in a kind of inversion à la Molière. While relationships appeared equivocal, it must be remembered that all negrito actors were in fact white beneath their stage make-up (although increasingly, mulatas were “real” mulatas). Therefore, despite their black faces and prescribed character, there remained a significant distance between the actor and the reality of the black. The theater provided a powerful point of contact between mainstream and marginalized. In prerevolutionary Cuba, Cuban identity appeared to be up for grabs. Its resolution depended on who had the power to decide what characteristics constituted a Cuban citizen.

The gallego had an especially poignant role, for with the increasing antagonism toward his character in both real and theatrical life, the image of “Cuban” began to take on a tanner hue. This bronceando (tanning) of the national image is discussed by Robin Moore, who writes about the “nationalization of blackness” and the point at which the Afro-Cuban element appears in public negotiations of nationality (R. Moore 1997). Following an essay by Argeliers Leon (1991), Moore describes two stages of “artistic nationalism.” The first stage, he argues, began in the mid-nineteenth century among the Creole planter elite. This was a predominantly white nationalist phase in which blacks were only grudgingly accepted into society and were excluded from cultural expression such as painting, literature, and music. The second period began in the 1920s and has continued into the present day, “characterized by the rapidly increasing centrality of Afro-Cuban music to national culture, at least as a somewhat abstract source of inspiration” (R. Moore 1997:22). Moore calls the period from about 1923 to 1933 “Leon’s axis,” because it was the “socio-historical moment linking distinct epochs of white and black nationalism.” The “sudden vogue of afrocubanismo” brought the discussion of race and nation to a level of new immediacy (ibid.:115–16).

Despite its popularity, Teatro Bufo was highly controversial for its provocative political content and was too much of a loose cannon for the colonial government. It was banned in 1869 and was not seen on Cuban stages for another ten years, until after the Wars for Independence. In the meantime, its ensembles were forced to perform in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. When the Bufos returned to Cuban stages, the degradation of the black had a smaller role. After 1895 the ambiguity of what constituted a “Cuban” continued, as did discrimination against the blacks, but Spanish colonization was no longer the political hot-topic. Rather, post-independence Bufos focused on the new star enemy—the North American (Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson)—and the three national Cuban types acted more as a collectivity (albeit an equivocal one) than as opposed characters. The themes and political targets changed with the times, but the central character types remained the same—the Cuban commedia dell’arte holding on to its archetypes.

The popularity of theatergoing in Cuba waned both during and after the War for Independence. Dozens of plays were being written in Havana and in other urban centers, but the lack of available venues and dwindling audiences were sizable obstacles. In the political turbulence of the early 1900s, theater was at a standstill, and the integrity of the genre as high art was regulated by those who could still afford to attend or sponsor the companies. Cuba’s most influential political poet and original nationalist, José Marti, had lauded the role of theater in the nation’s history and had stressed the importance of participation by Cuban artists instead of foreign ones (Marti 1891), but the continuance of war and political strife between Cuba and Spain, and also between Cuba and the United States, remained priorities. Despite the debates that surrounded the potential critical power of Teatro Bufo, theater was still considered just a form of entertainment.

Theater and Politics, 1952–1959

Under the second Batista regime (1952–59), theater productions, as well as other forms of art and literature, were being watched more closely by state authorities than ever before, since the heart of political resistance in Cuba, as in many politically unstable countries, was in the universities among the students and intellectuals as well as within leftist artistic circles. In the 1950s, some of the most influential individuals of both of these groups (intellectuals and artists) began working in the University Theater in Havana, and have been described as the “cauldron” of leftist writers who were to later emerge as prominent figures under Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime (Martin 1994). Batista had seen the danger of this growing nucleus of subversive artists and responded by creating the National Institute of Culture in 1954, intended to create a mechanism of government control over the arts through the control of essential subsidies. When ensembles began to go astray, he was then equipped with an official arm that had the power to either “persuade” the theatrical ensembles to redirect their energies, or cut of their ability to perform altogether—the latter being precisely what Batista did in 1956 when the critical murmurs of the University Theater became too audible. Ironically, after Batista’s fall, the revolutionary government used the same kind of regulatory hold and repressive tactics to control the theater. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the political and economic systems changed drastically, but the structural mechanisms of control over cultural production and the forced development of the social and political consciousness of Cuban society remained remarkably intact.

(Continues…)

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