Chapter 6 From Dancing to Dying in the Streets: Somaesthetics of the Cuban Revolution in Memories of Underdevelopment and Juan of the Dead
Marilyn G. Miller
1 The Cuban Body and the Body Politic
Since January 1959, when news broadcasts chronicled Fidel Castro’s trium- phant entry into the capital city of Havana after the westward push from the Sierra Maestra mountains, film has offered a visual commentary of the Cuban Revolution from the perspective of the capital city’s streets. Early newsreels fea- tured jubilant throngs hailing the young bearded revolutionaries as they made their way into the center of the city and the center of power. In the streets, Cubans celebrated the overthrow of the previous government, condemned U.S. political and economic control in the island, and toppled marquees and monuments that represented that control. The Castro brothers, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and other young leaders brought government to the ground level, first by recruiting revolutionary adherents in the villages and towns of the Cuban provinces, and then by convening the urban masses in streets, squares and other public sites in Havana. Neighborhoods and domestic spaces were repurposed as public venues for sociopolitical and cultural production under the new government. Soon after the revolutionary triumph, Cuba’s citizens were uniformly organized into cdrs, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, established in each neighborhood to institute government policy and surveillance at the most ba- sic level of the street (see Illustration 6.1).1 In 1959, a journal with the title La calle (The Street) was founded as the or- gan of the cdrs. As the image from one cover of La calle shows, the hands of
1 The importance of the cdrs to revolutionary infrastructure is documented in cdr: 10 años de trabajo, published a decade after their formation. No single individual is credited as author.
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Illustration 6.1 Emblem of the Committees for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution. citizens of different ages, races, and professions were envisioned working to- gether like cogs in the wheel to progressively implement revolutionary policies and reforms (see Illustration 6.2). While it has been commonplace to consider the storied, if dilapidated, streets of Havana as “actors” in their own right in documentary and feature films from and about Cuba, here we approach these public spaces from a new angle, from the intersection of the deployment of Cuban revolutionary rheto- ric and lived experience of bodies in community. Havana’s avenues and thor- oughfares provide international access, through their representation in film, to the ways Cubans have come to terms with the needs and desires of the body in the face of revolutionary demands on that body.2 In this essay, I consider how
2 The incursion of revolutionary rhetoric in the experiences of the body had a significant effect on the somaesthetic pleasures of movie-viewing itself. Havana had one of the most highly developed cinema-watching infrastructures in the world prior to the Revolution, but the hab- it of consuming cinema for pure entertainment changed radically after 1959, when the genre