Cuban- American Literature and Art Negotiating Identities Edited by Isabel Alvarez Borland & Lynette M.F. Bosch Cuban-American Literature and Art ••••••••• SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors Cuban-American Literature and Art ••••••••• NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES Edited by Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch State University of New York Press Cover art: El Arte sín historia (2001), by Carlos Estévez. Courtesy of the artist. “Irremediable,” by Laura Imayo Tartakoff, © Laura Imayo Tartakoff, reprinted by permission of the author. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Dana Foote Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cuban-American literature and art : negotiating identities / edited by Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch. p. cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-9373-1 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—Cuban American authors—History and criticism. 2. Cuban American art. 3. Cuban Americans—Intellectual life. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in art. I. Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. II. Bosch, Lynette M. F. PS153.C83C83 2009 860—dc22 2008017298 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In memory of Carlos Alvarez Santalís (1920–2006) Antonio A. Bosch y Cabezola (1924–2000) The old ones came from the sea and the people on land, the ones who lived here, let them in. But later, the ones from the land argued with the sea people and changed their minds and tried to push them back into the ocean . Then the ones from the sea drove the land people out and established themselves here and planted it all with palm trees. Little by little, without them realizing it, their scales and fins began to fall off, and their children didn’t want to live close to the water nor hunt shrimp, and the old ones began dying of sadness because they could no longer return to the sea even if they wanted to . and at the very end they lost their gills. This was the curse that had been put on them by the ones from land. —Roberto G. Fernández, Raining Backwards CONTENTS •••••• Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch Part One • The Literature 1 The Spell of the Hyphen 15 Gustavo Pérez Firmat 2 Figures of Identity: Ana Menéndez’s and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Photographs 31 Isabel Alvarez Borland 3 Engendering the Nation: The Mother/Daughter Plot in Cuban American Fiction 47 Adriana Méndez Rodenas 4 Reading Lives in Installments: Autobiographical Essays of Women from the Cuban Diaspora 61 Iraida H. López 5 Am I your worst nightmare? Reading Roberto G. Fernández’s Major Fictions 77 Jorge Febles 6 Exile, Memories, and Identities in Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba 93 William Luis 7 Writing in Cuban, Living as Other: Cuban American Women Writers Getting It Right 109 Eliana Rivero vii viii • Contents Part Two • The Art 8 From the Vanguardia to the United States: Cuban and Cuban American Identity in the Visual Arts 129 Lynette M. F. Bosch 9 Challenging Orthodoxies: Cuban American Art and Postmodernist Criticism 149 Mark E. Denaci 10 Cuban Artists and the Irony of Exile 165 Carol Damian 11 Cuban American Identity and Art 175 Jorge J. E. Gracia 12 Cuban Art in the Diaspora 189 Andrea O’Reilly Herrera About the Editors 203 About the Contributors 205 Index 209 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ••••••••••• The editors are deeply grateful to all of the scholars in art and literature who generously contributed their insightful essays to this collection. We especially thank Gustavo, Adriana, Jorge F., Willy, Iraida, Eliana, Mark, Carol, Jorge G., and Andrea. We thank Carlos Estévez for his permission to use one of his works for the cover. Roberto Fernández was generous with his sensitive wit and we thank him for giving us our origins in epigraphic form. Carlos Eire’s prose and Laura Imayo Tartakoff’s poem provided a moving portrait of divided lives. We are indebted to Jorge Gracia whose NEH idea and enthusiasm about this topic made our collaboration and this volume possible. This manuscript could have never been a book without the invaluable help of Mary Morrisard-Larkin and Danielle Bacon, of the Holy Cross Educa- tional Technology Group; as well as Larin McLaughlin, acquisitions editor, Dana Foote, production editor, and Kay Butler, copyeditor, at State University of New York Press. Finally, our special thanks to Kermit Borland and Charles Burroughs who read and commented on parts of this book at various stages in its compo- sition. We appreciate their patience with the tribe of Cubanos who have paraded through their lives as a result of our work. ix Introduction Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch The Chinese horn within Cuban carnival music entails a complex historical mystery: the arrival of the Chinese in Cuba, the cruel exploitation of this ethnic group, the acculturation of the group to the criollo ways of life, its desire for emancipation, and the contributions of the Chinese during the years of the Cuban Republic. —Antonio Benítez Rojo, “Carnaval de Ideas” For Antonio Benítez Rojo, the presence of the Chinese horn in Cuban carnival music represents a cultural encounter that offers unique and invaluable infor- mation not only about the evolution of Cuban music, but also about the stages of the formation of the Cuban nation. The author of The Repeating Island ob- serves that the anomalous presence of the corneta china in Cuban music of the nineteenth century speaks at once of the history, economy, and sociology of the Chinese as an ethnic group within the island of Cuba: “What had to occur in order to incorporate the rough and out of tune sound of the Chinese horn into a rhythm which was basically African was the closeness of the Chinese and the African men in the sugar plantations of the last century” (Interview by Stavans 22). The cultural juxtapositions that Antonio Benítez Rojo mentions in his com- mentary on the corneta china are not only applicable to the Cuban nation, but also permeate the sensibility of today’s Cuban-American cultural production wherein diverse ethnic and racial groups (European, African, Asian, Jewish) blend to form a fluid identity traceable to Cuban cultural and societal patterns. Much like the dissonant sounds of the Chinese horn in the music of Cuban carnival, the narratives and visual representations of U.S. artists and writers of Cuban heritage analyzed in this volume contain within themselves the sometimes disharmonious experience of a divided identity. In fact, the work of the writers and visual artists we analyze here exhibits a sensibility that is highly creative, but which is at times tragic and fractured because it is born from the precarious balance caused by the mixing of two very different cultural tra- 1 2 • Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch ditions that have coexisted in U.S. territory since the 1959 revolution. Most sig- nificantly, these Cuban-American fictions and works of art internalize crucial moments in the history of Cuba’s last forty years: dictatorship, exile, and multi- ple migratory waves. Because of the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity of the groups who came or were brought to the island, cultural pluralism is a marker of Cuban and Cuban-American identity. Afro-Cubans and Chinese Cubans were two groups that influenced Cuban culture, alongside the immigrants from Spain and other European countries. Cuba also had a significant Jewish population. As these groups met and mixed to differing degrees, their individual and group contri- butions to Cuban culture were brought to the United States by exiles and im- migrants from the island. Since the nineteenth century new arrivals from Cuba continue to change the tenor and meaning of the cultural synthesis that defines lo cubano-americano, an ever-shifting concept of identity defined by time, place, class, race, and ethnicity within an American matrix. Cuban-American writers, poets, and artists thus embody a microcosmic portrait of Cuban and American society in which individual artists choose their expository territory. Within this microcosm, a shift in emphasis provides a shift in meaning in the process of defining or designing that which is Cuban or that which is Cuban-American, or for that matter, that which is American. Record- ing the meaning of these transformations has been the purview of the writers, poets, and artists studied in this volume. Together, they have given voice to the reality of the thresholds they occupy as Cubans and Americans living within the continuum created by their bicultural identities. At times, the essays in this col- lection may reflect tension, reconciliation, or even a balance between these markers of identity. The art and the literature of Cuban America contain the fluidity and elu- siveness that characterize the Cuban national quest for identity since the sec- ond half of the nineteenth century (Ciani Forza 53). A sense of the metaphys- ical absence of a nation, and a need to reconceptualize it from within is evident in the intellectual history of the island not only in the nineteenth-century writ- ings of Jose Martí (“Nuestra América,” 1891), but also in the twentieth-century treatise of Fernando Ortiz (Contrapunteo del tabaco y el azúcar, 1940) and the essays of Jorge Mañach (Historia y estilo, 1944).