Statement of Purpose & Significance

Hume, Y. M. 1 Statement of Purpose and Significance Beginning with the Cuban nationalist movement of the 1920s-40s, Afro-Cuban performance traditions have increasingly served as important popular idioms for expressing Cuba’s national character or cubanidad (Pérez- Firmat 1989; Benítez-Rojo 1996). Cuban nationalist elites considered the traditional practices of Cuba’s longstanding Haitian community to be lacking the qualities of culture that characterized Cuban national identity. Yet by the 1980s, the staging of Haitian rituals for domestic and foreign consumption had become commonplace in regional and national festivals. The proposed research will explore the socio-historical transformations that prompted the inclusion of previously denigrated Haitian culture within the concept of cubanidad. I will trace the emerging role of Haitian-Cubans in formulations of cubanidad through documentary sources and interviews with government officials and performers. The study will use performance analysis and participant-based ethnographic research to examine the effects of this increased visibility on the culture, sense of identity, and performances of Haitian-Cubans in and around Santiago de Cuba. Additionally, I propose to examine how Haitian-Cubans have responded to state-based alterations to their status and role in contemporary Cuba. Performance has been a critical site of cultural production and the means by which Cuba has historically represented its culture to national and international audiences. Multi-layered comparative analyses of three differently configured folkloric troupes and their representations of Haitian culture in four state-sponsored events provide a window for examining how these presentations relate to changing national and regional efforts to define cubanidad. Exploring ritual performances of Haitian-Cuban residents and comparing them to state- sponsored events opens the door for mapping how they are reconfigured over time and space. Additionally, these cultural and ritual performances also exhibit and provide a context for examining regionalized understandings of Cuba’s national cultural identity. Although there has been attention to the ways cultural performance has been implicated in nation building projects (Handler 1988; Guss 2000), fewer works focus on the interwoven dynamics of cultural performance and tourism and its implications for reformulating regional, national and cultural identities. Moreover, while scholarship on the contributions of Afro-Cuban cultural traditions to the construction of Cuba’s revolutionary national identity has burgeoned (Castellanos et al 1988; Pérez-Sarduy and Stubbs 1993; Daniel 1995) no study examine how Cuba’s Afro-Caribbean populations interpret and participate in nationalist ideologies. This Hume, Y. M. 2 research will thus broaden our understanding of how the complex circuits of cultural production and the re- configuration of cubanidad relate to the constructions of Haitian-Cuban identity across local and tourist performances, social contexts and political/public discourses that shift over time. Ethnohistorical Context and Research Setting As the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti was believed to represent an imminent threat to colonial power and slave-based economic production (C.L.R. James 1963; Mintz 1989; Knight 1990; Maingot 1996). The dread of a Haitian style revolution and the fear invoked by the supposed Haitian proclivity for “witchcraft” engulfed the imagination of governing authorities throughout the Americas (Hoetink 1985; Trouillot 1990). In the Cuban setting, these apprehensions positioned Haiti as an antithesis to modernity and damaging to the social fabric (Kutinzski 1993; Helg 1995; Ferrer 1999). Moreover, Haitian cultural elements in Cuba itself were excluded from official expressions of national identity up to the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, in today’s Cuba descendants of Haitian labor migrants and Cuban nationals involved in folkloric performances are increasingly appropriating Haitian culture for the stage. The aftermath of revolutionary reforms that sought to integrate cultural practices of marginal citizens have been coupled with an expanding tourism industry that provides a platform for their exposure, thus paving the way for the new visibility of Haitian culture in Cuba. The history of Haitian migration to Cuba began shortly before the Haitian Revolution of 1804. French planters and their African slaves settled in Oriente, the eastern part of Cuba, and established strong Franco- Haitian traditions (Bettelheim 1993). The second wave of labor migrants, who had the more significant socio- economic impact on expanding Cuba’s sugar industry and with whom this study is concerned, arrived during the first three decades of the twentieth century (Pérez de la Riva 1979; Lundahl 1982; Knight 1985; McLeod 1998). The predominantly unskilled labor force established rural residences around sugar and coffee plantations, migrating across the interior regions between harvest seasons. Although relatively isolated, many of these communities did not remain endogamous after the first generation. The preservation of Haitian Creole and the development of a Spanish-Creole dialect provided many Haitian-Cubans a certain amount of mobility between their dual ethnic identities. While language has been important for maintaining a distinct cultural identity, it is the extensive family networks forged through and grounded in Vodou rituals and the social life of community festivals that has had the most profound significance in preserving Haitian culture in Cuba. The eastern provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Las Tunas, Guantanamo, and Camaguey have been the principal sites for Hume, Y. M. 3 annual ritual celebrations organized and presented by Haitian-Cuban residents of these communities. One such cultural performance is the Gran Gaga, a festive procession comprised of bands of revelers, percussionists, and dancers that takes to the mountainous roads during the week before Easter. Related to Haitian Rara and steeped in Vodou cosmology, the Gran Gaga presents an opportunity for Haitian descendants to recall their ancestral traditions and communal histories. Preliminary research in the summers of 2000 and 2001 demonstrated that the feast day for Ogun, one of the principal Vodou divinities, is a venue for communal and family solidarity and a hybrid cultural event wherein religious practices and the alliances among the cross- communal range of participants provide a space of conflict and negotiations of cultural identity. The performance and exhibition of Haitian cultural practices outside their community contexts emerged out of nationalist/socialist initiatives that materialized from dissatisfaction with the unfulfilled goals of the 1959 Revolution, which accorded primacy of class over race in forging a new national unity (Moore 1988). From the perspective of Santiaguero cultural officials, the definition of modern citizenry did not fully integrate Afro- Caribbean immigrant traditions within the cultural patrimony of the nation (James 2000). Santiago’s distinctive cultural heritage was consistently situated on the peripheries of national expressions of cubanidad and the cultural dominance of Havana. The Santiaguero perception of Santiago and the poorer, rural environment of Oriente being la alma de Cuba (the soul of Cuba) and the administrative center of Havana being la cara de Cuba (the face of Cuba) has long been an ideological rift that produced a strained cultural, political, and socio- economic relationship between the “two Cubas” (Knight 1970; Ibarra 1986; Pérez, L. 1988). Beginning in 1970, approximately eight years after Fidel Castro declared Cuba to be an “Afro-Latin” Caribbean nation, state and regional officials embarked on cultural campaigns with the aim of unearthing customary practices of the nation’s most peripheral communities. During this period of social and cultural re-evaluation, Cuban researchers, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and affiliated provincial cultural institutions, traveled to remote rural areas throughout Oriente to investigate “popular traditions.” Community elders and religious leaders became the subjects of local ethnographic investigation as cultural workers sought to document their living conditions and, more specifically, their Vodou rituals (James, Millet and Alacrón 1998). Performance collectives that had evolved organically were encouraged by the newfound interest in their cultural traditions to develop formal folkloric performance troupes. Hence many such troupes not only participate in performance circuits including Hume, Y. M. 4 regional, community and national festivals, but also elicit discussions about the constitutive elements of Cuban national identity, and who as well as what should be included in the nation’s celebration of its traditions. Theoretical and Disciplinary Significance The concepts of “invention of tradition” and “imagined community” (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1983) address the significance of cultural production in crafting national and postcolonial identities (Verdery 1991; Chatterjee 1993; Lazurus 1999). While the power of the state and elite discursive practices to systematically appropriate and exclude cultural symbols and “folk” traditions have been a focus of critical engagement (Williams 1977; García Canclini 1995; Moore 1997), other lines of inquiry emphasize how competing local agents challenge, negotiate and revise local and national ideologies, policies,

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