Acknowledgements As I dedicate this thesis to my cohort, the Tulane Latin American Studies, Class of 2016, I want to thank them for all the support, help, and true friendship throughout these two years. To Sarah, Maile, Alex, Leanna, Vanessa, Julia, Elizabeth, Shauna, Caitlin, Abigail, and Alex, the boy, thanks a lot. Thanks to the Stone Center for its warm embrace, to Dr. Thomas Reese, Sue Ingles, Valerie McGinley, Denise Woltering, Laura Wise, Barbara Carter, and many thanks to professor Jimmy Huck for his willingness to always assist and guide. Thanks also to the Stone Center for allowing me to do summer research at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami. And thanks as well to the faculty and staff of the CHC at the University of Miami; the research I did there certainly enriched my investigation. Thanks to all my professors for their teaching and care. I am greatly appreciative of Dr. Guadalupe Garcia and Dr. Grete Viddal for being of invaluable importance in the process of making this thesis and forming the best Reading Committee I could wish for. I want to truly thank my advisor in studies and in life, the mastermind of every step I took in the last two years and to whom I owe everything: Dr. Ana Lopez, mil gracias querida. Thanks to the poet Jesus J. Barquet, for welcoming my interest in this research, and generously offering me access to his personal archive on the Mariel Generation. Thanks to Laura Luna and Miguel Ordoqui, visual artists of the Mariel Generation, for answering my messages of inquiry. ii Thanks to Jennifer Triplett, my guardian angel, not only for backing me up in this final exercise but also in every single paper I had to write during the M.A. program. Thanks to Katy Henderson for stepping away of her dissertation research in Cuba to check on my thesis. Thanks to my wonderful friends from inside and outside Tulane for encouragement and love, with special thanks to Carolina, Sean, Elise, Jesus, Pepe, Handy, Cecilia, Daniela, Aroldo, Javiera, Nacho, William, Caitlin, Christina, Mira, Sarah F., Mart and Ezra. And, of course, this thesis, and everything in my life, could not be possible without my treasured ones from Cuba. Thanks to my family, my family-in-law, and my parents’ friends, because even from afar they always make me feel they are with me. Thanks to my favorite co-workers and best team ever at Estudio Carlos Garaicoa, for showing me how to work for the arts and to do work that means something. Thanks to my good friends on that beautiful island and around the world for the good energy. Thanks to all the earthly and divine on both shores. Thanks to the loves of my life: mami, papi and Boris, most of all, for their great patience. They are my strength and this thesis also belongs to them. Muchísimas gracias a todos. iii Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................ii LIST OF IMAGES..........................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1 PART ONE: The Overture............................................................................................11 PART TWO: The Disturbing Exceptionality...............................................................19 PART THREE: The Hinge.............................................................................................31 THE ARTISTS......................................................................................................41 THE STAGE..........................................................................................................55 CONCLUSIONS..............................................................................................................63 IMAGES...........................................................................................................................69 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................73 BIO....................................................................................................................................79 iv List of Images Image 1………………………………………………………………………………...69 “The sky is falling”. Gilberto Ruiz. Oil on canvas. 88 x 153 inches, 1986. Image 2………………………………………………………………………………...70 “Escape” Jesus ‘Cepp’ Selgas. Acrylic on canvas. 24 x 40 inches, 2009. Image 3………………………………………………………………………………...71 “Where Tears Can’t Stop” Carlos Alfonzo. Acrylic on canvas. 95 ¾ x 128 ¼ inches. 1986. Image 4………………………………………………………………………………...72 “The Legend of the Sese-Eribo.” Juan Boza. Installation: featuring Afro-Cuban imagery and mixed media. 1987. v 1 Introduction “Y al fin llegó el fatídico año 80 y mi familia fue disminuyendo como años antes pasó en Camarioca el puerto del Mariel los fue engullendo.” Frank Delgado, “La Otra Orilla” (1992). [“And finally came the fateful year 80 and my family was diminishing as it happened years before in Camarioca the port of Mariel was engulfing them.” Frank Delgado, “The Other Shore” (1992)]1 On November 10, 2015, Costa Rican authorities broke up a smuggling operation of Cubans trying to reach the U.S., leaving 1,600 Cubans migrants stranded in Costa Rica at the border to Nicaragua. When the government of Costa Rica tried to send them north, the authorities of Nicaragua closed the border. As more Cubans arrived daily, the number of migrants trapped there reached 4,000, with no end in sight. Media outlets around the world reported a new Cuban migration crisis. 2 After detaining migrants at the border for two months, the government of Costa Rica announced that the first group of Cuban migrants would leave on January 12, 2016, for El Salvador, and that the Cuban migrants would then take non-stop bus transportation through Guatemala until reaching Mexico. Once in Mexico, each Cuban migrant would be granted a 20-day temporary transit visa at no cost. However, they would have to reach 1 All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise noted. 2 Because it refers to both leaving the homeland and entering a new country, I use the word ‘migration’ here to include both immigration and emigration processes. 2 the U.S. border on their own. Many Cubans families thus considered 2015, like 1980, a “fateful” year. While reading about this recent migration crisis, debates broke at in the media about what to call this current Cuban migration crisis: “Are they the ‘new Marielitos?’ or the ‘new rafters’?”3 A commenter suggested calling them the “Land-Rafters”, which I think seems quite suitable given how this event recalls both the former Cuban migration crises: the Mariel (1980) and the Balseros, or Rafters (1994).4 Even though these three Cuban migratory crises are different in many ways, they were all rooted in the same causes: 1) the difficulties of daily life in Cuba and 2) the Unites States’ migration policy toward the island. As the three migratory events have dramatically shown, neither of these two factors has truly changed in more than fifty years. During this most recent “Land-Rafters” crisis,5 the well-known Cuban contemporary artist Tania Bruguera traveled to Costa Rica to express her solidarity and to understand the situation of the Cubans stranded at the border.6 Bruguera said in an interview published by the Costa Rican online journal Socialism Today: “I want to show my solidarity by being there with them. I have no plan; I am not anybody who is going 3 In addition to these conversations, I also discovered that a group of migrants created a Facebook page called “Let the Cubans Pass” with the aim that “the world will know their names, experiences and professions in order to contradict those who brand Cubans trying to reach the U.S. as criminals.” 4 I will explain Mariel crises at a later time. As for the Balseros (Rafters) crisis, some scholars regard it as the fourth wave of Cuban immigration (Masud-Piloto, 1996; Perez, 1999). On August 1994 Cuban more than 35,000 Cubans left the island on homemade rafts, and headed to Florida in the span of a few weeks. The 1994 Balseros Crisis was ended by the establishment of the Wet foot, dry foot policy in the U.S. (Greenhill, 2002). 5 To my knowledge, this term has not been used apart from the specific conversation mentioned above, but because of its accuracy I use it to refer to the recent migratory crisis that emerged in Costa Rica. 6 This artist has worked previously on the subject of migrants, in particular when she founded Immigrant Movement International. This is an art project conceived in 2006 and presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. With this initiative, she proposed to initiate a socio-political movement, and she spent a year working in the multicultural neighborhood of Corona, Queens in New York City. 3 change any situation. But well, at least to be with them.”7 With varying degrees of formality, Cuban contemporary artists have issued critical commentaries on Cuban migration, driven by a desire for reflection. They are motivated not only by the current public visibility of the issue nationally and internationally, but also by specific events of the Cuban migratory history like the exodus of Mariel or the phenomenon of the Cuban rafters. Among these, one historical moment stands out: the Mariel boatlift of 1980. This Cuban migration crisis shows up not only because it was the largest of its kind up to that point, but also because —although