ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba: su literatura desde el Modernismo hasta nuestros días July, 2002 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 TABLE OF CONTENTS Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba: su literatura desde el Modernismo hasta nuestros días • Paul Allatson Memory Mambo: Cuban Memory, "American" Mobility, and Achy Obejas’s Lesbian Way • Anke Birkenmaier Travestismo latinoamericano: Sor Juana y Sarduy • Luis Correa-Díaz La ciudad criolla, La Habana según Marta Traba • Alexis Díaz-Pimienta Apuntes para un estudio diacrónico del repentismo en Cuba. "Generaciones"y "promociones" que marcaron su evolución en el siglo XX • Carmen Faccini El discurso político de Zoé Valdés: La nada cotidiana y Te di la vida entera • Manuel Fernández La figura del mimo en Máscaras de Leonardo Padura Fuentes • Roberto González Echevarría Carpentier en Yale: recuerdo fotográfico de una visita • Emily Maguire Island Signifyin(g): Tracing a Caribbean Sense of Play in Lydia Cabrera and Nicolás Guillén • Celina Manzoni Leer, escribir, reescribir. Fragmento y totalidad en Vista del amanecer en el trópico • Oscar Montero Racism in the Republic: Martí and the Legacy of the U.S. Civil War • Desiderio Navarro In medias res publica • Margara Russotto Casa, cuerpo, pasión. Una lectura de Ultimos días de una casa de Dulce María Loynaz • Luis Veres Nicolás Guillén y el período vanguardista en América latina Interviews • Sara E. Cooper Entrevista con Mirta Yáñez: una manera de pensar diferente Essays • Jorge Bracamonte Mirada sobre lo elemental desde la poética en Pablo Neruda • Iraida H. López Autobiographical Narratives in Latino America: A Hemispheric Context 2 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 • Vilma Navarro-Daniels Tejiendo nuevas identidades: La red metaficcional e intertextual en Todo sobre mi madre de Pedro Almodóvar • Angel Núñez El concepto de América latina, los discursos postmodernos y la palabra auténtica del continente • Diana Palaversich Entre las Américas Latinas y el Planeta USA. Dos antologías de Alberto Fuguet • Lidia Santos Flora Tristán y Nísia Floresta: cosmopolitismo y género en el siglo XIX • Juan Antonio Serna El discurso de la subcultura transgresora en el film mexicano Amores perros • Elzbieta Szoka So Many Worlds – So Many Words. The Evolution of the Feminist Canon in the Brazilian Novel • Estela J. Vieira Writing the Present, Rewriting the Plague, José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira and Mario Bellatin’s Salón de belleza Reviews • José Ramón González Lidia Santos, Kitsch Tropical. Los medios en la literatura y el arte en América Latina. 3 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 HOMENAJE AL CENTENARIO DE LA INDEPENDENCIA DE CUBA: SU LITERATURA DESDE EL MODERNISMO HASTA NUESTROS DÍAS 4 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 Memory Mambo: Cuban Memory, "American" Mobility, and Achy Obejas’s Lesbian Way Paul Allatson University of Technology, Sydney "Guantanamera," the unofficial national anthem of island and exiled Cubans, derives from Joseíto Fernández, a Cuban radio presenter who composed the refrain in the 1930s and added to it lines from the first poem in José Martí’s 1891 collection, Versos sencillos (Calvo Ospina 27). Fernández’s musical invention was notable in two ways: the lyrics "could be changed at will with each performance"; and for eighteen years the news bulletins on his radio program were put into verse, and sung to "the rhythm of the Guantanamera" (27). Scores of singers have covered the song since the 1940s, and in keeping with Fernández’s usage many of its interpreters have added new verses to the original refrain, hence the many composers to whom the song is attributed. Thus while some versions are better known than others, "Guantanamera" circulates as a world- renowned cultural product but one subject to constant revision, with no correct, original, or authoritative lyric. In Memory Mambo (1996), the first novel by Achy Obejas, "Guantanamera" serves as a governing metaphor for a Cuban family’s rival accounts of displacement in the U.S.A. (1) For Nena, the sister of the novel’s narrator Juani Casas, family history is "like singing ‘Guantanamera’—everybody gets a chance to make up their own verse." Juani agrees with her sister’s assessment: "‘Memory mambo,’ I said, one hand in the air, the other on my waist as if I were dancing, ‘one step forward, two steps back’" (194). Aware of "Guantanamera’s" propensity for imaginative rewording, Juani intuits that 5 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 memory itself—elusive, unreliable, selective, contradictory, and always unsingular— poses identificatory difficulties for Cuban-Americans like herself. Deeply scored by ideological, historical, and bodily differences, the many accounts circulating in Juani’s family-centric world render Juani the product and victim of narratorial and national dissimulations. Indeed, the impact of historical revisionisms on Juani evokes Martí’s first verso sencillo: "Yo sé . /de mortales engaños,/ Y de sublimes dolores" (16). (2) As a result of such deceits and sorrows, Juani claims to embody an insularity that differentiates her from her immediate family: "I’m something else entirely: my own island, with my own practical borders" (79). Yet her claim is modulated, and complicated, by three factors: her lesbianism, her fraught relationship with a leftist Puerto Rican activist, and the meanings she attaches to "America" as a displaced Cuban. These factors distinguish Memory Mambo from celebrated but securely heteronormative Cuban- American novels by Cristina García or Oscar Hijuelos. (3) Like Obejas’s earlier story collection, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), and her second novel, Days of Awe (2001), Memory Mambo announces a queer engagement with both a dominant Cuban exile imaginary and the U.S. national imaginary. Accordingly, my interest in this paper lies in unravelling and assessing the novel’s figurations of multiple, and potentially antipathetic, modes of national belonging, each of which is politicized differently, and each of which may demand of the novel’s players some measure of "protective" isolation from transcultural U.S.A. In his analysis of nation-state formation, Benedict Anderson claims that the nation is composed of a "fraternity" of strangers for whom, "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, 6 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 horizontal comradeship" (7). But what happens to this explicitly masculine scenario for Cuban-Americans if, as María de los Angeles Torres claims, the Cuban state can no longer confine "cubanía" to and of the island (58)?; or, concomitantly, if the boundaries of the U.S.A. that are supposed to signify a geopolitical, ideological, and cultural separateness between the U.S.A. and its hemispherical nemesis, Cuba, cannot sustain the idea of an exceptional U.S.A.? One explanation is provided by David Mitchell’s response to Cristina García’s Dreaming In Cuban. Mitchell recognizes in that novel "a vaguely autobiographical attempt to reassess her [García’s] individual and familial dislocation between two antagonistic national bodies" (52). Operating as "classificatory units of belonging," both the U.S.-based Cuban family and the imagined national family "exist in parasitic relation to one another by virtue of a shared desire for a unity that inevitably proves to be illusory and contradictory. In other words, family and nation paradoxically coexist because neither grouping succeeds in sustaining the singularity to which each necessarily aspires" (italics his, 52). With some qualification—to counter the masculine and heterosexualized coordinates of nationhood when idealized as a giant kinship network [gran familia]; and to accept that the nation-family nexus is not a Cuban conundrum alone, but a U.S. one as well—these observations may be applied to Memory Mambo. The novel’s Cuban family in exile reproduces in miniature the nation imagined as a gran familia; and yet both family and nation are not only split between Cuba and the U.S.A., but also inside the borders of each geopolity. This sense of plurality-in-rupture is built into the novel’s first chapter where Juani meditates on her tenuous relation to the contradictory narratives told about her family’s past. Having arrived in the U.S.A. from Cuba with her family in 1978 when she was six 7 ISSUE 7 Homenaje al centenario de la independencia de Cuba (July, 2002) ISSN: 1523-1720 years old, Juani reaches adulthood obsessed by a need to determine the truth about her family’s motives for escape. (4) Later in the novel Juani announces that "in this house of nostalgia and fear, of time warps and trivia, I’m the only one I know about for sure," a claim to self-knowledge that she attempts to affirm with meticulously kept journal entries and correctly identified and placed family photographs (79). However, the familial knowledge required to attain a coherent historicized sense of self proves to be elusive: "I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself" (9). In part, Juani’s unease stems from the fact that she must adapt to multiple yet overlapping constructs of family and nation. Aside from her immediate family, Juani claims membership of two categories of cousins, those of "blood" who for the most part reside in Cuba, and those made "in exile" after 1959. The former grouping is defined by the heavy material and psychic demands that they may make of their U.S.