“Yuni and his Mákina” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

I walk over the broken eggshells on the corner of E and 13 and wonder what paths Eleguá opened today?

Cuba is the daughter of Ochún. Be careful because the smile is a front for her to get what she needs by leading you astray.

I remind myself to keep my foreign gaze so as not fall into the routine of the Cuban experience. The street is a great spectacle of drama, comedy, and sometimes horror– alive with humanness and expression as is no other city I know.

Each trip to Cuba, I arrive to find another Cuban friend suelto por el mundo [let loose to the world].

People on the street are constantly asking me the time in order to figure out where I am from, not because there is somewhere they need to be.

Constant sizing up to try to figure out, what kind of foreigner are you?

When the students arrived at the University today, they found out that classes were cancelled because it is “The day of the student.”

To be reminded of the preciousness of a plastic bag or a pen…

The students bought hamsters for their room but I am pretty sure one of them is a mouse.

Learning to live and navigate another country is like being born again.

Tiempo

“Boy with flag in pioneer uniform” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

One of my first transformations upon arrival in Havana is walking at the slow, local pace. There is no rush to get anywhere because time is not a commodity.

Cuba’s tempo of tomorrow is counter time. Rather as if the chacha lo kafún [ceremonial step of the orishas] was to take over Miami.

My guitar teacher is always late to our classes because there is no máquina service from his house and the bus is never on time.

Getting official signatures: Closed for lunch. The secretary went to the doctor. He already left for the day. Come back tomorrow morning. She had some issues to resolve. The power is out. His mother was sick. I don’t know where he is. He went to the bank but he might be back soon. Take a seat.

The repetition of daily events…

The melodrama of crumbling buildings alongside new businesses dressed up in 1950s décor, bringing the past back to life.

I wonder if they will make a museum out of the Riviera that depicts Meyer Lansky and the mafia years in Cuba before the hotel crumbles beyond repair.

There is a different kind of exceptionality in the Cuba post-Special Period, one that involves identifying with and meditating a peculiar sense of time.

History is an ongoing process that moves at accelerated revolutionary speeds.

“History will absolve me.” –Fidel

Imágenes

“Havana from the 18th floor” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

As I watch from the 18^th floor, the storm clouds roll across the ocean and bathe Havana in its afternoon shower.

Mojito green, strawberry daiquiri red, guayabera white, cement grey, ocean turquoise, sky blue: the colors of Havana.

On my evening run along the malecón, I watch the man with the sad eyes who is cradling the black doll in a blue dress and speaking gently to the sea. I wonder if Yemayá will show her kindness to his supplications?

Shades of sunset illuminate Havana from the malecón as the flag is folded to start the cañonazo ceremony.

“Havana Sunset” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Along the malecón, the turbulent sea, the salt air, and time erode the walls of the apartment buildings. Eroded but not vanquished.

A sea of white medical school jackets walking down San Lázaro to the Punta del Prado on November 27…

Tropical storm waves over the malecón.

Grateful for nature’s beauty when sitting in the lookout tower inside the castle of shells and sand in the Japanese garden of 1830 Restaurant… Watching the sunset over the malecón.

I almost stepped on the human shit in the middle of the malecón this morning.

The students laugh and take pictures of the fisherman blowing up condoms to use as floaters on their fishing lines. And the mother inflates another one for her child to play with like a balloon as she nibbles on peanuts.

From the luxurious pool of the Meliá Cohiba hotel, I can see both a girl hanging her laundry from a window of her tenement apartment building and the abandoned balconies of the Rivera hotel, former symbol of 1950’s mafia glory.

The abuelos meet at sunrise to gossip and to swim at the playita of 16^th. Wearing shoes to protect their feet, they carefully step over the sleeping man to plunge their bodies into the ocean and swim along the coast of the malecón. Bart, the dog, stands guard for emergency.

The solar is a living organism.

Centro Habana, a glamorous 1950s shopping district, deprived of stock, now divided into barbacoas for families to stack up generations… Buildings change the structures of their interiors in accordance to their new uses.

Centro Havana, most densely populated municipality, where personal lives spill into public spaces… The two mothers dressed in bathrobes stand gossiping while they watch their children play with toy cars in the street.

Two children in school uniforms chase chicks between the billowing sheets of laundry hung on lines across the patio under the watchful eye of the man fixing the red high heel shoe. Someone yells, “¡Hasta cuando!” [Until when!] from inside the solar with the Industriales sign over the door.

The park smells of grass, freshly cut by the old man with a machete. The young boy laughs as his father teaches him to ride a bike around the waterless fountain that now serves as the field for the neighborhood children to play soccer. I think of sitting and watching from the bench beside the bust of Jose Martí, but find all the wooden boards have been stolen. There is nothing left but the frame.

I like to try to imagine what lovers are whispering into each other’s ears as they sit folded together on benches along Prado.

At the Taller Experimental de Gráfica in la Chorrera we break for lunch and J. leads me into a solar on the corner and into someone’s kitchen, where the workers in Habana Vieja make lines for lunch. The sweet woman serves up a tasty plate of pollo con congris for 1 CUC that rivals any of the paladares that are being pushed on the foreigners below.

The pastel de guayaba.

Turquoise, blue, purple, and pink enliven the facades of crumbling Vedado. Laundry billows from the windows.

“Se Vende” reads the sign beside the pile of rubble that was once an apartment building on the corner of B and 5^th St.

The Iwayós, dressed in white, hide from moonbeams under their umbrellas as I walk to the theater soaking in the full moon.

Havana fashion represents the hustling and ingenuity between Europe and the New World. Tropical interpretations of zoot suits meet santería. The brighter the better. Lycra and rhinestones die hard.

How long will the unfortunate yonki mohawks be in fashion?

– Photo credit: Annie Gibson

In the living room at the santero house, the saints are whispering in the babalao’s ear. On one side of the living room is the altar for the orishás. We sit down on the other side of the room on the couch below a framed pin-up of a half-naked woman wearing underwear and heels who is lounging on a motorcycle.

Green and yellow bracelets of mano de Orula…

The students are allowed into the back room to watch the babalao feed coco to the santos on Y’s 18^th birthday as the daughter of Oyá.

October 4th, Orulá’s birthday. The sound of batá comes out of unexpected corners. The dulceria is all out of dulces. The woman sitting in the sidecar of the scooter is carrying a cake decorated with the Cuban flag and the woman getting into the collective taxi beside me can’t stand up for so much rum.

We pull up to photograph the apartment building across the street from the US Interest Section. “You want to take pictures here? I could lose my job.” And the car drives off and leaves us on the corner, not even accepting payment.

Today’s máquina was a shockless 1953 Buick tank. It’s like riding in a Flintstones cartoon.

Tattoo sleeve on the arm out the window of today’s yellow máquina driver.

We are riding in a 1952 Ford Customline, but the motor is a Toyota. The Virgen of Charity sits proudly on the dashboard protecting our journey.

There was a colt running the highway alongside our Transtur bus outside of Bayamo.

The police officers excitedly stopped our bus on the way from Baracoa to Santiago and asked the driver if he had seen a dead cow beside the road. (There had been a hit and run and they were searching for the culprit.) The policeman jumped on the bus to be taken to the nearest town to get back-up. His partner tried to come aboard, too, with a group of prisoners, but the bus driver refused since we were full of yuma.

We are following the tracks of the old filmmakers, chasing yesterday as we re-film “Tempo of Tomorrow.” The project is like a scavenger hunt across Cuba, through time backwards and forwards; past, present, and future overlap.

The Kurhotel Escambray sits out of place in the cool air and green mountains of the Tope de los Collantes National Park. Dreamt up by Batista in the 1930s, now the ex-military come here for homeopathic medicine and relaxation and to walk the grounds in tracksuits.

“Danger of Collapse” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

Observing architecture in Havana is like observing nostalgia for worlds that were abruptly ended.

Photographs of decaying buildings are politicized evidence of Havana stuck in time. Image has always been necessary for the Imperial project. But how do you photograph the Cuban experience when every image requires a caption about what is visible and what is missing? The foreign and the Cuban gaze collide.

The camera lens is focused on the changes taking place in Cuba?

Ciego de Ávila

Ciego de Ávila, the city of porches, where we can walk the whole historic center protected from the rain and the contradictory beauty and despair of decrepit buildings and crumbling staircases that lead to home.

Camagüey

Camagüey has narrow streets that keep out pirates and large buses. The tourists line up for bike taxi tours. All streets lead to a church. Ileana Sánchez found an original 18th century fresco on her wall when she chipped away at old paint to expand her studio. Tiny ballerinas in black leotards, their hair tied up in yellow bows, file out of the crumbling yellow building and double up on bikes with their mothers to ride home for dinner. The smell of maduros fritos at 6 pm drift out of open doorways in the narrow streets of Camaguey. The slow pace of the countryside…

Santiago

The Conjunto Santiaguero blares out of the speakers and is projected on the screen above El Encanto Department Store; the smell of fried chicken and oil drifts from the street vendors; the chess players hover over their tables in the park beside Heredia Street as shoppers saunter to and fro.

The women sit embroidering detailed guayaberas and sun dresses at the Quitrin.

The students ask if they will get lice by putting on the helmet to ride the collective moto taxis around Santiago.

Climb the Padre Pico steps to the Tivoli neighborhood and wind through the hilly streets that look down over the Bay. A grandfather is teaching his two grandchildren to ride a bike but their feet don’t quite reach the pedals. Neighbors are playing dominoes on the street corner to catch a breeze; the students are invited into a living room to dance salsa played loudly on a stereo. I sit to have a Bucanero as the Tivoli Son Band rehearses for their show at Casa de las Tradiciones.

The students question the giant penis coming out of the Monumento del Cimarrón [Monument to the Runaway Slave] looking over El Cobre copper mines. There are flowers and bones left at the statue’s ngangá. We seek out the Eleguás hidden in the woods. Art creates ritual and ritual creates art.

Alberto Lescay is expanding his studio and he leans over and whispers that the back door with the beautiful stained glass transom is the escape route for the cimarrón. “How many children do you have?” I ask L, “As of right now I have 7 but I haven’t shut down the factory yet.”

Rafael brings us through the living room where his grandmother is watching the Brazilian novela “Paraíso Tropical.” We go under the sheet that divides the living room from his bedroom. He pulls out a needle, anesthesia, and an assortment of studs for D’s lip piercing.

Baracoa

Curves over la Farola and fog over el Yunque as we make our way to Baracoa.

We order chocolate in la Casa del Chocolate but they are all out.

Local legend has it that if you take a bath in the Rio Miel you will always return to Baracoa.

S. hasn’t shaved since arriving in Cuba. In Baracoa people call him Pelú, like the crazy unshaven man of local legend who is supposed to bring misfortune. They keep steering him towards the barbershop.

Our flight out of Baracoa was delayed because there are no lights on the landing strip so the incoming flight had to land in Santiago. We must wind the 5 hours down the Farola in the dark.

Son y Movimiento

“Oyás” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Sitting under the flamboyanes on the patio of the Conjunto Nacional and listening to the rumba in the Palenque… Eight Oyás spin their skirts with the winds of the cemetery.

At 8:30 am the park comes alive with viejos in black pants and white tops gracefully practicing tai chi.

The sound of 50 voices singing “Para su ayo omo niala guana omonianama keke ayo é” as we run lines of dancing Eleguá in Baile Folklórico…

“Listen to me so that you can learn the step correctly,” said the dance teacher to the Cuban student ogling the German student instead of paying attention. “Then you can teach it to the yuma. Be careful; if you don’t pay attention, then the yuma will be dancing better than you. And then how will you catch a yuma in the Palenque?” The Baile Folklórico class (which costs 30 MN [$1.25] for 4 months) erupts into giggles.

“You have to brush the floor with each step,” says the dance teacher explaining Eleguá’s step. He says to correct me, “I know that in your country you all don’t have to scrub your shoes with toothbrushes, but here we do. So pretend like you are scrubbing.”

R, who sings with the Coro Folklórico Nacional, improvised amazing verses to “Chan Chan” as I strummed the new chords on the guitar. “Stop strumming like a yuma. Where is your cubaneo?” she says.

What music is the soundtrack to your Havana?

At the outdoor concert in El Sauce a packed crowd of Cubans grind their hips to the harmonious sounds of the seventeen Los Van Van musicians playing their souls out into the night.

With the breeze from the rocking chair on the second floor balcony, I listen to the music of the man selling brooms harmonize with the woman selling crackers up and down Calle E.

The New Jersey school bus decorated by Pastors for Peace drives the dancers of the Ballet Nacional Cubano home after rehearsal.

The tambor has begun in thanks to Yemayá and Ochún for saving Marta from her injuries incurred when a neighbor put on a spell of brujería.

Rap group Obsesión organizes a Saturday party for the elderly in Centro Habana so that they can have a space to “dance, socialize, and be relevant” [bailar, socializar, y ser relevantes].

Los Aldeanos sing, “A La Habana ya no aguanto más, se acabó el querer.” [I can’t stand Havana anymore, I have fallen out of love.]

Rain, lightening, and thunder smashes as Síntesis sings to the orishas at Casa del Alba.

At the Peña del Ambia at the UNEAC, the percussion that got everyone on their feet was made out of armoire drawers.

The craziness of my days here seems worth it when in the evenings I can go to see the National Ballet of Cuba, the American Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Chinese Ballet, and the Stuttgart Ballet all for the equivalent of 50 cents.

Dozens of young jazz musicians improvise on stage at the Jardines del Mella as part of JoJazz [Jóvenes Jazz] Festival, which sounds like jóias [jewels]. The electricity goes off but they keep playing even louder and even funkier in the pitch-blackness.

The rumba dancer on stage at Muñequitos de Matanzas used a pañuelo [handkerchief] with an American flag to prepare his vacunao.

Danza Contemporánea performed “Identidad-1,” a choreographed dance by George Céspedes imagining the story of Cuban cultural exchanges and dance genres if the cubaneo were to be replaced by robotic repetition. The Indian dance critic behind me didn’t understand, saying loudly to her friends that the piece didn’t say anything. Understanding Cuba means perceiving subtle cultural movements.

She spent intermission telling her Cuban guide that he should acknowledge that the government is controlling him while he held his breath to keep from bursting.

Francisco used to dance abakuá but lost his leg to diabetes. Now he sits at the park outside of my house and greets me every evening with a promise to take me out dancing to a Disco Temba party for senior citizens.

Voces

“Plaza de la Revolución” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Welcome to Cuba! “Se fue la luz” [The lights went out] and your room is on the 18^th floor.

“Tengo fé en el mejoramiento humano, en la vida futura, en la utilidad de la virtud.” [I have faith in human advancement, in times to come, and in the utility of virtue.] José Martí

Words spoken in the rhythm of son…

Exasperated visitor storms out of the registration line for the film festival saying, “Why is it that in Cuba they seem to want to complicate everything?”

Daynaris tells me to go change my clothes because I am wearing all black on the Día de Santa Bárbara (Changó).

“Are ruins really shame?” asks S.

“Pero amar y ser feliz es algo,” says the graffiti at Línea and Calle G. And I wonder if the voice is spraying out despair over having nothing material or happiness for having the company of others. And I think to myself that scarcity reveals the secret to a good life.

“Step exactly where I step,” says E as I follow her across the crumbling balcony to her home. Who is responsible for ruins in the hallway?

“La gente vive como puede, no como quiere.” [The people live as they can, not how they want.]

Y. tried to shove her wallet into her disheveled bag and then said, “Wait a minute, let me do this the way white people do,” as she organized the clutter.

Cuba is “orden con relajo” writes Damián Fernández.

“Quién no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabalí.”

“Sueño con papas” [I dream of potatoes], says A. “What I wouldn’t give to eat a potato right now.”

“If they made t-shirts here like they did in New York for every time there was a blackout, I would have all the pullovers I need,” says Ale with a laugh. “Blackout at 2pm. Blackout at 6pm…”

I stand in the park on Neptuno and San Lázaro. “¡Celia!” I yell up to the 8^th floor apartment. Celia leans out the window and throws down the keys to open the door because the buzzer is broken. “¡Doctora, traigo jamón!” [Doctor, I have ham!], yells the vendor. “Should I come up?”

M’s godmother in santería made her hacerse Oyá because she had never had an Oyá as an ahijada, even though the caracoles said that M. was the daughter of Ochún. “¡Que trabajo pasé para Oyá asumirse a la cabeza!” [What difficult times I went through for Oyá to assume her position on my head], M. says, as she tells me about her misfortunes for being initiated as the daughter of the wrong orisha.

“De dos en dos, las maracas se adelantan al yanqui para decirle: ¿Cómo está usted, señor?” [Two by two, the maracas move toward the Yankee to say, How are you, Sir?] – Nicolás Guillén

“Hershey Sugar Factory” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Luis, who once guarded the Hershey sugarcane factory when it was in its heyday, now guards its ruins. He chats with me to pass the time. “Life in Cuba is not easy. $300 pesos isn’t much to live on. It is a shame to think about how beautiful this place used to be.” And as we wander around the factory he warns, “Don’t walk too close because it could collapse at any moment.” And I think about how the collapse of Hershey somehow makes this place levitate in our camera’s gaze.

We had steak for lunch. “Where did you get that?” M. asks. “Don’t ask so many questions,” says Ivo. “En Cuba nada se puede y todo se hace.” [In Cuba you can’t do anything and you do everything.]

“Los cubanos son pegajosos.” [Cubans are sticky.]

“Estoy complicada”=I am busy.

Problemas

“March from the University of Havana, 27 November 2014″ – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Todo mundo se busca solución al problema. Estamos acostumbrados a pasar problema.” [Everyone searches for solutions to their problems. We are used to getting through problems.]

Day 2 in Havana: “Get out at Parque Central and wait for the rest of the group there. Don’t trust anyone,” I said on their first trip in the máquinas. José Martí points and laughs at me from Parque Central and tension builds as the men argue baseball at the Esquina Caliente and I wait for my students who don’t arrive. One hour later and 25CUCs lighter, they crawl back to me embarrassed, my pollitos led astray by the young man who promised to take them to a salsa festival that never was. It’s a good first lesson.

The students can’t get into the Artes y Letras building without a carnet and the facultad is out of carnet paper. The solution is to forge UH ID cards at the corner computer printing business and get the secretary to give me the official stamp so that my students can get to class this semester.

“Suave pa que se te de,” says Angel when I come home exasperated after another trip to immigration without receiving the student’s carnets. And I think how the Special Period has made sexuality and violence daily expressions for dealing with daily struggle.

The preciousness of water: Carrying bucket by bucket up the crumbling steps to fill the barrels outside Y’s apartment.

The Arquitecto del Barrio from the Ministerio de la Vivienda who was supposed to fix the hole in the hallway of E’s solar moved to the United States.

When winter comes, the waves break over the wall of the malecón and take away our evening lounging spot.

Seems as if all the 12-seat micros in Havana are broken…

The Cuban bureaucracy is a Kafkaesque machine.

I have to leave the house with Plan A, B, and C and consider the day a success when I complete one of them.

Mercedes fell through the floor of her rotten barbacoa onto the kitchen counter. Then, she dusted herself off, left the barbacoa in the sink, and went to work cleaning the house of the Colombian woman from UNESCO. Just as she does every morning.

D’s frantic phone call, “I don’t know what happened, but L. slipped and fell and there is blood everywhere. Come quick!” And I arrive to hold L’s hand as the doctor tells me, “Hay que luchar por la juventud,” as she meticulously ties 30 stitches to save the skin that had been sliced off L’s knee when she slipped on the mopped floors.

And the woman in the high heels is taking the passport with the paper to be signed into the next door and from there it is a mystery. We wait. And we wait. And we wait some more. “Chicas, no vale la pena coger lucha.” I tell them as I slump back dejected in the waiting room. And I put on that smile that by appearances means all is under control.

As both Brazilian and mulatto, Leo can pass as Cuban by his looks. ¿Quién es el hombre de color? , asks the highway patrol who pulls over our purple Customline 1952 Ford. They take him out of the car for questioning and check his passport and documents while Josh and I, who are clandestinely filming in Cuba, are never questioned. White is not always the color of innocence.

“You have to take advantage of the beach, the art, and the avocado when in season,” says A. in his explanation about how to deal with the difficulties of daily Cuban reality.

Ivo taught me to make tea with onion skins and dandelion to cure A’s cold.

When the rest of the world runs out of natural resources, Cuba will have learned how to make steaks out of marabú.

“Virgen of Charity and bike taxi” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

Josh forgot the charger for his camera back in the US. We walk onto the porch of Cellandia and ask, “Does anyone know anything about electronics?” R. gets to work trying to make us a new charger, testing the voltage with his tongue.

Y. can’t replace his stolen drivers’ license because the office is all out of stamps.

You can only get a t-shirt for Marhabana [marathon race] if you paid to participate as a foreigner or if you qualified in the race last year. T-shirts are rationed.

Registering 3,000 participants for Marhabana by hand, the old fashioned way. I wait in line for the woman from INDER to write down my name and my carnet number. Days later I will return for my race number but they can’t find the paper where they had written down my name.

Wear a guayabera and you will be dressed for any occasion.

A piece of metal protruded out of the seat of the collective taxi and tore a hole in my guayabera. The seamstress at the Quitrin in Havana Vieja shuffled me into the bathroom and instructed me to hold the door shut so no one would see me shirtless while she took my favorite shirt to her sewing machine, and using tailoring and problem-solving skills, magically repaired the hole in under 2 minutes.

H. calls to tell me that her carnet was pickpocketed and wants to know what scam the pickpocket was trying to pull when she broke into the bathroom and started chatting with D. as she squatted over the toilet. Hours in immigration paperwork await me.

S. broke his leg trying to jump down on the rocks of the malecón so that he could find a private place to hook up with his girlfriend.

Students arrive angry after waiting all day outside the professor’s office because she didn’t show up to class again and it is the last day for foreign students to take their final exams.

In order to leave the country, International Relations has asked us to turn in our carnets so that they can take them to immigration to be hole-punched. Making that hole is a 3-day process. Didn’t Cuba do away with exit permits? Can’t I just buy a hole-puncher?

Major crises of Tulane in Cuba semester: 2 physical assaults, 1 fall from a 20-foot ledge (luckily into water causing minor bruising), 1 fall resulting in 30 stitches in the knee, 1 fall resulting in leg and ankle break in 3 different locations, 1 dislocated shoulder, 2 stolen carnets, 2 deceased parents, 1 deceased best friend, 1 parent in the hospital in critical condition, 2 food poisonings, 2 allergic reactions needing cortisone injections, 1 crazy sub-letter back home who will not pay my last month’s rent.

Trabajo y Dinero

“Private Enterprise” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Sueña que no cuesta nada.” [Dream because it doesn’t cost you anything.]

Inventos Cubanos! [Cuban Inventions]

In the voice of a praying monk, Pedro Luis Ferrer and his audience repeat, “The people pretend to work and the state pretends to pay.”

The onion costs 75 pesos and the average state monthly salary is 500 pesos.

M. can’t retire from her secretarial job at the University because then she wouldn’t find students to fill her casa particular.

L. wanted to buy E’s father a drink to celebrate their new friendship. Unknowingly to L., the bartender and E’s father split the commission on his $8 mojito.

I ask to see the menu at the paladar and look the waiter in the eye while inquiring if this is the menu with or without commission.

Writing receipts because no one gives me one…

I make a reservation for the students to go snorkeling and Chirino insists on giving me the commission in hopes that I will bring another group to Punta Perdiz. I buy the students lunch with the commission they were charged for being yuma in Cuba.

We live in function of our infrastructure. The receipt for payment wasn’t prepared today because the power went out. Maybe tomorrow.

Cuba is a smileless customer service industry.

Always being aware of how much every fruit and vegetable costs at the agro…

“Agro Cooperative” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

It is beautiful to watch neighbors give to neighbors, but nothing is for free. As I listen to snippets of conversations down Línea, everyone is preoccupied with money, food, and getting what is theirs.

She came up to sell yogurt and cheese but she got a much better price for her body from the Canadian tourists renting the room next to me.

“How long have you been in Cuba?” asks T., one of the most important professors and researchers on race in Cuba. “I can’t believe that you have been here for two months and you haven’t invited me to give a talk! Do you want me to starve to death? You have lived here long enough to know that we don’t live off our salaries. I make $500 pesos cubanos a month. How am I supposed to eat if you don’t invite me to give a talk?”

R’s job is to watch the statue of Salvador Allende on the corner of Calle G and 17 where he earns $500 pesos a month, just like Professor T. at the University of Havana. “When I leave for Chile there are going to be people fighting to take my job,” says R. “Statue watching gives you plenty of time to ‘resolver los problemas de la vida.’”

Listening to the Beatles used to be prohibited. Now there is a statue of John Lennon in the park in front of the Yellow Submarine and a statue watcher because people are always trying to steal his eyeglasses.

The owners of the garage on 3ra y C turned it into a private fast food restaurant with the signage modeled after Burger King.

“Why do foreigners think they need so much toilet paper? All you need is one square. The toilet paper está perdido for a month and I have to get it from Julita’s house and she is charging 3 times the cost!” says Ivo as she cleans the bathroom of her casa particular.

At the seamstress’s house in the solar across the street, the seamstress yells out the door for me to come back tomorrow because she is having diarrhea coming out like water.

“Cakes Ana María” is on the second floor of the bright pink building. No sign. Just walk through the door and past the quineañera pictures where the birthday girl poses wearing nothing but a scarf and take your position in line for the best cake in Havana.

At the Cajonera, the warehouse has now been subdivided into living spaces. As we arrive with our cameras, we are offered a photo assistant, gas for our car, cigars, percussion classes, and to hacerse el santo [to be initiated into santería]. Though no longer a place of trade, the neighborhood is ready to do business.

I hand the teller 40CUC and she dispenses a huge stack of CUP through the plastic partition.

“$ pa que me mantenga.” [$ so that I can maintain myself.]

The Colombians staying in the room next door ran out of money and couldn’t pay for their casa particular because all they had was a Citibank card.

Misconceptions of the US: “You can do anything you want in Cuba. If you want to go out and spend $600 every night you can do it, no problem,” says the taxi driver who wants to overcharge us for a ride home.

“Parque Lenin” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

At the Monument to Celia Sanchéz in Parque Lenin, the old man poses as a tour guide to get a few pesos for his inaccurate historical analysis and I make up a fake phone call to help my students escape.

At N’s apartment, a woman makes her rounds with a bag of shirts, pants, and shoes for sale sent from her brother living in Portugal…

Y’s husband moves back in with his parents during the one-week a year when Y’s Canadian boyfriend comes to visit. How else would they pay the rent and keep money on their cell phones?

I stand with a huge stack of cash at the accounting office of the University of Havana. Fidel and Raúl stare down at me from the poster that reads, “La revolución pujante y victoriosa sigue adelante.” X. holds up a calculator through the bars of the payment window, “They prepared the issue of payment wrong, see? Sign here and on these other 10 copies. I don’t want anyone to think I stole the money.” And he starts counting, bill after bill and I start signing. The two young workers gossip on the lone black couch in the waiting room about how they would redecorate the office. It’s a blank slate. The line to get a receipt to process payment grows. The gossip distracts Y who reprimands them to return to work. He loses count and starts over. The student from Denmark walks in and asks where she should go and I point towards the line to get the receipt for the receipt to process the payment for her tuition.

Turismo

“Coco Taxi” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Ivo picks the stale crackers out of the trash where the tourists discarded them. One of the most important lessons to be learned from Cubans is that everything has a use. She will mash them up to make croquetas.

“This is not a tourist experience. Do you see any tourists here?,” says the historian who mediates our contact with the “real” indigenous people of Nengón Kiribá. “They didn’t know that what they were doing was anything special until the teacher discovered them.” We are ordered to sit in the chairs strategically lined up for us to stare at the natives who will cook, sing, and dance for us. After it is over, they will go back to their lives as students, teachers, farmers, and artisans until the next tourist bus rolls up. This was the “real” Cuba.

The clave beat of son and changui ring out from the balcony of Casa de la Trova while the tourists sit and drink their mojitos. The jineteros wait below, dancing in place, hoping to catch a tourist looking for a late-night local tour of buildings and bodies on their way back to the hotel.

Candles, votive figures, and copper rocks are shoved into our hands as we approach El Santuario del Cobre. “It is a gift! Take it my friend!” they shout, in hopes of whatever small change they can get from the students.

Artisans walk back and forth all day, waiting for the moment that a tourist allows them to spread out their hand-cut wood boxes for viewing. These same artists hover in the background ready to cut down coconuts or bring chocolate and cucuruchos or perhaps even to give a coconut oil massage. I buy a wood cutting board, not because I want it, but because I’m made all too aware that the local economy depends on my presence. The little boy throws a rock at the bus as we slip out of town and the artisans mumble under their breath.

Does Baracoa really house the cross that Cristopher Columbus planted on the Americas? It is the holy grail of local tourism.

We meet Señor Fuentes #5, the campesino from the Lonely Planet Guidebook, who will take you to the Cueva del Agua. They should start making Lonely Planet ID cards in Baracoa.

“All the bald men look just alike,” says Ivo as she watches the street through the binoculars to see if she can find Angel. Maybe he stopped for fruta bomba in the market? Angel still hasn’t returned from immigration where he went to report and the tourist and his Cuban companion are ready to check out of the room. They chain smoke impatiently.

Yacht travelers are allowed to stay at port in Cuba for up to 3 days without a visa thanks to Hemingway’s sport fishing tournaments. At the Hemingway Marina posed beside a boat from Wilmington, NC: “You aren’t from the Interest Section, are you?” (It is illegal for Cubans to board a boat in Cuba unless they have a special license for taking tourists sport fishing.) Where do all these boats come from and where do they go?

As the foreigners get goodie bags for their participation in Marhabana, they pose beside a cardboard mascot of a tropical mulata wearing a fruit hat and Adidas running shoes.

“Easy on the door!” say the máquina drivers anytime a foreigner gets into the 1950s vintage taxis because delicate care is needed in closing the doors.

There are plans for a new Hotel Internacional of Varadero, but Lansky’s vision for 1950s resort-style Cuba keeps pouring all-inclusive drinks. How much cheap Santiago rum until the Hotel Internacional of Varadero has been revived to its former mafia glory?

The true magnificence of the Cuban beach resort experience is to watch the foreigners in their vacation haze shaking their rusty hips behind the dance coach during the exercise hour.

“I have a license to take you into Varadero, but not a license to take you out,” says our taxi driver. (There is a special license with higher taxes for taxi drivers working with tourists in Varadero.) “Walk over this bridge and past the security checkpoint and I’ll pick you up where the highway curves.” So we walk over the bridge, umbrellas to block the sun, taking pictures of the signage for the Literacy Brigade that trained young teachers at Varadero beach and eliminated illiteracy in 1961.

The road to the ruins of 19th century sugarcane plantations like Mañach Iznaga is paved with vendors selling embroidered sheets and guayaberas. “I got conned into buying a banana and a cricket made out of sugarcane fronds,” says the Canadian tourist as she finally emerges from the gauntlet.

Standing behind the yellow line – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

There is a yellow line around the Plaza de la Revolución to mark where tourists are allowed to stand to take pictures of the martyrs of the Revolution. The guards keep watch and blow their whistles if we step outside the line.

The foreign voyeur finds his desires met by Cuba. There is a symbiotic relationship between foreigners and their host.

There is always a political rationale behind images produced for foreign consumption.

Cayo Coco: When the tourists eat at the buffet table at the Iberostar Resort of Cayo Coco they have no idea what food shortages Cubans find in the agro when they are bused two hours home from work. “I am so happy to be in Cuba!” say the Canadians in a drunken haze with their all-inclusive wristbands while watching the Michael Jackson impersonators on the pool stage.

A. won a bottle of rum last night by quickly changing clothes with a Canadian stranger during the nightly entertainment show.

J. returned to Cuba after 3 years and rented a car for his visit. He picks up as many hitchhikers as he can on the highway from Santa Clara to Havana. The trauma of living 29 years with poor transportation… He brings his parents on vacation to Havana and Varadero. His dad tells me that J. is now un hombre realizado [complete] because he is behind the wheel of a nice car going on a joyride along the malecón.

“Go to your room! My student is coming over!” I scold the drunk 50-year-old Spanish tourist and his naked Cuban lover sitting on my couch at 9 am. And to think that Cuba eradicated prostitution.

It is ironic that classic American cars are the symbol of revolutionary Cuba. A caravan of classic convertibles carrying tourists to the Meliá Cohiba hotel cruises down the malecón.

The Colombian tourist who came for Baila Cuba got conned into buying overpriced drinks in an empty bar as he naively trusted that the man he met on the street was leading him to a salsa festival.

Pillo Chocolate and his dog are professional costumers in Havana Vieja. If Pillo tells the dog that the tourists watching the act are Americans, then the little dog naughtily refuses to pose for the camera.

Am I like the tourists who come to take pictures of the living decay?

“Renta una fantasia,” says the coco taxi.

Políticas de Género

“At the santero house” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

On the days that the catcalls on the streets are too exhausting, I decide to spend the rest of the day at home.

Y. thinks it is normal to go over to her stepfather’s house to cook and clean for him because he never learned to do it himself.

At Casa de la Música, a strange show of masculinity: Maykel Blanco sits in a chair onstage sipping a glass of wine while his band plays behind him. A male dancer from the crowd, dressed head to toe in Cuban athletic gear inspired by the Juegos Centroaméricanos y del Caribe, jumps on stage to perform abakuá and breakdancing moves while Maykel Blanco inspects him from his chair sending nods of approval. The male dance circles around Maykel’s attentive gaze.

“Don’t you like mulaticos feos” asks the micro-driver with a flirtatious smile.

“Necesito hablar con su superior” I say, so that I can get the boss to get the boss who finally gets the boss who will do something…

I stuck my hip out with attitude and told the old man asking A. for a kiss to, “Deja la mecánica y coje tu rumbo.” And he looks at me with a surprised face and saunters away.

“It is her fault for being strangled and his fault for stealing the woman,“ says the policeman as we fill out a report in the waiting room.” As if she was paid for merchandise… We all know who was the paying member of that relationship.

I covertly find out the address and phone number of the jinetero that the police wouldn’t deal with as he laid game on me from Yara to Calle G. “Que si te haces el guapo con uno de los míos, lo que te voy a formar es candela,” [If you mess with my job I mess with yours], I say to him with attitude. We shake hands to confirm he will stay away and then he disappears around the graffiti wall of Nelson Mandela.

At CENESEX (Centro de Educación de la Sexualidad) D. tries to explain why she thinks catcalling in the street is machista and the head research librarian responds, “Yes, those piropos in the street are the good side of our machismo. I will see if I can find you a list of them so that you can take them home with you to your country.”

“Chocolate is an aphrodisiac.” That must be why you can find so many 70-year old men with teenage Baracoans at La Terraza night club. They must all have eaten the chocolate.

“Please not again.” I think to myself as the 70-something man with a cane sits down right beside me in an almost empty movie theater at the Yara. I wait tensely until that moment when he unzips his pants to masturbate and I put on the guapería that I wasn’t born with but have learned for survival purposes and, say, “¡Oye niño, ¿no te da vergüenza sacar esa pinga tan chiquitica?!” The theater turns to look. I change seats. And the old man hobbles quickly out the back door. Just another day at the afternoon movie show.

A man with dick in hand chased them down the street again last night. What is the psychological reason for so much public masturbation in Havana?

J. loves the attention at the gay club. “Why don’t you girls like the catcalling you get on the streets?” he asks.

At the adult puppet show, “Charco Seco,” I am handed rainbow-colored anti-discrimination propaganda, condoms, and instructions for proper anal insertion. Cuba sure is doing something right.

Revolución/Evolución

“Chavez at Fuster” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

“Fidel Te Queremos, Raúl Te Seguimos, Chávez Te Recordamos” [Fidel we love you, Raul we follow you, Chavez we remember you]

Ciudad Libertad and its barracks stand tall like a ghost town except for the laughter of children in their pioneer uniforms on their way to the schoolroom.

What does the poverty of resistance look like without war? The Special Period in times of Peace is the dignity of the quiet decay of infrastructure.

On 5^th Avenue, there is a statue built in homage to the egg, the salva vida of many a Cuban family during the Special Period.

1950s Cuba showed tropical paradise turning into a tropical nightmare.

All that is left of the statue on G and 1^st is the feet. What counterrevolutionary was removed from his immortality?

The caldosa at the CDR party on July 27th has the smoky flavor of hours over an open flame. The neighbors arrive with their plates and to-go containers and respond with a hardy “Viva la revolución” while rolling their eyes. And at the stroke of midnight we sing happy birthday to the revolution and the grandmothers and grandfathers fold up their chairs and take their plastic cups and plates home until the next time.

The Isaac Delgado concert was cancelled because Sunday, December 7 is Día de los Mártires and you can’t play music after 11pm.

December 8 is Día de los Derechos Humanos and the government organized a party in the square on Calzada and Calle D to cover up the madres en blanco who make laps in support of the freeing of political prisoners in Cuba.

José Martí, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos stare down at me at dusk as I walk through Plaza de la Revolución to flag an almendrón down Calle G. Havana is more than a city. It is a monumental dream.

What they fought to prevent happened anyway.

La Guarida is now a solar that Cubans can’t afford to enter.

Dilapidated buildings are the result of historic evolution. The structures of the Cuban nation are aging.

In a capitalist country all the socios would die of hunger.

“Che está liberando y ganando más batallas que nunca” [Che is liberating and winning more battles than ever], says the billboard in front of Calixto Garcia Hospital. Che sure has been busy postmortem.

“Jose Marti” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

The heroes have all become statues.

Every day when I walk past the National Office of Normalization [Oficina Nacional de la Normalización], I think of the scene in the movie La Muerte de un Beaurócrata where the uncle’s machine keeps spitting out busts of José Martí.

There are two rides working at the Parque Lenin. Families walk around eating popcorn and observing the rusting metal.

The adrenaline rush you get when getting onto “The Caterpillar” (La Oruga) mini-rollercoaster in Parque Lenin… It may not move fast, but there is real danger that it may fall off the track at any moment.

The psychological hunger of Cubans eating at a resort buffet.

All of Nuevo Vedado is out of power until 5pm today because Fábrica del Arte is doing some electric work. The clash between new private enterprises funded from abroad and Cuban neighborhoods begins.

Is Fábrica del Arte one of the first examples of Cuban cooperatives in the field of culture?

Tonight the theme of the nightly news show “Mesa Redonda” is the conflict between morality and legitimacy in Cuban society. Honesty is actually an expensive virtue. It is easy to be honest when you have everything that you need.

The comedian says, “Havana is like an onion, the more layers you peel back, the more you cry.” The audience bursts into laughter.

The first signs of creeping capitalism are the Bucanero mascot and his sexy dancers promoting beer at Casa de la Música.

The opening scene of Rascacielos by Jazz Vilá: If Cuban theater is the pulse of Cuban society it makes sense that there always seems to be someone on stage masturbating. It is also telling that it may be the first play promoting the small businesses that were the financers of its production. It’s virtually an advertisement for paladares StarBien and Catedral.

Behind every new small business is foreign capital.

We interview two students from California and New York studying at ELAM [Escuela Latinoaméricana de Medicina] and leave feeling as if we need more doctors in the US to practice preventative medicine. The living conditions at ELAM may be eleven students to a dorm room and rice and beans everyday, but med school means sacrifice no matter where you attend. At least ELAM doesn’t put a price tag on health.

I ask P. if she wants to come along to the march on November 27 in honor of the eight martyred medical students shot by Spanish firing squads in 1871. She says she had to spend her whole schooling being obligated to attend marches, receiving bad grades if she didn’t show up. She wishes me well on my adventure.

The tensed shoulders of the Cuban Americans in Terminal 2, arriving for their vaccination against nostalgia, for the part of themselves that they left behind. Or that left them behind. It’s unclear who abandoned whom.

After 3 years of living in the US, J. says that he no longer feels Cuban. But his father never tires of showing off the video of when J. was 11 singing on stage in his pioneer uniform for Fidel.

Medios de Comunicación

“Billboards” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Informes [Reports]: the art of writing circles around what I really want to say.

Waiting passengers along Línea point their thumbs over their shoulders while others gesture forward to the oncoming 1950s Chevy collective taxis. Fluency is much more about interpreting gestures than language.

At the opening of the movie Contigo Ajo y Cebolla in the Chaplin, director Héctor Quintero, dressed all in white, comes on stage to present his movie with a sign that says “Viva el Cine Libre.”

“Reading is Sexy. Be prepared. Free Condoms. Si, son de afuera,” says the note attached to the empty basket at Cuba Libro bookstore.

It is Cuban character to crack jokes at their own shortcomings.

“Último,” I call to the blob of people waiting in line. And I mark my ground behind the old woman in the pink skirt sitting in the corner. “Último” says the man walking up and I raise my hand and give my último position to him and he gives it to her and on and on again.

I wonder if there will be Internet today?

The importance of a flash drive: You never know when someone will have music, film, or pdf versions of rare books to pass along.

– Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Socialist slogans adorn city walls in an attempt to overwrite the city.

“El Bloqueo: Genocidio más largo de historia” [The Blockade: The longest genocide in history] reads the billboard in front of the Facultad de Artes y Letras.

Are billboards of socialist propaganda any different from billboards of consumer culture telling us what we should buy, what we should look like, and how we should behave?

Futuro

“Filming in Havana” – Photo credit: Annie Gibson

Sitting at the bookstore, we are approached by the young producer of “Bikinis and Boardwalks,” who is working on a TV segment for an American audience about travel to Cuba. He wants to film us showing them around the beach and a cigar factory in Havana, “like any normal day,” he says. Poor planning by Indigo Films since OFAC doesn’t allow Americans to go to the beach or to cigar factories. I will not be showing my face on that TV show.

Cuba is the country of the future when it comes to managing resources. Y. gives three-year old M. a bath, brushes her teeth, and washes her face with one bucket of water.

How will we cross the street to sit along the malecón when the embargo ends and Havana fills with traffic?

Iconic presence. Nostalgic travellers.

Delírio Habanero. Restored to former glory. I feel as if I’m on South Beach.

D. asks, will new economic changes get rid of Cubans sharing with neighbors as the haves and the have-nots become more visible?

What is the strange alchemy that holds this place together?

Viewers do not get a picture of the present. It is the picture of the past that helps imagine what the present and future will be.

Each fall, the University of Havana organizes a talk with the family of the 5 heroes so we can write to our Congressmen and Senate to plead for the freedom of 5 Cuban spies caught in a political stalemate. What talk will we hear next year?

You want to know what will happen when they open up Cuba to foreigners? The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And Cuba will shuffle all tourists to all-inclusives in Varadero or control them through entrance visas. They have had 50 years to think up a plan.

The US and Cuba announced the end to the embargo on the day of San Lázaro, Babalú-Aye in santería, the orisha of healing. Cubans take to the street on hands and knees in thanks. We all must heal.

“Hasta La Victoria Siempre” [Towards Victory Always]. –Fidel

“CDR” – Photo credit: Miriam Psychas

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Although there are numerous cultural connections linking Cuba and Brazil through the Black Atlantic, surprisingly little has been written about the similarities in performance between the two countries beyond simply acknowledging similar ethnic makeup.[1] In most parts of the world, the capoeira diaspora has been expanded since the 1980s by Brazilian mestres travelling abroad and opening new capoeira schools. In the Cuban context, however, no capoeira mestre ever arrived with the sole purpose of opening a capoeira academy. When capoeira arrived in Cuba in the 1990s, through Brazilian telenovelas and through student-capoeiristas studying at universities in Havana, Cuban practitioners connected capoeira to their own lived experiences and sense of Cuban identity. Learning to embody and relocalize Brazilian capoeira has created an incentive for a reencounter with their Afro Cuban traditions. As the last societies to abolish slavery in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil (1886 and 1888, respectively) have both engaged in historic cultural discourse around the integration of a large African Diaspora into the concept of a national identity.

El contrapunto histórico entre africanos, cubanos, y brasileños tuvo lugar, a nivel simbólico, en los relatos contados a ambos lados del Atlántico, que así conforman una cuenca épica. Esos lugares comunes del imaginario afro-románico sobrevivieron gracias a los continuos intercambios entre América y África. (Leo 142)

The capoeira practiced in Cuba today is not only a recent phenomenon of globalization, but is an ongoing reconfiguration of the circular movement of ideas, people, and practices that emerged in the New World and has continued into the present. National consciousness is an imagined expression of “people” in its collective form. In both Cuba and Brazil this imagining played itself out in the realm of performance. The myths and icons of nationality in Cuba and Brazil, often embodied through the mulato or creole figure, personified the social inversions, hybrid cultures, and the violence of colonialism.

Contextualizing Capoeira

In the words of Floyd Merrel, to define what capoeira is, it is necessary to define it by saying what it is not (2003, 279). It is not just a Brazilian martial art, although its characteristics are very martial and its history is in self-defense. It is not a musical tradition, although all the movements follow a distinctive rhythm and capoeiristas (capoeira players) must learn to be equally skilled on the berimbau, atabaque, pandeiro, agogô, and reco-reco. It is not a dance, although many moves are so fluid and graceful that you would think that the players were dancing. And it is not a ritual, although the roda of capoeira (the place where capoeira is performed) follows the traditional characteristics of ritual in that there are predetermined and symbolic actions that reoccur in a particular environment and sacred space.  Capoeira is all of these things and none of these things. And this enigma has been what has drawn practitioners and helped preserve this art form for hundreds of years.

Although capoeira is a Brazilian art form, it has origins in different dances and martial traditions of Africa. The Angolan martial arts n’golo, basula, and gabetula may have been influences in the creation of capoeira. It may also have picked up elements of West African culture such as the use of the agogô instrument and references to Yoruba orixás (sacred deities of nature in the African religion). (McGowan 118) Mathias Assunção explains that history is paramount in contemporary capoeira through the invocation of its historical roots and its performative reenactments of the resistance techniques used by the first practitioners of capoeira who were living under oppressive institutions. “The belief in the remote origins of the art, coupled with the conviction that an unaltered ‘essence’ of capoeira has been transmitted from that foundational moment down to the present, confers greater authority to contemporary practice, and is therefore shared by many practitioners” (McGowan 5).

Some of the first documentation of capoeira is among enslaved Africans and Creoles in colonial Brazil as early as the 18^th century. Despite periodic clampdowns by the police, the martial art continued to spread to the free underclasses in Brazilian cities throughout the nineteenth centuries (Assunção 1). While many of these legends come from the rural setting of capoeira during plantation life, much of capoeira’s development actually took place in the urban centers where there was obviously a tension between public authority figures and lower class Blacks (Chvaicer 546).  The fact that the performance of a historical past is at the very core of the game of capoeira means that its past has serious implications for its current practice in global settings worldwide. In the case of Cuba, practitioners are able to draw parallels with their own Cuban performative traditions of resistance, feeling a connection to capoeira’s history through a circum-Caribbean dialogue.

Capoeira in Cuba

The few foreigners who have come to Cuba and have made their mark on the capoeira community have not stayed in Cuba to create a new diaspora, rather they have been part of transnational flows, coming and going for brief periods of time over the years. Capoeira in Cuba has developed through sporadic encounters with these foreigners (who are mostly not Brazilian nor capoeira mestres) who come to the island for short periods of study or tourism and, in periods of their absence, Cubans continue training by improvising movements learned through studying the CDs, DVDs, books, or flash drives of capoeira music and videos left behind by these visitors. As Cubans inevitably learn about capoeira’s historical myths through playing capoeira and through media that has been left for them, Cuban players begin to find similarities with their own Cuban experiences of resistance to oppressive systems from their remembered historical past and from their present conditions.

Derrida argues and Stuart Hall elaborates that identity formation can be captured by the term, différance. According to Derrida, this term can refer to both French verbs “to differ” and “to defer.” Not only does identity describe a difference, but also characteristics of identity are often “deferred” or “postponed” as we focus on the more sounding likenesses. This creates bonds of commonality.[2]  The capoeirista historically has embodied this idea of différance. During times of slavery, traditions of different tribes and African nations were melded and incorporated into a system of resistance made solely for the context of the New World. As players and the game developed, this différance was reoriented to unite people of different social classes, ethnicities, countries, and languages. Today Cuban capoeiristas defer what may be seen as differences in Cuban and Brazilian cultures and instead focus on their imagined likenesses.  Capoeira evokes the struggles of resistance of Afro Brazilians throughout history and holds the healing powers to confront injustices committed against a group so often overlooked and forgotten. The processes of transculturation and globalization then make it so that the transformative powers of capoeira performance are not confined to a solely Brazilian experience; Cuban capoeiristas are able to connect its history to their own present and historical struggles, both real and imagined.

Transnationalism is defined as “the flow of people, ideas, goods and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution” (Braziel and Mannur 8). Transnationalism is often talked about in parallel with diaspora; however, diaspora refers specifically to the flow of people. The arrival of capoeira in Cuba is transnational but it is not diasporic since there has not been a relocation of Brazilian mestres or Brazilian capoeira academies to Cuba. Cuban capoeiristas, thus, are processing their capoeira training through their own lived experiences in Cuba. The processing of capoeira through a Cuban lens, however, is an example of an African diasporic connection. In Cuba, as in Brazil, the ritualized violence of social inversion is an important allegory of national culture. According to Jossianna Arroyo, both Cuban and Brazilian national culture is found in spaces where creole masculinity is performed.

…es un discurso sobre la necesidad de hacer un performance de la supervivencia del más fuerte y del más apto. La masculinidad se funda, entonces, a partir de la articulación de la ansiedad de subvertir espacios sociales y negociar las divisiones raciales y de género, y de obtener la libertad.” (Arroyo 177)

Arroyo points out that the performative and violent concept of masculinity in the Americas is represented through the often criminalized and carnavalized creole performer.

Creating a linkage between the similar images of embodied culture in Cuban and Brazilian tradition has meant that the Cuban capoeira group, Caiman Capoeira, has made a conscious decision to define its practice as a cultural expression rather than as sport, even though capoeira in Cuba was first registered as an official sport and as a martial art under the Federación Cubana de Artes Marciales, which is a subdivision of Instituto Cubano de Deporte (INDER). After the revolution in 1959, the right of the population to practice sports took a central place in the imaginary of Cuba and INDER was created to regulate all sport activity within the country. In 2008, La Escuela Superior de Educación Física, “Comandante Manuel Fajardo,” which was created in 1961 as the school to train and graduate professionals in physical education, began to teach capoeira as part of its curriculum. It now organizes community projects in Havana and in the neighboring provinces of Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, and Ciego de Ávila.

However, even though there is a central governmental institution (INDER) given the duty of promoting capoeira in Cuba, focusing on capoeira as culture rather than sport allows Caiman Capoeira to access funds and visibility as a cultural group through the Cuban Ministry of Culture and through the Brazilian Consulate in Cuba (both of which provide more access to prominent cultural [and touristic] performance spaces than would be available solely through INDER). Capoeira as culture is parlayed into a resource for accessing and debating rights and capital among capoeiristas on an island where culture is a powerful economic resource.

Ultimately, the way and the extent to which a cultural identity is performed in the minds of a public and a governing body have dramatic effects on policy, capital flows, and the extent to which a people’s way of life is to be performed.  This point is articulated in George Yudice’s The Expediency of Culture when Yúdice argues that what is considered cultural, as well as the very concept of multiculturalism, has become a resource in the sense that they are endowed with near-quantifiable values, and that the value imposed on the cultural by an audience has a direct effect on how culture is performed (1). Yúdice’s linkage of cultural practice with political and economic access foretells Cuban capoeiristas interest in performing Brazilian capoeira as an expression of a cultural linkage between Cuba and Brazil. While capoeira’s arrival in Cuba may not be a diasporic experience, the imaging of this linkage of Brazilian capoeira to Cuban soil is elaborated through the diasporic experience of the Black Atlantic where performative acts of resistance are part of cultural survival tactics of those affected by the slave trade. They are, thus, expressions that can be both Cuban and Brazilian simultaneously and increase practitioners’ cultural clout within the Cuban performance space.

When enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, their direct connection to their countries of origin was cut off. When the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1850, memory and oral tradition became paramount in communicating these individuals’ sense of their past and their history. Furthermore, they adapted to their new social environment, adapting people from other ranks of society and incorporating other worldviews into those of their own.  The process of transculturation, the malleability of culture to fit the local context, is ever-present in the capoeira game.[3] Cuban capoeirista Daniel says, “We respect the Brazilian culture and we mix it with what we are able to get here in Cuba” (Daniel June 30, 2012). In practice, this means players construct berimbaus out of local bamboo wood, sew their own abadá (uniforms), or cut and dye their own chords at capoeira batizados[4] that they organize without the direction of a Brazilian mestre. Such an attitude embodies these fundamental ideas of transculturation employed in the New World.

Even though no Brazilian mestre has ever come to Cuba to teach classes formally for any extended length of time and although Cubans face limitations in access to the Internet, a tool usually utilized by capoeiristas abroad to exchange information about the sport, the capoeira community in Cuba is training regularly, expanding their presence on the island and developing a style of play that is unique to Cuba. We often think of Cuba mostly as an exporter of cultural traditions, since the Afro Cuban musical traditions based around the beat of the clave are at the basis of so many Latin musical rhythms. Also, because of the isolationist position of the Cuban society exacerbated by the US embargo, we often think of Cuban culture as developing independently from the same global influences on popular culture that are common throughout the world. But while the processes of this consumption may happen under different parameters, Cubans are constantly consuming popular culture from abroad and making it their own.  There is no such thing as a fixed or static national cultural identity, especially when this culture comes in contact with imaginings of an outside eye.  What does arise is a connectedness between cultures, identification with a set of imagined cultural norms, and a self-understanding that is negotiated within the overlapping of the convergences. In discussing these convergences, one member of Caiman capoeira said the following:

I see many comparisons between Brazilian culture and Cuban culture because of the African influences. It is a mixture that comes directly from Africa. It makes me think about how cultures so far away from one another could have so much in common. They are different, but the essence is the same. The ideas about trying to get energy out of the earth, for example, are the same. (Haisa July 1, 2012)

Uprooting and transplanting a cultural form is followed by compromise, sharing, and ultimately a transformation into a new cultural whole based on the conglomeration of various cultural traditions within a new territorial space. Fernando Ortiz explains this process through transculturation, a complex process of cultural transmission and diffusion. Fernando Ortiz’s classic work Cuban Counterpoint emphasized individual agency in selecting parts of dominant discourse and reworking this discourse into something new (1947: 102-103). Meanings are always adapted to fit the local context. While Fernando Ortiz’s work is cited as a fundamental text for understanding Cuban culture, it is important to note that his social and intellectual links with Europe and other parts of the Americas meant that his definitions of Cuban culture were in a transnational dialogue. There are many comparisons between the theoretical arguments of Ortiz who aimed to systematize the geographic origins of Africans in Cuba with the work of ethnographer Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil, for example. “Assim, o conhecimento etnográfico dos africanos vindos escravos para o Brasil, o qual não me consta tenha sido tentado antes de meus estudos, projeta larga e intensa luz sobre todos estes fatores, conferindo a cada qual uma fisionomia histórica justa e racional” (Rodrigues 70). The works of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba theorize “un sujeto masculino ‘de color,’ delincuente, excesivo y atávico” who is an important figure in defining nation in the respective countries (Arroyo 19). These founding ethnographers, who were so important in recording cultural performances seen as being “Brazilian” or “Cuban” respectively, communicated that the tastes, sounds, smells, and dances produced by the African Diaspora were paramount to creating and defining national identity. This was especially the case in terms of performances in which the black (and especially the mulatto) body used creativity to escape, at least during the space of the performance, his marginal position (Leo 29-47).

The modern discourse surrounding the globalization of capoeira emphasizes that changes in capoeira over time and place should not be viewed as a lack of authenticity but as an active, inevitable, and pervasive social tool by which culture becomes expedient, recreating the idea of bodily performance as a tactic to escape a marginal position. Following this logic, capoeiristas in Cuba, whose “communitas”[5] was once defined solely by their Cuban cultural expressions, have entered into a global context and are redefining definitions of culture and authenticity. This speaks to changes in gender and racial norms among practitioners globally, in which females and white practitioners can also embody the allegorical figure of cunning and resistance that had previously been associated with masculine creole identity. And it also explains how Cuban capoeiristas imagine their connection to capoeira and to Brazil not through a lived connection to a mestre, but through using creative malleability as a survival tactic, an expression consistent with their own social contexts.

As a physical manifestation of how Cuban and capoeira identity combine, Cuban capoeirista Daniel decided to get a capoeira tattoo on his forearm to mark the importance of capoeira in his life. But, he emphasized that the tattoo needed to highlight the Brazilian cultural tradition that he loved (capoeira) as well as the centrality his own Cuban identity and, inevitably, the Cubanness of the capoeira that he practiced. He designed a tattoo of a berimbau, the central musical instrument in capoeira, made not from the traditional beriba wood customary of berimbaus in Brazil, but from bamboo, the wood that Cuban capoeiristas have available to fashion their own berimbaus. The design of the tattoo has a Cuban flag wrapped around his berimbau, symbolically highlighting the importance of the local in the practice of Brazilian capoeira. (Daniel June 7, 2012)

Francisco, another Cuban capoeirista, explained that learning about the history of capoeira deepened his own connection to his Afro Cuban heritage. He described that he received the book Fundamentos da Malícia from a visiting student from Mexico and, after he understood the concept of malícia in capoeira, it motivated a deeper spiritual connection to similar concepts and practices in Cuba. As an example of how malícia becomes interpreted within the Cuban context, I remember the first time I met Francisco (who is now one of the instructors of capoeira at the Escuela Superior de Educación Físcia). We were playing capoeira in front of the arts and crafts market, Mercado de San José, in Habana Vieja. This market is very similar in concept to Mercado Modelo in Salvador, Bahia, and the capoeiristas in Havana often go there on the weekends to perform rodas, the circular space where the capoeira game is performed, for tourists and locals alike. Before we played, Francisco made a special signage with his fingers on the ground at the foot of the berimbau that he would later tell me was for his muerto (the spirit of a deceased, enslaved Cuban) that protects him during the roda. For Francisco, Cuban cultural traditions that were born of a similar Afro Atlantic experience are what drew him to develop such a strong passion for capoeira. His Cuban muertos, he said, protect him during the roda and guide his movements. He confessed he also secretly hides his resguardo, his protective charm from the Cuban Palo Monte religion, before entering any roda. (Francisco June 9, 2013)

What Francisco’s story represents is that Cuban capoeiristas can hold a cosmic view that approximates to both the historical setting of capoeira in Brazil and to their own lived Cuban experiences. While most practitioners would agree that capoeira as it is practiced today is a secular event and that any connection with spiritual practices, such as Candomblé or Catholicism, are indirect, rodas often begin with an invocation that explicitly gives praise to God (Deus) and many songs refer to saints and deities, both Christian and African (Lewis 14).  Brazil, and Salvador in particular, was (and is) home to many different religious traditions that intertwined in practice. Capoeira, according to Mathias Röhrig Assunção, was an important part of this uneasy coexistence during its formative years (116). Francisco’s understanding of the malícia in capoeira, the secularized understanding of how cunning has a greater spiritual significance, is often difficult to discern and describe to foreign capoeira players, the most common transnational manifestations of capoeira being in Europe and the United States. Globalization has made it common to see an American, French, German, or Italian make the sign of the cross before entering into the roda or even to touch the ground to make reference to the African ancestry of capoeira, even though it is likely that this is not part of the student’s own personal history. These foreign practitioners are following the codes of the ritual as they were taught, passed on via oral tradition from mestre to student, and then appropriated, creating a new spiritual significance to the capoeira ritual within the global context. For Cuban students, however, these codes and rules were not taught by a mestre but are often a manifestation of their own lived understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred understood through similar slippages in Afro Cuban manifestations of culture such as abakuá or rumba, for example. In fact, these elements of deep play in the Cuban capoeira game are becoming less visible in capoeira even in Brazil due to inevitable globalization and commodification as capoeira and culture itself becomes farther removed from this defining historical past. However, the ritualized understanding of malícia continues to be the key element of any capoeira game. In Cuba the ginga flows from Cuban experiences of performances of cunning and social inversions.

Embodying Malícia with Cubaneo

An Italian capoeirista who was living in Havana for six months in 2012 had the following to say about Capoeira in Cuba:

For what I have seen of capoeira in Cuba, people have a lot of feeling. I have seen capoeira in Brazil, in France, in Italy, and in Sweden. Sometimes people have a lot of financial possibilities to buy a berimbau, but they don’t even play it well. They don’t have the “sandunga” (swing), as they say in Cuba. And here the fact that Cubans have music in their blood means that it comes easier to them. They sing and they sing in rhythm. They play and they play with rhythm. If the music isn’t good the energy isn’t born. But here with very little they make marvelous things happen. We need to help them a little, right?  Send them things. Because they have the talent, the swing, and the malícia… (Vilma June 23, 2012)

According to Floyd Merrel, “Malícia is a little bit of ‘malice’, but with a sly, clever, ingratiating roguish gesture. It involves awareness of what’s going on under the surface appearance. Malícia is cunningly putting something on someone before she does it to you…The slaves developed malícia into a carefully honed instrument by means of which to generate subversive acts against their masters. Malícia became their way of coping with life, a way of life, the heart and soul of which is found in capoeira.” (Merrel 2005: 280)

Just like the upside-down aú and bananeira movements, capoeira is a microcosm where elements of power, prestige, politics, and existence are turned on their heads. Only the most cunning will survive. Literally and figuratively, the capoeirista has made these capoeira movements his weapon. The capoeirista is playful, but also very careful. Your opponent may smile in your face as he pulls your feet out from underneath you. In doing so, the capoeirista embodies this subversive behavior learned as street smarts for those born into colonial systems of servitude. Roberto Da Matta comments that “malícia” and “jeitinho” (finding a way to make something happen when there are no resources available) are characteristics of the Brazilian national psyche (204).

These traits of the national psyche are also true in Cuba and are, thus, naturally incorporated into the Cuban capoeira game. Although making resources out of nothing is not in and of itself revolutionary and, in fact, is characterized by making changes to better individual social situations without changing the status quo, it is representative of the politics of the everyday. It turns the average individual into a heroic figure resisting dominant oppression with creativity and skill. Representing the common man as an heroic figure is at the basis of Che Guevara’s conception of the “new man” put forth in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” (1965) through which Guevara called for the average man to use his creativity and spontaneity to battle the repressive systems of capitalist embargoes. Today, post-Special period, the “new” new man in Cuba questions this very institutional discourse; the common man looks at the unfulfilled promises of what was supposed to be a bright future, and uses the same social cunning to question the official Cuban discourse, citing the frustration of accessing the limited resources available to them in an outdated Socialist system.

Capoeiristas in Cuba talk about connecting to capoeira because it is an escape from “la lucha diaria,” literally the daily struggle for survival. Capoeira songs and movements are filled with irony and double meanings, incorporating the concept of malícia that is often so hard for foreign students to grasp because it cannot be taught, but must arise from its own social context of marginalization. For Cuban capoeiristas, a similar cultural language of metaphors and riddles are employed daily to deal with the difficulties of living through moments of scarcity caused by the political climate and/or the effects of the US embargo, using humor, metaphor, and performance to assert presence and identity.  Thus, the same concepts of malícia are at the heart of the Cuban psyche, only under a different name. For Cuban capoeiristas who have not had direct contact with Brazilian mestres or Brazilian cultural contexts, the idea of malícia, with its connections to spiritual powers as well as its ability to make something out of nothing, is interpreted through a Cuban understanding of cunning and street smarts known as cubaneo. In the Cuban context, inventing ways of survival or getting around the system when there does not seem to be any visible solution has become an important cultural marker of Cuban identity.

According to Pérez-Firmat,

Rather than naming un estado civil, [la cubanía] cubaneo names un estado de ánimo, a mood, a temperament, what used to be called a ‘national character’…Its frame of reference is not un país—a political entity—but un pueblo—a social and cultural entity… Cubaneo, finds expression in all of those habits of thought and speech and behavior that we know as typically criollos—the informality, the humor, the exuberance, the docility…” (Firmat-Pérez 4)

Cubaneo is a term to refer to a loose repertoire of gestures, customs, and vocabulary that mark Cuban national character. Works such as Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del Choteo (1928), Calixto Massó’s El carácter cubano (1941), and José Muzaurieta’s Manual del Perfecto Sinvergüenza (1922) are the best-known studies exploring the ways that Cubans invent a vocabulary of informality and humor towards living and survival. Unlike cubanidad or cubanía, which are born out of legal documents and governmental decrees of nationality, cubaneo denotes membership in a cultural community (Ibid). This cultural community and way of using methods of informality, gestures, and street smarts as survival tactics denote a similar understanding to the Brazilian malícia. Playing capoeira in Cuba then becomes an act of ritualizing cubaneo.

Capoeira and Baile de Maní

As such, capoeira is not a foreign practice to Cubans who have grown up with similar corporal gestations in which movement, music, and sacred energies are in dialogue. In explaining how learning about the history of capoeira has revealed similarities between Cuba and Brazil Minhoca said, “Santería and Candomblé. Here [in capoeira class] we learn about both of the religions and the drum rhythms for both” (Minhoca June 30, 2013).

In Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba Fernando Ortiz writes,

…la danza [afrocubana] es originariamente un fenómeno dialogal, de magia o religión; por los efectos psíquicos de la danza y por la relación de su dinámica con los conceptos de la trascendencia de la acción sacromágica” (Ortiz 1951: 75).

Similarities in the institutional structures of colonialism in the Americas shaped the cultural sphere. Cuba became the largest producer of sugar after the Haitian Revolution of 1804. And in Brazil, sugarcane production was the largest earning crop in the slave plantations of Northeastern Brazil, especially in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Plantation systems as well as urban spaces in slave-holding societies in which slaves and poor, marginalized freedmen would congregate for social and financial reasons became places of creativity and performed resistance. Benítez-Rojo describes how the Caribbean (and I would argue that Northeastern Brazil can be included in this description) share a cultural history related to the structures of the sugar cane plantations. “The powerful machine of the sugar plantations attempted systematically to shape, to suit to its own convenience, the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it until that country is changed into a sugar island” (72). The Casa Grande became the basic structuring model for society and was a space for the generation of new cultural practices (Mwewa 153). The plantation system and slavery created the need for cultural acts of resistance in order to keep African (and indigenous) cultural traditions alive. These cultural performances that had their roots in systems of oppression created on plantations made their way to the cities through rural to urban migration.

Whereas in Brazil, capoeira was one of the products of the plantation system, making its way to urban centers when free Africans and Creoles moved into marginalized communities known as zungus, Cuban solares were parallel collective urban housing spaces for the poorest of the poor that also harbored cultural forms of resistance. Rumba, for example, is said to have “flourished in urban and rural settings where Cuban workers of all colors and occupations [gathered to share] their Creole heritage in music and dance…where free blacks gathered to communicate their feelings or comment on their struggles and enslaved Africans were permitted to congregate after work”  (Daniel 17). Musical synchronization between the drumbeat and the dancer is seen in the “rumba brava” or the “rumba de solar” just as it is in capoeira, for example.

Not only have Cuban capoeiristas brought up the connections between the cultural settings of rumba and capoeira and the importance of these practices in the performance of national identity, but playing capoeira has caused a new interest in a Cuban martial art that seems to have faded out of modern-day practice in Cuba: baile de maní. Maní, also known as Bambosá, was an African-derived acrobatic combat game that is rumored to have been widespread in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba, especially in the central areas of the island such as in Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus, and on the outskirts of Havana. These were all areas known for their sugar cane plantations. Fernando Ortiz documented one of the few detailed descriptions of maní in the 1930s in the neighborhood of “Los positos” in Marianao. This, interestingly, is also one of the last written documentations of baile de maní. Ortiz defined it as “consisting fundamentally in boxing, during which the player who is dancing tries to knock down one of the various participants, who remain on the defensive, and form a circle around him” (Ortiz 1951: 161).

El juego de maní consiste fundamentalmente en un pugilato, durante el cual un jugador que está bailando trata de abatir con un fuerte golpe a puño cerrado a uno de los varios participantes que están a la defensiva, formando un corro a su alrededor…Los maniseros iban descalzos, desnudos de la cintura para arriba y con calzones cortos o subidos a la rodilla; sin armas, insignias ni otro adorno que algún pañuelo de colores colgando de un ancho cinturón de cuero que les protegía el vientre. (IBID)

Mathias Assunção highlights its comparisons to the game of capoeira.

Despite its likely West African origins, maní offers a number of important parallels with capoeira, both in its formal aspects (played in a circle, with similar instruments, strikes embedded in a basic rhythmic movement) and its cultural meaning (multiple social functions, corresponding to the various modalities of the game, the role of ‘witchcraft’, and the importance of deception” (Assunção 63).

The origins of maní, like capoeira, are steeped in myth. It is possible that the name comes from Mani-kongo (King of the Congo Empire), which, according to Fernando Ortiz (1951: 160-161), is what the powerful freed blacks from the Congo region would call themselves.[6] Ortiz proposes that both rumba and maní are attributed to the Ganga, located in what are today the Sierra Leone and Liberia regions of West Africa. There are similarities between the two terms baile de maní and gangá maní, which is a term used to describe the dances of the manis, a group of people who migrated to Sierra Leone in the mid-sixteenth century (Ortiz 1951:164). Argeliers León supports this idea that baile de maní may be of bantú origin from the Congo region in his ethnographic study of Cuban folkloric traditions in “Del Canto y el Tiempo” (León 67-68).

Just as in capoeira, maní responded through lyrics to the game being played. The instrumentation of maní was usually two or three drums and an agogô.  Mathias Assunção makes the interesting observation that, although the berimbau is considered to be the iconographic instrument of capoeira, the first documentation of capoeira does not include the berimbau (7-8). The instrumentation of maní is actually very similar to capoeira as documented in the well-known engraving “Jogar Capöera-danse de la guerre” (1835) by Johann Moritz Rugendas, which is one of the earliest recorded visual representations of capoeira.[7]

There was also much exchange between players and musicians in both folkloric practices. For example, the leader of the musical line in maní was the cajero drummer. The cajero was supposed to mark a hard hit during the game with a hard hit of the drum. If the cajero missed the hit or was behind, he was taken off the instrument and put into the ring to be taken down. Similarly, different rhythms on the berimbau in capoeira mark a different style of game to be played. Whereas in capoeira, the circle of players surround a game of two capoeristas who battle in the middle, in the maní game, all men forming the circle could throw a hit. In both cases, however, the act of playing became an allegory of the physical violence one must avoid outside of the ring and a ritual for survival of the fittest.

Like capoeira, el baile de maní did not have a set choreography. Players would perform acrobatic punches and kicks to the rhythm of the music within a circle of other maniseros. In both practices players were noted for the surprise attacks that they performed on their opponents and the games were based in techniques of defense rather than attack. Yet, there are violent accounts of both maní and capoeira to the death.[8]

The spiritual worlds of maniseros and capoeiristas also hold parallels. The maniseros often used wrist bands or hid makutos in their belts, powerful charms prepared to help protect them and aid in their opponent’s defeat. In a parallel context, patuás, believed to ‘close the body’ and protect the owner from bad spells, were very popular historically among capoeiristas in Brazil (Assunção 118). Finally, although both were solitary fights, players often formed collectives. In Cuba, for example, one sugar cane plantation could challenge another plantation in maní games (Ortiz 1951:165). Capoeira is famously associated with maltas, Afro Brazilian gangs that would protect one another and battle rival gangs as well as the local authority.

The embodied performance of these cultural affinities parlays into powerful redefinitions of both Cuban and Brazilian culture. Maní was a Cuban folkloric practice that had all but disappeared since Ortiz’s last known documentation of it published in 1951. Today, however, capoeiristas in Havana are rediscovering it in their personal narratives explaining the Cuban connection to Brazilian capoeira. Since Cuban capoeiristas do not have mestres that are shaping their styles of play, they look towards and incorporate Cuban folkloric practices into the swing of their play. It is not uncommon to see movements from rumba or abakuá, for example, in a capoeira roda in Cuba. Players have also mentioned that they are incorporating the steps of baile de maní as part of their cubanization of capoeira. But, maní is not a contemporary practice in Cuba. This means capoeristas are reinterpreting what they imagine baile de maní must once have been like and applying that idea to their capoeira games. The interpretive powers of a Cuba-Brazil hybrid capoeira experience are actually resulting in a revival, or, at least, a rethinking of a Cuban cultural tradition that had been almost all but forgotten.

The capoeirista and the Íreme

Capoeira culture is also being incorporated into performances of Cuban cultural traditions. The way in which I first became involved with the capoeira community in Cuba is a particularly interesting example to illustrate this point. On November 27, 2011, I went to a march in honor of five Abakuá members who were killed in 1871 trying to defend eight medical students executed by the Spanish firing squad for allegedly desecrating a Spaniard’s grave; this was in the time of Spanish colonial rule when tensions between Spanish-born peninsulares and Cuban-born criollos were high. The yearly procession in honor of the 19^th-century medical students departs from the University of Havana and goes across town to La Punta del Prado where there is a statue in honor of these martyred medical students.  However, what is rarely mentioned in the commemorating event is that, along with these eight medical students, five black men also died that day trying to defend the students’ rights. These men were Abakuá members, a male initiatory secret society, who take oaths of lifelong loyalty to one another.

Abakuá Society[9] was founded in 1836 in La Regla and members, descendants of the Calabari cabildo, historically took a rebellious stance against Spanish colonial rule and slavery. As a mutual-aid secret society, Abakuá culture and lore has been transmitted orally and, though Abakuá lore has become ever-present in Cuban popular culture to represent the rebellious and anti-colonial aspects of Cuban culture, much of its meaning remains uninterpreted by outsiders. (Miller 161)

On the day of remembrance of the execution of the 19^th-century medical students in 2011, I did not actually go to the main procession leaving from the University of Havana, but to an alternative event, organized by the Abakuá Association of Cuba, that met in front of Editora Abril in Havana Vieja. I had heard of this event through the rumba circles where I had been studying dance, many of whose drummers and dancers were, themselves, Abakuá members. One of my dance partners was scheduled to play the part of one of the íremes for the march. The íreme, often referred to as the diablito ñañigo, is one of the principal figures in the Abakuá ceremony, representing an ancestral spirit from the other world that dances in typical Abakuá fashion for the duration of the ceremony.

When intellectuals and Abakuá members Orlando Gutierrez and Ramón Torres Zayas began their speeches, instead of beginning the event accompanied by the coro de clave of the abakuá or the beat of the Ékue drum (the ritual drum through which Tánse, the divine fish whose capture supposedly led to the creation of the abakuá society in Africa, and through which the voice of God is said to reverberate), the ceremony opened with the berimbau of capoeira. That was the first day that I met Cuban capoeira instructors Libre and Cobrinha, instructors for the group Caiman Capoeira. Libre played berimbau and sang capoeira songs to lead the event as Cobrinha answered the refrains and called for the crowd to join in.

The Brazilian berimbau opened a public event honoring the Cuban tradition of abakuá and its heroes, which is very significant given the strong markers of specifically Cuban creole culture that commemorate this particular day. Abakuá rhythms are in the basis of most Cuban music, including the rumba guaguancó rhythm, which is the symbol of Cuban national pride. So why was it that if there were Cuban drummers present, the organizers chose the berimbau to introduce the event as well as to be the musical accompaniment during the poetry reading? Purposefully or not, the berimbau, as a symbol of capoeira and, thus, an Afro Brazilian performance of cultural resistance against a dominant colonial system, brought a sense of universality to the specifically Cuban abakuá ceremony that day. The abakuá martyrs became martyrs of a whole cultural process that went far beyond the confines of Havana and linked the creole experience in Cuba to the rest of the Diaspora, sharing an historical experience in slavery and creative resistance across the black Atlantic.

After the berimbau, speeches, and poetry readings, the procession began down Prado Avenue led by two iremes. When the íremes finally arrived at the statue in honor of the medical students, the crowd watched as these íremes danced across the monument and the capoeiristas in the group began to organize a small roda off to the side. I watched in awe as I saw the movements of the íremes and the movements of the capoeristas blend into one.

Cuban capoeiristas overcome obstacles and pool their resources to reproduce capoeira a lo cubano. Players are transforming culture into a form of social capital within their own cultural context. Capoeira in Cuba embodies an experience of social inversion and performative resistance that was developed over centuries of Afro Atlantic exchanges. Though it is a Brazilian expression of national identity, capoeira blurs lines of nationality when localized into the Cuban context, creating a performative dialogue between observable Cuba-Brazil cultural affinities—of both past and present.

All photos are copyrighted to Annie Gibson, the author of this article.

The post Rediscovering lo cubano Through Capoeira in Cuba appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

La más reciente edición de los Premios Goya organizada por la Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España vuelve a poner al cine caribeño en la mirilla. El filme Juan de los muertos (2012, Alberto Brugués) se hizo en la noche del 17 de febrero de 2013 con el Goya a la mejor película iberoamericana. La historia se sitúa en La Habana, poco más de cincuenta años después de la Revolución, específicamente durante “la cosa ésta que vino después” del Período Especial, como explica el protagonista, Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas). La imposibilidad de definir el momento actual en la sociedad y la política cubana pronto encuentra su equivalente en la aparición de seres extraños que pululan por mar y tierra. Son los zombis que han tomado el control del país y que, como el contexto sociopolítico cubano, no se pueden definir: ¿muertos o vivos?, ¿disidentes o compañeros? La explicación es doble: mientras que para los habaneros se trata de una verdadera arma de destrucción masiva que impide la convivencia en la ciudad, para el gobierno cubano, en cambio, son un nuevo intento de los anarquistas, apoyados por el gobierno yanqui, de derrocar al otro gran muerto-vivo que es el gobierno castrista.

Juan, acompañado de su amigo apropiadamente llamado Lázaro (Jorge Molina), pronto descubre en esta situación una nueva oportunidad para comprobar que es un sobreviviente. Si sobrevivió “a Mariel, a Angola, al Período Especial, y a ésta cosa que vino después,” entonces también es capaz de sobrevivir y hasta de combatir la plaga infecciosa de los zombis. Es así que nace el negocio de asesinar por encargo a los “seres queridos” que se han transformado ahora en, literalmente, portadores de “gusanos”. Irónicamente, el paisaje a partir de ese momento se hace más homogéneo: si los edificios de la ciudad muestran constantemente su cara deteriorada que resiste como puede los embistes del tiempo y la falta de restauración, ahora la ruina se hace visible en los propios habitantes, aun cuando, en principio, todos parecen tener el mismo aspecto monótono de siempre, como observa una futura víctima ante la horda de zombis marchando por las calles: “Yo los veo igual que siempre”.

Juan de los muertos es una combinación de humor con elementos del cine de horror, algo que ya se había visto en 1985 con Vampiros en La Habana, película de animación del cubano Juan Padrón. En el filme de Padrón, sin embargo, la invasión proviene del exterior cuando los vampiros de Europa del Este descubren que un científico cubano posee la fórmula que les permite soportar la exposición al sol sin peligro de muerte. No obstante, a pesar del precedente de Padrón, no es hasta estos últimos dos años que el cine del Caribe hace su incursión de modo más sistemático y formal en el oscuro mundo del horror y del terror.

El horror visceral, no obstante, aparece ya desde el 2005 con el estreno de Andrea del dominicano Rogert Bencosme. El filme es la historia de Andrea (Any Ferreiras), una adolescente que inocentemente roba una cruz de un sepulcro para colocarla en la tumba de su reciente fallecida madre. Este hecho provoca la ira del espíritu que se libera y reclama lo que le ha sido arrebatado. Andrea es poseída por el espíritu que en vida había sido amigo de la infancia de Flora (Elvira Grullón), abuela de Andrea. En el pasado, cuando la joven Flora rechaza la propuesta amorosa de su amigo, éste se suicida y permanece encerrado en la tumba durante años hasta que es liberado en el presente de la narración por la joven protagonista. El padre de Andrea, Manuel (Hensy Pichardo), quien al comienzo de la película regresa del extranjero después de un largo período ausente, debe salvar a su hija por lo cual recurre a la ayuda de espiritistas. Aun a pesar del bajo presupuesto de la película, la misma recibió el Premio del Público del New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. La historia, alegan sus creadores, está basada en hechos reales ocurridos en Moca al norte de la República Dominicana.

Poco después del estreno de Juan de los muertos, aparecen dos filmes puertorriqueños que se valen de elementos propios del gótico clásico y que, podría decirse, contribuyen, junto con el filme de Brugués, a una nueva tradición cinematográfica: Los condenados (2012) de Roberto Busó-García y Under My Nails (2012) de Arí Maniel Cruz. El primero hace eco del más clásico cine de terror y suspenso: un pueblo remoto, una familia que guarda secretos, una casa presuntamente embrujada. Ana Puttnam (Cristina Rodlo), junto con su padre, vuelve desde México al ficticio pueblo de Rosales para reivindicar la imagen de éste, un médico estadounidense altruista que se encuentra, como si de un personaje de Poe se tratase, en estado catatónico. Ana planea convertir la casona familiar en un gran museo en el cual se pueda preservar el legado científico de su padre. Sin embargo, una vez en Rosales, la protagonista tendrá que descubrir los terribles secretos que oculta su familia y el pueblo. La clásica relación entre ciencia y horror que aparece en el siglo XIX vuelve en la película de Busó-García para presentar los crímenes cometidos contra la inocencia, la de los niños y la de un pueblo sometido al escalofriante y destructivo progreso científico.

Under My Nails, por su parte, es un thriller que presenta la figura del asesino perverso y de las mujeres que están a su merced. Filmada en Nueva York, la película sigue el día a día de Solimar (Kisha Tikina Burgos), una mujer puertorriqueña en el Bronx cuyo pasado está marcado por el abandono de su madre y el suicidio de su padre, y su vecino, Roberto (Iván Camilo), un dominicano que vive con su madre y que mantiene una violenta y masoquista relación con Perpetue (Dolores Pedro), una dominico-haitiana. La curiosidad que Solimar siente hacia Roberto y Perpetue la lleva a espiar (siempre a través de rendijas, agujeros mínimos o espacios reducidos) a Roberto y Perpetue y, finalmente, a presenciar el crimen violento de ésta. Solimar también desarrolla una morbosa obsesión sexual con el presunto asesino de quien parece enamorarse. Como en Los condenados, en Under My Nails la vivienda también es personaje porque es la que esconde amenazas, misterios y, posiblemente, cadáveres. Pero el terror en Under My Nails no sólo es el que genera la violencia y el crimen, sino también el que nace del abandono y la soledad. Solimar es un personaje solitario y apagado y su única relación es la que mantiene con Amalia (Antonio Pantojas), su amigo homosexual que actúa como una especie de madre y cuya pareja, además, tampoco habla porque se encuentra en estado vegetativo. Under My Nails, por lo tanto, es la historia de los “desplazados e inclasificables” –los emigrantes caribeños, los nuyoricans, los dominico-haitianos, los homosexuales, los enfermos. El terror de la ciudad y en la ciudad engulle a los más desprotegidos.

Si la película Andrea se estructura como un viaje que va de la realidad a la ficción, es decir, el hecho “real” adaptado al cine, en la película Desconocidos (2012, Andrés Ramírez), los personajes principales –un grupo de actores desconocidos contratados para realizar una película dentro de la película– hacen el recorrido inverso dentro de la trama. Sin saberlo, los actores son contratados para protagonizar una película “snuff”; los hechos que creen estar actuando, realmente ocurren; la ficción se convierte en realidad. Dos caras del terror, de esa forma, van desde Andrea hasta Desconocidos: la representación ficticia de algo que pudo haber ocurrido en el pasado y la representación de algo que podría llegar a ocurrir en el futuro. El terror se vuelve ineludible y omnipresente.

Finalmente, este año se estrenó Se vende del cubano Jorge Perugorría. El contexto de la película es el de la Cuba más reciente, durante el proceso de apertura iniciado por Raúl Castro. Los personajes tienen celulares, hay internet –aun cuando limitado–, y los cubanos de Miami vuelven para comprar antiguas propiedades (¿casas embrujadas?) de la Habana Vieja. Nácar (Dailenys Fuentes), la protagonista, aconsejada por el espíritu de su madre (Mirtha Ibarra), decide vender la bóveda familiar del cementerio para poder conseguir un poco de dinero. Cuando su compañera de trabajo la convence de que también venda los huesos de los difuntos, Nácar le pide ayuda a Noel (Jorge Perugorría) a quien había conocido poco antes y con quien inicia un romance. La película, como aclara el propio Perugorría, es un homenaje a los directores Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío a quien considera sus maestros del cine (Cubadebate). Las alusiones a Muerte de un burócrata (1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) o a Fresa y chocolate (1993, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío) no son escasas. Entre ellas, la mezcla de humor con ironía que en Se vende pasa por una puesta en escena de momentos propios del cine de terror, como la exhumación de una tumba o el entierro en vida de uno de los personajes. En una Cuba más abierta al mercado exterior, el terror también se vende y se compra; se vuelve mercancía. El aura misteriosa que cubre a la muerte como idea pasa a ser el aura del arte, la singularidad del objeto artístico, hacia el final de la película cuando el cadáver momificado del padre es exhibido como una escultura en un museo de la ciudad. Si durante el Período Especial, toda la infraestructura cubana –carros antiguos y casas destruidas– se fue tornando en museo abierto, en Se vende, el arte vuelve al interior del museo y junto con éste, entra también lo macabro. Tanto Juan de los muertos como Se vende presentan, entonces, la posibilidad de lucrarse con los cuerpos de los seres queridos y ese lucro es el que ambas películas transforman en arte a través del género de terror.

Zombis, vampiros, casas siniestras, asesinos psicópatas, espíritus… todos pertenecen al género gótico. Como el personaje de Solimar que se encuentra entre dos polos –deseo y rechazo; sol y mar– el gótico muestra una actitud ambivalente ante los cambios acaecidos en la sociedad europea del siglo XVIII como el paso del feudalismo a la industrialización, la migración del campo a la ciudad, la sustitución de la religión por la ciencia, de lo primitivo por lo moderno (Punter). Todo lo residual del pasado se expresa como una presencia monstruosa o fantasmal que se cuela en el interior de la vida doméstica y civilizada del presente pero que, a pesar de amenazar con destruir todo a su paso, no deja de generar fascinación y morbo en quien lo percibe. De ahí que la literatura gótica, desde sus inicios, y el cine de horror y terror, ya en el siglo XX, hayan sido y permanezcan siendo géneros muy populares. Era de esperarse, entonces, que el Caribe terminara por sumarse con fuerza a la lista de geografías amenazadas por los muertos-vivos, los fantasmas, los monstruos y los zombis. El paraíso tropical de las Antillas esconde secretos oscuros que su cine comienza ahora a develar.

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Las artistas concedieron una entrevista luego de su participación en el Trinity International Hip-Hop Festival, que tomó lugar en Hartford, CT (Estados Unidos) durante la primavera del 2013.

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The Postcolonialist: La producción artística independiente se está haciendo más prominente. ¿En qué medida piensan que el arte de los márgenes fomenta o interrumpe un discurso sobre el poder?

Odaymara Cuesta: Pienso que depende de que tipo de poder estemos hablando. El arte y las personas en las márgenes siempre hemos cuestionado, reaccionado y accionado ante el discurso de poder del estado, de los gobiernos, de los ejércitos, de las industrias, la industria farmacéutica, de la industria cárnica. La supremacía es causa de muchas líneas divisorias en este mundo. Con la proliferación de activistas independientes, autogestionamos y revindicamos el poder de nuestras voces, de nuestras acciones, de nuestros cuerpos, de nuestros orgasmos, legitimamos que el poder también es nuestro, poder de nuestro intelecto, el poder que tenemos cuando organizamos nuestras comunidades crecemos nuestras infantes con una educación renovada, inclusiva, de amor, justicia, equidad y respeto por la naturaleza.

Olivia: Tener la medida exacta es difícil pero si cada día el acceso a las redes sociales facilita mucho más la comunicación y promoción de la obra independiente, sentimos que se fortalece la red de artistas y activistas, que sí se puede. Podemos existir y resonar en el mundo underground muy aparte de esa supremacía, muy lejos de ese juego de poder, escapando de su opresión, burlando su prepotencia, aun cuando ellos también controlen las redes sociales, el arte popular, la conexión entre la gente y la opinión ciudadana se están fortaleciendo.

The Postcolonialist: Las Krudas es un proyecto de origen cubano, nacido en un contexto cultural rico y políticamente complejo. ¿Como describirían su producción artística frente a estos matices?

Odaymara: Somos nacidas, criadas y crecidas en Cuba, por esta razón somos personas que de la nada sacamos mucho, nuestra producción artística en los años que estuvimos en Cuba fue muy prolífica en lo que se refiera al material para discos y shows en vivo, una vez emigradas hemos tenido que adicionarle a eso el trabajo de booking y managing nosotras mismas para sobrevivir en este mundo capitalista.

Olivia: El sueño de socialismo nos influencio para siempre y la música cubana está dentro de nuestros cuerpos. El aire del Caribe siempre estará refrescándonos, las ideas de justicia social, equidad y resistencia inundaran siempre los acordes y melodías de nuestras canciones. Desde que comenzamos en Cuba y todavía aun en tierras americanas la sustentabilidad y la autonomía siempre nos acompañan.

The Postcolonialist: Las Krudas deconstruye los paradigmas de género, y proponen una visión alterna hacia la sexualidad y el cuerpo femenino. ¿Qué aperturas y qué dificultades presenta el rap para la mujer?

Odaymara: Para todas mujeres siempre es un desafío vivir en paz, en esta sociedad machista y misógina ser una mujer rapera dentro de una cultura blanca y popcentrista es más duro aun y ser una lesbiana dentro de la cultura Hip Hop es triplemente duro y al mismo tiempo fortalecedor. Son mucha cosas por las que luchar, que te mantiene viva, vigilante, haciendo la real revolución.

Olivia: El mundo del Hip Hop como el resto del mundo es dominado por hombres y las mujeres debemos ser guerreras siempre en busca de nuestros espacios. Es duro, es agotador tener que estar peleando por algo que nos debería corresponder por derecho propio, pero somos fuertes y decimos no a la victimización. Nuestras ancestras nos enseñaron a pelear por sobrevivir y eso hacemos, el rap es increíblemente apropiado para nuestra expresión antisistémica, no solo en términos de clase, raza y genero sino también con respecto a la elección sexual; podemos rapear con el corazón defendiendo nuestras diferencias, defendiendo nuestros sueños.

The Postcolonialist: ¿Como perciben la intersección entre la negritud o el mestizaje y las artes en el Caribe hoy en día?

Odaymara: El arte negro es la fundación.

• ”Soy virtud que dejaron mis ancestros soy poesía
• soy esta pasa mía, oscura iluminación
• es la verdad de mi gente
• voz de manigua presente
• soy rebelión a la vida cotidiana,
• veo cada mañana
• Iroko frente a mi puerta y digo:
• Negritud revuelta, suprema fuerza que se apodera del mundo
• negra, negro profundo.
• Soy hermandad soy valor,
• para echársela a quien sea de donde quiera que venga
• soy orgullo de mi bemba,
• orgullo de mi color
• soy identidad, soy cultura
• negra Kruda de Cuba.”

(Texto de Madre Natura)

Olivia: Más que intersección, las culturas nativas y africanas son la base y sostén de toda la cultura caribeña y más allá. No solo en el arte y en las palabras; puedes sentirlo también en las actitudes, en los colores, en el aire, en la gestualidad, en el olor, en todas partes. Muchos han sido los intentos y violencias del eurocentrismo y del “norcentrismo,” pero la realidad sigue ahí, palpitando en el centro de nuestras vidas, aunque estemos lejos del lugar, desde la diáspora continuamos representando nuestra identidad siendo embajadoras alrededor del mundo, y manteniendo este fuego vivo.

The Postcolonialist: Ahora viven en los Estados Unidos. ¿Este cambio geográfico ha alterado su perspectiva, o su gestión artística y política?

Olivia: Todo cambia todo el tiempo, estar desde fuera me hace ver a mi país de otras maneras y estar en estos sitios me hace cambiar a mi misma. Creo que amplié más la perspectiva, aprendo mucho de lo que voy conociendo del mundo, y traigo de Cuba lo que soy, lo que allí aprendí, lo mesclo todo y esa la persona que soy, así es el arte que hago.

Odaymara: Pues sí que se ha alterado mi perspectiva, además de cambiar de geografía, cambié de sistema económico, de cultura, idioma. Pasé a formar parte de la gran población de emigrantes en el mundo, afrolatina en la diáspora envolviéndome totalmente en luchas globales, comunitarias, feministas, culturales, de aprendizaje. Hermanando culturas, crecimiento espiritual y artístico, nuestra obra ha crecido, hemos aprendido y enseñado. Reclamando nuestro derecho como ciudadana mundial de nacionalidad cubana.

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