The Cuban Hustle: culture, politics, everyday life

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latinoaméricaines et caraïbes ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rclc20 The Cuban hustle: culture, politics, everyday life by Sujatha Fernandes, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020, 184 pp., $24,95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1478009641 Catia Dignard To cite this article: Catia Dignard (2022) The Cuban hustle: culture, politics, everyday life, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 47:2, 325-327, DOI: 10.1080/08263663.2022.2055331 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2022.2055331 Published online: 01 Apr 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 88 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rclc20 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES 325 petroleum – represent a coexistence of energy uses that is not a question of developmental stages but of environments and epistemologies. Taken together, these books add to the picture of how Mexican society, culture and environments have evolved over time, along with our ways of understanding them; both are indispensable to the literature on modern Mexico. Amelia M. Kiddle University of Calgary akiddle@ucalgary.ca © 2022 Amelia M. Kiddle https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2022.2055343 The Cuban hustle: culture, politics, everyday life, by Sujatha Fernandes, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020, 184 pp., $24,95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1478009641 The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life, by Sujatha Fernandes, consists of a series of 22 essays which stem from a 20-year period (1998–2017) of her visiting the island and documenting “the sheer inventiveness of ordinary Cubans as they hustle not only to survive, but to create meaning in a time of turmoil” (p. 2). The book revisits, in good measure, these dreaded years of the so-called “Special Period”, before dealing with the post-Fidel years of “Normalization” (p. 83) under Raúl Castro’s leadership and the Obama administration’s weakening of the Embargo, to finally open a space of preliminary reflections with “Cuban Futures and the Trump Era”. On first approach, one could wonder if all had not already been said about the hustle and bustle in Cubans’ everyday lives and the cultural manifestations that arose from it during the 1990s. The originality and pertinence of this series of essays lies precisely in the fact that the reader is led to examine lesser-studied topics, social and cultural actors, often on a micro-level, and to steer away from a Havana-centric and purely sociological angle. In fact, the wise words of Matanzas AfroCuban sculptor Augustín Drake, uttered at the beginning of her investigative journey, sets the stage for the rest of the book: “When you are in one particular place, you can’t see some things [. . .] Often just by moving, your vision clears” (p. 13). Accordingly, Fernandes makes us travel to the outskirts of Havana, to Alamar, “The Capital of Rap”, to discuss the “backstage” elements of Cuba’s Hip Hop culture, and then brings us to a small rural town in the Province of Pinar del Río, in which successful community-based cultural initiatives around the food-processing factory La Conchita and ceramics factory Fabrica Tejar are documented. Although the rise of inequalities and its marked racialization in the 1990s justify many of the essays’ focus on antiracist movements and black cultural expressions in music, visual arts and film, topics dealt with extensively by scholarship specializing in this period, and thus the inclusion of references to well-known and indispensable texts by historian Alejandro de la Fuente and cultural critic Roberto Zurbano, the book also includes a piece on gender inequalities, with a case study of the grass-roots initiative Magín, in its intent of filling a void in “Feminist Organizing in Cuba”; an unequal battle against the State monopoly represented by the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Furthermore, if analyzing films such as Fresa y chocolate (1994) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón) and La vida es silbar (1998) by Fernando Pérez may constitute a passage obligé with regard to the still-taboo topics of race and sexuality in Cuban society, Fernandes also includes a most interesting interview with the late Daniel Díaz Torres on his highly controversial Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (1991), the life span of which of four days in local theaters owes to its satirical portrait of Cuba’s 326 BOOK REVIEWS socialist bureaucracy. This attention to oeuvres that have not been rehabilitated by the benevolent hand of the global film industry echoes the scholarly and critical interest that Titón’s relatively silenced Los sobrevivientes (1979) has only recently received. Fernandes benefits us through her web of contacts, namely with former member of Magín, Norma Guillard, to whom the work is dedicated, of an insider’s view on how Cuban cultural actors’ transnational links, while they afforded “a language” and means to voice their concerns more widely about the rise of certain inequalities (p. 7), had their share of shortcomings. Whether AfroCuban or feminist activism, Fernandes demonstrates this uneasy “dance of promotion and deflection” (p. 3) when facing the State, and transnational links’ own interests and logics. This insider’s view also has the merit of focusing more on their day-to-day dealings with institutions and their politics, rather than exclusively on sociological readings of Cuban cultural production. Another of the book’s strengths is that due credit is given to social and cultural actors in the 1980s who paved the way to envision in a more critical stance of Cuban futures, although a space for discussing the topics of race, sexuality and, in a lesser measure, gender inequalities, was afforded in the 1990s by the island’s obligatory opening to global markets and then transnational cultural and academic networks, following the demise of the Soviet Union. We can also appreciate the author’s balanced approach, which invites us to “understand Cuba on its own terms” (p. 2). Cuban social and cultural actors’ resilience is portrayed in a positive and productive light, instead of islander-hustlers just waiting to “cash in” to the new possibilities opened by tourism and transnational networks. Without evacuating the effects of “fetishization of difference as a marketable commodity for global consumers” (p. 6) on the more individualist turn in many artists’ careers, Fernandes stresses the persistence well into the New Millennium of “collectivism, egalitarianism, and voluntarism” (p. 3) and the belief in the transformational powers of social critique, while not being “openly confrontational” (p. 7), as in the 1980s, in her “Public Art and Art Collectives in Havana”, “Hairdressers of the World, Unite!” and “How Socially Engaged Activism is Transforming Cuba” pieces. The author also exposes the modes and narratives which lead cultural production and services from emerging content providers to “take on their own shape, oriented towards the community” (p. 168), a guiding principle that permeates Fernandes’ analysis of the Island’s Rap and Hip-Hop movements, that of the Paquete Semanal or “Weekly Packet” of mobile varied sources of entertainment shared via hard drives and EcuRed, the Cuban version of Wikipedia, as inventive context-specific responses to State-controlled media and limited access to the Internet. While the essays comprised in “Cultures of the Special Period” draw, in part, from the author’s previous works, Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Fernandes 2006) and Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Fernandes 2011), affording more in-depth analysis and interviews, Parts II and III are based on revised articles previously published in The Nation, NACLA Report on the Americas, NY Times and the like, rendering these essays more accessible for the general public. My only reservation would be the un-naming of poet Nicolás Guillén in the NY Times piece (probably for editorial choices) when mentioning the revisiting of his 1964 poem “Tengo” by the Cuban rap group Hermanos de Causa. Finally, with the shortening of the “Trump Era”, the present Biden Administration and the reemergence of a more critical stance and civil society mobilization galvanized around the San Isidro Movement, we can only look forward to the author’s additional insight on Cuban society and cultural actors in this third decade of the twenty-first century. References Díaz Torres, Daniel. 1991. Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas. Havana: El Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos. CANADIAN JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES 327 Fernandes, Sujatha. 2006. Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fernandes, Sujatha. 2011. Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. London: Verso. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás. 1979. Los sobrevivientes. Havana: El Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, Juan Carlos Tabío, and Senel Paz. 1994. Fresa y chocolate [Strawberry and Chocolate]. Havana, Cuba: El Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos in coproduction with Telemadrid . . . [et al.]. Pérez, Fernando. 1998. La vida es silbar. Havana: El Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos in coproduction with Wanda Distribución de Filmes. Catia Dignard University of Toronto catia.corriveau.dignard@mail.utoronto.ca © 2022 Catia Dignard https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2022.2055331 Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: state slavery in defense and development, 1762–1835, by Evelyn P. Jennings, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020, 280 pp., US$45.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780807173947 Scholars of colonial Cuba have rightly focused on wealthy Spanish and Creole plantation owners exploiting the labor of enslaved Africans, but what they have often overlooked are the ways the Spanish state recruited enslaved workers for various civil engineering and defense infrastructure projects. Evelyn P. Jennings joins these two histories of bondage in Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835. Jennings follows the transition in Cuba from an economy based on imperial service to sugar production by analyzing coerced labor practices in Havana. Instead of assuming that commodity exports caused the influx of enslaved Africans to the island, Jennings argues that Spain’s defensive measures in response to various conflicts in the Atlantic was often the major motor driving slave imports before the sugar boom of the early nineteenth century. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana is primarily based on colonial bureaucratic documents from archives in Spain and Cuba. Despite the many limitations of these sources, Jennings still manages to offer a picture of state enslavement that balances slavery studies with other Atlantic, imperial and global labor histories. Divided into five chapters, Jennings begins her study by reviewing various forms of servitude in the Spanish world from 1492 to the end of the 1600s. We learn that Spanish kings deployed enslaved peoples on the Iberian peninsula – primarily Muslims from North Africa – in military service, construction projects, ship repairs and mining. Habsburg monarchs followed these same practices in the Caribbean as the transatlantic slave trade of sub-Saharan Africans began to replace the Indigenous slave trade in the 1540s. Jennings notes that Spain’s response to piracy and warfare with other European powers led to several recurring patterns in Havana: frequent fortification efforts, subsequent labor shortages and the strategic use of the king’s enslaved workers. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the impact of warfare on defense in Cuba before and after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Bourbon monarchs sought to reinvigorate its navy and expand the military role of Havana, which meant increasing its enslaved labor force. Jennings contends that these defense projects had a far greater influence on the influx of the enslaved to Cuba than the expansion of free trade and sugar production under British occupation. Put in other words, the