Cuban Studies

380 Pages·2018·4.496 MB·English

Nota del editor
Vuelvo a escribir esta nota introductoria en castellano, para facilitar el acceso
a los lectores de la isla. Comienzo por compartir una grata sorpresa: el número
de trabajos enviados desde Cuba —desde varios rincones de Cuba— se mul-
tiplica rápidamente, dando fe de que numerosos intelectuales y académicos
residentes en la isla ven a Cuban Studies como una plataforma importante
para diseminar sus resultados de investigación. A nombre de nuestro equipo
editorial, agradezco a nuestros colegas en Cuba por darnos la oportunidad de
leer y de evaluar sus trabajos. Una mención especial a los miembros de nuestro
consejo editorial, algunos de los cuales han animado a varios autores jóvenes
a publicar con nosotros.
Concluimos el numero 46 de Cuban Studies bajo el impacto de dos he-
chos potencialmente importantes para los estudios cubanos: el fallecimiento de
Fidel Castro, líder histórico del proceso revolucionario cubano, y la elección
de Donald Trump a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos. El fallecimiento de
Fidel Castro produjo titulares y notas de prensa alrededor del mundo. Aun-
que su muerte, a los noventa años de edad, no sorprendió a nadie; a pesar
de que llevaba casi diez años fuera del gobierno, al menos formalmente; y a
pesar de que, además, en su cotidianidad los cubanos apenas hablaban de él, la
muerte de Fidel Castro representa un momento simbólicamente importante, el
ocaso inevitable de una generación cuya huella en la historia de Cuba ha sido
y continuará siendo objeto de debate. Cualquier estudioso de nuestra historia
sabe que el tiempo histórico de la nación cubana es frecuentemente medido
en generaciones. No sé si esa generación será recordada como la “generación
del centenario” —como la denomina la historia ofi cial cubana—, o si será re-
cordada como la de-generación de dicho centenario. Tampoco está claro cuán
importante y duradera, en el sentido profundo de los engranajes culturales de
la cubanidad, será el impacto de esa generación. Los legados, contradictorios y
complejos, del proceso revolucionario cubano y de sus líderes serán objeto de
estudio y de polémica durante mucho tiempo.
Para muchos, Fidel Castro encarnó las ansias de justicia social y de afi r-
mación soberana de todo un continente, de cara a la arrogancia imperial ame-
ricana y de sus obsesiones anticomunistas. Para muchos otros, Fidel Castro
fue un caudillo, megalómano y cruel, que traicionó los ideales puros de una
revolución genuinamente popular, anclada en los reclamos cívicos de amplios
S
sectores de la población. Lo que ninguna de las dos partes disputará es que no
N
ix
ix
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb iixx 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
x : Nota del editor
se puede estudiar el siglo XX cubano, o latinoamericano, sin mencionar a Fidel
Castro. De hecho, hay procesos fundamentales de la pasada centuria, como la
Guerra Fría o los procesos descolonizadores de África y Asia, que no pueden
ser estudiados sin tener en cuenta las aspiraciones, acciones e infl uencias de
Fidel Castro. Aunque los tiempos en los que los estudios sobre Cuba y su re-
volución versaban sobre su máximo líder han sido felizmente superados, hay
muchos temas importantes de investigación que conectan, de una forma u otra,
con Fidel Castro y con las distintas etapas de su larga vida. Los futuros presen-
tes de Cuba tejerán sus propios pasados, reivindicando a algunos y condenando
a otros. Es imposible predecir como evolucionarán dichos legados y como Fi-
del Castro será recordado. Cualquier lectura premonitoria de esos legados está
inexorablemente anclada en el presente y es, por lo tanto, fundamentalmente
equívoca.
Con irrefl exividad característica, el presidente-electo Donald Trump re-
accionó a la muerte de Fidel Castro con un “tweet” desprovisto del más ele-
mental decoro presidencial. Esto tampoco sorprendió a nadie: el decoro no es
precisamente una de las cualidades del presidente-electo, quien ha hecho una
carrera política basada en el insulto, el sexismo, la xenofobia, la vulgaridad y el
racismo. Con la elección de Trump, hay temas tradicionales de los estudios cu-
banos que adquieren vigencia renovada, como las relaciones entre Cuba y los
Estados Unidos. En algún sentido perverso, Trump es un regalo. Para el nacio-
nalismo cubano el Presidente Barack Obama representaba un reto imposible.
El tradicional contraste entre una nación incluyente y fraterna (Cuba) y un país
imperial, arrogante y segregado (Estados Unidos) se tambaleó ante el carisma,
la franqueza y la crítica respetuosa (además de la melanina incómoda) que
Barack y Michelle Obama desplegaron durante su visita a Cuba en marzo del
2016. Con la elección de Trump, el nacionalismo cubano regresa a una especie
de antagonismo cómodo, que permite disimular o ignorar serios problemas al
interior de la sociedad cubana. Un racista soez y grosero es un enemigo inme-
jorable. El nacionalismo siempre se alimenta de patrañas, mitos y caricaturas,
pero es difícil imaginar una caricatura más efi caz que Donald Trump.
S
N
x
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb xx 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
RUTH BEHAR
Introduction: Looking Back and Forward
ABSTRACT
Lourdes Casal is one of the most important fi gures in contemporary Cuban history and
also one of the most diffi cult to categorize. It is impossible to discuss the relationship
between Cubans and Cuban Americans, and between Cuba and the United States, with-
out being aware of her contributions. And yet because she was a woman, and moreover
a black woman with Chinese heritage, and not just that, but a radical queer woman, and
because she wrote both prose and poetry, devoting herself equally to scholarly work and
creative work, she hasn’t received the level of appreciation that she deserves. Especially
in this moment of renewed relations between the United States and Cuba, it is impera-
tive that Lourdes Casal be part of the emerging conversations about the interpretation of
Cuban history. My introduction addresses the importance of Casal’s work and engages
with the critical essays included in this special volume.
RESUMEN
Lourdes Casal es una de las fi guras más importantes de la historia cubana y también una
de las más difíciles de categorizar. Es imposible hablar de la relación entre los cubanos
y los cubanos-americanos, entre Cuba y los Estados Unidos, sin estar consciente de su
obra. Pero porque fue mujer, y además mujer negra de herencia china, y mujer radical
queer, y porque escribió prosa y poesía, y se dedicó a la investigación académica y a la
obra creativa, por todo eso no ha recibido el reconocimiento que se merece. En este mo-
mento de nuevas relaciones entre los Estados Unidos y Cuba, es sumamente importante
que Lourdes Casal forme parte de las conversaciones emergentes sobre la interpretación
de la historia cubana. Mi introducción se enfoca en la importancia de la obra de Casal y
examina los ensayos críticos incluidos en este volumen especial.
Lourdes Casal is one of the most important fi gures in contemporary Cuban
history and one of the most diffi cult to categorize. It is impossible to discuss
the relationship between Cubans and Cuban Americans, and between Cuba and
the United States, without being aware of her contributions. And yet because
she was a woman, and moreover a black woman with Chinese heritage, and
not just that, but a radical queer woman, and because she wrote both prose and
poetry, devoting herself equally to scholarly work and creative work, she hasn’t
received the level of appreciation that she deserves. Especially in this moment S
N
3
3
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 33 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
4 : Ruth Behar
of renewed relations between the United States and Cuba, it is imperative that
Lourdes Casal be part of the emerging conversations about the interpretation
of Cuban history. The question of historiography is key. Who is written into
and out of the historical record, and why? The excellent papers collected here
offer a much-needed and wonderfully multifaceted portrait of Lourdes Casal,
revealing the productive tensions that inspired this scholar, writer, activist, and
poet to speak in a range of voices, all of them memorable and signifi cant. They
demonstrate forcefully why she needs to be written into the record.
Born in 1938 in Cuba, and exiled to the United States in 1962, Casal died
young at the age of forty-two in Cuba in 1981, and in that short life span she
developed a sense of self that was deeply rooted in the idea of hybridity. While
always aware that she had African and Chinese lineages, she identifi ed with an
almost mystical, sacred sense of Cubanness that draws heavily on José Martí’s
thinking. Trained as a social scientist in the United States, she developed a
profound understanding of subjectivity from her social psychology training, as
well as the sharp observation skills of a sociologist and the ethnographic listen-
ing skills of an anthropologist, which led her to undertake pioneering research
on the lives of black Cubans in the United States.
But academic perspectives fell short for Casal. She pursued autobiographic
analysis, writing about herself and her Cuban community in self-refl exive ways
that call to mind the work of anthropologists such as Barbara Myerhoff, John
Gwaltney, and José Limón, who have written about the meaning of home and
homecoming.1 She tried to construct a bridge to Cuba—a bridge between Cu-
bans on the island and Cubans in the diaspora who believed in the possibility of
a dialogue. She was perhaps the fi rst “professional Cuban” to emerge after the
Cuban Revolution, forging a career out of her search for her heritage and a lost
home and the quest for a sense of belonging in Cuba. I consider Casal to have
been an early proponent of auto-ethnography as scholarship.
Casal also felt a love of the Spanish language that led her to write poetry
in her native tongue. Bilingual and bicultural, her work published in English
in academic journals in the United States and poetry published in Spanish
with Casa de las Américas, the most prestigious literary publisher in Cuba
founded after the Revolution, Casal crossed borders, boundaries, and disci-
plines. She was a “scholartist”—a scholar and an artist—long before it was
fashionable, and indeed at a time when these kinds of fusions were uncommon
in academia.
But there were silences: her queer identity was kept under wraps in her
public presentation of self. This was the price, other scholars have said, that she
had to pay to reconnect with Cuba. Anti-gay politics in Cuba in the 1960s and
1970s were intense and unforgiving, with the existence of Unidades Militares
S de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP) camps and continual discrimination and
N efforts to impose a heterosexual norm on the population with the Family Code.
4
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 44 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
Rereading the Work of Lourdes Casal : 5
To become a public revolutionary intellectual in Cuba in the 1970s, Casal had
to stay in the closet. Among the rewards: she was buried in the Panteón de los
Emigrados Revolucionarios de la Habana (February 3, 1981). But I was dis-
appointed when I went to visit her grave—I found it too plain. I didn’t want the
words of José Martí engraved on it, but her own unforgettable words:
I will remain forever a foreigner
even when I return to the city of my birth.
At the same time, I wondered: do women’s words ever appear on tombstones?
Casal revealed her sexuality by dedicating her most famous poem, “To
Ana Veldford” (also known as Anna Veltfort), to a woman who was known to
be a lesbian, a daughter of German parents who had settled in New York and
then went to live in Cuba. Veltfort was in Cuba from 1962 to 1972, for ten years
at the start of the revolution. She and Anna met in New York and Lourdes was
drawn to the hybridity of Anna’s identity, her ambiguous Cubanness and im-
migrant identity.2
For me, Lourdes Casal was a role model when I began a series of return
trips to Cuba in 1991 that are ongoing to this day. I wrote a poem for her called
“Prayer to Lourdes,” where I confessed I didn’t participate in the brigades:
Lourdes, don’t bother waking up to hear me.
I wasn’t there when you led the brigades.
I was studying at Princeton in those years,
a scholarship girl reading Marx behind ivy walls
where dangerous ideas are kept in cages.3
I was a scholarship girl, my head in the clouds, and didn’t hear of Lourdes
and her work until after her death, though I did return to Cuba in 1979 for the
fi rst time during the brief thaw under Carter, and perhaps crossed paths with
Lourdes on a street in Havana and didn’t know it. She inspired me to think
about bridges to Cuba. And as a writer, I felt inspired by her merging of re-
search and poetry, her ability to be both a critical scholar as well as a lyrical
speaker of eloquent truths that came from the heart. I also felt a certain affi nity
with her sense of hybrid identity, as I was seeking to give voice to the mix of
Jewish and Cuban that is my heritage.
But despite these many points of connection, I realized, and said as much
in my poem “Prayer to Lourdes,” that for Lourdes Casal, culture and politics
were thoroughly interwoven, at a moment when it was impossible to sepa-
rate them because of the politicized relationship between the island and the
diaspora. She became a passionate supporter of the Cuban Revolution and the
political regime on the island. Her activism was expressed in her work with S
Grupo Areíto and the founding of the Antonio Maceo Brigade. She became, in N
5
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 55 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
6 : Ruth Behar
a certain sense, a political proselytizer, encouraging young Cuban Americans
to go to Cuba, to engage with the revolution, and do volunteer work, live out in
practice the socialist ideal.
I found myself in a more ambiguous position, not wanting to take a politi-
cal stand for or against, not wanting to choose between the island or the exiles,
walking a tightrope. I tried to have empathy for Cubans on all sides (following
the anthropological commitment to “being there” and witnessing and listen-
ing). I sought to separate culture from politics, believing that bridges could be
established along the lines of shared culture and memory, and while not ignor-
ing politics, at least giving it a secondary place in my interactions with fellow
Cubans wherever they happened to be. With the restoration of ties between
Cuba and the United States, it is time to rethink the relationship between cul-
ture and politics. Refl ecting on the decisions that Casal made, over thirty years
ago now in a different era, suddenly seems very timely.
The papers included here offer a fascinating new light on Casal’s thinking
about race, nation, and belonging in Cuba, and how these conceptions were
deeply infl uenced by her experiences in the United States, which became a
counterpoint to the homeland she both imagined and reclaimed in Cuba. They
also gracefully show the interplay between Casal’s autobiography and her aes-
thetics and politics.
Our contemporary concept of intersectional feminism seems to have been
invented to understand Casal’s work. As Laura Lomas shows, Casal worked
in the space of the “in-between,” both through her interdisciplinary pursuits
as a scholar and poet, and through the way she continually saw feminism as
entwined with struggles for black civil rights, working class struggles, and
international decolonization movements. Casal’s ability to inhabit borderlands
and to seek to defi ne them through lived experience connects her to other Lati-
nas of color of her generation, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga,
and Audre Lorde. As Lomas wisely suggests, Casal needs to be seen as part
of “this group of queer-of-color foremothers,” a thinker who helped to lay the
foundation for the fi eld of Cuban studies, through “interdisciplinary projects
that continue to invigorate cultural criticism and theory.”
Jenna Leving Jacobson illuminates the ways in which Casal developed
a sense of her own blackness in exile. In the United States, Casal felt more
defi ned by the color of her skin than by her cultural identity: “Mi color me
defi ne más que mi cultura.” In the 1960s and 1970s, Lourdes Casal experienced
both the cruel racism of American segregation and the hope for liberation and
equality that the civil rights struggle was espousing. But the emphasis was on
color, not culture, and Casal ultimately wanted to embrace her heritage, to
move color into a secondary place. She wanted the familiarity of living among
S the orishas that she remembered from her childhood in Havana—culture as
N lived experience, as part of the everyday fabric of being.
6
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 66 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
Rereading the Work of Lourdes Casal : 7
Jacobson notes that Cuba was celebrating its African heritage as a means
of bringing about racial equality through socialist revolution, while also en-
gaging in military operations in Africa. Color and race were being offi cially
erased. The elimination of private schools and a policy of integration on all
levels of society would make racial difference an obsolete marker. Certainly
it seems, as Jenna points out, that Casal was persuaded by this ideology—she
viewed herself as the descendent of oppressed peoples, indigenous, African,
and Chinese, who had reached a moment in history when they would gain true
freedom and self-empowerment through participation in the revolution.
Naming the magazine she founded Areíto, acknowledging a Taíno heritage
and a pre-Columbian ritual of collective dancing, was a way of claiming a his-
tory that preceded Spanish conquest, preceded the Cuban revolution—going
to the source. This move memorialized the severe injustice upon which Cuba’s
racial politics had been built—the disappeared indigenous peoples and cultures
whose bones had served as the bedrock for what would eventually become the
Cuban nation.
In turn, naming the brigade after Antonio Maceo inscribed the important
role of black Cubans in bringing about the fall of the Spanish empire in Cuba
and beginning the process of seeking national independence. While most of
the members of the brigade were white Cubans, giving pride of place to Maceo
was a way of questioning their own white privilege, making it possible for
them to return to the island under a noble cloak of hope for eventual racial
integration through revolutionary commitment.
Jacobson’s work shows us the crucial importance of key symbols in the
thinking of Lourdes Casal and in her efforts to revise Cuban nationhood and give
it a redemptive future. In this sense, it’s possible to say that Casal was actively
engaged in mythography—a mix of the mythological and the ethnographic.
And yet, as Yolanda Prieto shows, it is not mythography alone that Lourdes
Casal embraced, but the nitty-gritty observational and statistical analysis of so-
cial science in her work on black Cubans in the United States. Yolanda has a
very special perspective on this question, as she helped to complete the work
that Casal began, and in addition she was a student of Casal’s, so she also knew
her as a teacher. Hopefully one day Yolanda will be inspired to write about
Casal as an educator—and to give us more of a memoir about Casal—to share
memories of how she taught, and how she interacted with students.
In the meantime, Prieto shows us how very pioneering was the research
of Casal, who was studying black Cubans long before the existence of Afro-
Latino studies. Paying attention to this minority of 3 percent among the Cuban
infl ux in the early 1960s allowed Casal to understand the complex relationship
between race and class and gender. She was able to show that the migration of
black Cubans was miniscule because of their largely marginalized position in S
prerevolutionary Cuban society and because they feared racial discrimination N
7
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 77 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
8 : Ruth Behar
in the United States. She was also able to observe how black Cubans initially
identifi ed more strongly as Cubans in Miami but over time came to identify in
terms of race.
Casal was exceptional within her own group, coming from a middle-class
family, and using education as a route to social mobility. Perhaps, I will dare to
say, her own success as a scholar clouded her ability to see how racial discrimi-
nation and prejudice could be insidious. Social mobility might be attained, but
the fear of a black nation and the prejudice toward interracial relationships
could nevertheless continue unabated—even after years of revolution.
But my sense is that Casal was uneasy about her inclusion in the exile
community that was so overwhelmingly white, and she sought to disentangle
herself from the privilege she attained by choosing Cuba over the United States
as her ultimate home, both in life and eventually in death. Home is not simply
where you are born, but also where you are buried—the earth in Cuba took her
back into itself, repatriated her.
Iraida H. López beautifully rounds out our appreciation and understanding
of the work of Lourdes Casal by bringing our attention to the way Casal elabo-
rated a notion of mestizaje—a notion I think would be interesting to compare
and contrast to the idea of the “new mestiza” described by Gloria Anzaldúa in
her iconic work on Mexican borderlands.4
López focuses on Casal’s autobiographic writing, “Memories of a Black
Cuban Childhood,” as well as other texts where she was involved in the process
of self-invention, both recalling and refi guring herself through the use of the
personal voice.
“Too white” for Africa and “too black” for the United States, it is in Cuba
that Casal fi nds she belongs. There, her color is the norm, el color cubano. Casal
drew on her sense of a mestiza identity, though she used the Cuban term mulata
to describe herself, a complex and symbolically loaded term that reaches into
all levels of Cuban culture, fi nding its way into the poetry of N icolás Guillén
and becoming a rum brand as well.5 She embraced the imperfect hybridity of
this sense of identity, confi guring Cuban nationhood as a model of conver-
gence, a Cuba that is for all, in which differences are blended into the famous
ajiaco, a social unity that rises above the distinctions that could pull everyone
apart.
As López notes, for Casal it is at home that mestizaje happens, unfolds,
becomes real, in the cultural conjuncture of her Chinese great-grandfather, an
indentured worker, and her Afro-Cuban great-grandmother, a mulata, and a
descendant of slaves who practices Santería, who has not lost her bond with
Africa. The pictures of the ancestors hang together on the walls, meshing, cre-
ating a space for an intersecting history of exile from China and Africa and
S forced labor in Cuba, a place of suffering that eventually becomes a place of
N belonging.
8
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 88 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
Rereading the Work of Lourdes Casal : 9
This sense of home is defi nitely not unique on the island—the history that
Lourdes Casal recounts is multiplied numerous times, for marriages among
Chinese men and black women were very common, given that white women
didn’t want to marry Chinese men, while black and mulata women were more
willing, not sharing the same prejudice, and hoping for the economic mobility
that the work ethic of “los chinos” promised.
It is out of the intersection of lived oppressions, and overcoming them
through revolutionary change, that Casal envisions an ideal of mestizaje that
might offer liberation and a renewed sense of home on a larger scale, a national
scale. Hers is a hopeful vision of patria—founded on the notion of cultural
mixing and fusion, on tolerance and acceptance, and on a redemptive sense of
history. It was an uneasy kind of belonging, as envisioned by a woman who in
her poetry described herself as remaining a foreigner even when returning to
the city of her birth.
The legacy Lourdes Casal left us is a great one, and I am grateful that the
scholars in this volume, along with others, are reclaiming her work and as-
sessing it with fresh eyes. Lourdes died much too young, unfortunately. She
believed in the Cuban revolution, naively perhaps but with great sincerity, and
she was always brave, calling for reconciliation between Cubans on the island
and in the diaspora when you could get murdered for doing so. Had she been
a man, there’d be a monument in her honor by now, in Havana and Miami. In-
stead, all she has is a plain tombstone in the Colón cemetery. I doubt President
Obama heard of her, and yet she paved the way for the historic opening he
spearheaded. Lourdes Casal was there fi rst. Let’s not forget.
NOTES
1. Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Touchstone, 1980); John Gwaltney,
Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980); José Limón,
Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Politics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).
2. For an illuminating analysis of the relationship between Anna Veltfort and Lourdes Casal,
see Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, “In Search of Lourdes Casal’s
‘Ana Veldford,’” Social Text 25, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 57–84.
3. Ruth Behar, “Prayer to Lourdes,” in Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, 20th anniversary
ed., ed. Ruth Behar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 23.
4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books, 1987).
5. Nicolas Guillén, “Mulata,” fi rst published in his collection Motivos de son (Havana: Ram-
bla, Bouza y Co., 1930). Also see Raúl Rubio, “Materializing Havana and Revolution: Cuban
Material Culture,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 24 (2005): 161–177.
S
N
9
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 99 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM
LAURA LOMAS
On the “Shock” of Diaspora:
Lourdes Casal’s Critical Interdisciplinarity
and Intersectional Feminism
ABSTRACT
The exiled intellectual Lourdes Casal experienced in 1960s and 1970s New York a
“shock” that led her to reconsider her anti-Castro position and to become aware of
her condition as an Afro-descendent, a feminist, and Marxist, especially after returning
from serving on a student delegation to Africa and after traveling to Cuba in 1973. Like
other postcolonial lesbian-of-color feminists publishing in this period, she interrogated
dichotomies and introduced interdisciplinary approaches to her writings about Cuban
culture and society. Casal theorized the crossroads and the borderlands of discursive
categories such as race, gender, sexuality, language, class, age, nationality, and religion
before Kimberlé Crenshaw’s infl uential concept of intersectionality became common-
place in feminist and antiracist cultural studies and calls our attention to the effects of
décalage, a French philosophical term for the temporal and spatial gaps within social
formations. By examining Casal’s writings and their reception, this essay argues that
Casal contributed to the building of interdisciplines such as Cuban studies. A critical,
bilingual, gendered-subaltern diasporic intellectual of color such as Casal has played a
key role in the interpretation of Cuba’s revolutionary culture and considers how Casal
enacts strategies for rebuilding a post–Cold War and postcolonial intellectual dialogue
between the United States and Cuba.
RESUMEN
Lourdes Casal, intelectual cubana exiliada en Estados Unidos, experimentó en la urbe
nuyorquina de los años sesenta y setenta un “shock” que le llevó a declinar su posición
anti-Castrista y a adoptar un criterio de conciencia de afrodescendiente, feminista, y
marxista, especialmente a partir de su vuelta del África y de su visita a Cuba en 1973.
Como otras feministas postcoloniales y lesbianas que comenzaron a publicar en los
años setenta, Casal cuestionaba las dicotomías e introdujo una metodología interdisci-
plinaria en los estudios de la cultura y sociedad cubana. Casal teorizaba la cruzacalle y
el espacio fronterizo entre las categorías discursivas, es decir, entre raza, género sexual,
orientación sexual, idioma, clase, nacionalidad, y eso mucho antes que el concepto
de Kimberlé Crenshaw —la interseccionalidad— se volviera común en los estudios
S feministas y antiracistas. También subraya los efectos de décalage, término fi losófi co
N francés que refi ere a las brechas temporales y espaciales dentro de las formaciones
10
10
PP77223322--CCSS4466__11ssttRREEVV..iinnddbb 1100 22//1122//1188 33::1100::1144 PPMM