iVenceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba

247 Pages·2011·1.778 MB·English

by  Jafari S. Allen

Acknowledgments
my private pleasure (and terror) in this text derives
from the love and effort of collections of individuals
and institutions.
First, no one is able to do ethnography without
people who share. This book would not be possible
without people who opened their hearts and minds
and their homes, meetings, social circles, and favor-
ite haunts. My gratitude goes to those who opened
their mouths to tell their own truths and to those who
opened doors to archives and to new experiences. I
hope this small offering of the faithful reporting of
my truth of this experience will be received with the
respect and love it is offered.
Three roads of Ellegua/Eshu opened the door to
Cuba to me. If you want to do ethnographic research,
go find someone as knowledgeable and generous as
Danny Dawson. Such individuals will introduce you
to their equally generous friends like the eminent
painter and Cubanista Ben Jones, who will then send
you to “the field” with an introduction to someone
who knows everyone and everything (and has a pro-
vocative opinion on it all) such as Tomás Fernández
Robaina, the heretical patron saint of black Cuban
studies.
Thank you to my friends and family who were not
sure that Cuba was really a research site, but listened
and loved anyway: Gera Peoples, Tayari Jones, and James Reynolds (whose
memorable visit to Havana precipitated an international incident), and Sacha
Vington, for his love and encouragement.
Books take a long time to find the bookshelf and your hands. Through
research, moves around the country and around the world, near death and
death, and relationships ending and beginning, real life and academic life
go on—and with as much style as one can decently manage, my thanks to
Paulette Young; to my family, especially Barbara Smith and my sister, Yvonne
Robinson, for her prayers and for the camera equipment that made the pho-
tos possible; to my brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews, for wonder-
ing aloud (and with some irritation) when the book would be finished.
My thanks also go to my circle of writer friends and fellow travelers who
celebrated every completed revision with me and who reminded me that even
academic books must be written: Marvin K. White, Steven G. Fullwood, Matt
Richardson, Martha Ramos Duffer, Sheree Ross and Miramar Dichoso, Ana
Maurine Lara, and Sharon Bridgforth. Thanks also to Davarian Baldwin, Ro-
samond King, Michele Brown, and Bayo Holsey, who witnessed the seeds of
this project. Marc Perry, whose account of this same period of time is forth-
coming, provided crucial friendship in the field, as did Pablo Herrera Vetia,
Ivonne Chapman, Joseph Mutti, Llane Alexis, Sue Herrod, and a number of
folks whom I will not name. My thanks go to Nehanda Abiodun, freedom
fighter, revolutionary mother-sister of Havana and Harlem, and exemplar
of Oshun, to whom this volume is lovingly dedicated; and to Assata Shakur,
whose courage and determination is legendary. These women exemplify Che
Guevara’s contention that “a true revolutionary is motivated by deep feelings
of love.” Those privileged to see and experience this as exemplified in these
women are changed forever.
Enormous thanks go to the members of my dissertation committee: my
chair Sherry B. Ortner along with Steven Gregory, Robin D. G. Kelley, Carole
Vance, and Nadine Fernandez. They are role models of the highest order, and
I earnestly hope that this book honors their work and their time. And to the
mentors and senior scholars who have not yet read a word of this work but
have carved out space in academe for this to live—I sincerely hope that you
see in this book, glimmers of your own work on behalf of new eyes, insurgent
voices, and progressive politics. Thank you.
This work was transformed by the effort and grace of my brilliant Duke
x acknowledgments
University Press anonymous readers, including Martin Manalansan, who
eventually “outed” himself as a reader. My eternal gratitude is yours. Having
René Peña’s Solitario grace this cover is a dream come true. Thank you for the
inspiration. The Perverse Modernities series editors J. Halberstam and Lisa
Lowe, along with Ken Wissoker, deserve every kind word already uttered in
print about their enthusiasm, generosity, and professionalism: thank you.
The African–New World Studies Program at Florida International Uni-
versity gave me a home close to the Caribbean in every way I needed it to be:
thanks to Carole Boyce Davies, Rosa Henriquez, Jean Rahier, Keisha Abra-
ham, Kameelah Benjamin-Fuller, and the visiting scholar Rhoda Reddock.
Thanks also to Nathaniel Belcher who opened his home to me, Jody Benja-
min, and John King—all of whom made my life in Miami sunny.
My love and gratitude also go to Edmund T. (Ted) Gordon and Daisy Garth
Gordon and to Charles R. Hale and Melissa Smith. At the risk of embarrass-
ing Ted in print, I must say, without hyperbole or drama, that this work—
and the work of a growing number of emerging scholars—would not be pos-
sible without his revolutionary love and work on our behalf. Thank you to
my friends and former colleagues at the Department of Anthropology and
the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the
University of Texas, Austin: especially Juliet Hooker, Pamela Haith, Stephanie
Lang, Jennifer Wilks, Jemima Pierre, Shirley Thompson, Stephen Marshall,
Ben Carrington, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, Frank Guridy, Deborah Paredez, Jos-
sianna Arroyo-Martinez, Tiffany M. Gill, Simone A. Browne, Eric Pritchard,
Christen Smith, Kamran Ali, Kamala Visweswaran, and Joni Jones Omi
Osun. And to my brother, whom I would call my collaborator if it would not
implicate him in the errors and foibles of this book: muito obrigado to João
Costa Vargas.
Say it plain: Research (and writing) is also a matter of money. Thank you
to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; the Co-
lumbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Minority Affairs
Office, under the direction of Sharon Gamble; the Rockefeller Foundation’s
Diasporic Racisms Project, and the University of Texas, Austin, Center for
African and African American Studies, both directed by Edmund T. Gordon;
and the Yale University Office of the Provost, which generously supported my
final trips and the Yale Humanities Center’s Frederick W. Hilles Publication
Fund which supported the preparation of the manuscript.
acknowledgments xi
I have drawn inspiration from my new colleagues in the departments of
African American studies and anthropology and the program in lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender studies at Yale University, especially P. Sean Broth-
erton, Kamari Clark, Elizabeth Alexander, George Chauncey, Terri Francis,
Enrique Mayer, Emilie Townes, William Kelly, Robert Stepto, Michele Stepto,
Alondra Nelson, Marcia Inhorn, Glenda Gilmore, Hazel Carby, Inderpal Gre-
wal, Barney Bate, Khalilah Brown-Dean, Michael McGovern, Eric Harms, Jon-
athan Holloway, Gerald Jaynes, Doug Rogers, and Karen Nakamura. Thank
you for your warm welcome and generous spirits.
I have come to the end of this long-but-still-too-abridged list of institutions
and people who have helped to make this book real. As usual, despite all
of the wonderful things these folks have contributed, and despite their high
expectations and sage advice, there are missteps, flaws, and perhaps even fail-
ings here. They are mine alone.
Thank you is of course inadequate to say to my parents, James Herbert
Allen Sr. and the late Geraldine L. Allen. My parents are my first and most
solid foundation of support. Always. Words fail to convey how profoundly I
miss my mother. At the same time, I take inspiration from all that she gave to
me before leaving in the middle of the research process. Mojuba to all of my
ancestors, known and unknown.
Finally, to love and live in partnership with an artist is to recognize that
time spent in thought, music, verse, fabric, or canvas doing your work is not re-
ally time spent away from your lover. I cannot repay the time I borrowed from
my one and only, Phillip Kirk Alexander, to give to this book. Without Phillip,
huge parts of this work, and my own sensibilities, would have perished long
ago under a terrifying mound of grief, drafts, anxieties, drywall, and dishes.
For this, to you: my love and reciprocal care of the beauty you create.
xii acknowledgments
IntroductIon
Invoking “a larger freedom”
¿Venceremos? (Will we overcome?) ¿De verdad? (Really?)
I asked seventy-year-old Señor Leudis Ferrer as we sat
together in a small park just beyond the Plaza de la
Revolución in Havana. From the first moment of con-
tact with Cuba, one is struck by this social ethos—
¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!)—and its stark
contradictions. Free and universally accessible edu-
cation and healthcare, and one of the highest rates
of literacy and lowest incidence of infant mortality in
the Americas, are just a few of the gains of the Cuban
Revolution of 1959. These accomplishments seem
especially glaring against other realities such as the
widespread shortage of medicine and access to tech-
nology, the cultural inequality of women, the margin-
alization of blacks, and prejudice against sexual mi-
norities. Political disillusionment some fifty years after
the triumph of the Revolution is just as formid able
a threat to the promise of a people’s revolution as is
the unilateral blockade of Cuba by the United States.
In practice ¡Venceremos! is less an objective decla-
ration of unqualified victory than a prophetic hope for
the future. And while it is debatable to what degree
Cubans believe in slogans like ¡Venceremos! that pro-
claim the eventual victory of the downtrodden brave
enough to resist, it is clear that this seemingly quix-
otic rhetoric and the political education it represents
has conditioned subjectivities of “entitlement.” Cubans feel that it is their
birthright to enjoy human security (e.g., free healthcare, education, and sub-
sidized food and housing), as well as to express themselves freely as human
beings, even if material realities and political exigencies find them merely
subsisting in spaces of lack and uncertainty. This central contradiction of Cu-
ban life is observable in realms of class, race, gender, and sexuality, and is
the space in which this books enters; to query how and to what extent, in fact,
we will overcome.
While the stories and analyses here—chronicling racial, gender, and sex-
ual hegemonies and (dis)articulations, are resonant with the experiences of
marginalized populations in various places around the globe, what is differ-
ent in Cuba is this dogged assertion: “¡Venceremos! . . . ¡Adelánte, hasta victo-
ria, siempre! [Ever onward until victory].” It is made explicit on buildings, in
newspapers, in theaters, school murals, popular nightclubs, and in the tenac-
ity of Cubans’ everyday practices: “No para sobrevivir, pero prosperar [Not only
to survive, but to prosper],” Ferrer told me. Writing and living in the United
States—post–civil rights, post–Black Power, post–women’s liberation, post–
queer liberation—in this dawning of the “Age of Obama” in which we are met
with “hope” and our own stark contradictions, and find ourselves still reeling
from lost political ground following the center’s precipitous shift rightward, I
am also compelled to have faith. As Señor Ferrer put it, “we must . . . there is
no other solution.” Thus this book, which critically engages seemingly intran-
sigent racial, sexual, and gender apparatuses that frustrate the hope that even
socialist revolution would cure all forms of inequality, is in some ways “a tes-
tament of faith and idealism.” It insists that we must listen to the margins and
look to the interstices of human subjectivity for the realization of the promise
of freedom. In this critical ethnography of changing gender, racial, and sexual
meanings among contemporary black Cuban men and women, I argue that
gendered, raced, and sexed self-making in Cuba is impelled not only by inter-
action with foreigners and global discourses but most pointedly by individual
and group desire for a larger freedom.1 This is made legible and within reach by
the Cuban Revolution of 1959. For my respondents, however, this longing is
also constrained by the Cuban state, which has seen itself as too embattled to
afford “openings” in which its citizens—especially gender-insurgent women,
blacks and “queers”2 who had already been cast as “other”—consume liberally
and improvise new collective subjectivities.
2 introduction