Keywords: Cuba, socialism, heritage, museums, narratives
In the much-anticipated Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation, author Pablo Alonso González (2018) combines material culture, cultural heritage, history, and comparative politics in an appealing and sophisticated manner. The ambitious and detailed study examines the development of heritage form and content from 1902 to 2014, analyzing how particular processes and ideologies shaped architecture, monuments, public spaces, museums, national narratives, and the performance of national identity.
The work investigates how Cuban governments, stakeholders, and engaged social actors attempted to harness the power of heritage in post-independence Cuba, and the use of heritage as a vehicle for symbolic and material meaning production. One of the main arguments is that Cuban cultural heritage represents a discourse about the present – through the resignification and use of events of the past as “raw material” for meaning production. An important contribution is the author’s use of “virgin” source material that expands the theoretical and analytical scope of the book. Scholars conducting research in Cuba will appreciate the effort that the breadth of empirical data and archival documentation represents.
The author identifies critical ideological debates in each period, analyzing how Cuban authorities attempted to refine revolutionary principles and harmonize them with the values of influential foreign allies and international collaborators. Two examples from the Revolutionary era are Cuba’s “crypto-colonial” relationship with the USSR and longstanding collaborations with UNESCO. Valuable discussions address the role of Cuban coloniality in the symbolic order of heritagization, and the evolution of Cuban socialism from a comparative perspective.
Republican Heritage
As the author illustrates, a quest for modernization, social fragmentation, and political turbulence characterized Cuba’s Republican period (1902-1959).[i] Cuban governments were not the primary heritage benefactors, and the lack of clear political and ideological strategies hindered a cohesive ideology, state-sponsorship, and effective use of heritage.[ii] Several discussions highlight the contradictions and complexity of this period – and Cuban heritage in general. One example is the ambiguous role of Fernando Ortiz as a public intellectual and representative of a “pan-Hispanic community” (43). His interest in “the past” and preservation was part of a counterbalance to the “modernizing thrust” of the Republican era.[iii] “Cuban intellectuals and especially historians started to function as self-conscious builders of national identity, looking for the national roots in the past,” notes Alonso González (2018:42). Ortiz and new institutions, such as the Society of Cuban Folklore and the Academy of History, contributed to the creation of a new “epic national narrative” based on the War of Independence (43). To expand this trajectory, one could explore how Ortiz and fellow criminologists furthered the era’s “modernizing thrust” through the study of Afro-Cuban religions as criminality and promotion of legislation and practices created to civilize and “de-Africanize” society.[iv]
Revolutionary Heritage
The analysis of heritage after 1959 describes three periods of Cuban socialism and the use of heritage to achieve three objectives: the creation of new socialist symbols, promotion of master-narratives about the nation, and universal public education about Cuban socialism and nationalism.
The examination of the early years of the revolution (1959-1973) analyzes how “the transformation of the old symbolic order to suit the new political needs triggered a process of cultural violence” (74). [v] The government assigned positive and negative values to the colonial and republican periods, attempting to redefine significant aspects and realities of life before and after the Revolution. The reader discovers internal debates and the emergence of a “new early master-narrative for passion” promoting the foundational myth of the birth of the Cuban nation (99).
The analysis of the “institutionalization of the Cuban heritage field” (1973-1990) considers the proliferation of heritage laws and museums, and the implementation of new symbolic orders and narrative practices. The focus is how the growing state heritage infrastructure, the power of the Cuban Communist Party, and new legislation, such as Law 1 of Cultural Heritage Protection (1977) and the Municipal Museums Law (1976), facilitated a shift from symbolism to iconicity. Another trajectory explores the influence of Fernando Ortiz’s notion of “transculturation,” and the evolving symbolic order, particularly the merging of “folklorization” and an imposed “cultural localism” in municipal museums.
Examining the “reification of ideology as heritage and the return of the nation between 1990 and 2014,” the author suggests that the regime “enacted a sea change in its self-representation” through the inclusion and cooption of symbols of non-European traditions and history, such as slavery and Afro-Cuban religions (201). An unresolved question is whether the Cuban authorities inherited its epistemological biases from soviet museography. The lacking epistemological reflexivity could have Cuban origins, for instance equating “culture with alterity and specifically with the oppressed,” as part of an ongoing politics of assimilation in Cuba (200).[vi] Nevertheless, as the author notes, “despite transculturation talk, actual transculturation is neglected and processes of social dynamics are concealed” (2018:201).
Cuban Cultural Heritage is a unique contribution to the Cuban studies and heritage fields. The author addresses many intended and unintended consequences of cultural heritage, for the Cuban state and citizens. The book offers much to discover, debate, and enjoy.
Works Cited:
Alonso González, Pablo. 2016. “Monumental Art and Hidden Transcripts of Resistance in Revolutionary Cuba, 1970–1990.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25(2): 271-296.
Alonso González, Pablo. 2018. Cuban Cultural Heritage. A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary nation. Gainesville, University Press of Florida.
Bronfman, Alejandra. 2004. Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902–1940 (Envisioning Cuba). Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Hamlish, Tamara. 1995. “Preserving the Palace: Museums and the Making of Nationalism(s) in Twentieth-Century China.” Museum Anthropology 19(2): 20.
Hamlish, Tamara. 2000. “Global Culture, Modern Heritage: Re-membering the Chinese Imperial Collection”. In Museums and Memory, edited by Susan A. Crane, 137-158. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kearney, Michael. 1996. Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective. Boulder, Colo, Westview Press.
Ortiz, Fernando. 1973. [1906] Hampa Afro-cubano: Los Negros Brujos. Apuntes para un Estudio de Etnología Criminal. Miami: Ediciones Universales.
Palmié, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sawyer, Mark Q. 2006. Racial Politics in Post-revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, J