Beyond Cuban Waters: Africa, La Yuma, and the Island's Global Imagination - Hardcover

Ryer, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826521185 ISBN 13: 9780826521187

Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Twenty-first-century Cuba is a cultural stew. Tommy Hilfiger and socialism. Nike products and poverty in Africa. The New York Yankees and the meaning of "blackness." The quest for American consumer goods and the struggle in Africa for political and cultural independence inform the daily life of Cubans at every cultural level, as anthropologist Paul Ryer argues in Beyond Cuban Waters. Focusing on the everyday world of ordinary Cubans, this book examines Cuban understandings of the world and of Cuba's place in it, especially as illuminated by two contrasting notions: "La Yuma," a distinctly Cuban concept of the American experience, and "África," the ideological understanding of that continent's experience. Ryer takes us into the homes of Cuban families, out to the streets and nightlife of bustling cities, and on boat journeys that reach beyond the typical destinations, all to better understand the nature of the cultural life of a nation.

This pursuit of Western status symbols represents a uniquely Cuban experience, set apart from other cultures pursuing the same things. In the Cuban case, this represents neither an acceptance nor rejection of the American cultural influence, but rather a co-opting or "Yumanizing" of these influences.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Ryer is Director of Scholar Programs at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Beyond Cuban Waters

África, La Yuma, and the Island's Global Imagination

By Paul Ryer

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2018 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-2118-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction: An Antillean Archipelago, 1, 
1. The Rise and Decline of La Yuma, 25, 
2. África in Revolutionary Cuba, 57, 
3. Color, Mestizaje, and Belonging in Cuba, 89, 
4. Beyond a Boundary, 123, 
Conclusion: Geographies of Imagination, 157, 
Notes, 163, 
References, 189, 
Index, 219, 

CHAPTER 1

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF LA YUMA

The Caribbean story as I read it is less an invitation to search for modernity in various times and places — a useful yet secondary enterprise — than an exhortation to change the terms of the debate. What needs to be analyzed further, better, and differently is the relation between the geography of management and the geography of imagination that together underpinned the development of world capitalism and the legitimacy of the West as the universal unmarked.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World

Beginning with a seemingly simple popular term, La Yuma, this chapter interrogates one Cuban vernacular space of privileged foreignness. This chapter's focus on Cuban commonsense ideas about the boundaries between Cuba and the unmarked, whiter, richer foreignness of Europe and North America and the once and future place occupied by the Soviet Union's "lo bolo" along with the following chapter's exploration of África as another imagined space that marks a different shore of cubanidad, I propose, are part of a worldwide Cuban geography of the imagination. In this imagined geography, the foreign is largely stripped of the impurities of home, and the Cuban:foreign boundary does indeed effectively constitute a new form of racial distinction (Roland 2011). Relying less on interviews than on observations and more on bodily style than on verbal ideologies, here I work through the lens of Western material goods and symbols that connote capitalism. The value of the commodities and the meaning of the metaphor have changed rapidly over the past two decades, and I argue that these changes index Cuba's painful reintegration into a not-new world economic order, specifically as symbols of a new remittance economy. However, even the humblest product — a pair of socks, a "Tommy" T-shirt — may be locally sought out in ways unanticipated from an outside perspective. Only after foregrounding such agentive desires of ordinary Cubans do I move to consider micropractices and macrostructures of the contemporary socioeconomic context. For despite the encroaching US dollar, Cuba's economy retains elements of a centralized command structure and is hardly "postsocialist." While also evident in events such as the state's distinctive civil defense against hurricanes, contemporary Cuban state socialist particularity is best illustrated, I argue, through an ethnographic examination of the parallel economy, which is officially invisible yet omnipresent in daily life. Although, rather than negating Cuba's Caribbean context or history, this examination will also, in fact, begin to suggest answers to many of the questions posed at the beginning of this book. If this balancing act seems unconventional, it is nevertheless a deliberate attempt to avoid the twin perils of pathologizing and pitying. Celebrating the ways Cubans pursue, appropriate, and reinterpret the goods and symbols of La Yuma does not deny the staggering inequalities of global capitalism or the severe experience of scarcity in fin de siècle Cuba, but it does localize the global and presents Cubans as subjects, rather than objects, of desire.

The Rise of La Yuma

In Havana, two possible origins for the vernacular Cuban term La Yuma are commonly proposed by those interested in the topic. Often, it is believed to derive from a 1957 American Western, 3:10 to Yuma, and thus to refer literally to Yuma, Arizona — infamous in the United States, ironically, for its prison. The film, based on an eponymous Elmore Leonard short story and directed by Delmer Daves, starring Van Heflin, Glenn Ford, Felicia Farr, and Richard Joeskel, recounts the struggle of a stubborn farmer with a captured but still powerful robber baron as they both wait for a train that will deliver them to the US legal system. It apparently was extensively screened and widely popular in Cuba just before an era dominated by a genre of Soviet war movies, which seem to have been considerably less popular as entertainment. In such a context, this theory suggests, 3:10 to Yuma had enough recognition, or captured enough of the Cuban imagination, to come to denote the United States (Daves [1957] 1993; also see Dopico 2004; Roland 2011, 65).

Another widely and often concurrently cited theory proposes that Yuma is simply derived from a mispronunciation of "US man" or of "United States." Common Cuban linguistic patterns, such as an elided "s" would seem to support this thesis. In either case, it is clear that as a spatial term, La Yuma's primary and original referent is the United States. In this context it is a singular feminine noun. It can also refer to a person or people from La Yuma:2 I was el yuma or un yuma; a North American woman could be una or la yuma; and a group (or the total nation of people) would be los yumas. Clearly, the meanings ascribed to the term have a historical trajectory: it seems to have become increasingly popular, first with increased US-Cuba contact during the "blue-jean revolution" of the Carter administration (1978–79) and then especially in the Special Period following the end of the Soviet era. Since the millennium and the post-Chavista special relationship with Venezuela and ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) and the related stabilization of the now hybrid, dual-currency state socialist system, the term has declined in popularity and changed in tone. As I will argue below, it is probably no coincidence that the term was most prevalent during the period that Western goods first became widely (if unevenly) available, disrupting the previous uniformity of material culture under socialism, which Nadine Fernandez (1996, 44) succinctly described just before the 1993 legalization of the US dollar: "Every store has the same items, just as in every Cuban household you can find the same model of T.V., the same dishes, the same pots, the same glasses, the same sheets, the same knickknacks, and the same plastic flowers" (also see Veenis 1999, 91; Patico and Caldwell 2002, 285; Sunderland and Denny 2007; A. Porter 2008; Weinreb 2009; Pertierra 2011).

In any case, depending on context and intonation, the designation of a person as a yumamay be factual, envious, or critical — perhaps because it bespeaks more familiarity than conventional or official terms such as Americano or estadounidense. Although not vulgar per se, and despite frequent intellectual analysis of its charter, the term has been distinctly more common on the street (and especially among men) than in the academy, and my self-referential use of the term was most warmly received in non-intellectual circles. Finally, while ostensibly apolitical, in its heyday in the 1990s it would have been very surprising to hear the term La Yuma used by a Party official or in the state media — which referred instead to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826521185
• ISBN 13: 9780826521187
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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