Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

Envisioning Cuba

Louis A. Pérez Jr., editor

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2004 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Eric M. Brooks

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The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M.

Lydia Cabrera and the construction of an Afro-Cuban cultural identity / Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual.

p. cm.—(Envisioning Cuba)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2887-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-5554-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Cabrera, Lydia—Contributions in Cuban ethnology. 2. Cuba—Civilization—African influences. 3. Blacks—Cultural assimilation—Cuba. 4. Blacks—Cuba—Ethnic identity. 5. Blacks—Cuba—Folklore. I. Title. II. Series.

PQ7389.C22Z865 2004

868’.6409—dc22 2004049626

cloth 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

paper 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

For Miriam and Geño

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Point of Departure: Fernando Ortiz and Afro-Cuban Studies

2 A Disarticulation of the Gaze: Exploring Modes of Authority and Representation in the Rhetoric of El monte

3 The Death of the King: Between Anthropology and Fiction

4 The Anthropologist’s Exile: Nation and Simulacrum

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Lydia Cabrera in the 1980s 6

Lydia Cabrera in La Quinta San José, ca. 1944 9

Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, María Herrera de Ortiz, and María Teresa Rojas in Vienna, 1952 63

Lydia Cabrera with an informant at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s 96

Lydia Cabrera with informants at the Central Cuba, Matanzas, Cuba, 1940s 105

Acknowledgments

When the credits roll at the end of a film, if one has the patience to sit still and read all the names that made the production possible, one can then understand the collective work, effort, and energy that go into such a production. A book is not a film, yet many start with a grateful author listing a series of names that made it possible for her words to make it into print. This work is no different. I am completely indebted to a community of people who have offered me, and this project, their best talents. So the credits roll.

The idea for this book emerged a long time ago and far away from Cuba and the Caribbean, during the dark winter days of Glasgow. That year I had the opportunity to read with pleasure—and no deadlines—the short stories of Lydia Cabrera, as well as a lot of postcolonial theory and cultural studies. I was able to chat freely about my ideas with many friends, including Dr. Simon Halliday. I want to thank him for the long hours of conversations on post-colonialism and globalization.

After I came back from Scotland, I received much support from my colleagues and professors at Emory University, where this book incubated as a dissertation. I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee for the good remarks that I was able to incorporate here. I am especially grateful to my adviser, Carlos J. Alonso, for his insights, criticisms, comments, and suggestions. Just when I would think I had everything figured out, everything done, he would open another Pandora’s box that would take me back to my desk. He is still there when I need him. I will always be indebted to him. At the beginning, this project was also deepened as a result of my conversations with Marzena Grzegorczyk, for which I thank her.

The Internationalization Dissertation Research Grant at Emory University provided the initial research support that took me to Cuba for the first time, a dream I had always held deeply. I was not aware of what this trip might reveal. The pains and difficulties are still in my memory. However, I would never have understood Cabrera without getting to know the culture about which she wrote, without smelling the sweat, and sweating myself, to the rhythm of the drums during a Toque de tambor. And, as someone once wrote, Cuba is addictive. I have been there many times since then, and every time I find it harder to leave. I want to express my gratitude to all the people in the island who helped my research by feeding me, guiding me, lending me books, and serving as informants. But among all the good people I encountered, I particularly want to thank Doña Henrietta Price at the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, for her advice and connections; Lisia Prieto at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, who led the way into the never-ending bibliography; and, more recently, Marcelo Fajardo, for taking me everywhere, even into a camello bus ride. I also thank Natalia Bolívar for taking time out of her busy schedule to see me. Thanks to Santero Eugenio Colás Ramos for all the information and to José Millet for standing next to me when I didn’t understand what was going on.

My dear colleague and friend Justin Crumbaugh is responsible for the translation of the Spanish draft of my dissertation into the English version that I then reviewed and turned into this manuscript. His prose became part of my prose. I simply cannot express how much I owe him.

Friends and colleagues who read different versions of the manuscript at different stages provided me many key insights; they have helped me develop a better work. I especially thank Darren Middle-ton, Bonnie Frederick, Betsy Flowers, Lee Daniels, and S. Brent Plate. Néstor and Sylvia Figueroa have always been there for me, as have other now long-distance friends. Special friends who inspired me to keep going and shared so many cups of coffee when I needed it include Luis Vivanco and Peggy O’Neill, Caroline Beer and Mike Ballard, Chas Gay, Julie Sexeny, Alberto Egea, Victoria Pericot, Anna Martín, and Héctor Sáez.

This book was four years in the making, and life does not stop; many things have happened. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Vermont and, more recently, to those at Texas Christian University for their generosity and encouragement. Texas Christian University also supported this project by making me the recipient of the Research and Creative Activities Grant, which allowed for another important trip to Havana.

Thank you to Elaine Maisner, my editor, for her hard work and support for this project, as well as to Louis A. Pérez. Production staff members at the University of North Carolina Press have been enormously helpful. My appreciation also goes to my friend Tracy Brandenburg for helping me acquire the images for the book, and to María Estorino at the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.

The section Hybridity as a Textual Space in Chapter 4 is a much-revised version of the short essay that appeared as "Sueño y deseo de una nación en Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba, de Lydia Cabrera," La Habana Elegante, Fall 1999.

I am the kind of person who leaves her favorite bite of food for the end in order to keep the best taste and sensation lasting longer. This book is dedicated to my parents, Miriam Mangual Matos and Eugenio Rodríguez Suárez, two extraordinary human beings who have taught me important lessons hard to find in books. I am very fortunate to have them in my life. My family—all of them, including my uncle Damián and Naomi—is an important and constant presence; family members all took care of me at many levels when I thought I was not going to make it. My siblings, Carlos and Wanda, have been a source of inspiration and motivation; I look forward to growing older with them. Finally, I want to let my life-companion, S. Brent Plate, know in print that he means the world to me. His daily hug is what keeps me grounded. Brent, thank you for holding my hand when I got scared and for being the editor of my life.

Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity

Introduction

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Lisandra Otero quite rightly states, Cuba is a small country destined to play a role out of proportion for its size (Fornet 18). The Cuban Revolution of 1959 not only radically affected the culture and politics of the island but also affected international politics. The Revolution converted the small island into a real foe of the ideological apparatus of North American capitalism, altering U.S. policy for many years, while Cuba became a paradigm for leftist political groups in Latin America. It also became a utopian model for the leftist intelligentsia in academia throughout Europe and the Americas. Today, Cuba is still situated in an international arena, especially now that the borders are once again open to tourism and global capital investments. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of socialism is still alive, and few Cubans, even if they want to see the end of Castro’s reign, wish to embrace free market capitalism. And while the popular consciousness of North America and Europe still imagines Cuba as a land of cigars, nightclubs, and 1950s Fords, other more critical and imaginative studies have strategically defined Cuba and contributed to the multiple perspectives that create a plural national identity. In this book I explore the possibilities and contradictions of some of these multiple ways of imagining Cuba.

This book is about the diverse writings of the Cuban intellectual Lydia Cabrera (1900–1991), whose body of work spans the decades before and after the Revolution. In a unique way, Cabrera struggled to redefine the identity of the otherwise marginalized Afro-Cubans and to reinsert their story into the broader understanding of Cuban identity. In so doing, she also rewrote the narration of the nation.

My investigation begins with basic questions about how discourses of power intertwine with discourses of individual and national identity. Such questions take on a striking resonance in the context of contemporary Cuba, where a mixture of ethnic identities meets a mixture of political identities. In relation to modern and contemporary Cuba we might ask: How can Cuban national identity be defined after four decades of the Revolution and a massive emigration that has divided the nation? How was that identity defined before the Revolution and by whom? Who wrote, and who is presently writing, the culture?

Social scientific approaches to Cuban cultural and national identity since the late nineteenth century have predominantly understood white Creoles to constitute Cuban identity. Within this framework, Afro-Cubans have been studied, but only from the presupposition that they are other to the social-symbolic order maintained by white Creoles. Yet, to talk about cubanía—Cuban culture and identity, or Cubanness—one must remain open to the ethnic complexities and pluralities that exist on the island. Ethnically speaking, Cuba is made up of Europeans, Africans, indigenous peoples, Asians, and others, who have lived together and mixed together to varying degrees. Cuban culture, as many writers have noted, is a deeply hybridized one. However, the ethnic-cultural complexities of Cuba have not been manifested in the rhetorical writings of many intellectuals presuming to take an objective view of culture in Cuba. Simplistic renderings of white and black are not adequate to Cuban cultural analysis. But then again, how is the story of someone else told without appropriating them into their own framework? How does one do ethnography when the tools of ethnography are created by and for a particular ethnic group?

Framing Cabrera’s Journey

These cultural complexities underlie my investigation into the works of Lydia Cabrera. She was a creative writer who sought to retell the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, thereby questioning the empirical truth of anthropology. Yet, she also wrote ethnographies, and her fiction is supposedly based on the oral stories she heard from Afro-Cubans. I particularly focus on the blurry line she invokes between fact and fiction, between anthropology and literature. This volume probes the reasons why her books are considered to be the bible of Afro-Cuban folklore and religion. In the end, I argue that her writings offer an alternative discourse to the standard, homogenous interpretations of Cuban identity.

My personal interest in Cabrera’s work began the first time I saw a photograph of her and discovered with surprise that this woman was white. Until then, I had read only a few stories from Cuentos negros de Cuba, and in my ignorance I thought they were written by a black Afro-Cuban author. There was something in her style and subject matter that had me convinced she could not be a detached observer outside the Afro-Cuban culture about which she was writing. Instead, I perceived her as an insider. Thus, my interest was piqued when I saw that she was white.

Everyone who studies Latin American or Caribbean literature will come upon Cabrera’s name, and yet she is often overlooked by critics. As Ada Ortúzar-Young proposes, most of the studies about Cabrera center on her first three collections of short stories, but there is a need for a thorough analysis of the rest of her work, a need for a revisionist approach that perhaps would take into account issues of race, class, and gender (114).¹

I remember studying one of her short stories in a Caribbean literature class while I was still an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, but we did not discuss the fact that she was white; we did not discuss problems of racial representation; we never looked at the biography of this author; we did not talk about her sexuality; we did not do a close reading of the story. The discussion focused only on decoding what the story was saying, as if it were written in a foreign language that one must translate. Now I realize I did not understand anything about what Cabrera was doing with her writing, and probably none of my peers did either.

As if echoing Cabrera’s reinvention of Cuban identity, my attempt to say something about her life is bestowing on her an almost invented identity. For such an invention, we might begin with her birth date. According to Cabrera herself, she was born on May 20, 1900, in Havana. Her passport and other official documents, however, state that she was born in 1899. Other sources affirm that New York was the place of birth, not Havana (for example, the Diccionario de Literatura Cubana, published in Cuba, indicates that she was born in New York). In other words, there are several different versions of who Lydia Cabrera was, some real, some imagined, but all the versions are bound up with how identities are created through stories.

Lydia Cabrera in the 1980s.

Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.

She had died (in 1991) by the time I started studying her work, so like any such enterprise of knowledge pursued through archives, one must put pieces together and arrive at one’s own conclusions. When people ask me about her I always reply that she was a Cuban writer who was born in 1900. I think Cabrera would have been satisfied with this quick and concentrated response to her identity, although if the interested party wants to hear more about her, I then go into the details of her disputed birth year and place of origin, her interesting journey through life, and her most argued sexuality.

Lydia Cabrera was the youngest child of eight siblings. Her mother, Elisa Marcaida Casanova, was the typical señora of the times for a family of social and economic prestige. Her father, Raimundo Cabrera Bosch, was the owner and editor of the Cuban journal Cuba y América and was involved in politics—he fought for Cuba’s independence from Spain. He was a lawyer, jurist, writer, and president and member of La sociedad económica de amigos del país, the first Cuban corporation founded in the eighteenth century. Cuba y sus jueces, published in 1887, was among his best-known books, and he became a very important figure in Cuban society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lydia Cabrera undoubtedly benefited from her father’s status. Cabrera was the anonymous author of the column Nena en sociedad, first published in her father’s newspaper in 1913, when Cabrera was only thirteen years old (using the 1900 birth date). The column appeared for three years and was dedicated to announcements of such usual social information as births, marriages, dances, and deaths. Even in these first writings Cabrera shows a taste for satiric comments and political complaints about the current government (Castellanos 19–21).

Like any good señorita of that time, Lydia Cabrera’s education was mainly provided by private tutors in her home. She did, however, attend the prestigious private school of María Luisa Dolz, but only for a short period of time. She ultimately completed her secondary school studies on her own, since it was not customary at the time for women to pursue a high school diploma. Interested in painting, Cabrera studied for a few months in the San Alejandro Art Academy without the consent of her father. She exhibited her paintings in 1922 and received good critical reviews. Despite the positive press, however, she did not become a professional painter as everyone expected.

Cabrera wanted to have money of her own and saved to go to Paris. To earn money, between 1922 and 1927, the year she left for Europe, she ran an antique store called Casa Alyds and was an avid advocate for the preservation of local antique furniture in Cuba. Quinta San José, where she lived with her lifelong companion, María Teresa Rojas, from the beginning of the 1940s until 1960, is a good example of her passion for antiques: both women worked to restore this eighteenth-century mansion to its original colonial appearance, filling it with national treasures of antique furniture, art, and crafts of historical value. This house-museum was dismantled by the Cuban government when Cabrera left the country after the Revolution of 1959.

In 1927, Cabrera went to Paris, lived in Montmartre, studied oriental art at L’Ecole du Louvre, and attended courses at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts. There, she reestablished her friendship with the Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra, whom she had met in Havana a few years earlier. To entertain de la Parra while she was ill with tuberculosis in Leysin, Switzerland, Cabrera began writing the stories that would become Cuentos negros de Cuba. De la Parra died on April 4, 1936, a month after the first publication of Cuentos negros. As the story goes, Francis de Miomandre read and enjoyed the stories written by Cabrera, translated them, and gave them to Paul Morand from Gallimard Press, who published the book in French (Contes negres de Cuba) in March 1936. The Spanish version was not published until 1940.

Cabrera had been interested in Afro-Cuban culture since she was young. As an upper-class child her first contact with the Afro-Cuban world was very personal: her black nanny, Tata Tula, and the seamstress Teresa (Omí Tomí) sparked her interest. Through newspaper archives we know that in 1923 Cabrera attended the inauguration of the Sociedad