Of Slashes and Hyphens
Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island
Verso, 256pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781784781217
reviewed by Dunja Fehimović
Rachel Price's Planet/Cuba is a timely, insightful and innovative study of contemporary Cuban culture. Nevertheless, the eye-catching cover and strikingly stark title of this significant text turn out to be its first stumbling blocks, establishing unfair and false expectations regarding the kind of relationship between Cuba and the world that it develops and that constitutes one of its most innovative proposals. The slash that separates the two nouns, also known by the telling technical name of solidus, implies division or opposition. It evokes the popular image of Cuba as an island out of time, a rotting relic or pre-capitalist paradise, depending on one's ideological inclination. Implying such an 'either/or' dynamic in relation to Cuba evokes the Cold War logic that still survives in many media outlets, exile communities, lobbying groups or activist associations. But this Manicheanism has long been on the wane, increasingly eclipsed or at the very least tempered by the logic of the hyphen.
The increasing visibility and popular adoption – particularly in the US – of the hyphenated identity, whereby one is never simply American but rather always Irish-American, African-American, Italian-American, for example, has been echoed and developed in the works of prominent scholars of Cuban origin such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, 1994). Others have explored the added complexity of the 'Jewban' (Jewish-Cuban) experience of exile in Miami (Caroline Bettinger-López) or the lives of 'Chino Latinos' (Cuban-Chinese) in New York City (Lok Chun Debra Siu), to name just two examples. Whilst such studies – often originating in autobiographical work – have helped to productively split apart monolithic, restrictive notions of identity in order to pay attention to lived differences, experiences and practices, the fragmentation they both express and enact also threatened to reinsert the solidus, gesturing towards the incommensurability of individuals and their experiences. On the other hand, the positive repercussions of this splintering of notions of a single 'norm' are also evident in Cuba, in examples such as the work of CENESEX (Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual – National Centre for Sexual Education) to promote sexual diversity and combat discrimination (though much remains to be done here and on other fronts, where different ‘pluralities,’ not least political, are not quite so welcomed).
To the late 20th-century and early 21st-century logic of the hyphen, we might add the particular permutations that have taken place since the announcement, on 17 December 2014, of the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US. The Cold War solidus that slashed Cuba's relations with the US was decisive in defining its interactions with the wider world, whether that meant collaboration and alliance with the Soviet Union or a crippling 55-year embargo – not yet lifted – that also effectively restricted the island's relations with US allies. If it ever adequately expressed the complexities of identity, the simple hyphen certainly cannot do justice to the new reality that is taking shape in the wake of the so-called ‘Change.’ The frenzied exchanges of goods, people, information, images and capital that are now occurring between Cuba and the US (and, via the US, much of the rest of the world) are difficult to capture, not only in terms of their sheer volume and multifaceted nature but also, and perhaps above all, in the unevenness and asymmetry of their flows. Inequalities that resurfaced during and since Cuba's Special Period (a wide-ranging economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc) are being reconfigured and reinforced as tourism booms, emigration spikes, foreign investment proliferates and new op-ed pieces are written every day, new TV documentaries (Conan O'Brien's special on TBS and the Discovery Channel series 'Cuban Chrome' stand out) and fiction films made and circulated every week.
Whilst connection rather than separation is clearly the order of the day (see the Cuban 'wifi song' for a humorous take on the internet obsession taking over since the establishment of certain Wi-Fi spots, especially in Havana), it is equally evident that connection is far from seamless, that Cuba still represents something different, a 'new' territory that bears witness to the idiosyncratic, restricted forms of its interaction with the wider world over the last half a century. In this sense, there is a possibility for a more generous interpretation of Price's slash: like all borders, this line that separates 'in a certain way' can also be perceived as a point of contact. In this sense, it might begin to undermine its own designation as solidus with implications of porosity and commonality. With this in mind, Price's choice of title for the introduction to this volume – 'A Treasure Map for the Present' – is particularly revelatory. Many companies, lobbyists and individual investors are circling a Cuba whose borders are being rendered more porous than ever; with events such as 'Rethinking Cuba: New opportunities for development' (organised in June 2015 by the Brookings Institution) proliferating, there is a premium on 'insider information' on how to invest in (and profit from) Cuba. At the same time, many existing and nascent cuentapropistas (self-employed Cubans, who have proliferated since the controversial legalisation and subsequent spread of certain kinds of private enterprise since the 1990s) and government agencies are looking for new opportunities in a shifting economic landscape. For those on both sides of the Florida Straits, a treasure map is precisely what is needed now.
A map – albeit of the cognitive kind – is also what the author herself aims to trace in Planet/Cuba. The book sets out to rethink the relationship between Cuba and the rest of the world in terms of three interrelated themes: climate change and the environment; global capitalism; and pervasive systems of surveillance. None of these phenomena respect borders or boundaries, none obey the solidity of the slash, the definitive implications of the 'either/or' or the defensive possibilities of separation. Although Price begins by acknowledging that in the run-up to 'The Announcement' of December 2014, no-one – not least the author – suspected change to come so soon or so suddenly, the moment of publication makes inevitable the weight of readerly expectation to respond to the most recent developments. Contrary to the implications of her title, Price makes a point of acknowledging that rather than being frozen and separate, 'Cuba has always been changing,’ thereby rejecting from the start the dangerous tendency to musealise (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s coinage) the island. Indeed, continuity is evident in the way in which her analyses – initially written before December 2014 – still speak to the present moment, unstable and uncertain as it may be. However, perhaps precisely because of the uniquely definitive nature and portentous implications of the current period, one cannot but feel, throughout the book, that connection, continuity and contact are not pushed far enough, that the pervasiveness and inescapability of economic and environmental crises and threats are not adequately accounted for. Whilst Price's real contribution stems from her insistence on the way in which '[t]he everyday, the planetary, and the digital increasingly replace national, regional, and analog narratives and counter-narratives,’ the methodological implications of this are not quite assumed and its wider resonances remain insufficiently explored.
This problem of speaking to specificity whilst analysing that which is explicitly posited as planetary (particularly in the case of environmental issues) or global (perhaps more in relation to the economic and political) is one that is increasingly inescapable, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unfortunately, however, it is also one that makes itself particularly felt, even establishing itself as a central thematic, in a text that calls itself Planet/Cuba. Parallels between the Cuban works on which the author focuses and similar concerns and practices elsewhere are periodically highlighted, but their underdevelopment leaves productive avenues and compelling connections unexamined. The title of Price's introduction refers to one of the texts in the study – Jorge Enrique Lage's novel La Autopista: The Movie (The Highway: The Movie, 2014) – specifically, to its meditation on the highway as metaphor for late capitalism, a kind of 'treasure map, where the treasure moves all around, or where it remains unclear at the end what the treasure is.’ If the treasure does move all around, including into and through Cuba, I can't help but feel that its traces are not tracked for long enough in this text. And if the book is concerned, as Price claims, with objects and phenomena 'both typical of global trends, and singular,’ then it is perhaps the global that is underplayed throughout.
On the other hand, as Price points out, in the wake of the Special Period and particularly since Raúl Castro's assumption of the presidency in 2008, there has been an acute emphasis on the national, as the internationalist ideology of the 1960s and 1970s has been increasingly replaced by a concern with solving problems at home. For many artists, this has translated into a turn to the 'hyper-local' as a sphere of action that offers the added opportunity for evasion of official nationalist rhetoric. By paying attention to these local interventions, Price at times attends admirably to the specificities of historical, political and geographical context. This works well in chapters such as ‘Marabusales,’ which explores the symbolic significance of 'marabú' (marabou), a non-native and aggressively invasive plant that has taken hold of up to 70% of Cuba's agricultural land. With such a specific object and situation laid out for the reader, Price traces marabou's thorny roots through three examples – Samuel Riera, Lisbet Flores and Jacinto Muñiz's conceptual art project Marabusal (Marabou Bush), José Ramón Sánchez's poetry collection Marabú (2012), and Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno's installation Modelo de expansión: marabú (Model of expansion: Marabou, 2013). Reflecting on the multivalency of this plant as a figure for state failure, abandonment, migration, climatic change, Chaos, postcoloniality, postmodernity and globalisation, Price makes a convincing argument about the increased interest in environmental thematics and rhizomatic forms in contemporary Cuban cultural production.
This chapter, however, is followed by 'Havana Under Water,’ in which an engaging discussion of works that deal with or touch on Cuba's attitudes to its island status and the surrounding sea nevertheless feels stunted as a result of underdeveloped contextualisation. Whilst the analyses of installations, paintings, photography and literature are extremely evocative, the cultural history of Cuba's relationship with the sea, not to mention the national trauma of events such as Mariel (the exodus of tens of thousands of Cubans by raft in 1980) (as well as the international resonances of other water-bound migrations, both recent and historic) is strikingly absent. Whilst Price acknowledges, 'of course,’ that 'the omnipresence of water in Cuba's cultural imagination is nothing new,’ citing the most famous example of Virgilio Piñera's 1943 poem 'La isla en peso,’ the lack of detailed information regarding such historical precedents not only forecloses an interesting exploration of comparison, continuity and change, but also raises the question of intended readership.
In the book’s delightfully titled first chapter, 'We are Tired of Rhizomes,’ Price establishes the importance of ecological debates regarding the forest versus the plantation to Cuba's historical development, and the text as a whole contains references to the decline of the sugar industry and its effects that seem to be intended for the less specialised reader. Nonetheless, other elements of background knowledge of Cuban history and culture are implicitly assumed, with the most influential analyses of the role of sugar in Cuba's history – from Fernando Ortiz's Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar, 1940) to Antonio Benítez Rojo's Deleuzian-inflected analysis of the Plantation in La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island, 1989) conspicuous in their absence. Despite appearances, this criticism is not intended as an exercise of academic pedantry; rather, such incomplete or latent connections between past and present undermine the text's attention to the specificity of the Cuban case and hinder its central argument regarding what exactly is new, global or planetary about the artistic and cultural phenomena it discusses.
It is difficult to know how the author could have satisfied the desire for more detail and specificity on one hand and further developed the global and interconnected aspects of her study on the other at the same time. Despite these criticisms, there can be no doubt of the thought-provoking, innovative and influential nature of this text. One of its principal merits lies in the way in which Price takes the 'contemporary weariness with Cuban exceptionalism' as evidenced in recent cultural productions such as Cuba's first zombie film, Alejandro Brugués's Juan de los Muertos (2011) as well as in academic studies of Cuba and Cubans ('at home' and abroad), in a productive direction. By indicating how the planetary – whether it take ecological, economic or political form – can be a source of both anxiety and creativity, Planet/Cuba breaks with the national frame that has dominated studies of the island until now whilst also resisting the temptation to see it as a passive receptor, a barren shore beaten mercilessly by waves of global change. Whatever the future of the island, Planet/Cuba stands as a rich, fascinating testament to the resilience, creativity and foresight of its artists, writers and cultural producers at a very particular and significant point in time.
The increasing visibility and popular adoption – particularly in the US – of the hyphenated identity, whereby one is never simply American but rather always Irish-American, African-American, Italian-American, for example, has been echoed and developed in the works of prominent scholars of Cuban origin such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, 1994). Others have explored the added complexity of the 'Jewban' (Jewish-Cuban) experience of exile in Miami (Caroline Bettinger-López) or the lives of 'Chino Latinos' (Cuban-Chinese) in New York City (Lok Chun Debra Siu), to name just two examples. Whilst such studies – often originating in autobiographical work – have helped to productively split apart monolithic, restrictive notions of identity in order to pay attention to lived differences, experiences and practices, the fragmentation they both express and enact also threatened to reinsert the solidus, gesturing towards the incommensurability of individuals and their experiences. On the other hand, the positive repercussions of this splintering of notions of a single 'norm' are also evident in Cuba, in examples such as the work of CENESEX (Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual – National Centre for Sexual Education) to promote sexual diversity and combat discrimination (though much remains to be done here and on other fronts, where different ‘pluralities,’ not least political, are not quite so welcomed).
To the late 20th-century and early 21st-century logic of the hyphen, we might add the particular permutations that have taken place since the announcement, on 17 December 2014, of the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US. The Cold War solidus that slashed Cuba's relations with the US was decisive in defining its interactions with the wider world, whether that meant collaboration and alliance with the Soviet Union or a crippling 55-year embargo – not yet lifted – that also effectively restricted the island's relations with US allies. If it ever adequately expressed the complexities of identity, the simple hyphen certainly cannot do justice to the new reality that is taking shape in the wake of the so-called ‘Change.’ The frenzied exchanges of goods, people, information, images and capital that are now occurring between Cuba and the US (and, via the US, much of the rest of the world) are difficult to capture, not only in terms of their sheer volume and multifaceted nature but also, and perhaps above all, in the unevenness and asymmetry of their flows. Inequalities that resurfaced during and since Cuba's Special Period (a wide-ranging economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc) are being reconfigured and reinforced as tourism booms, emigration spikes, foreign investment proliferates and new op-ed pieces are written every day, new TV documentaries (Conan O'Brien's special on TBS and the Discovery Channel series 'Cuban Chrome' stand out) and fiction films made and circulated every week.
Whilst connection rather than separation is clearly the order of the day (see the Cuban 'wifi song' for a humorous take on the internet obsession taking over since the establishment of certain Wi-Fi spots, especially in Havana), it is equally evident that connection is far from seamless, that Cuba still represents something different, a 'new' territory that bears witness to the idiosyncratic, restricted forms of its interaction with the wider world over the last half a century. In this sense, there is a possibility for a more generous interpretation of Price's slash: like all borders, this line that separates 'in a certain way' can also be perceived as a point of contact. In this sense, it might begin to undermine its own designation as solidus with implications of porosity and commonality. With this in mind, Price's choice of title for the introduction to this volume – 'A Treasure Map for the Present' – is particularly revelatory. Many companies, lobbyists and individual investors are circling a Cuba whose borders are being rendered more porous than ever; with events such as 'Rethinking Cuba: New opportunities for development' (organised in June 2015 by the Brookings Institution) proliferating, there is a premium on 'insider information' on how to invest in (and profit from) Cuba. At the same time, many existing and nascent cuentapropistas (self-employed Cubans, who have proliferated since the controversial legalisation and subsequent spread of certain kinds of private enterprise since the 1990s) and government agencies are looking for new opportunities in a shifting economic landscape. For those on both sides of the Florida Straits, a treasure map is precisely what is needed now.
A map – albeit of the cognitive kind – is also what the author herself aims to trace in Planet/Cuba. The book sets out to rethink the relationship between Cuba and the rest of the world in terms of three interrelated themes: climate change and the environment; global capitalism; and pervasive systems of surveillance. None of these phenomena respect borders or boundaries, none obey the solidity of the slash, the definitive implications of the 'either/or' or the defensive possibilities of separation. Although Price begins by acknowledging that in the run-up to 'The Announcement' of December 2014, no-one – not least the author – suspected change to come so soon or so suddenly, the moment of publication makes inevitable the weight of readerly expectation to respond to the most recent developments. Contrary to the implications of her title, Price makes a point of acknowledging that rather than being frozen and separate, 'Cuba has always been changing,’ thereby rejecting from the start the dangerous tendency to musealise (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s coinage) the island. Indeed, continuity is evident in the way in which her analyses – initially written before December 2014 – still speak to the present moment, unstable and uncertain as it may be. However, perhaps precisely because of the uniquely definitive nature and portentous implications of the current period, one cannot but feel, throughout the book, that connection, continuity and contact are not pushed far enough, that the pervasiveness and inescapability of economic and environmental crises and threats are not adequately accounted for. Whilst Price's real contribution stems from her insistence on the way in which '[t]he everyday, the planetary, and the digital increasingly replace national, regional, and analog narratives and counter-narratives,’ the methodological implications of this are not quite assumed and its wider resonances remain insufficiently explored.
This problem of speaking to specificity whilst analysing that which is explicitly posited as planetary (particularly in the case of environmental issues) or global (perhaps more in relation to the economic and political) is one that is increasingly inescapable, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unfortunately, however, it is also one that makes itself particularly felt, even establishing itself as a central thematic, in a text that calls itself Planet/Cuba. Parallels between the Cuban works on which the author focuses and similar concerns and practices elsewhere are periodically highlighted, but their underdevelopment leaves productive avenues and compelling connections unexamined. The title of Price's introduction refers to one of the texts in the study – Jorge Enrique Lage's novel La Autopista: The Movie (The Highway: The Movie, 2014) – specifically, to its meditation on the highway as metaphor for late capitalism, a kind of 'treasure map, where the treasure moves all around, or where it remains unclear at the end what the treasure is.’ If the treasure does move all around, including into and through Cuba, I can't help but feel that its traces are not tracked for long enough in this text. And if the book is concerned, as Price claims, with objects and phenomena 'both typical of global trends, and singular,’ then it is perhaps the global that is underplayed throughout.
On the other hand, as Price points out, in the wake of the Special Period and particularly since Raúl Castro's assumption of the presidency in 2008, there has been an acute emphasis on the national, as the internationalist ideology of the 1960s and 1970s has been increasingly replaced by a concern with solving problems at home. For many artists, this has translated into a turn to the 'hyper-local' as a sphere of action that offers the added opportunity for evasion of official nationalist rhetoric. By paying attention to these local interventions, Price at times attends admirably to the specificities of historical, political and geographical context. This works well in chapters such as ‘Marabusales,’ which explores the symbolic significance of 'marabú' (marabou), a non-native and aggressively invasive plant that has taken hold of up to 70% of Cuba's agricultural land. With such a specific object and situation laid out for the reader, Price traces marabou's thorny roots through three examples – Samuel Riera, Lisbet Flores and Jacinto Muñiz's conceptual art project Marabusal (Marabou Bush), José Ramón Sánchez's poetry collection Marabú (2012), and Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno's installation Modelo de expansión: marabú (Model of expansion: Marabou, 2013). Reflecting on the multivalency of this plant as a figure for state failure, abandonment, migration, climatic change, Chaos, postcoloniality, postmodernity and globalisation, Price makes a convincing argument about the increased interest in environmental thematics and rhizomatic forms in contemporary Cuban cultural production.
This chapter, however, is followed by 'Havana Under Water,’ in which an engaging discussion of works that deal with or touch on Cuba's attitudes to its island status and the surrounding sea nevertheless feels stunted as a result of underdeveloped contextualisation. Whilst the analyses of installations, paintings, photography and literature are extremely evocative, the cultural history of Cuba's relationship with the sea, not to mention the national trauma of events such as Mariel (the exodus of tens of thousands of Cubans by raft in 1980) (as well as the international resonances of other water-bound migrations, both recent and historic) is strikingly absent. Whilst Price acknowledges, 'of course,’ that 'the omnipresence of water in Cuba's cultural imagination is nothing new,’ citing the most famous example of Virgilio Piñera's 1943 poem 'La isla en peso,’ the lack of detailed information regarding such historical precedents not only forecloses an interesting exploration of comparison, continuity and change, but also raises the question of intended readership.
In the book’s delightfully titled first chapter, 'We are Tired of Rhizomes,’ Price establishes the importance of ecological debates regarding the forest versus the plantation to Cuba's historical development, and the text as a whole contains references to the decline of the sugar industry and its effects that seem to be intended for the less specialised reader. Nonetheless, other elements of background knowledge of Cuban history and culture are implicitly assumed, with the most influential analyses of the role of sugar in Cuba's history – from Fernando Ortiz's Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar, 1940) to Antonio Benítez Rojo's Deleuzian-inflected analysis of the Plantation in La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island, 1989) conspicuous in their absence. Despite appearances, this criticism is not intended as an exercise of academic pedantry; rather, such incomplete or latent connections between past and present undermine the text's attention to the specificity of the Cuban case and hinder its central argument regarding what exactly is new, global or planetary about the artistic and cultural phenomena it discusses.
It is difficult to know how the author could have satisfied the desire for more detail and specificity on one hand and further developed the global and interconnected aspects of her study on the other at the same time. Despite these criticisms, there can be no doubt of the thought-provoking, innovative and influential nature of this text. One of its principal merits lies in the way in which Price takes the 'contemporary weariness with Cuban exceptionalism' as evidenced in recent cultural productions such as Cuba's first zombie film, Alejandro Brugués's Juan de los Muertos (2011) as well as in academic studies of Cuba and Cubans ('at home' and abroad), in a productive direction. By indicating how the planetary – whether it take ecological, economic or political form – can be a source of both anxiety and creativity, Planet/Cuba breaks with the national frame that has dominated studies of the island until now whilst also resisting the temptation to see it as a passive receptor, a barren shore beaten mercilessly by waves of global change. Whatever the future of the island, Planet/Cuba stands as a rich, fascinating testament to the resilience, creativity and foresight of its artists, writers and cultural producers at a very particular and significant point in time.