Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba by Laurie A. Frederik (review)

Rich, thorough, and beautifully-written, Trumpets in the Mountains is a rare ethnography that focuses on rural Cuba. Frederik tells the story of Cuban national identity not through official narratives, but through theater-making in remote areas, especially in the Special Period, Cuba’s post-Soviet crisis. Throughout the book, the reader follows Frederik’s journey in search of the campesino de verdad (the real peasant, rural resident), the figure of which ultimately vanishes in artistic and intellectual efforts in theater to “let him speak.” The figure, however, is recognized to embody the essence (pura cepa, pure stock) of cubanía, or Cubanness, and has been imagined, constructed, and expressed many times over in history. In his latest incarnation in the twenty-first century, the campesino inspires what Frederik terms the Hombre Novísimo (”even newer man,” newer than the Hombre Nuevo of earlier years of the Revolution): “an urban man with campesino morals and a campesino soul; still communist in his humility and loyalty to the nation, but less aligned with a political party and more cognizant of a general martiano (José Martí centered) and nationalist philosophy of patriotism and of the united Latin American struggle against imperialist domination” (14).

The book covers history of theater, cultural politics, and discourses of cubanía, and an in-depth look into three theater groups: Teatro de Los Elementos (Theater of the Elements) in the Escambray Mountains, La Cruzada Teatral Guantánamo-Baracoa (Theater Crusade Guantánamo to Baracoa), and El Laboratorio de Teatro Comunitario (Laboratory of Community Theater) in Guantánamo Province. These groups are called Teatro Comunitario, and were a new form of theater that emerged in the Special Period, out of the harsh conditions of material scarcity. These theater people went to live with campesinos in the “zones of silence,” as areas of difficult access are called, and “sought to preserve the old, to rescue dying traditions, and to reinsert a sense of beauty and spirituality into the lives of the Cuban people” (82). Their emphasis was on the creative process rather than the end product, where the play came out of a long process of collective effort among the actors, director, writer, (and the participating anthropologist,) as well as campesinos they lived with and interviewed, and through the experience of rural life. The created play was meant to address the story campesinos wished to tell, and they became the primary audience, who would later discuss the play with the theater people. Teatro Comunitario stood for “Theater in the community, for the community, and by the community” (82).

Artists in socialist Cuba are salaried by the state, and thus guaranteed to be able to dedicate their time to the professions while expected to communicate moral values of the Revolution to the masses. In Fidel Castro’s oft-cited words, “Within the Revolution, everything, against it, nothing” (50), and that was the parameters in which artists operated. Frederik explores this condition when those moral values were subtly changing, represented in the transformation of the Hombre Nuevo into the Hombre Novísimo. The artists found themselves in a number of conflicts and tensions: between the city and the countryside, an age-old question that takes a particular manifestation in the revolutionary Cuba; between the state and the artists (funding, censorship, and recognition); artists and lay campesinos (bringing “culture” to places where they have little access to such while attempting to break barriers between intellectuals and the masses); and pseudo-culture and genuine art (selling out or art for art’s sake?). In the end, as Cuba’s search for its identity after the Revolution cannot be comprehended without its projected antithesis of North American imperialism, these opposites are revealed to be co-constitutive or “co-substantial” (261). The borders separating the two spheres are...