Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

2 Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme

2 / Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme In a crypt in the Sunset Mausoleum of the Flagler Memorial Park on Flagler Street and Fifty-Third Avenue in Miami rest the remains of one of the most important Afro-Cuban women cultural figures of twentiethcentury Cuba and its U.S. diaspora. The crypt plate offers an identification : “Eusebia Cosme, Vda. de [widow of] Laviera, ‘Mama [sic] Dolores,’ Marzo 5, 1908–Julio 11, 1976.” Born in Santiago de Cuba, Eusebia Cosme had been living at the Miami Convalescent Home since early 1974. She had arrived there from Mexico City, her body partially paralyzed by a stroke. It was another stroke that eventually ended her life: she died at the Jackson Memorial Hospital, and over three hundred people, including many Cuban American artists and performers, attended her wake at the Caballero Funeral Home on Calle Ocho. Nearly four decades earlier, right around the time Alberto O’Farrill had begun disappearing from print accounts of the Harlem theater scene, Cosme arrived in New York City. It was August 1938. Already, in the Cuban cultures of poesía negra (black poetry)—viewed by many people as a legitimate alternative to the bufo in its representations of Afro-Cubans—Cosme had achieved in her recital performances an international renown unlike anything O’Farrill had ever experienced. She was hailed on arrival as “the celebrated Cuban reciter [declamdora cubana],” and, by the end of the year, she had made her U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall in a performance attended by thirty-two hundred people, including many from the Cuban and Latino communities of Brooklyn and Harlem, where tickets for the event had been sold.1 62 / re/citing eusebia cosme Yet the line between Cosme’s career in poesía negra and O’Farrill’s in the bufo—a class line, among others, with her audiences coming from middle-class and elite zones, in contrast to O’Farrill’s more workingclass spectators—is blurred. A Miami obituary text suggests as much in its remembrance of her as “la negrita,” a term that, despite its lack of a formal bufo meaning, comes close to negrito in its figuring a belittled, Afro-Cuban femininity.2 Cosme’s crypt offers another point of contact between her and O’Farrill in its reference to “Mamá Dolores.” Dolores was Cosme’s character in the film El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born; 1966), a role that later in life brought her renewed fame (and career prospects), particularly in Mexico. What this cryptic movie-role reference conceals is Cosme’s lifelong professional challenges—not unlike O’Farrill’s—as an Afro-Cuban woman in the twentieth-century Latino and Latin American theater and film industries. Her career in poesía negra performance, in other words, developed in large part because of the near impossibility for Cosme, except toward the end of her life, to find work as an actress. Linking her, too, to O’Farrill is an Afro-Cuban experience of uneven U.S. racialization, exemplified in the official discourses of U.S. arrival: in 1938, at the port of New York City, a “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” called her “race” “Cuban.” Just a few years later, however, Immigration and Naturalization documents written in Laredo, Texas, called her “African black.”3 In this chapter, I offer a critical account of Cosme’s life and work from the early 1930s in Cuba to her final days in Miami in the mid-1970s. Cosme is exemplary of the modern Afro-Cuban literary and performance cultures of the United States. As we shall see, one reason involves her various collaborations, both ephemeral and enduring, with African American cultures and institutions—collaborations only hinted at in the O’Farrill record. In one way, Cosme’s connection to African Americans resulted from the accessible meaning (as signs of uplift) that her poes ía negra performances held for middle-class African American audiences in the early twentieth century. In another way, Cosme’s African American contacts in the United States resulted from a conscious effort on her part, one that illustrates the Afro-Cuban American difference: being an Afro-Cuban migrant woman in the United States—an AfroLatina —put Cosme in the position to conceive of and benefit from a relationship with African Americans in terms of improved career prospects , friendship, and, most elusively, perhaps even African-diasporic solidarity despite (and, in some ways, because of) the social risks such an identification in a white-supremacist...