From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

Travesía: Crossings of Sovereignty, Sexuality, and Race in the Cuban Female Imaginaries of Zoé Valdés, Nancy Moréjon, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons

When her mind turned to the privileges available outside of Cuba, she resumed cursing her luck. “It’s a prison,” she said, gesturing to the necklace of lights along the boulevard. “Beautiful, but a prison.” —Christopher Hunt, Waiting for Fidel Travesía, the Spanish word for “crossing,” stands in the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons as a tautology by which the multiple realities of displacement , alteration, alienation, commerce, and tragedy are invoked as a consequence of the Middle Passage and slave trade.1 As such, it also embeds the notion of two or more geographies inextricably bound together by the ships Paul Gilroy has invoked as signs of a denied modernity in the New World, those of the slave trade. Even more, it suggests a bridging of past and future, a historical conjoining that is defined by a circularity of loss and return, as descendants of colonials and colonized have become increasingly mobile searching for sites of origin, whether in Europe or in Africa, or in the ground of their island homelands in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas. I invoke travesía here to situate Cuba as an interstice in this study but also as a groundthatbridgesdiscussionswemightentertainaboutthetriumvirateIam suggesting between Haiti, Cuba, and the DR. I do so with intent, breaking the TRAVESÍA Crossings of Sovereignty, Sexuality, and Race in the Cuban Female Imaginaries of Zoé Valdés, Nancy Moréjon, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons 133 already tense relation of the Dominican Republic to Haiti which I explored in the above chapter. I suggest that by understanding the ways in which history, race, and gender relations are discussed by Cuban women writers and artists whoseworkisgroundedintheCubanimaginarybutproducedbeyondtheconfines of the nation-state, we might be better able to think of Haiti, the DR, and Cuba in simultaneity. The three countries occupy contingent spaces of memory, and recognizing the racial and gender issues they share might disrupt the tensions born of an amnesic approach to history, a result of hierarchies of race that have benefited some while disempowering others. Within such hierarchies , gender, when consciously united to considerations of racial disenfranchisement , provides not only an avenue to reconsider what is at stake in histories of disavowal but also what there is to be gained. In placing Cuba in this interstice between considerations of texts by Haitian and Dominican women, I am also underscoring David Hellwig’s observationthat “[e]xceptforHaiti,noNewWorldsocietyreceivedasmuchattention from black North Americans in the nineteenth century as did Cuba” (qtd. in Mirabal 190), but I would also add to this that no other country has received as much attention from North America, that is the U.S., except for Haiti. African Americans were forced to collude with U.S. imperialist interests in Cuba as some, usually the writers but also military men, were made aware of the shared history of slavery and dispossession through U.S. foreign interests in Cuba. Rather than deny the space that Cuba held in the American imagination at the turn of the century, by comparing the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nancy Morejón, and Zoé Valdés, I seek to demonstrate how each contests and reframes questions of sovereignty and national identity within and without Cuba (since of the three, Morejón is the only one who has remained in Cuba), offering perspectives both of disillusionment with and hope for the culture and life of Cuban women by contesting erased realities of race and gender struggle within the nation. In contrasting their work, I think it is possible to gain an overview of the complexities Cuba presents as a crossroads of U.S. foreign policy and sovereignty while remaining a crucial (though instable) site of Caribbean identity. Key to my discussion, then, will be a consideration of the terms mestizaje and jineterismo as features of cubanidad , since these are central components of the ongoing, embattled notion of Cuban identity; both reveal the raced, gendered, and sexualized politics at play on the island. By recourse to Magdalena Campos-Pons’s art installations and photographs of the late 1990s and early 2000s at the end of this discussion , I will suggest also that the racial obfuscations of the region necessitate not only literary responses but also visual texts that actively present and val134 SOVEREIGNTY: Cuba orize embodied Africanness in the Caribbean landscape in ways that the written word cannot. For if the issue of race in the Latin...