The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubania

Old Cubans say that if you walk to the very end of Key West you will able to see Cuba. I myself don’t know any Cubans, young or old, who have actually seen the island from this point, but there is a plaque at that spot that marks it as “officially” ninety miles from the island of Cuba. Of course, a lot more separates Cuba from Key West than those piddling ninety miles. There is a haze that obscures any view, ensuring that one will indeed never see Cuba from that or another vantage point. That haze is comprised of certain ideological mists that we might understand as the United States’s endless propaganda war against the island, the rage and melancholic romanticism of the Cubans outside the island, and the North American Left’s precritical celebration of the revolution. Cuban exile art thus needs to respond to the onus of breaking through the distorting cloud that keeps us all from actually seeing Cuba. In this way Nilo Cruz’s work is both admirable and necessary, insofar as it not only understands the onus of “seeing Cuba” but in fact tries to do something about it. Cruz’s writing practice attempts to cast a picture of cubanía, of Cubanness as a way of being in the world; this picture not only helps us begin to achieve a historical materialist understanding of Cuba, but it also encourages us to access cubanía as a structure of feeling that supercedes national boundaries and pedagogies.

If this play, Two Sisters and a Piano, were to be addressed on the level of plot, such an explication would dwell on the way in which the work attempts to interrogate a difficult and pivotal moment in Cuban history. The play is set in Cuba of 1992, at the moment of perestroika. Through the lives of four characters (two sisters—one a writer and the other a musician—a lieutenant in the nation’s military, and a piano tuner) a charged moment of historical transition and entrenchment is described with dense nuance. The two sisters are political prisoners who have been upgraded from penitentiary incarceration to house arrest. The house they are sent to is their now dilapidated family home, and they settle among its ruins. Maria Celia, the older sister, is forbidden her vocation as a writer. The other sister, Sofia, is allowed to play her out-of-tune piano for a time, until that, too, is taken away from her. Throughout the play she trembles with desire for the outside world and the bodies of men, while Maria Celia longs for her husband, a political activist who has escaped Cuba, denounces it from the outside, and labors to get his wife and sister-in-law out through diplomatic mechanisms. Maria Celia is desired by Lieutenant Portuondo, the military representative who is in charge of her detainment and enforces her restriction against writing. His great conflict is this assigned duty and his love of Maria Celia’s writing and body. The play’s other major character is Victor Manuel, the piano tuner. Maria Celia treats him with suspicion as he is desired by Sofia. His major concern is the state of the family piano.

A reading that focused primarily on plot would miss some of the important cultural work that Cruz is doing. The play is about cubanía as a manera de ser (a way of being), and it attempts to provide an affective understanding of the world. These characters, anchored in the Cuba of 1991, are witness to a moment of world historical turmoil. They face this moment with manifold desires and longings: some desire social change, while others desire sexual and psychic liberation. Still others are invested in the state and strive for the survival of the existing system. These feelings speak to the emotional life world of cubanía. The...