A Traveler's Album: Variations on Cubanidad

In the first snapshot, I am listening to a rock concert in a tiny club in Providence that functions at the same time as a café, art gallery, and playhouse; the lead guitarist (a Peruvian) sings with equal energy in English and Spanish. He segues from the mythical "Jailhouse Rock" to a hard version of "No se tu" (I Don't Know You), a bolero recently made popular by the Mexican Luis Miguel. The audience, almost totally Anglophone, enthusiastically applauds the performance by the group, which also includes a Colombian bass player and a Philippine drummer. My friend Bob Arellano has taken me to this concert. A Cuban born in the United States, a specialist in hypertexts and a fan of rock and country music, he was anxious to show me this place, which is important in the city's alternative culture scene. At the end of the set, we go over to congratulate the musicians, and my friend (who also plays guitar and wants to produce hard rock sung in Spanish in the United States) starts negotiations for a subsequent concert with the group. He is fascinated by this vogue of taking songs from parents and grandparents, songs that have been part of the continental Latin American imaginary for generations, and inserting them into the musical rhythms of the present. I listen to him say that this kind of creative adaptation is a good thing for Latino culture in the United States, instead of a simulacrum of some sort of "ethnic" sound as a means to gain a niche in the market.

In the second snapshot, now in Boston, at the end of one of my lectures, a young man approaches me. He wears on his lapel a pin with a small Cuban flag. He is a representative of the youth wing of the Cuban-American Foundation in that part of New England and the grandson of a certain Colonel Barquin, who in the fifties had been the leader of the most important conspiracy within the army to depose the dictator Batista. We chat, he promises to bring me books the following day, but nothing impresses me more than that small pin on his lapel.

The third snapshot corresponds to New York. In this one appears Luis, a young Cuban photographer, also born in the United States, who utters a phrase that still astonishes me: "When I return to Guanabacoa!" This astonishes me, first, because Luis was born in the United States, has never been to the land of his parents, much less Guanabacoa, and thus refers to, for him, an entirely imaginary place; secondly, because, with a will to identity that seems to me almost magical, he gestures and dresses exactly as a street kid in the real Guanabacoa would today.

In the fourth snapshot, I am back in Providence. This time, a group of art students, all of Cuban origin, are introduced to me; they tell me that there are, all told, a dozen of them in the city and that they recently founded their group in the Casa de España at Brown. They want to invite me to a special welcome meal, for which they promise to serve black beans, a dish their parents taught them to prepare.

The fifth snapshot takes place in New Orleans, in a tiny movie theater where the film Bitter Sugar, by the Cuban émigré director Leon Ichaso, is being shown. There are no more than twenty people in the audience, and before the first half hour is over, one of the two North Americans present (the other is the female companion of the friend I am with) shouts out that we are looking at imperialist garbage and walks out. The reaction to the film is quite cold, dispassionate, including the weak applause at the end.

The opposite occurs in the sixth of my snapshots. This time, I am in Miami, at the premiere of the opera Balseros, with a libretto by Mar&iacute...