Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary by Jennifer Ruth Hosek (review)

“Bienvenidos und herzlich willkommen auf Cuba, der größten Antilleninsel und dem Inbegriff karibischer Lebensfreude” – this is how a website advertises Cuba to German tourists, only to continue by describing the white sandy beaches, the rumba rhythms, the mojitos, the colourful antique cars, and the “Herzlichkeit der Inselbewohner” as the real characteristics of the Island of Cuba, imagined as the “Queen of the Antilles.”¹

Clearly, Cuba exerts a powerful hold on German imaginations, but this fascination with Cuba is neither simple nor entirely new. Jennifer Hosek’s Sun, Sex, and Socialism offers a critical investigation of the histories and present manifestations of such German fantasies of Cuba. Hosek begins with an analysis of the role these fantasies played for national redefinitions in the Berlin Republic of the 1990s and, in the following chapters, historicizes them to show how specifically “‘revolutionary fantasies’ of Cuba shaped German national understandings” (10) during Germany’s division. Hosek’s readings of mainly German films and literary texts demonstrate that during the Cold War, attention to fascism and the Global South played an important part in the project of national (re)definition in both Germanies (9). By discussing cultural products from a transnational perspective, Hosek also highlights the Global South’s broader importance for European national projects in the twentieth century. She argues convincingly that the Global South does not simply serve as a foil for projection. Rather, it offers a complex space for contrast, comparison, exchange, and critique.

In her analysis of what she calls the “Kuba Welle” of the Berlin Republic, Hosek argues that “each of these cultural artifacts of the Kuba Welle represents the island according to its own concerns for Germany. [. . .] The promulgation of these German visions of Cuba is enabled by, expresses, and seeks to strengthen the cultural capital of each contested design” (54). The different approaches to Cuba in a diverse range of cultural artifacts from the 1990s until the early twenty-first century (an advertisement campaign for Havana Club rum, three films, and a literary travelogue) that Hosek interprets illustrates that national identity – or national “design” – in the Berlin Republic was a contested concept. What emerges is a complex mix of historical references, national imaginaries, racialized fears, and exoticized and eroticized dreams. Read together, these cultural products shed light on these critical discourses around national history and national belonging that have currency beyond Germany.

In the chapters on divided Germany, Hosek focuses on “how critical intellectuals, artists, and activists used Cuba to reinterpret German nationalism and to move towards transnational alignments” (9), which allows her to argue that “national pasts drive such transnationally inflected redefinitions whose engagements are with global presents” (9). Cuba, specifically, “embodied an untainted nationalism that German leftists valued” (11) and offered a foil for “fantasies of liberal sexuality” and “sensuality” (13). In socialist East Germany, Cuba also “contributed to discussions about consumption and bureaucratization within socialism” (13). In her discussion of East Germany in the 1960s, Hosek explores “extended Heimat,” a socialist notion that not only included the national concepts of the German Heimat but also extended some of the traits of Heimat to the so-called socialist brother nations. Even though the three films, one short film, and one novel that Hosek analyses differ in how they relate Cuba to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hosek shows that “in contrast to the Cuba of the West-Berlin anti-authoritarians, in which the resultant national model seeks ultimately to spring national borders, these GDR texts envision bounded, solidarian, brother islands in common cause for national protection” (58). She also illustrates how the short film Carlos (1966) and Irmtraud Morgner’s novel Rumba auf einen Herbst (written in 1962–65) unsettle “Northern stereotypes and engage[] Cuba as a hope for ameliorating, rather than stabilizing, the realexisting, young GDR” (76), which means that they engage in a project of “extending domestic Heimat on their own terms” (88...