Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba by Laurie A. Frederik (review)

Laurie Frederik engages us in a beautifully written ethnography of her lived experiences with teatristas, “professional troupes composed of actors, writers, dancers, producers, and designers” and campesinos in rural Cuba, during the late 1990s (p. 20). Those years, which constituted the post-Soviet “Special Period in Time of Peace,” are the distinct social, economic, and political period that frames Frederik’s work. It was the time of Opción Cero, a government mandate for sustenance survival under which essentials were rationed to the bare minimum, or eliminated altogether. In Cuba’s isolated mountainous areas, distant from the strong influences of urban life and “contaminated capitalism,” Frederik is able to examine the dialectic between the state and its people in construction of the “real” campesino and the “pura cepa” (‘pure stalk,’ in its idiomatic ideological sense of national memory and identity making).

With the troupes La Cruzada Teatral and El Laboratorio de Teatro Comunitario, Frederik travels to isolated regions in Guantánamo. She also works with the teatristas of Teatro de los Elementos, a troupe in a small town near the Escambray Mountains. Frederik details the process of making the play, which includes the teatristas exercising ethnographic methods as they interview the campesinos to represent their stories, a fascinating practice to which she makes us privy. Frederik shows how theater is important to the state for reinvigorating the Revolution, involving campesinos in more critical dialogue and contradiction than one might casually imagine. The campesinos gain a sense of voice through the process, and Frederik argues that they will “ultimately take control of their own historical representation” (p. 258). As consultant and anthropologist, and in a few rare instances as actor, she lives and works with the troupes. She examines the process of rural participatory theater and its cultural and artistic transformation from prerevolutionary archetypes like the mid-1800s blackface Teatro Bufo to the introduction of the “raceless and classless” New Man “(p. 51) of the 1959 Revolution (Teatro Nuevo), and the currently negotiated “even Newer Man” or hombre novísimo of the post-Soviet Special Period. The artistic production process becomes a very revealing cultural medium for analyzing Cuban history and the Cuban present, and the debate regarding the making of national identity (cubanidad).

Frederik’s beautiful prose allows the reader to experience being at the author’s side, hearing the murmur of the water and feeling the swaying of bodies in the back of the old truck as it climbs into the rugged mountains. Frederik ponders the characteristic empty feeling of hours spent waiting that was all too well known during the Special Period, reminding us of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and considering the idea of what Godot might represent for Cubans. The complexities of these “zones of silence,” where the campesinos have all but been forgotten, are made manifest through the performers themselves, who are at times resistant to the state’s guidelines, and at other times willing to self-censor or do whatever else it takes to be rewarded with travel. The remote areas become the stage for understanding the condition and dialogic play between the values, perceptions, and ideals of both the Cuban government and everyday people. In the final chapter, Frederik joins Teatro de los Elementos in Europe and witnesses its members perform in ways foreign to their homeland but nonetheless deemed appropriate for external consumption. This split highlights the ongoing struggle over what constitutes cubanidad, affected as it is by the constant influence or pressure to conform and perform in line with official state discourse.

Frederik sifts through the paradox of political ideology and national imaginary carried by the purported New Man (Hombre Nuevo), a prototype founded in Che Guevara’s image that was pumped into Cuban society through the arts, media, and school curricula and ubiquitous until 2000. Frederik not only verifies...