Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures

7. Haitian Migration and Danced Identity in Eastern Cuba

Haitian Migration and Danced Identity in Eastern Cuba Grete Viddal I arrive at Santiago de Cuba’s Teatro Oriente to see a small crowd of locals and tourists waiting outside. We are here to see Ballet Folklórico Cutumba, one of eastern Cuba’s premier folkloric dance troupes. Although the theater is run down and no longer has electricity or running water, its former elegance is apparent. As we enter, we see that lush but tattered velvet drapes flank the stage and ornate architectural details adorn the walls underneath faded and peeling paint. Light filters in through high windows. As the performance starts, women in elaborate ball gowns enter this dusty stage. They must hold up their voluminous skirts to keep yards of fabric from dragging on the floor. Men sport white topcoats with tails and matching white cravats. The costumes, modeled on eighteenth-century French court attire, may lead the audience to expect a re-enactment of an ancien régime ball. Instead, the performance space fills with the driving rhythms of Africanstyle drums. This is the tumba francesa (French drum), a striking dance genre with roots in what is now Haiti that developed in eastern Cuba. I had seen many different Havana styles portrayed in documentaries about Cuban dance. I’d read extensively on Cuban music and culture; however , I was completely unprepared for the exciting folkloric manifestations of Afro-Franco-Haitian-Cuban origin found in Cuba’s eastern provinces. In 1998, I traveled for the first time to Santiago de Cuba to participate in a study program hosted by Ballet Folklórico Cutumba, a group specializing in performing the dances of eastern Cuba. Cutumba’s mission is to research, collect, conserve, and present these dances. 84 Grete Viddal Figure 7.1. Cutumba performing Tumba Francesa. By Grete Viddal; used by permission. Santiago de Cuba, the “capital of Oriente”—the island’s eastern provinces —has been home to thousands of Haitian immigrants and retains a special culture that strongly differentiates it from Havana. Haitian Creole, referred to by speakers as patuá, is considered Cuba’s “second language.” It is estimated that more than 400,000 Cubans have at least “some familiarity” with Creole (Martínez Gordo 1989). The eastern provinces of Cuba were host to two major waves of migration from Haiti, one during the time of the Haitian Revolution in the early nineteenth century, and another in the early twentieth century, when almost half a million Haitians were recruited as manual labor for eastern Cuba’s expanding sugar industry. Both waves of migrants brought well-defined, and quite different, traditions of music and dance still practiced in Cuba today. Haitian Migration and Danced Identity in Eastern Cuba 85 The Tumba Francesa (and Tajona) In eastern Cuba, the remaining tumba francesa societies and professional troupes such as Cutumba specialize in performing this intriguing dance genre. In Ballet Folklórico Cutumba’s version, dancers in ornate costumes enter the stage promenading in stately rows. Tumba francesa is danced to the beat of a battery of African-style drums: the premier or maman (which improvises and solos), the segonde, the bulá, and the catá (an ideophonic drum, in this case a hollow log struck with two sticks). When Cutumba’s musicians play, they fill the performance space with robust sound. According to Ernesto Armiñan Linares, Cutumba’s choreographer and an authority on regional performance, domestic slaves living in the households of the francophone plantocracy created the tumba francesa. They danced it wearing the cast-off finery of the masters. Later, free blacks of means and mulatto elites adopted these dances as well. Even before emancipation in Cuba (1886), tumba francesa clubs or societies were formed. Members held offices, such as that of presidente and presidenta. Public dances started with salutations to the organization’s titleholders, then other visitors and local elders. Armiñan Linares explained to me that in later decades, heroes of Cuba’s wars for independence were also ritually saluted by the societies. Today, two urban societies with their own buildings still exist, known as La Caridad in Santiago and La Pompadour in Guantánamo. A third group, the Tumba Francesa Bejuco, survives in an isolated mountain village in Holguin province. The Santiago tumba francesa society and various professional troupes such as Cutumba also perform a dance called tajona (sometimes spelled tahona). According to Armiñan Linares, the tajona was a rural comparsa, or a...