The Cuban Diaspora

Since the 1990s, many dancers from Cuba have found work in North American and Western European ballet ensembles. This chapter describes how their international dance careers reflect high-skilled labor migration in the global economy, as well as the decentralizing expansion of ballet’s labor market. Migrant Cuban dancers cite a depressed local economy and the artistic stagnation of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba as fundamental reasons for looking for work in international ensembles. Their exodus is also political—extending into the present practices and discourses associated with the Cold War concept of defection. The numerous departures constitute a detrimental form of brain drain for Cuban ballet, which loses precious human capital and is relegated to the subaltern role of labor supplier for the international ballet community. Yet, this diaspora could also fuel brain gain—a scenario in which émigrés such as Carlos Acosta return home to reinvest in local institutions the knowledge and resources acquired abroad.

Guamá's cyber-humor in exile: Aboriginal-Afrocuban identity and politically incorrect translationese working for another Cuba

Guamá is a graphic humor online publication and an outstanding Cuban cultural phenomenon in exile. It’s creator, Alen Lauzán Falcón, was born in Cuba in 1974, and before he managed to escape the Castros' island, he had already had a successful career in the field of graphic humor. What followed was astonishing for the whole Cuban Diaspora. Upon his arrival in Chile, where he remained, working for and inspired by the graphic humour style of The Clinic, a popular Chilean humoristic publication, he created his own online journal, adopting the name of the most known Cuban aboriginal fighter against Spanish conquistadors. Through incisive and constant “politically incorrect” humour Lauzán Falcón have been ridiculing the majority of the Castroist publications through spicy comments and upturned Cuban propaganda slogans. This became a kind of creative ‘translationese’. His efforts are significantly contributing to criticizing and redirecting the meaning of Castroist ideological indoctrination concepts – efforts enriched with a strong flavour of Cuban Aboriginal (Taíno) and Afro-Cuban humour. Lauzán Falcón aimed to show a critical perspective on Cuban affairs for Cubans, and for anyone else who can feel and understand the Cuban situation and show solidarity with the difficulties of the people living under the longest-running extreme-left-wing regime in Latin America. In this article, I will first analyze the ‘translationese’ phenomenon from a Complexity point of view, meaning, historically and culturally rebinding of the Cuban study case to the historical antecedents of ‘translationese’. Second, I will analyze ten graphic Guamá ‘front pages’ (satiric imitations of Castroist publications), published by Lauzán Falcón between 2008 and 2014 in his eponymous blog, starting with the main banner of Guamá itself. Third, I will operate a complex rebinding of the results demonstrating that the same spirit of creative resistance that the Taíno and African slaves showed in Cuba during more than five centuries, is still in action today in Cubans’ efforts to deal with the consequences of a long-lasting extreme-left-wing regime. A selected glossary of Guama’s Afro-Cuban words and expressions analyzed here will appear at the end of the article.

Writing Conflict to End Conflict: Reconciliatory Writing in Cristina García’s "Dreaming in Cuban," "The Agüero Sisters," and "King of Cuba"

The building of bridges between Cuba and the US has been ongoing for a long time, not least by artists. Reconciliation work preceding the commencement of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US encompasses, for example, novelist Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997), and King of Cuba (2013). I argue that these novels take on the task of lessening polarizations with the aspiration of furthering reconciliation processes through concentrating on the divisiveness between families and politics within the Cuban communities, focusing on the island Cubans and the US Cuban diaspora. García writes conflict to end conflict and this is, I claim, her strongest contribution to the reconciliation processes. In the last part of the article I briefly discuss how I use the concept of translation to theorize the relationship between fiction and reality.

Theatricality in the Art of the Cuban Diaspora

Art critic and collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa proposes that certain “tropes of identity”—common metaphors inherited from previous generations of modern Cuban artists—continue to shape the work of contemporary Cuban-American artists. Pau-Llosa underlines the trope of theatricality as a form of representing “the poetics of shelter (from time, history, persecution, and other forces).” The early work in exile of Mario Carreño and Cundo Bermúdez launched a diasporic sensibility in Cuban art that still resonates in the more recent work of Emilio Sánchez, María Brito, and José Bedia. From this perspective, theatricality ties together several generations of Cuban modern artists and those who left the island after 1959.

Cuban Art in the Diaspora

Literary and art critic Andrea O’Reilly Herrera analyzes an itinerant art exhibition known as CAFÉ (Cuban American Foremost Exhibitions), curated by Leandro Soto (b. 1956) since 2001. O’Reilly Herrera argues that the artists participating in this exhibition raise many of the same issues as earlier vanguardia artists in Cuba, including the significance of the island’s African and Indigenous roots, landscape, and architecture, although they do not claim to represent the entire Cuban diaspora. Still, O’Reilly Herrera’s analysis of the artworks of several cafeteros, such as Soto, José Bedia, and Raúl Villarreal, identifies recurrent themes and common concerns, especially with displacement and transculturation that, in the end, “allude to the all-embracing nature of Cuban culture itself.”

THE RECLAIMING CUBAN CULTURAL IDENTITY WHILE LIVING AS A CUBAN DIASPORA IN AMERICA AS DEPICTED IN CAMILA CABELLO “HAVANA”

Question of identity remains one of the most important and debatable concept in the world of postcolonial theory especially when it is related to cultural identity of the diaspora. As culture is intertwined with place of origin, diasporic community often experience difficulty to identity themselves as they are located outside their culture of origin.By using Hall’s Cultural Identity, Bhabha’s Hybridity, and Historical Biographical approach, this paper shall dissect such notion of reclaiming the diasporic’s own culture as depicted in Camila Cabello’s most famous song “Havana.” Upon closer scrutiny, what at first glance considered as a simple love song underlines the cultural notion behind it. As the singer and songwriter is Cuban, Cabello expresses a theme of longing and stake a claim of Cuban cultural identity in the character of the song despite being offered a life in America. This perspective is highlighted through essay from Cabello herself, which notes the notion of cultural exchange and the life of the immigrants.

Framing the diaspora and the homeland: language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora

This article discusses language ideologies in relation to political ideologies in the Cuban diaspora in the United States. The findings of three longitudinal attitude studies, two conducted using the methods of perceptual dialectology, and a third with the matched-guise method, indicated that the diaspora’s political beliefs have a robust effect on its beliefs about Cuban Spanish in the diaspora and in the homeland. The perceptions studies showed that the national variety has a high degree of prestige in the diaspora, and that it has very low prestige in Cuba. The results of the matched-guise test showed that participants were unable to differentiate voices recorded in the 1960s and the 1990s, and that social information about residence in Cuba or the diaspora was more important to judgments of correctness than the presence of nonstandard variants. It is argued that the diaspora’s language ideology is maintained through erasure and essentialization: social and linguistic facts are erased, and the homeland is racially essentialized. It is suggested that through its language ideology, the Cuban diaspora claims authenticity and legitimacy vis-à-vis the homeland.