Santiago de Cuba, April 6, 2015
Last Saturday night, my hosts Agnes and Osvaldo escorted me to see danzón performed in a popular venue just off the city’s central Parque Céspedes. Danzón is a dance similar to the waltz that was very popular among middle- and upper-class Cubans of color in the first half of the twentieth century. Danzón is nothing like the rumba, or the conga, or the salsa. It is reserved and refined—some might say boring. But it is historical, not often performed, and I was excited to see it.
Our first obstacle was Osvaldo’s shirt. He wore an olive-green long-sleeved button down, and I was impressed with his decision to wear sleeves when it was pushing 80 degrees at 8 pm. But the woman at the door of the Casa de la Cultura firmly told us that men who wished to enter must wear guayaberas, the airy, embroidered, short-sleeved shirts that became fashionable in Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s. Many Cuban concert halls and dance venues have fairly strict dress requirements—no shorts, no sandals, no tank tops—but I had never heard of a guayabera requirement before.
Our second obstacle was his wife Agnes’s pants.
Women had to wear skirts. Osvaldo had to leave, but Agnes and I were permitted to stand in the corner and watch from afar.
The corner turned out to be the perfect point to see the old and the new Cubas collide. Nattily dressed men and women of color were the vast majority of those inside; most of them were over 50 years old. The men wore guayaberas, slacks, and shiny dress shoes; the women wore their best dresses, high heels, and carried pretty embroidered fans as accessories. They danced and mingled as though they’d all known each other for decades, which they probably had. For anyone who has read about the old Afro-Cuban social clubs like La Fraternidad or the Club Atenas, watching these elderly Cubans dance to the music of the band onstage was like spying on one of their parties from the 1940s. Some of the dancers we watched probably had attended their parties in the 1940s.
My hosts were not the only Cubans surprised by the dress code. Over the course of about thirty minutes, several men and women dressed for a night out—tight, shiny shirts, embellished jeans, high-heeled sandals or polished shoes—were turned away with surprising consistency. A few got angry. This was a free event! The Casa de la Cultura hadn’t advertised the strict dress code beforehand. Didn’t this exclusivity fly in the face of the ideals of socialist Cuba? Perhaps it did, but those guarding the door saw no need to justify their actions. The band played on; the dancers kept dancing. It was 2015, but it could have been 1955 inside that airy concert hall. Maybe my hosts and the Cubans who were turned away had a point: a public event in a public venue should not have been so exclusive. But as an outsider in the city and the country already, I was thrilled at the opportunity to stand back and watch.
–Anasa Hicks
Santiago de Cuba, April 15th, 2015
The bag of raw chicken parts didn’t bother me so much as the fact that bloody fluid from the bag was dripping onto the library’s floor. I was waiting in the lobby of the city’s Biblioteca Provincial Elvira Cape for the receptionist to store my tote bag when her coworker approached, holding the bag of chicken parts and telling the receptionist where to find her own chicken and its cost.
It seemed contradictory that I couldn’t get past the lobby with my tote bag—devoid of any food at all—while someone else could get inside with raw foodstuffs, but if I brought up all the contradictions I noticed in Cuba I would get little else done. Once I noticed the leak, though, I felt I had to speak up. “The bag broke,” I offered. I didn’t want to sound judgmental, but I also didn’t want to get raw chicken juice on my sandals.
“Ay, mi madre,” the woman holding the bag exclaimed, and scurried further into the library, ostensibly to find another bag. The receptionist explained to me, “Mi’ja, you know that the economic situation here is very bad, and when there’s a certain kind of food available we have to take advantage right away.” She could have been a prophet: two weeks later, there was no chicken in any restaurant in the city.
Santiago’s main library and its archives are largely staffed by women. They can simultaneously tell you whether a certain newspaper from the early twentieth century is available and discuss the price of tomatoes or the run on butter in the nearest grocery store. Food shortages are regular occurrences, and if you think that as a researcher in the city the scarcities won’t touch you, I’d just suggest you bring a few pairs of close-toed shoes on your next trip.
–Anasa Hicks
Santiago de Cuba, April 24th, 2015
The Teatro Heredia in Santiago de Cuba hosted the 14th International Conference of African and African-American Culture this April. The meeting of the conference in Santiago coincides with the 500th anniversary of the city of Santiago, and the conference was dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the African presence in the city. At the Inaugural Ceremony, diplomats from five African countries spoke about the challenges that Africa faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More interesting than their analyses of the problems facing their nations, however, was the reverence with which each diplomat spoke of Cuba.
At an exhibition of graphic posters that portrayed the independent Namibia’s first president, Pedro Luis Ramírez, the santiaguero artist who painted them, spoke of a Namibian student his family had hosted, and the fierce patriotism the student had for his nation and his admiration of Cuba. Most students of Cuban history know that Cuban troops entered the Angolan war for independence from Portugal in 1975, earning that nation’s continued gratitude and admiration. But Cuba participated in other African anti-colonial struggles too, including those of Algeria and Guinea. The continent has not forgotten the Caribbean island nation’s support 30 years later.
Among the participants in the conference were African students, their attendance financed by scholarships from the Cuban state. Cubans proclaimed that Africa’s strength will stem from its unity and Africans thanked Cubans for their government’s unyielding support for their own nations’ sovereignty in the face of imperialist forces.
Relations between the U.S. and Cuba are warmer now than they have been in 56 years, and the question on many Americans’ minds is how our future presence on the island will change it, for better or worse. How will the U.S. influence Cuba? What good can we offer; what bad will inevitably infiltrate? But we should keep in mind that Cuba holds its own influence. It does not consider itself a nation that needs a good or a bad example; Cubans have been setting examples themselves since 1959, and the nations they have helped have not forgotten.