Marginality Beyond Return: US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s 9781032138107, 9781032138718, 9781003231196

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Introducción
Notes
References
1 Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”: Transculturation, Networks of Proximity, and US Cuban Theater
Miami, Cuba
The Cuban “Success” Narrative
The Chaos of Transculturation
US Cuban Cultural Production: Language and Ethnicity
Language: “Bilingual Blues”
Ethnicity
“No Soy De Aquí Ni Soy De Allá”
Notes
References
2 Dos. “Momento Renacentista”: US Cubans and Latine Off-Off-Broadway
Introduction
Off-Off-Broadway
María Irene Fornés’ La Viuda (The Widow)
Manuel Martín Jr. and Magali Alabau Latinize Off-Off-Broadway
Conclusion
Notes
References
3 Tres. “¡Ay Mama Inés!”: Gender, Ethnicity, Blackness, and Racism
Introduction
From Race to Racialization
From Blackness to “Feeling Brown”
Gender, Blackness, and Racism in Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rita and Bessie
Re-dressing the Ghost of Race in Cuban and US Stages: Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata
Conclusion
Notes
References
4 Cuatro. “La Vida En Rosa”: Carmelita Tropicana’s Performative Excess
Introduction
Performance Art: The Body as Text
“A Fine Samurai Machete”: Tropicana’s Campy “Choteo” and “Picuencia”
Memorias De La Revolución / Memories of the Revolution
From WOW and INTAR to Cuba, Los Angeles, and Back
With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit / ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta La Cucaracha?
Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Cinco. “Todos Por Lo Mismo”: From Bridges to Greater Cuba
Introduction
Gestures Within the Big History of Cultural Heritage
First Gesture: Teatro Cubano Contemporáneo
Second Gesture: (Cancelled) Encuentro En La Habana
Third Gesture: Repertorio Español’s Revoltillo and CubaTeatro in New York
Fourth Gesture: The First International Monologue/Performance Festival in Miami
Fifth Gesture: Parece Blanca Or Coproducing the Tragedy of Cubanness
Futurity in Greater Cuba
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

“Marginality Beyond Return takes marginality as a keyword in part because of the ways in which Cuban theater and its historiography falls out of the teleological understanding of Latinx/​e theater, which is itself based more clearly on Chicane or Nuyorican models of transformation.The contribution of the book is less one of learning something new about Cuban identity and more Manzor’s contribution to thinking about how theater was important to and registered many shifts in Cuban identity over the years, which changes the history/​ historiography of Latino theatre history.” Patricia Ybarra, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University “Groundbreaking and deeply researched, Marginality Beyond Return’s comprehensive study of US Cuban theater and performance uncovers little-​known archival ephemera and moves skillfully between theory, sociocultural context, theater historiography, and textual and performance analysis to show how performance enacts a US Cuban ‘identity-​in-​difference.’ The book is an invaluable contribution to Latino cultural studies.” Camilla Stevens, Rutgers University

Marginality Beyond Return

This study is an exploration of US Cuban theatrical performances written and staged primarily between 1980 and 2000. Lillian Manzor analyzes early plays by Magali Alabau, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, María Irene Fornés, Eduardo Machado, Manuel Martín Jr., and Carmelita Tropicana, as well as these playwrights’ participation in three foundational Latine theater projects—​INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Laboratory in NewYork (1980–​1991), Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, CA (1986–​2004), and The Latino Theater Initiative at Center Theater Group’s Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (1992–​2005). She also studies theatrical projects of reconciliation among Cubans on and off the island in the early 2000s. Demonstrating the foundational nature of these artists and projects, the book argues that US Cuban theater problematizes both the exile and Cuban-American paradigms. By investigating US Cuban theater, the author theorizes via performance, ways in which we can intervene in and reformulate political and representational positionings within the context of hybrid cultural identities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Performance Studies, Transnational Latine Studies, Race and Gender Studies. Lillian Manzor is an associate professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami’s College of Arts and Sciences, Faculty lead for Latin American and Caribbean Research at the University of Miami Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas, USA, and founding director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-​edge, upper-​level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-​garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Live Visuals History, Theory and Practice Steve Gibson, Donna Leishmann, Stefan Arisona, Atau Tanaka The Celestial Dancers Manipuri Dance on Australian Stage Amit Sarwal Marginality Beyond Return US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s Lillian Manzor Staging Rebellion in the Musical, Hair Marginalised Voices in Musical Theatre Sarah Browne Shakespeare and Tourism Valerie Pye, Robert Ormsby Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance Hongwei Bao Rapa Nui Theatre Staging Indigenous Identities in Easter Island Moira S. Fortin Cornejo For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​ Routle​dge-​Advan​ces-​in-​Thea​tre-​-​Perf​orma​nce-​Stud​ies/​book-​ser​ies/​RATPS

Marginality Beyond Return US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s Lillian Manzor

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Lillian Manzor The right of Lillian Manzor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9781032138107 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032138718 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003231196 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003231196 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgments  Introduction / Introducción 

viii 1

1 Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”: Transculturation, Networks of Proximity, and US Cuban Theater 

22

2 Dos. “Momento renacentista”: US Cubans and Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway 

68

3 Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”: Gender, Ethnicity, Blackness, and Racism 

119

4 Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”: Carmelita Tropicana’s Performative Excess 

190

5 Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”: From Bridges to Greater Cuba 

239

Index 

295

Acknowledgments

This book started outside of Duo Theater in March 1990, after the premiere of Elías Miguel Muñoz’s L.A. Scene. In a post-​performance conversation with playwrights Pedro Monge Rafuls and Manuel Martín Jr., they asked me why my research only focused on narrative. They encouraged me to write about what I had seen, which I did and eventually published in Gestos. I owe this book to both. On the West Coast, I thank Juan Villegas, for giving me the opportunity to participate for several years in UC-​Irvine’s Organized Research Initiative on Hispanic Theaters. This initiative, along with the UC-​Irvine Humanities Research Institute, UC-​Irvine’s Focused Research Group on Woman and the Image, and Chicano/​Latino Studies (SCR 43), funded my earliest research on US Cuban and Latine theaters. I am most grateful to my Irvine colleague and mentor Jane Newman, for reading the first versions of some of these pages, along with the Irvine students who eventually became colleagues and friends: Karen Christian, Grace Dávila López, Carmela Ferradáns, Teresa Marrero, and Alejandro Yarza. I would also like to thank Rosa Ileana Boudet for her willingness to share her knowledge about Cuban theater, as well as her materials and her historical memory as a spectator. Last, but not least, I must acknowledge my carnala Alicia Arrizón, Norma Alarcón, and the many other Chicanas comadres with whom I experienced and from whom I learned embodied theory, practice, and praxis. I would not be who I am today if it were not for them. In New York, Iván Acosta continues to connect me with his theatrical networks, as Max Ferrá did while he was artistic director of INTAR. I have had the luxury to attend many performances with Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Nilo Cruz, Carmelita Tropicana, and Caridad Svich. I thank them for their beautiful and important plays and their insightful conversations in many cities in the United States throughout these years. Nilo and Caridad deserve a note of apology.Their important plays in the 1990s were originally part of this book, but I decided to include them in my next book project that will be dedicated solely to their work. A note of gratitude to Marlene Cancio Ramírez, Marcial Godoy-​ Anativia, and Diana Taylor from the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics who gave me the opportunity to meet countless performers from the Americas and allowed me to share my research throughout the HEMI’s Encuentros.

Acknowledgments  ix My move to Miami, a city in which I could not live in the 1980s and early 1990s, allowed me to get to know, collaborate, and become friends with numerous artists and producers who have culturally shaped Miami where I have been leaving since 1995. First and foremost, I would like to thank director Alberto Sarraín (many say he is my second husband) and producer Ever Chávez; both have been my partners in crime and have helped transform Miami’s theatrical landscape in Spanish. A special thanks to Beatriz J. Rizk whose generosity and knowledge of the New York, Miami, and Latin American theater scenes have enriched my way of viewing and writing about theater. Many artists have kindly shared their work and have included me in their difficult theatrical adventures throughout the years. They are the ones who have taught me not only what theater is but what it can be, regardless of the lack of financial support. These include Carlos Miguel Caballero, Micheline Calvert, Nilo Cruz, Eddy Díaz Souza, Juan David Ferrer, Sandra and Ernesto García, Alexa Kuve, Yvonne López Arenal, Lili Rentería, Mabel Roch, Teresa María Rojas, Mario Ernesto Sánchez, Javier Siut, Liliam Vega, Larry Villanueva, and many, many others. In La Habana, Matanzas, Camagüey, and Ciego de Ávila, many artists, friends, family members, and collaborators have shared their work and their homes during my visits, alone, or with my husband and videographer, Daniel Correa. Antón Arrufat, Mariela Brito, Raquel Carrió, Nelda Castillo, Carlos Celdrán and Manolo Garriga, Carlos Díaz, Norge Espinosa, Jennys Ferrer and Juan Germán Jones, Pedrito Franco, Eberto García Abreu, Jaime Gómez Triana, Abel González Melo, Maité Hernández-Lorenzo,Yohayna Hernández, Nieves Laferté, Julio Maitena, Vivian Martínez Tabares, Martica Minipunto, Raul Martín, Sahily Moreda, Odalys Moreno, Freddy Núñez, Ulises Rodríguez Febles, Omar Valiño, and many others have helped us navigate the contemporary Cuban theatrical scenes throughout these years. I would like to offer a special note of gratitude to Gisela González Cerdera who, despite the political divide, always facilitated my visits and my projects. We got to know each other folding and stapling hundreds of theater programs in Miami in 2001. She rolled her sleeves till the end and made sure our complicated theater projects could come to fruition. My cousins Selva and Sonia Díaz-​Duque (whom my mother loved as the sisters she never had), Manny, Roxanna and Luis Alberto Valdés, Leisy and Libet Alonso, Carlos Alberto Manzor and Chiqui Pérez, and Yamile Manzor gave up the comfort of their homes to host us innumerable times. ¡No tengo cómo agradecerles! The University of Miami has been my intellectual home for the last 25 years, and my colleagues have made me the scholar that I am today. Rebecca Biron and Michelle Warren became my first intellectual and personal friends in 1995. Since then, the publications of and conversations with Hugo Achugar, Susanna Allés-Torrent, Chrissy Arce, Christina Civantos, Steve Butterman,Tracy Devine Guzmán, Viviana Díaz Balsera, Ralph Heyndels, Elena Grau-Lleveria, Gema Pérez-Sánchez, Allison Schifani, Maria Galli Stampino, and Omar Vargas, each in their own way, have offered new insights to my research. Lilly Leyva has

x Acknowledgments helped me survive multiple administrative positions. I need to give countless special thanks to Logan Connors, Donette Francis, Andrew Lynch, Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel, and George Yudice who helped me finish this book. Their theoretical insights, readings, and happy hours sustained me in the middle of a pandemic. The informal conversations on bilingualism in Miami with Andrew and with Donette on race and American Studies bolstered many of my readings. Logan’s questions and French connections helped solidify my arguments. Regular dinners and check-​ins with both Yolanda and Logan sustained me during the last stages of revisions. Yolanda also invited me to the Caribbean Studies Writing Group where I workshopped a draft of Chapter 3; I thank Simone J. Alexander, Nadia Ellis, Kate Ramsey, and Patricia Saunders, as well as Lorgia García-​Peña, for their excellent comments and engagement with my research. Yolanda also connected me with Ricardo Bracho, whose work as a playwright I knew well. I particularly want to thank him for reading drafts of this manuscript and offering comments not only as an editor but, most importantly, as an engaged theater artist who appreciates many of the networks and artists I analyze. My undergraduate and graduate students have been a constant source of inspiration and learning. I thank them all, especially Francisca Aguiló Mora and Marelys Valencia who helped me to better understand performance through their focus on the phenomena of language use and language contact, and ideologies of language in Latine cultural production, respectively. Alexandra Gonzenbach and Ariel Gutiérrez attuned me to theories of space and theatrical mappings. Lilianne Lugo Herrera improved my readings of media and technology on stage. Dainerys Machado Vento’s analysis of the mediatization of novelists made me keenly aware of the importance of the mediatization of theater by the US press in Spanish and English. Ernesto Fundora’s theories of canon formation in Cuban theater offered me a different lens to approach US Cuban theater. I am also grateful for his close reading of the final manuscript draft and the index creation, as the impeccable editor that he is. Several institutions have funded my research and Digital Humanities publications generously, and I thank them for their support: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Puentes Cubanos (through the Ford Foundation), and Smithsonian Institution, Center for Folk Life, and Cultural Heritage (through the Rockefeller Foundation). The University of Miami has also supported my research through the Provost Office’s Max Orovitz Grant, Provost’s Research Award, and several General Research Support Awards; the Libraries’ Digital Library Fellowship; the College of Arts and Sciences Small Grant and several Research Grants; and the Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship. My archival research has been facilitated by many colleagues throughout the United States. First and foremost, I would like to thank Lesbia Orta Varona who started collecting theater programs in Miami in the early 1960s and always understood the importance of ephemera to research and heritage preservation.

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Acknowledgments  xi As a librarian at the University of Miami Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) and theater goer, she always helped me and was the perfect interlocutor for my research. Bill Walker, Dean of the Libraries, saw the importance of developing Digital Humanities, digital archives, and academic faculty and library faculty relationships, since his arrival at UM in 2003. I thank him and María Estorino for believing in the concept of a digital theater archive and supporting my research and development. A special note of gratitude goes to the current CHC staff for their continued support, especially since the onset of the pandemic. Elizabeth Cerejido and Gladys Gómez-​Rossié keep me abreast of theater collection development and pursued my leads. Amanda Moreno, Martin Tsang, Kate Villa, and Juan Antonio Villanueva have given me many hours of their time pulling boxes, scanning and digitizing materials, and tracking down misplaced items. I also thank Ozzie Rodriguez from La MaMa Archive in New York and Amanda Smith, Film Archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research where La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club video collection is housed. Danielle Nista and Jasmine Sykes-​Kunk from New York University Libraries Special Collections facilitated access to María Irene Fornés Papers. Roberto Ramos-​Perea unselfishly shared his knowledge and materials as well as ephemera from the Instituto Alejandro Tapia y Rivera. I very much appreciate their expertise, assistance, professionalism, and responsiveness; they are academia’s essential workers. I could not have found a better home for this book than Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. Laura Hussey, Editor of this series, and Swati Hindwan, Senior Editorial Assistant, guided this book to completion. I am indebted for their time, guidance, and suggestions. A small circle of close friends and family in the United States, Spain, and Chile have helped sustain the research and writing of this book in ways they will never know. Lourdes Manzor and Miguel Cruz; Rafael Alejandro, Carlos Manuel, and Sandra María Nodal; Ximena Valdivia and Charles González; Norberto Flores and Mónica Fuentes; Duvy Argandoña, Rodrigo Arrau, and their two boys Agustín and Nicolás; Reyes Caparrós; Eyda Merediz; Luis Pérez Tolón; and Diane Tritica—​they have accompanied me during difficult moments. And they have filled my live with laughter, fun, escapades to world cities and campgrounds, good food, wine, and love. Finally, my deepest gratitude to my two Danieles and Deandra Irizarry. Big Daniel has been my loving compañero on and off stage. Danielito’s laughter and intrepidness has kept me young. And Deandra’s friendship has accompanied us throughout.The three have put up with too many weekends of theater, months of festivals, and years of writing. I could not have done it without their patience, emotional support, and unconditional amor.

Introduction /​ Introducción

I remain as foreign behind this protective glass as I was that winter —​that unexpected weekend—​ when I first confronted Vermont’s snow. And still New York is my home. I am ferociously loyal to this acquired patria chica. Because of New York I am now a foreigner anywhere else [. . .] But New York wasn’t the city of my childhood, it was not here that I acquired my first convictions [. . .] This is why I will always remain on the margins, a stranger among the stones, even beneath the friendly sun of this summer’s day, just as I will remain forever a foreigner, even when I return to the city of my childhood I carry this marginality, immune to all turning back, too habanera to be newyorkina, too newyorkina to be —​even to become again—​ anything else. (Lourdes Casal, “For Ana Veldford”)

Lourdes Casal (1938–​1981), one of the first Cuban intellectuals exiled from Castro’s Revolution to return to Cuba, was also one of the first US Cubans who began to build bridges between the United States and Cuba. She was a psychology professor in the United States whose research (published in English) focused on Cuban immigration; she also transformed her Cuba-​mania into art by writing poetry and short stories in Spanish.1 Most importantly, she inspired a whole generation of young US Cubans as founding “mother” of the Antonio Maceo brigade in the United States in 1977 and urged them to do the same: to embark on a trip “home.”2 I write “home” in quotation marks because Casal, as a “hyphenated American,” knew very well the ambiguities of home as a concept. Indeed, the poem I have partially quoted here is characterized by a constant movement DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-1

2 Introduction between home-​ness and foreign-​ness, resulting in defamiliarization of both terms. The poem itself begins with the poetic voice, gendered female in Spanish, contemplating a familiar summertime scene from a bus window. This familiarity is immediately disrupted, however, by the poetic voice in the first verse of the section quoted above: “I remain as foreign . . . as I was that winter.” The movement from familiar to foreign reverts to the familiar in the verse that seems to situate New York unquestionably as home even as the poetic voice declares in an outpour of seeming nationalist fervor, she is “ferociously loyal to this acquired patria chica” (small fatherland). In Latin America, patria chica immediately recalls the expression used by Spaniards to refer to their region of origin as opposed to or in relation to Spain, the nation-​state. Latin Americans have long been accustomed to a citizen of Spain adhering to a sense of loyalty to his/​her patria chica because this relation is conceivable, topographically understandable; there is nothing anomalous about these regions being a part of Spain. In Casal’s poem, however, the construction of New York as the patria chica is more complex. Patria chica in relation to what patria? To the United States? To Cuba? The answer is, of course, neither. New York is constructed in and by the poem as a patria chica in relation to another patria chica, La Habana. The feeling of partially belonging to two patrias chicas thus results in the overarching sentiment of remaining “forever a foreigner” anywhere, as articulated by the poetic voice.3 The last verses of Casal’s poem seem to stabilize the back-​and-​forth movement between familiarity/​home-​ness and foreign-​ness. Yet, this doubling of the self, suggested in these last two verses, a self that is always already becoming, in process of subjectification, calls for a different theory of self-​formation. I take these last two verses, “too habanera to be newyorkina, /​too newyorkina to be /​—​even to become—​/​anything else,” to be emblematic of the processes of hybrid subjectification at work in “hyphenated Americans” in general, and in US Cuban identity in particular. Thus, Casal poetically envisioned the very image of the self which years later Gilles Deleuze, borrowing form Foucault, theorized in the image of the pli or the fold: The double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the different . . . it is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other. (1986, 98) Furthermore, in order to conceive topographically the relation between those two patrias chicas, New York and La Habana, we must, in similar Deleuzian fashion, abandon our traditional notions of space/​geography and resort to another kind of space, to a “topological space which establishes contact between the Outside and the Inside, the most distant, the most deep” (Deleuze 110).

Introduction  3 Casal’s doubleness of voice and self, her multiple projections, and rearticulation of self and other point toward still a further level on which the hybrid nature of the self is both bodily configured and discursively constructed. It should come as no surprise that the multiple folds of Casal’s experiential self reverberate in her poem as a lack of a sense of loyalty to any one nation or patria. She was born in Cuba in a mulatto middle-​class background and then moved to the United States; her “mix of African, Spanish and Chinese heritage epitomized the mosaic of Cuban culture” (Behar 407). She was lesbian although that did not stop her from building relations with Cubans on the island at a time when homosexuals were persecuted.4 As Leving Jacobson has pointed out,“her attention to questions of race permitted certain erasure of issues such as homophobia and censorship, taboo in Cuba’s political climate of the 1970s” (41). While this is not the place to discuss this absence in Casal’s scholarship, suffice it to say that I see it, like José Quiroga does, as strategic though problematic agency: Problematic, disturbing, difficult agency—​ silencing itself at specific moments, gaining for itself spaces of freedom in the microcontext, appealing to the outside world when the inside universe is terribly unjust, and at times at the center of the national scenario. (2014, 157) I believe that it was “theory in the flesh,” her lived experiences as a result of that mix, which prompted her as a social scientist and as an activist to research and fight for the Latine populations in New York, the struggle of African Americans, and the Cubans that belonged to the “untriumphant exodus” (Prince 11). As an activist and a public intellectual, she believed in the intellectual’s critical function, in their role to put everything into question. María Cristina Herrera and Leonel A. de la Cuesta in their introduction to Casal’s anthology underscore: the stubbornness with which she insists . . . in analyzing all aspects of a problem . . .; her resistance to being carried away by simplistic and Manichean formulas that always have the virtue of being the most convenient ones to main “peace and order” in society. (Casal, Itinerario 65)5 As such, she played an instrumental role in the foundation of the two most important “exile” magazines that helped to establish the first bridges to Cuba and formed a generation of US Cuban critical intellectuals: Nueva Generación in the 1960s and Areíto in the mid-​1970s.6 Furthermore, as Iraida López and Laura Lomas demonstrate, through all her writings, “her proto-​latinidad . . . anticipates the most recent anti-​establishment, feminist and /​or Afro-​Latino discourses” (López 66).7 My own self-​construction and scholarly formation echo that of Casal’s. I was also born in Cuba but into a middle-​class family that descended from

4 Introduction immigrants from Lebanon and the Canary Islands. Nine years after the Cuban Revolution, my family moved to Puerto Rico via Spain and then to the United States, to Miami-​Cuba (see Chapter 1). Like Casal, I eventually became a university professor and transformed my own “Cuba-​mania” into the stuff of my research endeavors. It was only after I left Miami that I discovered I was not racialized as white in the United States. Working in California with my Chicanas comadres, I assumed the identity of Latina, woman of color, and feminist. Like Lourdes Casal, I returned to Cuba in 1986 in search of “home” only to find that I, too, would never fully belong to only one “home.” To say that these experiences have shaped my life and influenced my research is an understatement. Most Latin Americans and Latines who, like Casal and myself, come from a long tradition of uprootedness conduct their lives trying to understand and work within processes related to hegemony and marginality, centers, and borders/​peripheries. Our own lives depend on how well we occupy the political and discursive position of others. Our identity, in turn, depends on how effectively we undertake social, intellectual, and artistic projects. The nodes in these networks are always shifting and allow us to function within reticulated processes of identity formation. The inclusion in this book of speaking “I” is an attempt to bring into theory and analysis the experiences that locate this hybrid first person singular and female. At the same time, their inclusion indicates their figuration, tropology, and performative construction. My “experiences” will sometimes take the form of anecdotes. As an anecdote, this experience has a referential hybrid-​ productive function. As Meaghan Morris has suggested, [anecdotes] are oriented futuristically towards the construction of a precise, local, and social discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a myse en abyme. That is to say, anecdotes for me are not expressions of personal experience, but allegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working. So anecdotes . . . must be functional in a given exchange. (7) In fact, the different experiential stories that appear throughout this book seek to create a discursive mise en abyme in order to resituate the theoretical in relation to specific social and political landscapes. Precisely as figured in and by discourses, then, the inclusion of my own speaking “I” may be read as part of a search for “a feminist enunciative position which could articulate a discursive space to speak from” (Probyn 11). Additionally, articulating this discursive space also provides insights that would not otherwise be available. Elspeth Probyn’s feminist re-​reading of both Foucault and Deleuze has allowed me to precisely theorize this “I” and its experiences within a theory of articulation that underscores not a sense of “belonging” but the historical and institutional conditions involved in its speaking (Probyn 28). These conditions, along with personal and collective relations, articulate with

Introduction  5 media and other elements, such that at a given moment we are temporarily situated in a world of becoming. Probyn’s project sprang from a suspicion of the “autobiographical turn” in cultural theory. This concern prompted her to study the concept of experience to try to articulate it with that of the self. To do so, she separated, for the purposes of analysis, two registers of experience: the ontological and the epistemological. The ontological level of experience corresponds to the immediate experiential self, a self that “testifies to the gendered, sexual and racial facticity of being in the social” (Probyn 16). Simultaneously, however, at the epistemological level, “experience is recognized as more obviously discursive and can be used overtly to politicize the ontological” (Probyn 16).The tension resulting from the pull between the epistemological and ontological is highly productive in so far as it keeps the experiential/​ontological self in check, so to say, by the discursive/​epistemological use of experience which “locate[s]‌and problematize[s] the conditions that articulate individuated experiences” (Probyn 16). Grada Kilomba and other Black feminist theorists have long underscored the importance of the personal as part of academic discourse and of the fact that we all write from a specific place. The difference is that as women of color, we write and theorize from the periphery and not from the center. As Kilomba has theorized, our stories are not just personal; they are also accounts of racism. Such experiences reveal the inadequacy of dominant scholarship in relating not only to marginalized subjects, but also to our experiences, discourses and theorizations. They mirror the historical, political, social and emotional realities of “race relations” within academic spaces and should therefore be articulated in both theory and methodology. (30) The present study of US Cuban theater and performance art was born out of the tensions between an individuated personal self and a discursive/​institutional one. They are tensions that to date remain undertheorized in the US Cuban context. As a US Cuban woman studying Latin American and Latine cultures in US academic circles, finding a space from which to articulate a feminist of color, cubana and Latina discursive position no es fácil (it’s not easy) on institutional and intellectual grounds. Latin American cultures have been not only marginal to the curricular and research needs of North American academia, but there has been a tendency to overlap Latine culture in the United States with Latin American cultures. Additionally, until the late 1990s, US Cuban culture remained marginal to Chicano/​Latino Studies given the critics’ preponderance to read it as a culture in exile rather than as a moment of US cultural production (see Chapter 1). Moreover, to focus on live theater and performance is to speak a theoretical language which, until the late 1990s, was practically foreign to many Latin American and Latine theater scholars who generally focused solely on the text as a literary document or artifact. Finally, to approach these

6 Introduction texts from a Latina feminist of color perspective means that I am theorizing from a place that is still peripheral to the centers of knowledge production. I use the term culture here in the way that Néstor García Canclini has theorized culture to refer to “the production of phenomena that contribute, through symbolic representation or re-​ elaboration of material structures, to understand, reproduce, or transform the social system, in other words, all practices and institutions involved in the administration, renewal, and restructuring of meaning” (Transforming 10). Culture, in this sense, is not only tied to the ideal realm, the realm of values, ideas, and beliefs, it is connected to technology and economy as well. Processes of expressive representation are produced by material structures and mechanisms of social reproduction. Thus, any analysis of culture, in general, must proceed intersectionally and must consider the conjunction of the symbolic and the material.8 Marginality examines a particular version of this intersection and thus provides a model for future conjunctural studies. Since Spanish is a gender-​inflected language, there are various terms used to refer to Latinos in the United States in order to use gender-​inclusive language, such as Latino/​a, Latin@, Latinx, and Latine. Processes of naming make visible a historical revision that is not only genealogical but also account for the changes in what is named and in what one wants to make seen. Creating names (and the way to create them) is to bring to the scene certain controversies; in my case, it is the concern to create a gender-​neutral term with the potential for “grammaticality” that Spanish gives (ending in a vowel is totally possible in Spanish). Thus, I have opted to use Latine over the others because I want to intervene in the US academy with a gender-​neutral Spanish term that affords easiness of pronunciation; this is indeed the nomenclature commonly used in Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this book, Latino refers to the historically specific way in which the term was used in the 1990s and Latina highlights women who self-​identify as such. Latinx is reserved to refer to artists or communities who are trans or gender nonconforming in the way that the term is deployed currently in this post-​gender here and now.9 Cuban-​American literary production entered the Latine Studies canon in the late 1980s and has garnered critical attention since then. Despite its many contributions, book-​length studies about Cuban-​American literature are few when compared to Chicano Studies, Nuyorican Studies, and Latine Studies at large. Theater, with rare exceptions, is usually not included in these analyses, although it was one of the first art form of Cubans in both Miami and New York and, arguably, the one closest to post-​1959 early exile communities. Marginality is the first critical book dedicated solely to US Cuban theatrical production thus remedying the lack of scholarly attention to such an important corpus of theater and performances. I have created an ensemble of selected plays, companies, and theater artists that I consider foundational to US Cuban theater. Some, like Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, María Irene Fornés, Eduardo Machado, Repertorio Español, and Carmelita Tropicana, are well known in Latine theater circles; others like Magali Alabau, La Má’ Teodora, Manuel Martín Jr., and

Introduction  7 Alberto Sarraín are less so. Methodologically, I conduct a historiography of the two decades in which the plays were written and/​or produced: the decade of “the Hispanic” (1980s) and the decade of “the Latino” (1990s). I analyze archival materials related to the artists’ theater-​making practice and reconstruct the performances by reading not only the playscripts but also photographs, stage and costume designs, musical scores, documentary videos, theater reviews, my own notes, interviews with the artists, and other archival ephemera. The main argument of this book is that the concepts of exile, national identification, ethnicity, diaspora, and transnationalism are all insufficient to address US Cuban identity and performances. Furthermore, I contend that, studied as an ensemble, US Cuban theater and performance call into question foundational literary and sociological studies of Cuban-Americans as well as the historiographical teleology of both Cuban-​American and Latine theaters. It proposes that this theatrical ensemble, contrary to other forms of Cuban-​American cultural production, performs a concept of identity-​in-​difference that is hybrid and chaotic and that challenges and exceeds Cuban—​on and off the island—​Latine, and US norms. US Cuban theater, el teatro usano-​cubano,10 is one of three different modalities that coexist temporally and spatially within the theater and performance of Cuban diaspora: vernacular theater or teatro bufo, exile theater, and US Cuban theater. Vernacular theater is staged primarily in Miami. Characterized by its use of political satire and parody, it comes from the Cuban bufo or vernacular tradition. Exile theater, as Escarpanter and others have studied, consists of playwrights who come from different generations. The first one—​the split generation—​includes playwrights who were born mostly around the 1930s or before.11 Most of them were famous playwrights in Cuba or were part of the theatrical movements there. They continue to write mainly in Spanish, in the same style that they wrote in Cuba. The second one—​the transterritorialized generation (escindida y trasterrada)—​is composed of playwrights who were born around 1940s and left Cuba when they were very young or as adolescents, such as José Abreu Felippe (1947), Iván Acosta (1943), René Alomá (1947–​ 1986), René Ariza (1940–​1994), Miguel González Pando (1942–​1998), Pedro Monge Rafuls (1943), Luis de la Paz (1956), and Héctor Santiago (1944). Besides these two generations studied by Escarpanter, I add a third one that I call revolutionary exiles. It is made up of playwrights, actors, and directors who left Cuba after 1989 and who belong to the so-​called “velvet exile.” Many of them were born during the Revolution, were educated at the Instituto Superior de Arte and other art schools, and were protagonists of the stage renewal of the late 1980s and 1990s in Cuba. Most of them also worked with professional theater groups in Cuba. Common traits of their productions are the use of strong corporeal language, anti-​realist directing and acting techniques, and a strong collective process of research and dramaturgy. Examples of these are Liliam Vega’s staging of Lila la mariposa with Teatro Avante; the stagings of Yvonne López Arenal in Los Angeles first, and then in Miami with Akuara Teatro; the work of Alberto Sarraín with La Má’ Teodora; performances of Teatro Obstáculo with

8 Introduction Víctor Varela and Bárbara Barrientos; Eddy Díaz Souza’s work as playwright and director; and the performance multimedia work of Leandro Soto.12 US Cuban theater, as this book demonstrates, comprises a wide variety of plays, written in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, published and unpublished, staged and unproduced, in Miami as well as in other cities, mainly New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. I became interested in US Cuban theater outside of the Miami area because it is a moment of cultural production that, like Casal’s poem, problematizes both the exile and Cuban-​ American paradigms. Those who advocate an understanding of Cuban identity as an exile mentality, unlike the identity of other Latines who immigrate for supposedly economic reasons, argue that this identity is characterized by a refusal to become part of the “American” immigrant history. The exile persists in seeing him/​herself unproblematically as Cuban. The Cuban-​American, on the other hand, is generally characterized by means of an assimilationist rhetoric. As a supporter of American middle-​class values, the Cuban-​American sees him/​herself as part of the melting pot which constitutes contemporary US culture (see Chapter 1). In contrast to both paradigms, the plays I analyze here propose a hybrid and intersectional model of identity, as hybrid as Casal’s and my own, which refutes simple and exclusive identification with either the culture of origin or “American” culture (see Chapter 1).They thus offer the possibility of reconfiguring in and as performance a collective Latine identity which takes into consideration issues of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, linguistic stratification, national identity, and ideological stances. This identity challenges and exceeds both Cuban and US norms. By investigating US Cuban theater, then, I theorize, via performance, ways in which we can intervene in and reformulate political and representational positioning within the context of hybrid cultural identities. Furthermore, I argue that US Cuban theater offers models to preview and predict alternative opportunities and experiences of Cubanity in the future. The time frame of the performances included in this study spans the mid-​ 1980s through the early 2000s. This specificity is crucial. These years were characterized by a highly contentious discussion about the role of the arts in the United States. It coincides with the so-​called “Latino Boom” as well as with the “obscenity-​censorship” controversy in the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the need “to go multicultural” by many theatrical institutions. It is also the period of three foundational projects in Latine theater which will be discussed throughout the book: María Irene Fornés’ direction of INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-​ in-​ Residence Laboratory in New York (1980–​ 1991), Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, CA (1986–​2004), and the Latino Theater Initiative at Center Theater Group’s Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (1992–​2005). The selection of plays that were produced during this period depended upon political, economic, and social factors as much as, if not more than, the “quality” of the plays themselves. As Teresa Marrero has argued, “[r]‌epertory and commercial theaters [as well as

Introduction  9 non-​commercial ones] walk the fine line between established hegemonic artistic taste (standards) and economic viability” (151).Thus, my choice of focusing on plays produced precisely during this period must consider the political, economic, and social spheres of both “mainstream” theatrical institutions and of “marginal” ones. Both depended upon grants from the NEA, as well as from private and corporate donors. Since many of these plays were not produced, some might argue that the sample is not representative and the choices are limited. I partly agree. However, the focus of Marginality is on texts that entered public discourse via commissions, developmental staged reading, workshop productions, world premieres, and translations.13 As I have previously demonstrated (Manzor 2017), Latine theater historiographical teleology, based primarily on the Chicano theater movement, has three identifiable periods. The 1960s through the 1970s is the period of community-​ based theaters, which amid sociopolitical upheavals, existed outside of major funding agencies. The 1980s and 1990s correspond to a period of professionalization, when playwrights, that is, individuals, became more important than collectives. Some have argued that theater began to “sell out” to mainstream audiences in part due to funding from the NEA, the Ford Foundation, and other institutions. As a result, Latine theater became less “nationalistic” by the 1990s (Rossini 2008 and Rossini and Ybarra 2012). The beginning of the 21st century marks, finally, a period of “Latine arrival,” as exemplified by Nilo Cruz’s, Quiara Alegría Hudes’, and Lin-​Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer Prizes, granted in 2003, 2012, and 2016, respectively. I have addressed the factual and historical inexactitudes of this periodization elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is important to underscore that the US Cuban theatrical productions I analyze were staged precisely during that second period of professionalization of Latine theater. Moreover, all the playwrights studied here have become important Latine theater representatives on contemporary US stages. However, their early work, which is the focus of this book, has gone largely understudied because of a lack of accessibility to research materials. When I started working on this book, few of the playwrights or plays I study in Marginality had been published. In terms of Latine theater, only a handful of New York-​and California-​based playwrights were in print. I started collecting materials from playwrights and discovered a treasure of unpublished and unproduced plays. My move from UC-​Irvine to the University of Miami allowed me to make this material available to a wider audience. In collaboration with the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Richter Library, I started to develop an archive for this important theatrical corpus. Originally conceived as the Cuban/​Latino Digital Theater Archive, I eventually designed the Cuban Theater Digital Archive (CTDA) to host these materials online and make them accessible to a wider audience. Working at the intersection of humanities and digital media, the CTDA’s purpose is threefold: it is a resource for teaching, learning, and research in Cuban and US Cuban theater and performance, as well as in related fields; a digital repository for important US Cuban theatrical materials as well as Cuban materials little known outside

10 Introduction the island; and a forum to foster scholarly communication in this field. CTDA has a special focus on theater produced by Cuban and US Cuban artists in the United States. For some time, I abandoned this manuscript and focused my labor on CTDA’s development. As I have studied elsewhere (Manzor, Rymkus, and Ogihara 2013), researchers know that the fleeting nature of performance transforms research for historians and scholars of theater as live-​art performance into a search. Patrice Pavis has suggested that theater research is, indeed, a search for a lost object: a non-​locatable and inaccessible representation (1998, 4). Any writing/​research on theater is partly a search for documentation that serves as a trace of that non-​repeatable performance. Documents for theater re/​search are composed of the researchers’ own notes of the spectacular text (representation) and published or unpublished texts. Other important elements are photographs, video recordings, sketches for costumes and stage design, program notes, directors’ notebooks, newspaper clippings, social media posts, and oral histories with audience memories. These ephemera are traces of the live representation, the missing object of the re/​search, and, as José Esteban Muñoz has argued, they are a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things [that] maintain . . . experiential politics and urgencies long after those experiences have been lived. (1996, 10) US Cuban and Latine theater artists, cultural institutions, and theater companies now recognize the need to create archives of their work. Documentation on US Cuban theater existed, but it was scattered in different personal collections until the creation of CTDA with the concurrent development of theater collections at the Cuban Heritage Collection. Limited resources were available at different institutions. However, the drive for many institutions traditionally has been to collect. With limited budgets, theater collections usually do not have finding aids and other organizational elements that accompany full processing, serve research, and provide the infrastructure necessary for digitization projects and broader access. Only in rare circumstances is there collaboration between librarians, archivists, theater faculty, and artists in the processing of theater collections.14 There is an ongoing need for the continued collaboration among four fundamental “actors” or cultural workers in the production of knowledge from within, for, and about US Cuban and Latine theaters: the artist/​researcher, the researcher/​artist, the artist and researcher working together, and the participating researcher (not an artist) who produces knowledge based on the theatrical event itself (Dubatti 2014).15 The US Cuban plays I discuss are the products, then, of multiple intersecting factors. They re-​enact this multiplicity by staging processes of subjectification,

Introduction  11 of a hybrid self-​in-​progress or a subject-​in-​process, along a fluid model of “identity-​in-​difference” as developed by Norma Alarcón and other feminists of color, as a result of networks of proximity. This kind of subjectivity has been theorized most eloquently by Trinh T. Minh-​ha in what she calls a “not you/​like you” model.Trying to go beyond the ways in which both identity and difference are constructed in terms of essence (374), Trinh develops the subject position of what she calls “inappropriate other or same” who, “undercutting the inside/​ outside opposition . . . moves about with at least two gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her difference, and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at” (375). The mechanisms that construct a subject which is “Cubano/​a, Latino/​a, American” like you but different are precisely those of hybrid “identity-​in-​difference.”This hybrid subjectivity constantly underlines a “self-​conscious flexibility of identity,” as Chela Sandoval has called it, which “allows us no single conceptualization of our position in society” (67). This flexibility of identity, like Deleuze’s image of the fold in which self and other constantly double each other, in turn, allows one to move beyond the category of otherness as an absolute difference from the self. US Cuban identities are precisely the locus where the self/​other, inside/​outside oppositions are undercut. Constantly reaffirming a “not you” and “like you” gesture allows us to locate points of “identity-​in-​difference,” that is, points of identities in the present that, as Norma Alarcón has suggested, allow us “to forge the needed solidarities against repression and oppression” (102) but which are not reductively assumed always to be the same.16 In the plays and performances I study, hybridity also characterizes individual and collective identities at the level of plot, character construction, and the spectacular text, thus figuring in their formal mechanisms their hybrid situations and consciousness. It is also deployed in these playwrights’ and directors’ notions of art, invention, and construction.The trope of hybridity captures both the sense of deterritorialization which I have been addressing and underlines the need to continue with a project of invention and reinvention of the self. As I theorize in Chapter 1 and demonstrate throughout, this reinvention or reterritorialization of the political and cultural self is not based on a static concept of a national identity or culture in opposition to or separate from an “other” culture. On the contrary, it examines the possibilities of decentering both cultures through the insertion of the “other” into the national political body. The national political body, in this case, is multiple: a dispersed and still dispersing Cuba, a hegemonic United States, and the emergent Latine. The title, Marginality Beyond Return, points toward this “identity-​in-​difference” as it captures the “at-​oddness,” the “in-​between” position which Casal captured poetically in her verses, which, in turn, embody for me the predicament of Cuban cultural identity in the United States. US Cubans carry within ourselves a marginality that makes us too Cuban to be “American,” yet also too “American” to be anything else. This is, indeed, a marginality immune to all return to our Cubas or to our Americas, immune to static processes of gender, sexual, ethnic, or national identification along essentialist lines.

12 Introduction I must clarify the use of a key term before proceeding: US Cuban, as opposed to Cuban-​American. As can be expected, part of the problem lies in the word to the right of the hyphen.17 This word, as Gómez Peña has pointed out, refers to “this troubled continent accidentally called America” and “this troubled country mistakenly called America” (1989, 20). I have argued elsewhere that I reject the usage of the term “Cuban-​American” because, in its inherent redundancy, it reproduces the cultural and political ideologies which have characterized the last two centuries of history in North and South America (see Manzor-​Coats 1991). In the 19th century, the independence of the Spanish colonies created a need for Europe to name and contrast that part of the two Americas that was not Anglo-​Saxon. Thus, all of us became Latin Americans and were forced to produce a literature and a culture to prove that we indeed were Latin Americans.18 This political and semantic move is not very different from the amalgamation and lumping together of Mexicans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans, US Cubans, and other South and Central American “legal” and “illegal aliens” (undocumented migrants) under the term “Hispanic” enacted during the Reagan administration.19 In the 20th century, not only was Cuba, along with the rest of Latin America, transformed politically and economically into the backyard of the United States, the United States also subsumed linguistically the other Americas with the demonym American. In other words, the use of America as synonymous with the United States constitutes a rhetorical obliteration of “our America” which mirrors performatively its economic and political leveling. As sociolinguist Jonathan Rosa has underscored, [t]‌ he possessive “America’s,” which invokes a territorial mandate in place since at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that claimed US neocolonial ownership of the Americas, must be distinguished from the plural Americas, which simultaneously invokes a foreclosed geopolitical order and a haunting of US sovereignty. These chronotopic figurations become highly consequential through their capacity to constitute the terms of legibility and legitimacy of particular identities and populations in particular times and places. (14) By using US Cuban, I do not want to erase the violence inscribed in the hyphen of Cuban-​American. As we construct a sense of self, we constantly straddle the hyphen which linguistically creates a non-​existing equivalence between the terms on either side. Thus, we simultaneously have to unveil the imperial fiction to the right of the hyphen as well as underline the heterogeneity and multiplicity which is not necessarily invoked by the term to the left. Eliminating the hyphen also underlines the need to re-​map and reconfigure the boundaries of US culture(s), both inside and outside academia, as well as the boundaries of Cuban culture(s) themselves. In other words, there is a need to re-​map the internal and external geographies of “our Americas”

Introduction  13 so that we may find a space and a place for these cultural “hyphenates” or hybrid subjects. My analyses focus on the performative aspect of theater, that is, on the transformations from its written version to the staged, spectacular one.The genres of live theater and performance art (as opposed to scripts or drama) embody and figure precisely the places where the intersections between “live bodies” and cultural construction become visible and thus can be studied. As a performance, as a live process in relation to reception, theater presents a unique way to discuss questions of identity and identity formation as well as identity in relation to a given aesthetic or social project. My primary texts are mainly performances and my reading of them takes “the performative” as a critical and theoretical tool (see Chapter 1). In choosing theater and performance as my “primary texts” of cultural analysis, I am not suggesting a one-​to-​one correspondence between theater and the hybrid subject or between theater and social change, between representation and the real. Theater appropriates mechanisms of cultural mediation which go beyond the stage. The transformation of Afro-​Cuban and Afro-​Caribbean religious imagery and the re-​enactment of internal racism between different Latine communities (Chapter 3), or the desire to address the need for reconciliation (Chapter 5), for example, are all part and parcel of the “real” in the Latine social ensemble as well as the representation of that real in US Cuban theater ensemble. I use ensemble in three different but interconnected ways.The first use is related to the theatrical definition of ensemble, namely, the group of creators involved in a theatrical production, from playwright, directors, and actors to scenographers, choreographers, and designers. Second, an ensemble allows me to bring together a set of productions and to discuss them as a theatrical repertoire. Third, and most importantly, I adapt Randy Martin’s concept of ensemble and deploy it in ways theoretically similar to the contemporary use of assemblage, that is, theories of social structure adapted to theatrical production, consumption, and dissemination, including the physical spaces, locations, and networks of artists and critics important to the analysis of theatrical production, reception, and critical analysis. While Diana Taylor’s theorizations of the archive and the repertoire inform my analyses, I privilege Martin’s use of ensemble because he developed it during the time frame of my analyses, a decade before Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society:Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Although Martin’s focus was socialist ensembles in Cuba and Nicaragua, it allows me to decode the entanglement of public and private actors related to theatrical productions in various sociohistorical settings. Theater, however, is a cultural production that displays its own organizational ensemble as a style of metarepresentation, as a representation about representation. If indeed, as Butler points out, “the real is positioned both before and after its representation; and representation becomes a moment of the reproduction and consolidation of the real” (1990b, 106), then live performance, as I have stated previously, must be seen as metarepresentation. For metarepresentation, as a device, allows us to see and read how representation functions both within theater and within a sociohistorical context. Theater, then, provides the space for “seeing” processes of social change.

14 Introduction And talking about theater provides us the space to address those processes in a keenly theoretical fashion.20 The audience is conceptually central to any study of live theater. Each performance generates an audience “as a momentarily gathered collectivity” (Martin 27). A performance, like any text, creates a space for an implied audience. And yet, the “real” audience as a gathered collectivity and the implied audience do not always coincide. Throughout the readings, I have tried to decode that audience by underscoring the performances’ double function. On the one hand, I have studied the observational/​participational role of a “real” audience in relation to specific performance as a textualized performance in and of itself (see, for example, the discussion in Chapter 4 of the Anglo lesbian audience and the straight Latina audience in Tropicana’s performances). On the other hand, I have also theorized the audience as an “unstable absent presence” (see Martin, Blau 1990) by reading into the spaces implied for it in the various texts (for example, in the discussion of audience and language in Chapter 1). Thus, I am not only interested in theorizing how certain audiences read specific texts but also in describing the relations of that audience within social structures and how those structures have shaped and situated my own position as a seeing and speaking critic. My analysis of live performance also inserts theater into the broader context of other mediascapes and reads theory in relation to other ideoscapes, mainly that of popular music. Music is deployed as an integral part of most of the performances. The titles and starting point of most of my chapters are also borrowed from popular music because for Cubans and Latines in the United States, popular music functions as one of many cultural markers of Cuban or Latine consciousness. It thus becomes a medium of “symbolic cultural communication” (Padilla 44). It is also used to embody, in a performative sense, specific sociohistorical realities. As José Esteban Muñoz has suggested, music drafts “an affective schematic particular to the emotional emergence and becoming of a citizen-​subject who will not ‘feel’ American in the way in which the protocols of official affective citizenship demand” (2000, 78). In this sense, Alexandra Vázquez’s theoretical construct of “listening in detail” has enriched my reading of the use of music in these plays and it is foundational to the ways in which I analyze the entanglements of music, race, and culture. Marginality Beyond Return, then, is the study of contemporary US Cuban theatrical production as a performance of the multiple “in-​betweens” of identity-​ in-​difference. These multiple “in-​betweens” produce “inappropriate others” whose subjectivities fail to conform to the US and Cuban norms of cultural intelligibility and thus challenge the coherence of those norms (see Chapter 1). While most of these “in-​betweens” are at work at the same time—​Cuban versus US norms of masculinity and femininity, of whiteness and Blackness, of heteronormativity and queerness—​I will address them separately, for the sake of analysis, in individual chapters. As hybrid performances, the travels through these “in-​ betweens” in the productions studied question the very norms which restrict and guide the production of “inappropriate/​d others.” The first

Introduction  15 chapter, “Uno. ‘Mister Don’t Touch the Banana’: Transculturation, Networks of Proximity, and US Cuban Theater,” presents an introduction to the history and cultural production of Cubans in the United States. The chapter presents a different/critical chronology of Cuban migration to the United States, primarily to Miami. Although Miami as a city and site for US Cuban theater projects did not figure prominently during the 1980s and 1990s, Miami exile culture haunts some of the artists studied and, in the 21st century, Miami becomes the site for these artists’ transnational connections with Cuban theater on the island (Chapter 5). Informed by Cold War history, it presents and critiques the Cuban success narrative and debunks the exceptionalism of this narrative. It continues with an analysis of anthropological theories of transculturation contrasting it to the ways in which multiculturalism was deployed in the United States during “the decade of the Hispanic” in the 1980s and “the decade of the Latino” in the 1990s. It is within these cultural and academic debates that the US Cuban playwrights studied in this book started to develop their work and that regional and community theaters began to produce them. The playwrights and productions studied entered the mainstream as Latino artists but their work, like that of other Latino writers during the 1980s and 1990s, performed critical multiculturalism that worked against the homogenizing and commodifying tendencies of the period. The productions performed a critique of Cuban and American exceptionalism present at the time in Cuban and Cuban-​American Studies and American Studies, respectively. The chapter ends by theorizing US Cuban identity as hybrid and chaotic. It borrows from cultural studies’ appropriation of scientific theories of chaos and fractals as well as network theory. It reviews and critiques the literature that uses static approaches to identity formation while it redeploys both the “exile” and “ethnic” categories outside of essentialist and nationalist paradigms. Chapter 2, “Dos. ‘Momento renacentista’: US Cubans and Latine-​Off-​Off Broadway,” focuses on the role US Cubans and Puerto Ricans played in Off-​ Off-​Broadway. This chapter grounds the book historically and places the artists I consider foundational to US Cuban theater—​Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Eduardo Machado, and Carmelita Tropicana—​in relation to María Irene Fornés and the 1960s and 1970s productions that set a precedent for their work. I analyze the work of María Irene Fornés and two US Cuban theater artists whose involvement in the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement has gone largely unnoticed: Magali Alabau, Manuel Martín Jr. Although Fornés is seen as a progenitor of the Off-​ Off-​Broadway movement, no one has analyzed her first play, La viuda. I present how the processes of hybridity and transculturation studied in the previous chapter were at work in their theatrical productions. Furthermore, I demonstrate how their retooling of themes and aesthetics coming from non-​US traditions, namely Latin American and European avant-​garde theaters, were key to their theatrical processes. However, it was that very aesthetics and the use of Spanish language that remained unreadable to English-​language theatre critics who pushed their work away from Off-​Off-​Broadway to the then nascent Spanish or Hispanic theater. I begin the chapter with an analysis of María

16 Introduction Irene Fornés’ La viuda (The Widow). I analyze La viuda relating it to other works from Fornés’ Off-​Off-​Broadway period, namely, Tango Palace and Promenade, to prove that La viuda already contains many of the theatrical techniques and language used by Fornés in her later work. I suggest that this play’s lack of critical attention is representative of the marginalization of Spanish-​language plays in that period. The second half of the chapter is devoted to Manuel Martín Jr.’s early work as actor, director, and playwright to demonstrate how he, alongside actress Magali Alabau, latinized Off-​Off-​Broadway. The main objectives of this chapter are to bring back three key US Cuban theater artists, to put them into dialogue within the networks of their Puerto Rican and Anglo Off-​Off-​ Broadway contemporaries—​Roberto Rodríguez Suárez, Tom Eyen, Leonard Melfi, Candy Darling, and Ellen Stewart—​and to demonstrate how they shaped what I term Latine Off-Off-Broadway. Although these experimental theater pieces might not relate directly to Latine identity politics nor are they solely part of Latine community-​based activism, I argue that it is the haunting of ghosts from the past that endow these early works with an undeniable Cubanity, in José Esteban Muñoz’s use of the term.21 Because that Cubanity was performed from a Cuban/​Latin American perspective, the plays remained unreadable as Off-​Off-​Broadway plays. Chapter 3, “Tres. ‘¡Ay mama Inés!’: Gender, Ethnicity, Blackness, and Racism,” analyzes how US Cuban theater has practically overlooked the racial underpinnings of national identity constructs in Cuba. It begins with a reading of Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rita and Bessie in New York, one of two plays that addresses intersectionally ethnicity, race, and sexuality. I theorize the staging of transcultural processes of subject formation against the backdrop of a dominant culture’s persistent racialization and “objectification.” Focusing on the intersections, the “in-​betweens” of gender and Blackness in Cuba and the United States, of differing models of femininity along class, racial, and national boundaries, and of sexuality, I explore how configurations of identity as “identity-​in-​difference” are constructed and represented in and through this performance. I end the chapter with Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata in San Francisco. The play presents a critique of Cuban-​American’s de-​racial imagining as it stages the transcultural experiences of younger US Cubans who have lived with other racialized Latines. Affects and memory are crucial to the construction of character in this play and of the audience as a social body. Focusing on the development of these characters on stage, on their affective relationships, and on the networks of Latine artists within which this play was developed, I argue that this play artfully and performatively constructs a politics of memory based on a contrapuntal articulation of affect, race, and desire that allow us to imagine very different Cuban and Usonian futures. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the heretofore unrecognized pioneering gestures of US Cuban theater in both American and Cuban Studies. In 1988, when Rita and Bessie was produced, scholarship about the queer divas of the Blues and the queering of the Harlem Renaissance was nascent. Manuel Martín Jr. participated in that early recuperation of Black women artists to underscore

Introduction  17 their independence, including freedom in the realm of sexuality. Furthermore, these plays’ staging of racialized constructions of Blacks and of the performative markers of Blackness in Cuba and US Cuba antedate academic scholarship on this issue. Thus, this chapter underscores the primacy of performance over academic theorization on these topics. Chapter 4, “Cuatro. ‘La vida en rosa’: Carmelita Tropicana’s Performative Excess,” focuses specifically on US Cuban performance art. It looks at how the body is used in feminist performance as both means and repository of a split historical and personal memory of the US Cuban woman. The chapter begins with an analysis of the construction of Carmelita Tropicana’s performing persona through theories of tropicalization. I then read Memorias de la Revolución / Memories of the Revolution (1986) focusing on the use of humor or choteo,“ethnic camp” or picuencia, and gestic moments. Picuencia in its Cuban version consists of a scandalous mixture of objects and forms which are utilized as cultural signs; it is synonymous with bad taste—​bad taste, of course, in relation to Eurocentric aesthetic codes. I analyze how the gestic moments in the performance inscribe a racialized sexual fantasy within a lesbian dynamic of desire. By studying the play’s critical reception, I argue that to read the complexity and ambiguity of these gestic moments, we need to address the entanglements of sexuality, racialization processes, and geopolitics. The play de-​essentialized and racialized the “lesbian spectatorial community” before critical writings on the subject.The second half of the chapter focuses on With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? /​ ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la cucaracha? (2004). This one-​woman play rewrites the Spanish folktale of La Cucarachita Martina, the cockroach that eventually marries the mouse Pérez, and uses as a backdrop the Elián González international conflict (1999–​2000) and Cuban exile politics. Tropicana performs a whole array of animals, parodies hardline political positions in Cuba and in Miami, and highlights the importance of affective relationships. My reading of this queer political fable and of the queer cabaret Memorias interconnects the arguments that have been presented separately in the previous chapters focusing on the intersections of gender and ethnicity, of sexuality and national identity, and of sexuality and geopolitics in specific New York spaces, places, and times. Moreover, it situates those performances historically and artistically as precursors of the cross-​Cuban performances discussed in the last chapter. Chapter 5, “Cinco. ‘Todos por lo mismo’: From Bridges to Greater Cuba,” looks at the ways in which Cuban and US Cuban theaters form part of and respond to a plurality emanating from sociohistorical displacement and cultural discontinuities. I analyze several festivals and plays, including Repertorio Español’s production of Eduardo Machado’s Revoltillo in Miami and Cuba—​the first US Cuban production performed on the island—​the First International Monologue/​ Performance Festival which brought to Miami twenty-​seven theater artists residing on the island, and Alberto Sarraín’s Miami-La Habana coproduction of Abelardo Estorino’s Parece blanca in Cuba. By studying plays across the spectrum of Cuban diaspora theater (exile and US Cuban theaters), I offer models to study Cuban theater produced on and off the island as a product of cultural dispersion.

18 Introduction The staged encounters in this last chapter, however, move the discussion of the “national” and the “ethnic” in Cuba and the United States to a transnational perspective. I suggest the need to study Cuban theater on and off the island as a product of and within this cultural dispersion.This chapter closes the book with a reading which performatively operates as an intellectual and discursive encounter between our dramaturgies. It also engages Transnational Latine Studies as it argues for a theater of Greater Cuba, a non-​geographical cultural space that moves us away from the traditional island/​exile dichotomy. In this future-​focused chapter, I demonstrate the power of theater and performance over diplomacy and political science and explore how theater offers a productive and innovative take on where US-​Cuba relations could go in the future.

Notes 1 See Casal, El caso, Cuban, Palabras; Herrera and de la Cuesta; López; and Prohías and Casal 1974. 2 For an analysis of the Antonio Maceo brigade see Behar; Casal, “Ganar”; Jesús Díaz and Pérez-​Tolón. 3 De-​Costa Willis’ reading of the poem underscores Cuba as la patria: “the geographic space and symbolic place of her identity is Cuba” (200). 4 For a reading of this poem as “Casal’s most daring inscription of lesbian desire in her literary production,” see Negrón-​Muntaner and Martínez-​San Miguel. 5 “la testarudez con que insiste . . . en analizar todos los aspectos de un problema . . .; su resistencia a dejarse llevar por fórmulas simplistas y maniqueas, que siempre tienen la virtud de ser las más convenientes para mantener “la paz y el orden” en la sociedad.” 6 For an analysis of the importance of Areíto, although he does not mention Lourdes Casal, see de la Campa 81–​94. All translations in this book are my own, unless otherwise noted. 7 “proto-​latinidad . . . se adelanta al discurso contestatario, feminista y/​o afrolatino de más reciente factura.” See also Lomas. 8 Stuart Hall, on the other hand, has also theorized culture to mean both “the actual, grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages and customs of any specific historical society” and “the contradictory forms of ‘common sense’ which have taken root and helped to shape popular life” (26). García Canclini’s conceptualization of culture goes beyond Hall’s formulation in so far as it also accounts for the conscious politicization of culture based on the strategic use of cultural symbols by a specific group. In this sense, García Canclini’s approach is similar to what David Laitin in Hegemony and Culture calls the two faces of culture. 9 I thank Ricardo Braccho and Elena Grau Lleveria for this formulation. 10 Usano is a Spanish variation of Usonian, a term used by William Nericcio to playfully refer to citizens of the United States. It is also a linguistic play on the word gusano (worm), a pejorative term used in Cuba to refer to Cuban exiles. 11 Some of these playwrights are Luis A. Baralt (1892–​1969), José Cid Pérez (1906–​ 1994), Raúl de Cárdenas (1938), Eduardo Manet (1930), Mario Martín (1934–​ 2016), Julio Matas (1931–​2015), Matías Montes Huidobro (1931–2022), Marcelo Salinas (1889–​1976), and José Triana (1931–​2018). 12 For more information, see Escarpanter; Manzor, “Más allá,” Sánchez-​Grey Alba, and Cuban Theater Digital Archive. There is also a more recent generation of artists who

Introduction  19 left Cuba in the new millennium and whom we could call novísimos, as they tend to be known in Cuba. However, these artists are not part of this study. 13 The questions of what plays never make it to the stage and why not are extremely important, but they lie within the confines of another project. For an excellent analysis of this situation in Southern California see Marrero. 14 I have elaborated on all of these points in Manzor, “Archiving” and Manzor et al. 15 However, this important engaged scholarship tends to go largely unnoticed within US academia and rarely is taken into account in tenure and promotion cases. 16 These theoretical constructs will be discussed further in Chapter 1. 17 My analysis of the use of the hyphen is completely different from Pérez Firmat. I address my disagreement with his “Cuban-​American way” in Chapter 3. 18 The literature on Latin American identity is extensive; suffice it to mention Ardao, Campra. As a matter of fact, the literature on the Quinto Centenario demonstrated that Latin Americans were still pondering over issues of identity. See, for example, Nuestra América. 19 This amalgamation is noted any time a Latine artist or cultural critic invokes the term Latine.We constantly underscore that we use the term Latine, despite its many pitfalls, because it is a name that has not been directly imposed upon us by Anglo hegemony. Sandoval and Román, for example, state that “ ‘Latino’ emerged as a category for self identification to agitate the imposed US Government census term ‘Hispanic’ ” (7). Chon Noriega also underscores that “the fact that Hispanic emerges as a US census category suggests the difficult play between race and ethnicity, as the government seeks institutional control through homogenization (“Hispanic”), and social movements undertake radical change through the formation of a collective identity (“Latino”)” (46). Also see the excellent essays by Flores and Yudice, and F. Padilla. 20 As Herbert Blau has suggested, “theater is theory, or a shadow of it . . . In the act of seeing, there is already theory” (114). José Esteban Muñoz throughout his work also argued for “the theory-​making power of performance” (Disidentifications 30). 21 I use Cubanity, like Muñoz, to distance myself from the use of Cubanness prevalent in Cuban and Cuban American Studies. See Chapters 1 and 3.

References Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman.” Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 1990, pp. 248–​56. Ardao, Arturo. Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina. Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1980. Behar, Ruth. “Introduction.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 33, no. 3, 1994, pp. 399–​414. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Butler, Judith.“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by SueEllen Case, Johns Hopkins UP, 1990, pp. 270–​82. Campra, Rosalba. América Latina: La identidad y la máscara. Siglo XXI, 1987. Casal, Lourdes, editor. El caso Padilla: literatura y revolución en Cuba. Ediciones Universal, 1971. –––​. Cuban Minority Study: Statistical Reports Series. Florida Atlantic University, 1972. –––​. “Ganar hermanos (Entrevista a Lourdes Casal)” (por Norberto Fuentes). Revolución y Cultura, no. 77, Jan 1979, pp. 70–​4.

20 Introduction –––​. Palabras juntan revolución. Casa de las Américas, 1981. –––. Itinerario ideológico: Antologı́ a, edited by María Cristina Herrera and Leonel A. de la Cuesta, Instituto de Estudios Cubanos, 1982. –––. “For Ana Veldford.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 33, no. 3, 1994, pp. 415–​6. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. Directed by Lillian Manzor, University of Miami Libraries and College of Arts and Sciences, in cooperation with Cuba’s National Council for the Performing Arts, 2011. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org De Costa-​Willis, Miriam, editor. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-​Hispanic Writers. Ian Randle Publishers, 2003. De la Campa, Román. Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation.Verso, 2000. DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand, U of Minnesota P, 1986. Díaz, Jesús. De la patria y el exilio. Ediciones Unión, 1979. –––, director. 55 hermanos. ICAIC, 1978. Dubatti, Jorge. Filosofía del teatro III. Atuel, 2014. Escarpanter, José A. “Veinticinco años de teatro cubano en el exilio.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 19, no. 2, 1986, pp. 57–​66. Flores, Juan, and George Yudice. “Living Borders/​Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-​Formation.” Social Text, no. 24, 1990, pp. 57–​84. García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Grijalbo, 1989. –––​. Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico. Translated by Lidia Lozano, U of Texas P, 1993. Gómez Peña, Guillermo. “The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community.” High Performance, vol. 12, Fall, 1989, pp. 18–​27. Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, 1986, pp. 5–​27. Laitin, David. Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba. U of Chicago P, 1986. Leving Jacobson, Jenna.“Race and Reconciliation in the Work of Lourdes Casal.” Cuban Studies, vol. 46, 2018, pp. 39–​50. Lomas, Laura. “On the Shock of Diaspora: Lourdes Casal’s Critical Interdisciplinarity and Intersectional Feminism.” Cuban Studies, no. 46, 2019, pp. 10–​38. López, Iraida H, coordinator. “Dossier: Rereading the Work of Lourdes Casal.” Cuban Studies, no. 46, 2019, pp. 1–​84. –––​.“Entre el ideal de la nación mestiza y la discordia racial:‘Memories of a Black Cuban Childhood’ y otros textos de Lourdes Casal.” Cuban Studies, no. 46, 2019, pp. 63–​84. Manzor, Lillian. “Más allá del guión: El teatro usano-​ cubano.” Teatro cubano actual: Dramaturgia escrita en Estados Unidos, edited by Lillian Manzor and Alberto Sarraín, Ediciones Alarcos, 2005, pp. vii–​xxi. –––​. “Archiving US-​Cuban Performances.” Caribe, vol. 13, no. 2, 2011, pp. 71–​94. –––. “Latino/​a Theater.” Keywords for Latina/​o Studies, edited by Lawrence LaFontaine Stokes, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Deborah R.Vargas, NewYork UP, 2017, pp. 232–​5. Manzor, Lillian, Kyle Rimkus, and Mitsunori Ogihara. “Cuban Theater Digital Archive: A Multimodal Platform for Theater Documentation and Research.” ECLAP 2013, LNCS 7990, edited by Paolo Nesi and Raffaella Santucci. Springer-​ Verlag, 2013, pp. 138–​50. Manzor-​Coats, Lillian. “ ‘Who are you anyways?’ Gender, Racial and Linguistic Politics in US Cuban Theater.” Gestos, vol. 6, April 1991, pp. 163–​75.

Introduction  21 Marrero, María Teresa. “Chicano/​Latino Self representation in Theater and Performance Art.” Gestos, vol. 11, April 1991, pp. 147–​62. Martin, Randy. Socialist Ensembles: Theater and the State in Cuba and Nicaragua. U of Minnesota P, 1994. Minh ha, Trinh T. “Not You/​ Like You: Post-​ Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Making Face, Making Soul/​Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa, Aunt Lute, 1990, pp. 371–​5. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading Postmodernism.Verso, 1988. Muñoz, José E. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Performance. Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 5–​16. –––​. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota P, 1999. –––. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDs).” Theatre Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 2000, pp. 67–​79. Negrón-​Muntaner, Francis, and Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel. “In Search of Lourdes Casal’s ‘Ana Veldford.’” Social Text, vol. 25, no 3 (92), 2007, pp. 57–​84. Nericcio, William Anthony. Tex[t]‌ -​ Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. U of Texas P, 2007. Noriega, Chon. “El Hilo Latino: Representation, Identity, National Culture.” Jump Cut, no. 38, 1993, pp. 45–​50. Nuestra América frente al V Centenario. Emancipación e identidad de América Latina: 1492-​ 1992. J. Mortiz/​Planeta, 1989. Padilla, Felix M. “Salsa Music as a Cultural Expression of Latino Consciousness and Unity.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1989, 28–​45. Pavis, Patrice. Diccionario del teatro. Translated by Jaume Melendres, Paidós, 1998. Pérez-​Tolón, Luis, director. Exilio/​Exile. 1984. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen:The Cuban-​American Way. U of Texas P, 1994. Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. Routledge, 1993. Prohías, Rafael J. and Lourdes Casal. The Cuban Minority in the U.S.: Preliminary Report on Need Identification and Program Evaluation. Final Report for Fiscal Year 1973. Cuban National Planning Council, 1974. Quiroga, José. “Unpacking My Files: My Life as a Queer Brigadista.” Social Text, vol. 32, no. 4 (121), 2014, pp. 149–​59. Rosa, Jonathan. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford UP, 2019. Rossini, Jon D. Contemporary Latina/​o Theater:Wrighting Ethnicity. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. Rossini, Jon D., and Patricia Ybarra. “Neoliberalism, Historiography, Identity Politics: Toward a New Historiography of Latino Theater.” Radical History Review, no. 112, 2012, pp. 162–​72. Sánchez-​Grey Alba, Esther. Teatro cubano moderno: dramaturgos. Ediciones Universal, 2000. Sandoval, Alberto, and David Román. “Caught in the Web: AIDS and Allegory in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Musical.” American Literature, vol. 67, no. 3, 1995, pp. 553–​85. Sandoval, Chela. “Feminism and Racism.” Making Face, Making Soul/​Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives byWomen of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa,Aunt Lute, 1990, pp. 55–​71. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003. Vazquez, Alexandra T. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Duke UP, 2013.

1 Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” Transculturation, Networks of Proximity, and US Cuban Theater

Miami, Cuba May-​ June 1991. I traveled from Los Angeles to Miami to attend the VI International Hispanic Theater Festival. I was really going to see one play, La verdadera culpa de Juan Clemente Zenea, written by Abilio Estévez, a Cuban playwright residing in Cuba who is now living in Spain, staged by Prometeo, a Latine university theater group in Miami, and directed by Alberto Sarraín, a Cuban émigré who would later move to Venezuela, and then return to Miami, to end up living between Miami and La Habana. This was the first play written by a contemporary Cuban writer residing on the island staged in Miami. The Miami production of this play eventually forced me to reconceptualize this book project (see Chapter 5). On the way “home” in Miami, the radio station “La Cubanísima” (WQBA-​1140 AM) was playing a song I had not heard before. The tune seemed to be an upbeat salsa song about Changó, the thunder God in santería. However, the song turned out to be about three confused (Anglo)1 Americans who, not understanding this Afro-​Cuban ritual, misread the fruits in the altar’s offering to Changó as a buffet table. The Anglo misreading is misinterpreted, in turn, by the madrina who construes the Anglos’ move as horrendous and sacrilegious. She warns them accordingly in the refrain: “Mister don’t touch the banana /​Banana belong to Changó.”2 Moreover, to avoid any linguistic confusion, the refrain is repeated in Spanish “La banana es de Changó.” Willy Chirino’s song, “Mister Don’t Touch the Banana,” provides us access to that very complex urban space many call Miami-​Cuba. A bilingual city (officially) since 1973 and now a prototypical multilingual world city, Miami is the cultural, economic, and political center of the US Cuban ethnarchy. An economic, cultural, and political gateway to the Caribbean and South America, Miami could best be characterized as a “contact zone.” Mary Louise Pratt describes the term as that “space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (6). In this contact zone called Miami, the Cuban/​Latine population stands out for being drastically different from other US cities with a predominantly DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-2

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  23 Latine population. First of all, few in the city identify themselves as Latines in any of the multiple variations of this term. Furthermore, it is rather common for white Miami Cubans and other white Latines to say that they have never experienced discrimination—​neither racial nor linguistic.3 Indeed, it was not until I left Miami for graduate school in Southern California that I experienced both forms of discrimination intersectionally with sexism. And it was not until much, much later that I could actually articulate those experiences in relation to different levels of social formation (see Probyn).4 The very name of Miami-​Cuba captures the nature of this space as a contact zone; indeed, Miami-​Cuba is also reminiscent of Casal’s construction of her two patrias chicas (see Introduction). Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick describe the city of Miami as an anomaly for social scientists since it defies traditional methodological tools. They argue that Miami, while part of the United States, is not like any of the other urban centers. Furthermore, it does not fit very well more recent descriptions of a “social mosaic” composed of established ethnic groups that maintain certain elements of their culture under the hegemonic umbrella of a white Protestant elite. In Miami, the fragments of the mosaic are loose and do not come together in any familiar pattern. (Portes and Stepick 8) In this contact zone, at least in reference to the Latine/​Anglo contact—​which is very different from the Black/​Anglo and the Haitian/​Anglo contacts—​5 it could be said that there is not one hegemonic class or ethnicity, not one mainstream. Instead, we have a series of parallel structures with their own institutions and organizations. Cubans and other Latines will tell you that they are the ones who set the cultural pace for restaurants, music, clothing styles, and even politics. As Chirino’s song so effectively demonstrates, from the point of view of the Cubans, it is the Anglos who make the cultural mistakes and not the “recent immigrants.” In order to survive in Miami, the non-​Latine English speakers are the ones who have to learn how to read different cultural codes and how to perform in different cultural and business spaces. Rather than assimilation, the process that best characterizes what has been happening with Latines in Miami, according to Portes, is acculturation in reverse: “a process by which foreign customs, institutions, and language are diffused within the native population. As a consequence, biculturalism has emerged as an alternative adaptive project to full assimilation into American culture” (Portes and Stepick 8).

The Cuban “Success” Narrative Before looking at US Cuban culture, and specifically its theater, the Cuban “success story” needs to be contextualized historically. Only then can we begin to account for the different threads that weave this fairy tale (or nightmare) called Miami-​Cuba. The first group of Cuban immigrants or the “historic

24  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” exile,” as is well known, was composed of a relatively homogeneous group.6 They were called the “golden exiles” because most of the immigrants were part of the economic, political, and intellectual elites in Cuba. Data shows that this group was mostly white, middle-​aged, with an average of 14 years of schooling. While 68% of the Cuban population in 1953 supposedly worked in skilled, semi-​skilled, unskilled, agricultural labor, and fishing, only 0.8% of the golden exiles belonged to this category (Boswell and Curtis 46). Similarly, 36% of Cuban immigrants had completed either high school or some college while the figure in Cuba was only 4% (Boswell and Curtis 45). The majority of Cuban exiles settled in Miami and Union City, following the trail of pre-​Castro immigrants.7 The “golden exiles,” then, had the economic and intellectual potential to build the core of an economic base that eventually expanded with the growth of the Cuban immigrant population first, and then immigration from other Latin American countries.8 Within this economic enclave, Spanish was and is the language in which business was and is conducted. The analysis of different sociological studies on the connection between income and use of the English language should come as no surprise: in the 1980s and 1990s, while in California Chicanos and/​or Mexican-​Americans who spoke English fluently earned 30% more than those who did not, in Florida there was barely any difference in salary between Cubans who could speak English and those who could not.9 Ideologically, the “golden exiles” shared the US view of the Cold War prevalent at the time. For them, Castro’s Marxist Revolution was in sharp conflict with Jeffersonian capitalism. These “golden exiles” were generally strong anticommunists and stout conservatives; as a matter of fact, sociologists referred to them as “the most genuinely patriotic group of Americans that have ever been citizens of the United States” (cited by Llanes, 10). Most importantly, they also shared a work ethic similar to that of the United States and were used to participating actively in a capitalist system. “The American way of life” was not at all foreign to them. As Louis A. Pérez Jr. has demonstrated, “the American way of life” had a strong influence in the forging of Cuban identity in the 20th century. Through complex processes of adaptation and transformation, daily life in Cuba had been changing throughout the 20th century as a result of modernization, that is, Americanization. Pérez Jr. states, [Cuban] postcolonial environment was dominated by an array of agencies that transmitted North American cultural forms, with which a vast number of people were obliged to come to terms daily in ordinary ways. This process of negotiation, often irrespective of outcome, was arguably the single most decisive determinant of an emerging national identity. (157) Modernization in Cuba has been and continues to be part of a globalizing tendency marked by triangular relations or lack thereof between Cuba, Europe, and the United States. Like modernization/​Americanization at the beginning of

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  25 the 20th century, postmodernization and technologies came to Cuba through the development of the European tourist industry—​itself a direct result of the US travel ban. When US travel to Europe was suspended during World War I, Cuba became the number one vacation spot for US citizens. As a result, La Habana was one of the first Latin American cities to have an international airport (Pérez Jr. 167). To ensure a level of comfort similar to that of the US tourist at home, hotels were refurbished and built with modern facilities. Personnel in hotels and restaurants spoke English. US goods and services were imported in order to make the US tourist feel at home. Even facilities for new forms of entertainment such as boxing, racetracks, golf, and miniature golf were built for the US tourist. All of these changes had a profound impact on the Cuban way of life. Clothing, education, taste, and leisure time all continued to change and develop, not necessarily in a conscious manner, according to the needs of the US tourist. World War I also had a tremendous economic impact on Cuba resulting in an unprecedented economic boom. Sugar mills, mostly North American, were constructed and quickly went into production. Cuban trade was diverted from Europe to the United States. North American imports increased from 59 percent of the total to nearly 80 percent. The value of US imports soared from $68 million in 1914 to $404 million in 1920, a movement of capital goods and consumer durables of huge proportions, a seemingly endless flow of commodities of every imaginable type. (Pérez Jr. 281) Pérez Jr. continues his analysis of the connections between US cultural presence in Cuba and the ways in which it impacted all areas of daily life such as consumption, tastes, fashion, and ideals of beauty. He concludes by underscoring that the 1959 Revolution was able to triumph primarily because the willingness with which Cubans sought to integrate into North American capitalist structures, adopt US cultural forms, and assimilate elements of the normative system from which they derived, could not, in the end, deliver to Cubans control of those forces that most directly governed their lives. (Pérez Jr. 453) The long-​standing economic relations between the United States and pre-​ 1959 Cuba were not merely capitalist but also imperial, a fact that was obviated by early Cuban exiles and was highlighted by the Revolution. From the very beginning, The economic relationship between Cuba and the US was determined by the logic of the expansion of US corporate capitalism, or emerging imperialism, and the subordination of Cuban industries to its interests. . . . The

26  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” Cuban oligarchy was willingly incorporated as a subordinated component in a US-​centered power structure, becoming in the process a key tool in producing and reproducing US hegemony. (Domínguez López and Yaffe 2519) Furthermore, the imperial nature of this relationship, as we will see, manifests itself in racial fetishism and sexual tourism.These imperial economic modalities become important to many of the plays under discussion with regard to sexual silences, racial opacity, and the disruption of relations within Greater Cuba, that is, between those on and off the island. Returning to Cubans in South Florida, the social and economic success of pre-​Revolution Cuban communities and of the Puerto Rican communities had already set a pattern of favorable opinions toward them. The 1960s Miami to which Cubans migrated “was in the throes of major governmental reform, racial strife, political upheaval and booming population growth” (Navarrete 4). Jewish Americans started to move to Miami in the 1940s, as well as Puerto Ricans, Black Bahamians, and African Americans. As Jeanine Navarrete has demonstrated, they created the precedent for the local treatment of Cuban immigrants in the early 1960s.The aforementioned groups, individually or in coalitions, began to make inroads in challenging Miami’s Anglo dominated city government and the Cold War red baiting of the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee at the height of the segregation era in the late 1950s. (5) Puerto Ricans moved to Miami in large numbers during the post-​war years, 1953 being the year of the largest migration. The first migrants were mostly wealthy families who bought farmland in the outskirts of the city and rental properties in Miami itself. After the implementation of Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Ricans came mostly to work in the then nascent garment industry and in agriculture. The city welcomed the first Puerto Rican investing class but, as it happened in the Cuban case, the rhetoric changed when the working class began to arrive. With the Revolution’s first immigration, the US press at the time, in the middle of the Cold War, continued to cover and enlarge stories of “heroic escapes” and of the plight of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban refugee children sent by their parents to the United States. Originally spearheaded by late Monsignor Bryan O.Walsh, then a priest from Miami who headed the Catholic Welfare Bureau and James Baker, headmaster of Ruston Academy, a private school in La Habana this operation was discovered to be a State Department/​ CIA maneuver code-​named “Operation Pedro Pan.” Resembling a typical Hollywood film, it involved a complex network of international operations that included US voluntary organizations, the state of Florida, federal government, the British Embassy in La Habana CIA-​sponsored programs in Radio

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  27 Swan, and CIA-​sponsored underground activity in Cuba. What originally started out as a program to rescue children of underground anti-​Castro families (de Valle) ended up being a massive federally funded program through which, for the first time, the United States provided foster care for refugee children. Although there are pieces of the history missing due to the CIA’s refusal to release documents that fall under the Freedom of Information Act, the operation was planned as follows. Members of the US Chamber of Commerce in La Habana moved to Miami after their businesses were nationalized. Baker met with them in Miami to try to get them to fund a boarding school in Miami. Monsignor Walsh, through the Catholic Welfare Bureau, made arrangements to fill out immigration papers, proof of enrollment for student visas, and to take care of the children until their parents arrived. The forms, letters, and funds were sent through diplomatic channels. While CIA-​sponsored Radio Swan broadcasted several radio programs falsely alerting Cuban mothers that their children would be taken away from them and advising them to go to their churches, the visa waivers were apparently distributed through the Cuban Catholic Church and Polita Grau.10 In the United States, the press and ads asking for foster parents focused on the motives of these deeds. In the midst of the Cold War, fear that these children were going to be sent to the Soviet Union or fear of the influence of communism was the number one factor underscored by the media.11 US national opinion, shaped by the media and the relative success of pre-​ Revolution Cubans, at first was mostly favorable and sympathetic toward the predicament of these children and the resilient, hardworking Cuban refugees fleeing “the monster of communism,” as the press usually presented them. This acceptance, however, has to be seen in relation to the previous Jewish American, Bahamian, African American, and Puerto Rican migrants to the city, who paved the way for the recent arrivals. First, the Jewish enclave what is now Little La Habana and Miami Beach, then the African Americans who were pushed out of their neighborhoods by “slum clearance” urban projects, and then the Puerto Ricans who, regardless of phenotype, were pushed to move to neighborhoods previously occupied by African Americans, all of them bore the brunt of dealing with Miami’s white, Anglo-​Protestant social and political establishment and of confounding the white/​Black racial divide at the core of racialization processes in the United States (see Chapter 3). Cubans’ arrival to Miami also coincided with the city’s positioning of itself as the resort capital of the United States not only to US Northerners primarily but also to Spanish-​speaking tourists from Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, the impulse to be a Pan-​American city and the gateway to Latin America often “masked the more virulently anti-​Black, anti-​Semitic, and anti-​Latino policies of the local government and racist attitudes of the city’s white residents” (Navarrete 11). If the early white Cuban immigrant in Florida was not “hampered by any great degree of open prejudice as have many other minority groups throughout the history of United States immigration” (Gallaguer 36), it is because of all of the above factors.

28  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” The achievements of post-​Revolution communities in the United States have also been attributed to their level of education. While it is usually noted that a salient characteristic of the Cuban exile is their involvement in education programs, the incredible variety and amount of federal support for these programs usually goes unnoticed. President John F. Kennedy established the Cuban Refugee Program in 1961 in order to aid the Cuban immigrants in a variety of ways.12 It included financial assistance to Dade County public schools so that they could provide a number of services, including instruction to refugee children, English instruction, and vocational training for adults. The program also offered college loans to refugee students and funds for English and refresher courses for lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. The 1963 Cuban Teacher Retraining Program is one of many examples. It prepared Cuban refugees who had been teachers in Cuba for certification and teaching positions in the United States. Through this program, the first bilingual aides were hired in Dade County.13 In 1974, the Florida House of Representatives required the different licensing boards to create refresher courses and bilingual exams for foreign residents. In 1975, the federation of Cuban University Professionals in Exile was able to get $400,000 from the Cuban Refugee Program to pay tuition for courses offered in Spanish at the University of Miami in order to obtain licenses to practice in the state. My father, who had been a veterinarian in Cuba and had been working in a furniture factory in Puerto Rico since 1969, took advantage of this program, as did many other Cuban immigrant professionals residing in the United States. Besides the federal support for the Cuban Refugee Program, and with the blessing of school administrators, the Ford Foundation funded the three-​year Project in Bilingual Education of Cuban Refugee pupils. Through this project, new material was developed for non-​English-​speaking students entering the first grade; new guides and audiovisual materials were prepared for teachers of bilingual students; and new bilingual programs were established. Coral Way Elementary became in 1963 the first school in the United States to offer a bilingual program designed for both native Spanish-​and English-​speaking students. By the end of the 1960s, there was a large number of private schools with bilingual education programs serving Spanish-​speaking children or located in Spanish-​speaking neighborhoods.14 Moreover, when the US Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act in December 1967, bilingual education was practically a comprehensive countywide program in Dade County. Subsequently, the federal government allocated to public schools a total of $15 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1968, for the development of bilingual programs to start in 1969; this amount was increased to $30 million in fiscal 1969 (Rossell 217). By 1969, Dade County Public Schools had received from the Cuban Refugee Program the amount of $75,259,432 and $278,000 from the Ford Foundation (Mackey and Beebe 7, 141, 61).15 Cuban immigrants, then, “helped to develop and profited from a federally funded bilingual education [which] was in fact born in 1960-​61, fourteen years before it was legally mandated, as part of a program to receive Cuban political refugees in Dade County”

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  29 (Pedraza-​Bailey and Sullivan 376). Needless to say, this early bilingual education program differed from the ways in which later transitional education programs “framed the Spanish language as a handicap to overcome rather than a resource to develop” (Rosa 67). Even today, sociolinguists have demonstrated that “unlike other parts of the United States with large Latin@ populations, where Spanish is mostly a language of non-​elites, Spanish in metropolitan Miami lives throughout the socioeconomic hierarchy” (Carter and Callesano 72). All these federal programs benefited Cuban refugees in large part thanks to the Congress passing the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 with the endorsement and strong support of state and county officials and Cuban Refugee Program administrators and the Cuban Coordinating Committee, “one of the earliest groups to articulate Cuban demands for permanent residency and local political recognition” (Navarrete 30). The Cuban Coordinating Committee was formed in the mid-​1960s as a response to the mounting negative and nativist responses to the large numbers of Cubans who followed the initial honeymoon with early Cuban arrivals. This committee argued that the Cubans did not represent a tax burden to the city. On the contrary, because of the Cubans, millions of federal moneys had come to the city, and Cubans had invested in the city. They established businesses—​stores, cafeterias, and nightclubs that created the commercial strip of Calle Ocho that became the heart of “Little Havana” and a popular tourist attraction for visitors to Miami. Cubans had “provided the City and Miami Beach with a bilingual Latin American environment which had enhanced the tourist attraction of both cities.” Thanks to the establishment of Cuban businesses and stores, Miami had become “the true gateway to Latin America.” (Navarrete 33) The problem was that federal funding could be used for programs aimed at permanent residents, and Cubans lacked that status; most of them were parolees or nonimmigrants who could neither return to Cuba nor obtain residency. Therefore, proposals were drafted, which led to the formulation of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966: Notwithstanding the provisions of section 245 (c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the status of any alien who is a native or citizen of Cuba and who has been inspected and admitted or paroled into the United States subsequent to January 1st, 1959 and has been physically present in the United States for at least two years. (United States, Congress) Through this Act, Cubans’ status could be adjusted to that of a lawful permanent resident. Historian Carl Bon Tempo rightfully argues that this was a “stunning formulation of American citizenship” and that “no other previous

30  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” refugee or immigrant group had been granted . . . such leeway in defining their loyalties” (130–​1). Sociological analyses based on the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study corroborate the connection between socioeconomic factors and the importance of the enclave private schools for these first group of immigrants. In 1992, over 30% of the children whose parents came between 1960 and 1964 attended private schools while less than 10% of those children attended public schools in Little La Habana and Hialeah. In comparison, less than 5% of children whose parents arrived with the Mariel boatlift or after attended private schools in 1992, while more than 50% of those children attended public schools in Little La Habana and Hialeah. As sociologists have pointed out, it is very unlikely to find in the United States another immigrant community with over one-​fifth of its children enrolled in private schools, especially private schools established by members of the same group.16 Lisandro Pérez brought to the fore two additional inter-​related factors that needed to be considered when discussing the Cuban success story: the familial structure of Cuban immigrants and high level of female employment. Analysis of the 1980 census demonstrated that early exiles tended to live in a three-​ generation family. Having the grandparents or elder relatives living at home facilitated the participation of women in the labor force. The elders served as caretakers of the children and contributed economically to the household—​ either through employment or through benefits from Social Security. Pérez underscored that comparisons among the different Hispanic populations are usually made based on household-​level data while the success story is presented at the level of the individual or the community. He concluded that at the individual level, the Cuban “success story” has been overstated, and the key to the observed economic achievements of Cuban immigrants lies in the apparently high degree of economic cooperation within the family. It is a family with characteristics tailored to facilitate upward mobility: a relatively large number of workers, high rates of female employment, the presence of an elderly generation that contributes directly and indirectly to the household’s economic welfare, low fertility, and high levels of school enrollment. (Pérez, “Immigrant” 17) I have incurred in this long sociohistorical section in order to contextualize the “Cuban success story” in the United States. While the early Cuban community in Miami was imagined and constructed as proof that the American Dream was still attainable, this construction is obviously shaped by at least five inter-​related factors: (1) the drastic differences between the racial and economic makeup of early Cuban refugees/​migrants and other Latine groups; (2) the mostly political nature of the first groups of Cuban immigration to the United States; (3) the ways in which the Cuban middle class had adapted to the “American way of life” in Cuba; (4) US response of mostly favorable public

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  31 opinion; and (5) massive federal support for programs geared toward Cubans. Needless to say, there was quite a difference between the Cuban Refugee Program and the Bracero Program and Operation Bootstrap that brought so many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to this country.17 Lourdes Casal was the first one to point out that the “Cuban success story” did not consider the vulnerable position in which the elderly population found itself (1973). She was also a pioneer in focusing on race relations years before the Mariel boatlift. It was only after 1980 that race surfaced as an important category of sociological analysis about Cubans in the United States. As a matter of fact, Usonians’ popular response to Cuban immigration and Cuban’s belief in the myth of the American Dream began to change with the immigration from the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Until this moment, the United States and/​ through its media mostly welcomed Cubans and others leaving communist countries in keeping with the anti-​communist zeal characteristic of the United States during the Cold War (see Masud Piloto). The “Marielitos” immigration signaled a change in both the official and popular discourse around Cuban immigrants. While the Carter administration continued to characterize the “Marielitos” as “individual refugees from persecution and tyranny,” Carter’s aide Jack Watson stated that “Castro, in a way, is using people like bullets aimed at this country” (Alpern 22). The official change from refugees to bullets was echoed in the popular press, which altered its previous rhetoric of the “hard working resilient Cuban” to emphasize that the “Marielitos” were single men, criminals, the insane, and homosexuals.18 In reality, the majority of “Marielitos” brought the demography of Cubans in the United States closer to that of Cubans on the island with respect to race, class, age, and education: about one-​third of them were non-​white and many of them were young. This change in demography continued through the early 1990s with the slow immigration of “balseros” (raft people), the Cuban version of the “wetback” or of the Dominican “yolero.” In August 1994, the slow “trickle” quickly transformed into a “gush” when thousands of Cubans jumped daily into “the deadly sea of dreams,” as CNN “poetically” reported. Indeed, not only was the popular response to all immigrants completely different in 1994, but even official US policy toward Cubans was also reversed overnight.19 After 30 years of defection encouragement in which virtually all Cubans who “escaped” would be granted political asylum—​as a matter of fact, practically the only way to come to the United States was via a “heroic escape”—​all of a sudden the Clinton administration decided that it would no longer accept Cubans who entered the US “illegally.” Although this decision came as a surprise to many US Cuban communities, we should not have been astonished. On the contrary, it was yet another evidence of the irrational way in which US policies toward Cuba are usually enacted. Moreover, it was an illustration of what María de los Angeles Torres has termed the “Kafkaesque metamorphoses” which daily take place in Miami:“persons who were defined as traitors forty minutes airspace prior to their arrival are transformed into heroes—​human beings into gusanos [worms]” (433). Indeed,

32  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” you can be transformed into an epic capitalist hero one day while the same actions make you an “illegal alien” the next. Most importantly, we should have learned from the Mariel experience that US immigration policies are intricate forms of contemporary gift exchange. As John Borneman has clearly elucidated: American attitudes toward immigration and immigration laws are linked to a projected psycho-sexual self-​image, which structures who is to be admitted, under what conditions, and how they are to be classified. Immigrants must be reclassified once admitted to the American fold; they must be conceived of in a proper conceptual form. A family entering America, or an individual as part of a family, is the most readily incorporated group because it is seen as a substitutable group in an already existing universe of families. Single, unattached men with no acceptable group referent, unless reclassified, are seen as penetrating, therefore as threats. Single women, on the other hand, have long been seen as exchange products, and are nearly universally trafficked by men . . . Unlike the exchange of men, the exchange of women presents no threat . . . Seen from this perspective, modern immigration policies are nothing more than culturally elaborated forms of gift exchange. (88) The latest phase of migration since 2012 is the result of Cuba’s elimination of the exit permit previously required of all citizens who wanted to travel internationally combined with changes in US Cuba policies that were enacted during the Obama administration and the retrenchment during Trump’s four years in office. As Obama “normalized” relations with Cuba, the “Wet Foot-​Dry Foot policy” came into discussion until it was eliminated in January 2017.20 During the Obama period, the United States received the largest numbers of Cubans since the Mariel boatlift: in addition to the 20,000 legal immigrants admitted yearly, almost 125,000 Cubans entered the United States between 2014 and 2016.21 These numbers do not include the number of Cubans declared inadmissible at US port of entries nor those deported.22 Cuban immigrants, however, entered the United States primarily through Mexico border towns such as Laredo and Matamoros. As a matter of fact, the routes of Cubans entering the United States were and are similar to other Latin American and Central American immigrants. Trump’s immigration policies impacted Cuban migrants the same way they impacted migrants from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) enacted in January 2019, commonly known as the Remain in Mexico Program, state that foreign individuals entering the United States through Mexico will be returned to Mexico where they have to wait for the duration of their immigration proceedings (see Migrant Protection Protocols). As of September 2019, 5864 Cubans had been returned to Mexico, making them the fourth largest group in the program behind Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans.

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  33 This number only reflects migrants formally remitted to MPP procedures. There is a larger backlog of Cubans waiting in border towns to cross over and file an asylum claim, including those who arrived before MPP became law. (Bustamante) Although statistical numbers have yet to appear, the various newspaper accounts of this group of migrants demonstrate that most Cubans returned and/​or awaiting in Mexico have an education, and they come from all social backgrounds, gender, race, and age (including children). From housewives, barbers, factory workers, and former sex workers to physiotherapists and doctors, “now they’re stuck at the border like everyone else,” as a headline read in The Washington Post (Sheridan). However, there is one major difference; many of these migrants have some money either because they sold everything they had in Cuba or because their families in the US are supporting them through this journey. Unlike the Central Americans, the Cubans have largely been welcomed in Mexico. Many have enough money to rent apartments or hotel rooms and to eat out. At least five Cuban restaurants have opened recently in Juarez, and enterprising Cubans have set up street carts hawking a national favorite, corn fritters. (Sheridan) Their access to dollars makes them the prey to violence, theft, and extortion from both police and common criminals (see “Policías asaltan”). These latest migratory phases (post 1994) not only have brought the Cuban immigrants closer to other Latine groups, they also have changed the cultural and ideological landscape of Miami-​Cuba.23 Latine Miami is a place well known for its culture of intolerance, “the capital of US terrorism” as the FBI named it in 1989. Since 1968, bombs have been set in the residences and businesses of those who are thought to be striving to improve relations with Cuba.24 In spite of its border nature, policies coming from the US government, the Cuban government, and the hardline exile organizations have fostered an extremely politicized space where everything is measured in a Manichean way in relation to Cold War attitudes toward communism. Anyone who is anti-​embargo, pro-​dialogue, or pro-​contact with Cuba, or who now supports the Black Lives Matter movement, is immediately stigmatized as leftist, communist, and pro-​ Fidel and Raúl Castro.Within these harsh and anachronistic categorizations, the Kennedys, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and even Aristide are seen as communists; so are those of us who travel to Cuba for “non-​humanitarian” reasons. This political intolerance often comes at the expense of interests of other segments of the city’s population, including Cubans. For this reason, some think “Cubans really value economic freedom, but there are other freedoms they don’t value” (Portes and Stepick 10).

34  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” This culture of intolerance can give rise to inconceivable situations in the cultural realm.25 Coser y cantar, a play about hybridity and biculturalism written by US Cuban playwright Dolores Prida, was cancelled from the Festival of Hispanic Theater in 1986 because she had participated in the “dialogues” of the 1970s. El pavo real, a painting of a peacock by Cuban artist Manuel Mendive, was bought and subsequently burned as an act of protest in front of the Cuban Museum in Miami because the artist resided on the island. In December 1991, US Cuban artists who took part in the first art exhibition of Cuban nationals and exiles in Mexico City were accused of helping the “Castro regime” through their participation. Some of them were reminded by their US gallery representatives that these sorts of activities would lower their prices. In 1997, Repertorio Español took Eduardo Machado’s play Revoltillo (Broken Eggs) to several cities in Cuba as part of their CubaTeatro Project. Actress Ana Margarita Martínez-​Casado, best known for her role in the television series, ¿Qué pasa, USA? traveled as part of the cast. As a result, Pan-​American Hospital cancelled a four-​year advertising contract with her (see Chapter 5). In 2002, a production of El último bolero was cancelled by three theaters because the actress lived in Cuba. As late as December 2019, President Trump’s changes in Cuba policy re-​emboldened segments of the exile community who once again protest against Cuban musicians performing in Miami. Thus, the popular group Gente de Zona, which was supposed to sing at a New Year’s Eve event in Bayfront Park (2019) organized annually by Pitbull, was disinvited from the event after pressure from Miami commissioner Joe Carollo. This culture of intolerance has a symbiotic relationship with the failed US policies toward regime change in Cuba. The powerful Cuban lobby created by the Cuban American National Foundation has guided these policies especially during Republican leadership in Washington, DC. The enactment and hardening of these policies help to strengthen the exile hardline mentality that fosters intolerance. These policies are at odds with the transition that has been taking place in Cuba since Fidel Castro’s illness, Raúl Castro’s presidency, and Miguel Díaz-​Canel’s current presidency.They are also at odds with the majority of Cubans who are more interested in family reunification than in politics and policies of regime change.26 Post-​1994 immigrants do not share the well-​known hardline stance toward Cuba prevalent in Miami’s exile ideology. Similar to other groups who have slowly created a transnational community, Cuban immigrants also travel to their country of origin and help their family through remittances.27 Post-​1994 immigrants have also helped to change Miami’s culture of intolerance through cultural remittances. Cuban musicians from the island perform in Miami to sold out houses in spite of the protests of a few who do manage to get the media’s attention. In April 2001, La Má’ Teodora, in collaboration with the University of Miami, Florida International University, and Miami Light Project, brought 22 actors, directors, and playwrights from Cuba to the First International Monologue/​Performance Festival. During “the ten days

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  35 that changed the landscape” of Miami, as the Miami New Times subtitled its review article (Leonin), different Cuban theater groups played throughout the city. The performances and the event as a whole received ample press coverage and there were no protests (see Chapter 5).28 Between 2002 and 2008, the process that was started with the festival in Miami was temporarily halted because of visa and travel restrictions during the George W. Bush administration. Exchanges continued but events and publications were held primarily in Cuba. In 2007, FUNDarte brought Doris Gutiérrez’s La Habana production of Los días felices, and they started bringing to Miami Cuban musicians from the diaspora; Habana Abierta was the first group of such project. During their fifth Season (2007–​2008), FUNDarte in collaboration with Miami Light Project started Global Cuba Fest, a month-​long festival of contemporary music with artists from Cuba and the Cuban diaspora, now (2020) entering into their 13th Season. In 2009, Dr. Katrin Hansing (then at Florida International University) and I started the series Cuban Culture on the Edge, aimed at creating a cultural bridge between diasporic Cuban artists and those in Cuba with open dialogues in Miami. In 2011, Cuban Culture on the Edge and FUNDarte joined forces and we focused on theater programs and coproductions in Miami and La Habana.29 Therefore, when President Barack Obama re-​established diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2016 and cultural exchanges between Cuba and the United States became a novelty, first, and then a very short-​lived norm, in the area of theater we had already built a network of collaborators based on many years of working together under laws enacted precisely to impede these exchanges. The dates of the above exchanges generally coincide with the periods in which the United Sates has had a Democrat as a president. Most importantly, though, the exchanges prove that the majority in Miami is growing beyond the culture of intolerance and toward a tolerant social formation in spite of the fact that there are still a few intolerant gerontocrats who do exert financial and political control in some areas of the city (see Chapter 5).30 Philosopher José Antonio Solís has offered the best explanation of why a segment of Miami’s Cuban community has refused to create a climate of tolerance where racial and ideological differences are tolerated: The Cuban community . . . has tended to substitute the necessary serious critical study, reflection, and discussion of Cuban history and problems, leading to the present situation, for the easy demonization of the present Cuban government, the loud and empty diatribe, the insulting epithets, and the comfort of repeated clichés. The broadcast media has contributed to this situation in no small measure . . . What would, otherwise, be the difference between a Cuban government that physically jails its dissidents and a Cuban community that psychologically “jails” those whose ideas and methods it finds unsettling? (14)

36  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”

The Chaos of Transculturation The “Marielitos,” balseros, and the Cuban immigrants arriving in the last two decades forced cultural critics to look at Cuban peoples and their culture as a result of “extremely complex transmutations of culture” which had been taking place on the island since 1492 (Ortiz 1947, 98). The Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz utilized the term transculturation to refer to these cultural contacts. Based on the Cuban and Latin American experience, Ortiz believed that the term transculturation better expressed the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. (102–​3) The processes of transculturation studied by Ortiz in Cuba are varied and multiple. First, we find those which took place within aboriginal cultures (“the transculturation of the Paleolithic Indian to the Neolithic” [98]). We then have the transculturation resulting from the stream of Spanish immigrants. Almost parallel to it is the transculturation of African enslaved people transported from the different coastal regions of Africa. Finally, we have the French, British, United States, Chinese, Arabic, and Jewish immigrations which came sporadically or continuously throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. During these 500 years, processes of transculturation have been produced simultaneously in two cultural zones, the internal one, within each migratory group, and the external one, in the encounter among all of them.Thus, as Ortiz pointed out, All of them snatched from their original social groups [desgarrados], their own cultures destroyed and crushed under the weight of the cultures in existence here . . . and each of them torn from his native moorings [desarraigado], faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation and acculturation—​in a word, of transculturation. (98) In fact, it is not gratuitous that uprooting (desarraigo) and splitting (desgarramiento) are the two words most often utilized by Ortiz to describe the processes of transculturation in Cuba. Again, uprooting, splitting, and reterritorialization are the mots justes for the processes of transculturation taking place within US cultures concerning Cubans and other Latine and ethnic minorities. Indeed, as Arrizón has underscored, “transculturation dramatizes the in-​between site in narratives of encounters and confrontations” (5).31

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  37 One of the most interesting aspects of Ortiz’s paradigm of transculturation is the fact that it does not follow the anthropological syncretic models that emphasize the coexistence of cultural systems.32 Instead, Ortiz’s model encourages us to account for the historical specificity of cultural contact and the importance of artistic originality in the selection of elements that comprise the new cultural system. This is very different from the ways in which multiculturalism was deployed in the United States, especially during the period in which the plays analyzed in this book were performed: the “decade of the Hispanic” and the “decade of the Latino.” The 1980s became known as the “decade of the Hispanic” due to the significant growth in terms of population and visibility of Hispanics in the United States. Aggregate numbers were available for the first time because the US Census Bureau introduced the category Hispanic in the 1980 census. The history of the use of the word “Hispanic” is complicated and its applicability highly contentious. In 1966, Julián Samora from La Raza edited a report, La Raza: Forgotten Americans. Focusing on Spanish-​ speaking Americans in California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, the report presented how this group was discriminated against in the areas of housing, education, employment, and so on. Most importantly for this analysis, it argued that the heterogeneity of this group accounted for their lack of representation in political and economic life: “This population, exploited at times, living mostly on the fringes of society, misunderstood by public and private agencies, and largely ignored by the federal government and its programs, has managed to survive with dignity, composure, and pride” (Samora viii). With support from the Ford Foundation, the National Council of La Raza was formed, and they were successful in changing the 1970 census so that “Spanish-​speaking people” could be counted for the first time. Some of the information from La Raza reports made it to a Subcommittee on Minority Education report, “Higher Education for Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians,” discussed in 1973 by the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE). Issues of language discrimination and bilingual education were the primary focus of that report. Members of the committee argued that the report wrongly identified some groups, and they suggested to Casper Weinberger, then-​secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, that he “coordinate development of common definitions for racial and ethnic groups” (Hattam 116). Weinberger created the Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions in 1974.33 The four Latines in the commission could not agree on what was the best term to use: Spanish surname, Spanish language, Hispanos, Hispanic, and Latino were all considered. After much debate, Hispanic was the name that passed and that was field-​tested, along with the other ethnoracial categories. Thus, Hispanic—​to be used in all federal statistics—​was cemented in the Statistical Policy Directive 15, first drafted in 1977 and posted in the Federal Register in 1978. La Raza had indirectly accomplished to bring together many heterogeneous groups under one category, although the majority did not self-​identify as Hispanic.

38  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” It is not surprising, then, that US Cuban María Elena Toraño, Associate Director of the US Community Services Administration (1976–​1980), used the category Hispanic in an often-​quoted 1978 US News & World Report article about Hispanic Americans working in the Carter administration. The article ended: “The blacks [sic] had the decade of the ‘60s; women had the ‘70s. The ‘80s will be the decade for Hispanics” (“Hispanics Push”). However, the exact phrase, “decade of the Hispanic,” often attributed to Toraño, was the result of a re-​branding of her phrase by Coors Brewing Company in a 1982 campaign after Chicano/​a activists ended their boycott against the company for its discriminatory hiring practices. Indeed, “the decade of the Hispanic” had more to do with marketing practices than with major gains in Hispanics’ socioeconomic status. As Ramón H. Rivera-​Servera explains, “the 1980s marks the birth of an intimate relationship between Latina/​o politics and corporate sponsorship that set not only the infrastructure but the rhetoric of market growth that fueled the Latin Explosion of the 1990s” (11).The new aggregate numbers for Hispanics were used, on the one hand, to demonstrate that Hispanics had a sizeable buying power. Spanish-​ language Univisión was a leader in this area since it started promoting the Hispanic category in commercials for the 1980 census (see Guilligan, Mora, del Olmo). On the other hand, the very same numbers were used to demonstrate that the gap between Hispanic and non-​Hispanic income had widened significantly during this decade. A 1990 report by the National Council of La Raza analyzing 1980 census figures highlighted the following: (1) stagnating income levels and continued high poverty; (2) high proportions of impoverished children; (3) no improvement for woman-​ maintained households; (4) deepening hardship among married couple families; (5) widening income disparity between Hispanics and other ethnic groups; (6) still significant, still unequal benefits from education; and (7) a decrease in men’s earnings with an increase in women’s earnings. (Miranda and Quiroz, preface) Despite the media hype about this decade and the fact that “Hispanics” were soon to be the largest minority in the United States, their economic plight continued. The structural changes needed to remedy this situation—​namely, the relations of power and domination and the racial inequalities that form the basis of US society—​remained unaddressed. The Chicano performance group Culture Clash put it best in A Bowl of Beings: “The decade of the Hispanic turned out to be a weekend sponsored by Coors.” In many ways, the debates that surfaced in the 1990s around multiculturalism precisely addressed the above incongruity, which Guillermo Gómez-Peña appropriately named in 2000 “somewhere between corporate multiculturalism and the mainstream bizarre” (“New Global” 7). In the realm of education, the 1980s saw the institutionalization of Chicano Studies and its opening to other groups toward the end of the decade and into the 1990s to Chicano-​a/​

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  39 Latino-​a Studies. American Studies also began to incorporate into its curricula this corpus of works, along with African American, Native American, and Asian American writings. As a matter of fact, American Studies had to confront how it was going to address the demographic changes that had become obvious during those last two decades. It opened its own discipline to reformulate it in relation to both the ethnic canon and US long history of imperialism. At stake were the ways in which ethnic literatures were incorporated into US academia; multiculturalism had become “a general program of representing the cultures and histories of diverse minorities,” and diversity had been transformed into a marketing strategy by US universities (Palumbo-Liu 2). As Palumbo-Liu argued in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, [b]‌ ut an understanding of multiculturalism as a synonym of pluralism (which seems the predominant understanding of the term within administrative circles) stands in sharp contrast to the practice of a critical multiculturalism. Instead of presenting the occasion for a critique of the ideological apparatuses that distribute power and resources unevenly among the different constituencies of a multicultural society, the insertion of ethnicity into the curriculum can be articulated through pedagogical discourses that ultimately defer to monocultural presumptions of “aesthetic value,” “expressive force,” “character formation,” and the ethnic text reduced to a pretext for the pluralistic argument that all cultures share certain expressive values. (2) It was exactly the lack of critique that became the focus of attack on the multicultural turn in the United States in the 1990s. Scholars agreed that, indeed, the United States was a multicultural society. However, as Hazel Carby argued, academia used multiculturalism as a code word for race. Syllabi included one or two texts by “ethnic” (US) Americans [b]‌ut processes of racialization . . . are discussed as if they were the sole concern of those particular groups perceived to be racialized subjects. Because the politics of difference work with concepts of individual rather than structures of inequality and exploitation, processes of racialization are marginalized and only given symbolic and political meaning when the subjects are black. (Carby 12) Focusing primarily on African American literature and putting special emphasis on African American women writers, Carby rightfully suggested how, “[f]‌or white suburbia, as well as for white middle-​class students in universities, these texts are becoming a way of gaining knowledge of the ‘other’: a knowledge that appears to satisfy and replace the desire to challenge existing frameworks of segregation” (17).

40  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” Furthermore, the scholars of Chicano-​a/​Latino-​a Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American Studies forced American Studies to confront and address the fact that racial oppression and imperialism were foundational to US history, that American Studies heretofore had really focused on the United States and not on “our America,” and that what really had to change was “our perspective on the nature of American society” (García 51). Latino Studies and Latino History were suggested as instrumental in rethinking New American Studies given the Spanish-​Mexican and Indigenous presence in the Southwest and Spanish and Afro-​Caribbean presence in other parts of the United States. Gómez-​Peña aptly concluded that “[w]‌e must realize that the West has been redefined.The South and the East are already in the West. And being American today means participating in the drafting of a new cultural topography” (“Multicultural” 20). Ethnic Studies’ scholars underscored the contradictory ways in which cultural texts were being appropriated and co-​opted in the culture industry. Socialized in the Anglo-​American cultural traditions but segregated as racially defined inferior groups (García 54), ethnic writers and artists became very profitable for the culture industry, including theater. It is within these cultural and academic debates that the US Cuban playwrights studied in this book started to develop their work and that regional and community theaters began to produce them. The various Latine playwrighting projects offered them the space to come together with other Latines in the United States. Writing and living outside of the Miami area, they were able to create works that oftentimes critiqued Cuban and American exceptionalism present at the time in Cuban and Cuban American Studies and American Studies, respectively. Moreover, performing stories in the West and East coast allowed them to introduce to both Anglo-​American and ethnic American audiences voices and stories that had remained invisible. They found in Latine theater the community they did not necessarily have in exile communities in Florida, New York, and California. US Cuban theater artists thus contributed to forge Latine theater in the 1980s and 1990s establishing solidarities and networks with the various Latine communities in which they worked and with other Latine playwrights who participated in the workshops. The ways in which their plays were produced put in practice a critical multiculturalism, in spite of the fact that a benevolent form of multiculturalism has been adopted by corporations and media conglomerates . . . [an]d our major cultural and educational institutions have followed suit. This global transcultural artificially softens the otherwise sharp edges of cultural difference, fetishizing them in such a way as to render them desirable. (Gómez Peña, “New Global” 12) Carby’s words about African American women writers are applicable to Latine writers and artists as well:

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  41 We can see how the black female subject has become very profitable for the culture industry . . . I would argue that it is necessary to recognize the contradictions between elevating the black female subject as a major text within multiculturalism, and the failure of multiculturalism to lead students to understand the possibility of an integrated society . . . Instead of recognizing this contradiction, the black female subject is frequently the means by which middle-​class white students and faculty cleanse their souls and rid themselves of the guilt of living in a society that is still rigidly segregated. (11) In the end, liberal multiculturalism reinscribed marginalization since it required “subaltern and minority subjects . . . to perform an authentic difference in exchange for the good feelings of the nation” (Povinelli 6). The various ways in which mainstream theatrical institutions created programs for African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latines between the 1980s and 1990s served to commodify multiculturalism and to commodify ethnicity by, among other things, lumping together everyone into one category. “Ethnic” writers profited from these programs, as I demonstrate throughout this book for US Cubans, but they did so by performing their own unique stories that questioned the very notions of an authentic Latine identity. The US Cuban playwrights and productions I study, like many though not all Latine writers during the 1980s and 1990s, entered the mainstream as Latine artists, but their work performed a critical multiculturalism that worked against the homogenizing and commodifying tendencies of the period. From their plays, we can discern that Latine is a multiethnic and multiracial group, with roots in several continents, with varied religious practices—​different strands of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism while maintaining deep connections to various native American and African-​ based religious beliefs—​ and with different linguistic registers of Spanish, English, and Spanglish. In other words, transcultural instead of multicultural. I argue that Ortiz’s theory of transculturation is very different from multiculturalism’s “I’m o.k. you’re o.k.” model of cultural coexistence because it not only provides a space for the element of loss involved in cultural encounters but also underscores the relevance of the traces of that loss within transculturation. As Diana Taylor has stated eloquently: The issue in transculturation, then, is not only one of meaning (what do symbols mean in different contexts). It is also one of political positioning and selection: which forms, symbols or aspects of cultural identity become highlighted or confrontational, when and why. (61) My analysis of the plays and their institutional context will highlight precisely how those elements of loss were performed, when, and in which contexts. There are several shortcomings,however,to Ortiz’s theories of transculturation. The main one is related to his rather monolithic concept of culture that ignores

42  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” gender, for example, as an integral element; women’s subcultures in Cuba and Latin America thus remain categorically an empty set. Moreover, his linear/​diachronic approach to transculturation results in a paradigm too neat to account for contemporary reality given the fact that Ortiz’s writings predated multidirectional migrations and the present globalization or transnationalization of cultures.34 In spite of the many advantages offered by Ortiz’s paradigm of transculturation, his theory needs to be modified to “bring it up to date,” so to speak, with our contemporary historical reality. As a matter of fact, part of the problem concerning contemporary analyses of Cuban and US Cuban cultures lies precisely in the fact that most of these studies continue to utilize nationalist definitions that do not adjust to the transnational reality inhabited by divided or dispersed peoples and their cultural productions.35 Cuban culture, like most Latin American cultures, is in fact “all over the map” without any boundaries or regularities. As Arjun Appadurai has suggested, our cultures are fundamentally fractal (20). Clearly, in these fractal and overlapping cultural forms, the imagination and expressive forms take on a new role. Bringing together the Frankfurt School’s idea of images that are mechanically reproduced, Anderson’s idea of the imagined community, and Jean-​François Lyotard’s notion of the imaginary, Appadurai studies ways in which the imagination becomes a social practice, a social practice that is based on “negotiation between sites of agency (‘individuals’) and globally defined fields of possibility” (5). To study the imagination as a social practice in our global culture, Appadurai looks at the relationship between flows of people (ethnoscapes), finance (financescapes), ideology (ideoscapes), information (mediascapes), and technology (technoscapes). It is precisely the mediascapes and technoscapes that are missing from Ortiz’s paradigm of transculturation. Furthermore, as far as his model is not sufficient to explain the functioning of an industrial, technological, financial, and cultural system based on a dense network of economic and ideological structures, it cannot capture contemporary “oblique” relations of power.36 Appadurai’s model is a step toward an “alternative cartography of social space” (Rouse 12) in which fluid concepts such as network, circuits, and borders replace the rigidity of center and periphery. Others have examined the processes of transculturation in relation to contemporary sciences and information theory, as Appadurai does.They suggest that in Latin America those processes produced societies that were chaotic or fractal from their very inception. Gruzinski, for example, believes that “[f]‌ractal societies had emerged in the Caribbean after 1492” (69). Focusing on the Mexican case, he examines the ways in which the differential encounter produced a culture of dis-​encounters based on ruptures, distortion of social practices, and predominance of “fragmented reception” which resulted from the loss of reference points following conquest and colonization. As Gruzinski explains it: This dynamic of loss and reconstitution is expressed in the intermittent and fragmented reception of the various cultures: a black child growing up in New Spain would acquire memories of Angola or Guinea through

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  43 his African mother; to these he might add types of behavior partly copied from Creole or urban whites; and to this amalgam he would “glue” scraps of indigenous culture acquired from customs relating to food, to ways of caring the body, or to healing rituals. (69) This fragmented reception resulting from continuous deculturation and neoculturation thus produced cultural practices characterized by the juxtaposition of scraps from different cultural traditions.37 Indeed, the Miami production of La verdadera culpa de Juan Clemente Zenea staged this fragmented reception resulting from the tensions between deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Cuban cultures.38 It brought to the fore the fact that Cuban culture is not solely anchored in the island nor in the United States. US Cuban culture, I argue, as a result of multiple and varied processes of transculturation is also fractal in nature. Adding to those brought from the island, we must insert the multiple ones taking place in the United States: mainly, the contact between Cuban and Anglo cultures, between the Cuban communities and other Latine groups, between Cuban and Afro-​ descendent communities, and between the early Cuban communities and the various phases of more recent Cuban migration. The chaotic and fractal nature of US Cuban culture can also be seen precisely in that space I have been calling Miami-​Cuba. This space is at once and the same time the economic and political center of the US Cuban ethnarchy and a space that has fostered a culture of intolerance once the golden exile generation began to lose its stranglehold on Cuban politics in Miami. Miami is also the place where recently arrived Cuban artists and intellectuals—​the revolutionary diaspora which includes “dissidents,” legal guest workers, many living in what artist Arturo Cuenca has termed “low intensity exile,” those who are now living between Cuba and the United States, and the economic migrants in the 21st century—​are forging previously inconceivable coalitions with the political center of US Cuban communities, as we will see in Chapter 5. In the end, Miami has become, as María de los Angeles Torres suggests, “a depository of the island’s political memory” (433).

US Cuban Cultural Production: Language and Ethnicity Until the mid-​1990s, the cultural production of Cubans in the United States had been considered as belonging to the category of “exile” literature. In most studies, theater was generally left out or was mentioned in passing, as in Burunat and García’s introduction to the anthology Veinte años de literatura cubanoamericana: Needless to say, there exists . . . a Cuban American theater represented in several works by José Corrales, Matías Montes Huidobro, José Sánchez Boudy and Dolores Prida. (15)39

44  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” The little criticism that existed usually emphasized that this cultural production’s salient characteristics were that it was written in Spanish, and it dealt with Cuban experiences or the experience of exile. Surprisingly enough, the old dichotomies of “form” and “content,” redeployed in the language and experience debates, were the “measuring sticks” used to approach and describe our cultural production. However, as I began to discuss in the Introduction, these generalizations are too simple, too neat to explain the multifarious experience of US Cuban hybrid identity, as well as different tendencies in US Cuban theater. Like Miami, that contact or border zone where different peoples and discourses coexist, Cuban theatrical production in the United States is composed of several coexisting phases and trends. Language: “Bilingual Blues” Burunat and García’s comments in relation to language are typical: In spite of the fact that its literature demonstrates that the Cuban American has not assimilated linguistically nor culturally to the United States, the structural assimilation of many of then, that is, their economic success and participation in the commercial and financial activities of this country has been almost total. (14)40 They reflect the language ideologies prevalent in many of these analyses. Following the Modernist model of nation-​states where states are constructed as monolingual, critics assume that each “culture” must speak “one language.” “Monolingual dictionaries, national language academies, and systems of education reinforce the ostensibly natural link between geographic location, language, and ethnoracial groups” (Carter and Callesano 70). In this case, Spanish is the language of Cuban-Americans and English is the language of the United States.41 The problematic usage of “assimilation” notwithstanding, to state simply that Cuban-Americans have not assimilated linguistically to Anglo culture (the subtext of this is the fact that the Chicanos/​as and the Nuyoricans have), is not completely true. First of all, the use of bilingualism and code-​switching in our literature as in our daily practices is quite common. US Cuban poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat expressed this very well in his poem “Bilingual Blues”: Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones. Vexed, hexed, complexed, hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally alienated, psycho soy, cantando voy. (Pérez Firmat, “Bilingual Blues” 164) Moreover, there is an extensive body of work written solely in English that needs to be acknowledged. Carolina Hospital was the first one to note these

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  45 writers’ exclusion due to their language.42 As she explained in the introduction to the anthology appropriately named “Los Atrevidos” (“The Daring Ones”), “[b]‌ecause most of these authors write primarily in English, they are automatically dismissed and excluded from anthologies and analysis of Cuban exile literature” (16). Until the mid1990s, they were excluded from Latine and North American anthologies as well.43 María Irene Fornés’ collective creation Cap-​a-​ Pie (1975) and Dolores Prida’s Beautiful Señoritas (1977) and Coser y cantar (1981) are early examples of the use of bilingualism and code-​switching in US Cuban theater. The first Latine anthology to include US Cuban writers publishing in English was Delia Poey and Virgil Suárez’s Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction. We had to wait for Roberta Fernández’s In Other Words: Literature by Latinas (1994) to see theater included in an anthology in English; the only play was Dolores Prida’s Beautiful Señoritas. In the Introduction, Fernández accepts tenets proposed by Burunat and García including that thematically Cuban-Americans tend toward assimilationist experience, but she did recognize changes in the Cuban-American novel. Virgil Suárez and Delia Poey’s 1996 Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-​American Literature Anthology presented a more nuanced view of the important role language plays in second-​generation writers: In their Americanization they are not rejecting their heritage or their Hispanic culture; rather they are Cubanizing, tropicalizing, expanding the realm of American culture and letters.Their vision is inclusive; their sources go deep into Anglo-​and Hispano-​European tradition and as deeply into Afro-​Caribbean and mestizo culture, not to mention their love affair with popular culture and its icons. (back cover) They included three plays: Matías Montes Huidobro’s Once Upon a Future (in translation from the Spanish), Dolores Prida’s Coser y cantar (written bilingually), and Omar Torres’ Memories of My Father’s Family During His Self-​imposed Exile (written in English). Finally, it is not until 2019 that the first anthology of the so-​called second-​generation Cuban-Americans or ABC’s (American-​born Cubans) who write primarily in English was published: Iraida López and Eliana Rivero’s Let’s Hear Their Voices. This anthology also included excerpts of Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ play, Bird in the Hand. Similarly, we had to wait until 2005 to be able to read in Spanish translation the US Cuban playwrights writing in English (see Manzor and Sarraín). And only in 2019, do we have the first anthology of Latine playwrights in Spanish, Teatro latino: nuevas obras de los Estados Unidos (Boffone), which includes plays by US Cubans Teresa Dovalpage, Teresa Marrero, and Pedro Monge Rafuls, as well as US Colombian Diana Burbano’s Silueta, about performance artist Ana Mendieta’s last days with Carl Andre. As I have stated before, theater tends to be left out of anthologies and analyses of US Cuban cultural and literary production. While it is true that many US Cubans have been able to preserve the use of the Spanish language, I believe one has to underscore the reasons why “linguistic

46  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” assimilation” has not taken place so rapidly among them, namely, (1) the nature and composition of the first Cuban immigrants, (2) US popular attitude toward this group, and, most importantly, (3) Cuban immigration coincides with the rise of bilingual education in the United States. In other words, it is necessary to emphasize that the class and political differences between Cuban and other Latine groups are directly connected to the question of language use. In Miami, to speak Spanish has meant to belong to the “in group,” until the late 1980s, there was very little stigma attached to public use of the language. Most importantly, we must establish a correlation between resistance to linguistic assimilation and financescapes. Anyone with money to set up their own private schools in order to maintain their culture, and with massive funding from federal, state, and private agencies to create bilingual education programs unique in this country—​ programs which have been used worldwide as models—​would be able to resist “linguistic assimilation.” Moreover, to suggest that the Chicanos/​as and Nuyoricans have linguistically assimilated into Anglo culture is to forget the economic and political “incursion” in, not to say colonization of US’ Southwest and Puerto Rico. It is also a disregard to the many years of linguistic discrimination and enforced English-​only laws resulting from the climate of nationalism prevalent in the United States from the beginning of the First World War until the Civil Rights Movement.44 This nationalism started coming to the fore again in the 1990s. Most importantly, it is also a disregard of the neocolonial relationship between the United States and Cuba. The question of language use is especially thorny when dealing with theater. Originally, I had planned to focus on plays produced and written in English. As my research continued, I realized that my early reasons for this were rather simplistic and naive: “exile” theater was written mostly in Spanish, and US Cuban “ethnic” theater was written mostly in English. The hundreds of plays I received in the mail, the many conversations I have had with playwrights, and the produced plays themselves all point toward the fact that the chaotic nature of our transcultural experiences and our hybrid cultural productions force us to look at language use in a much more complex and multilayered manner.45 I have been employing language use as opposed to language choice because the uneven relations between ethnoscapes, financescapes, and mediascapes do not leave Latines much choice at all. Indeed, this book is written in English partly because of the constraints of US academia. My predicament is, in many ways, the very quandary of most of the playwrights included here. In terms of publication, there are very few university presses in the United States that publish Spanish material; furthermore, theater is not the preferred genre for presses because the readership is much smaller than that of other literary genres. Regarding productions, if they want to be produced in the so-​called mainstream theatrical institutions, even in the ones marginal to but within the mainstream (Off-​Off-​Broadway, for example), English must be the language of “choice.” However, playwrights whose works are produced in these theaters often were branded as “sellouts” to Anglo culture or traitors to “community theaters.” Theaters that produce in Spanish tend to be smaller, with much less financial

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  47 and technical support. Although the productions of Spanish-​language theaters respond, in part, to their community, the US Cuban community, as I have begun to demonstrate, is not as homogeneous as it is usually portrayed in the media. The younger generations, as in most communities in the United States, do not have the tradition of going to the theater. And those who do attend recognize the technical, that is, financial limitation of the productions. The older “exile” generation, on the other hand, does not appreciate the questioning of certain elements deemed to be quasi-​sacred: the family, heterosexuality, religion, and anti-​Castro stance.They are also accustomed to the popular, vernacular theater they used to attend in Cuba, which has been transplanted in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York (see Manzor and Rizk). Thus, the content of most of these plays, even if they are written in Spanish, is considered to be “not Cuban enough.” However, the very content of these plays usually makes them too Cuban, that is, too “ethnic” or too “other” to be considered a financially sound endeavor by mainstream institutions, even if the plays are in English. Whether we use Spanish or English, it seems that, as a common Spanish proverb says, “palo porque boga y palo porque no boga” (damned if you do and damned if you don’t). In fact, it has been quite interesting for me to teach these plays and discuss them with Anglo audiences. A typical response is that they do not quite understand the plays because they do not speak Spanish. It actually took me a while to discern that this response did not refer to the language in which most of the plays were written since they only include phrases or sayings in Spanish followed by an English translation. I constantly wondered how it was possible for Latin Americans to go to an Asian American production, for example, and not be bothered by the Japanese, Chinese, or Korean linguistic “intrusions.” Although neurolinguistic evidence has suggested not only that the brain of a bilingual differs from that of a monolingual but, more importantly, that the two store language(s) differently (see Preston, Albert and Obler, and Buchweitz and Prat),46 I did not want to recur to biologistic explanations. Eventually, both Serres’ studies on information theory and Anzaldúa’s revisions of reader-​ response theory helped me decipher that reaction. It seems that for a monocultural/​monolingual audience, Spanish phrases, accents, and intonation patterns function as noise to the communication system. As Serres notes, noise is “the set of phenomena of interference that become obstacles to communication” (66). Serres continues to point out that communication is a sort of game played by two interlocutors considered as united against the phenomena of interference and confusion, or against individuals with some stake in interrupting communication. These interlocutors are in no way opposed, as in the traditional conception of the dialectic game; on the contrary, they are on the same side, tied together by a mutual interest: they battle together against noise . . . They exchange roles sufficiently often for us to view them as struggling together against a common enemy. To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to

48  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man . . . We might call this third man the demon, the prosopopeia of noise. (66-​7) In the communication system of our present multilingual reality, it seems that we are not all fighting against this common demon, thus most dialogues are not successful. And I venture to propose several possible hypotheses to explain, following Serres, this failure of communication across cultures. The easiest one is, of course, the Manichean one; we could call it the “racist” excuse: some individuals indeed have some stake against communication.This excuse is related to ideologies of language in the United States, where, on the one hand, Latines and other Usonians are expected to speak English, and on the other, it is assumed that Spanish is spoken by all Latines. In Miami, specifically, “prevailing language ideologies which fully favor English in the US national context and, at the same time, construct both Spanish and English as economically and culturally vital languages at the local level (South Florida) and in the more macro-​level discourse of globalization” (Carter and Lynch 373). In the rest of the United States, the result of these ideologies is that Latines’ use of English is considered inherently deficient. As Rosa has demonstrated, As people expected to produce two languages legitimately but understood to use neither correctly, US Latinxs’ linguistic practices come to be framed as “supposed ‘non-​languages’ ” (Gal 2006:171) in relation to a racialized ideology of languagelessness. I develop the notion of a racialized ideology of languagelessness to characterize the simultaneous stigmatization of US Latinxs’ English and Spanish linguistic practices. This raciolinguistic ideology . . . frames the linguistic practices of racialized populations as deficient regardless of the extent to which they might be perceived as corresponding to standardized norms. (126–​7) A second related reason would be that, in fact, we do not exchange roles sufficiently often in order to be able to acknowledge that there is noise in all communication systems and that in order to fight this common demon we must not rely solely on the elimination of an accent or of an intonation pattern. If there is to be communication among subjects whose identity is constituted through “identity-​indifference,” we must train our ears to difference; as Serres says, “one must . . . cover one’s ears to the song and the beauty of the sirens” (70). In spite of the many accents and types of noise in our present society, there is very little being done in order to train participants to fight against that “third man.” Noise is usually understood in a unidirectional fashion so that only the so-​called “foreign” accents are interpreted as noise, as if there was only one variety of English and linguistic practice of English speakers was accentless.47 In other words, not all observers change their point of observation; thus, the ambiguities which result from noise are never able to be part of the communication

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  49 system. As Serres has explained, ambiguity changes its meaning when there is a change in our points of observation, It depends on whether he [sic] is submerged in the first level or whether he [sic] examines the entire unit from the next level. In a certain sense, the next level functions as a rectifier, in particular, as a rectifier of noise. What was once an obstacle to all messages is reversed and added to the information. (77–​8) Unfortunately, it seems that the differential power structures of our society impede this organic integration from taking place. This is not to say that language is not functioning. On the contrary, “at the most highly integrated level, a language is still functioning . . . as individuated signals equipped with something like meaning: calls for desired objects or warnings against dangerous ones” (79). For these reasons, throughout this book, I pay special attention to the role languages play between writer, theatrical production, grant writing, audience, theatrical reviews, and academia. Anzaldúa’s analysis of what it means to read with what she calls a “queer facultad” and VèVè A. Clark’s diaspora literacy and marasa consciousness are proper complements to Serres’ analysis of noise in information theory. Based on a model of identification and not of identity, Anzaldúa noted that reading is a process through which what is not familiar to us remains hidden in the text, is not perceived. In other words, noise remains as noise. Queer, in this essay as in most of Anzaldúa’s writings, is used to refer to gays and lesbians as much as to allude to what she calls “cultural Others” (“To[o]‌Queer” 270). For her, to read with a queer facultad means to “see into” and “see through” unconscious falsifying disguises by penetrating the surface and reading underneath the words and between the lines . . . For me, then it is a question of whether the individual reader is in possession of a mode of reading that can read the subtext and can introject her experiences into the gaps. Some conventionally trained readers do not have the flexibility (in identity) nor the patience in deciphering “strange,” that is, different, texts. (238) In other words, a queer facultad allows one to move from one level to the next so that the strange noise can be decoded or rectified and reprocessed as information. VèVè A. Clark, on the other hand, addressing Afro-​diasporic texts, suggested that for readers to go beyond exoticized readings, they had to have diaspora literacy: “Diaspora literacy defines the reader’s ability to comprehend the literatures of Africa, Afro-​America, and the Caribbean from an informed indigenous perspective. The field is multicultural and multilingual, encompassing

50  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” writing in European and ethnic languages” (11). This literacy goes beyond a theoretical engagement with the texts in question; it also requires “a knowledge of historical, social, cultural, and political development generated by lived and textual experience” (11). Although Anzaldúa’s essay does not refer directly to reader-​response theorists, any critic familiar with this extensive body of theoretical work will ask immediately how Anzaldúa’s mode of reading with a queer facultad is different from, say, the modes of reading theorized by Iser, or Fish, among others. We have learned from them to acknowledge the creative role of the reader, to identify the diachronic and synchronic processes through which the reader fills in gaps, and to analyze the interaction of text and reader.48 This approach is summarized by Iser in the following fashion: The phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text. (“The Reading” 274) Whereas the now classical approaches to reader-​response criticism do offer different accounts of the reading experience, most of them have overlooked issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and language use. In other words, the reader has been posited as an abstract, sexless, ageless, genderless entity, with the exception of feminist and Black film spectatorship theory.49 Moreover, in these approaches, the nature of the reading material is inconsequential. Anzaldúa’s model of reading with a queer facultad aims to overcome these oversights. She underscores, first, that it is impossible to separate how we read from what we read. Second, how we read is dependent upon “the place one’s feet are planted, the ground one stands on, one’s particular position, point of view” (“To[o]‌ Queer” 258). In other words, the reader’s lived and textual experience. For her, as for Clark and Serres, successful communication depends upon the ability to navigate from one level to the next, to identify with what is familiar. The difference, what Serres terms painful or dangerous noise, must also be organically decoded. In Anzaldúa’s words, the difference can be actually used as another mode of identification through negation: “I’m not that; I’m different from that character” (260). In Serres’: “There must be noise in pleasure and information in pain” (78). Ethnicity Issues of ethnic affiliation and group construction have also been deployed problematically to differentiate Cuban exile writers from the “ethnic” US Cuban ones. Burunat and García, for example, argued that, albeit the differences between Cuban-American and other Latine writers in the construction of

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  51 ethnicity, Cuban-American literature should be regarded as ethnic literature. They suggested that different from Mexican American literature and Nuyorican literature, in Cuban American literature ethnicity is not defined as diversity and difference in continuous clash with dominant culture, rather as attachment to its fore-​fathers and the traditions of country of origin. (14)50 Interestingly enough, other critics have viewed this attachment to traditions as characteristic of Cuban exile literature. Pérez Firmat, for example, has characterized this literature as being “relentlessly retrospective” (“Transcending” 3) and usually written in Spanish since the use of English is considered to be “an intolerable symptom of cultural dissociation” (“Transcending” 4). This “exile versus ethnic” debate continues among literary critics who rarely admit that this polemic in fact is shaped by the ethnic, racial, and political ideologies within the US Cuban community (see K. Christian). Many members of the older generation and some of the younger ones—​the most vocal and visible members—​ascribe to an exile mentality, differentiate themselves from other Latines who immigrate for “economic” reasons, and refuse to see themselves as part of the US immigrant history. Since Mariel and especially in the new millennium, exiles, and other members of Cuban communities in the United States often differentiate themselves from the recently arrived Cubans, primarily economic migrants and many of them Afro-​Cubans. For these reasons, they are read as being staunch supporters of American middle-​class values and US racial hierarchies.51 Race is usually left out of these conceptualizations. As a matter of fact, in both Cuban-American and Latine Studies, it is not until the decade of 2010 that work on Afro-US Cubans and Afro-​Latinidades emerged.52 Again, when the studies focus on literature, theater and performance tend to be left out. But the Cuban experience in the United States, as I have been suggesting, is much more multifaceted.53 There are also many members of this community and many writers who are engaged in a much more complex and revisionist discussion of our cultural background. As the various chapters in this book demonstrate, both nostalgia and assimilationist politics are put into question. Most importantly, through their work, they are proposing a hybrid approach to identity formation that refuses simple and exclusive identification with both their culture of origin and American culture. Furthermore, I argue that US Cuban theater between the 1980s and the 1990s was groundbreaking because, among other things, it tackled questions of race and racial inequality before there was academic literature addressing the topic (see Chapter 3). Needless to say, the attachment to the traditions of our forefathers is highly problematic for some US Cubans. Their legacy also brings with it construction of gender roles and heterosexism, which many writers are trying to unveil and combat. Since the 1970s, many US Cuban women have been writing as

52  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” feminists and some writers as gay or lesbian. They began to see themselves as different from both the Cuban community and the dominant Anglo groups. As Eliana Rivero points out, we . . . began to be conscious of our being different from the dominant groups in the seventies, and internalized this difference as a first step in becoming members of one of the largest ethnic minorities in America . . . We are consciously biculturals, and bilinguals in varying degrees . . . Thematic richness for these authors implies direct experiences of their ex-​centric life; that is, an existence that is functional within the system but not at the center, and which the system and the Anglo majority can neither assimilate nor understand. (“[Re]Writing” 167–​8)54 These writers, then, began a process of reconstruction that Anzaldúa excellently analyzed in relation to Chicanas. This three-​way process consists of (1) analysis of the ancestor’s legacy, (2) rupture with the oppressive traditions of that legacy, and (3) reconstruction of an individual and collective self. Modifying Anzaldúa’s words, this process can be summarized as follows: Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja . . .This weight on her back—​which is the baggage from the Indian [and black] mother[s]‌—​which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo? Pero es difícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentros, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraizado, de la gente antigua. (Borderlands 82) The playwrights studied in this book are all proposing this intricate approach to cultural negotiations. On the one hand, they present a critical posture toward idealized values of prerevolutionary Cuban culture and the mythical vision/​ construction of pre-​Castro Cuba prevalent in the golden exiles’ generation. On the other hand, they also propose a critique of the revolutionary Cuba trope admired and fetishized by the Anglo-​European left. For some of them, Cuba and its people are still the last hope toward a socialist utopia without realizing that the Cuban people are being used as “guinea pigs” of their utopia,55 as became evident in the responses from the Black Lives Matter movement and others to the July 11, 2021, revolts in Cuba. Many of the playwrights in this book, as well as critics such as myself, fall between the discursive trap of both the extreme, Cuban right who sees us as communists and the US left who sees us as colonized gusanos (worms). As Coco Fusco and many others have commented in relation to the pro-​Cuba intellectuals,

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  53 The international left, or cubanólogos as some of us lovingly refer to them, can use the convenient stereotypes about Cubans outside Cuba—​gusanos, colonizados, and fanáticos—​to maintain a paternalistic attitude toward all exiles and US Cubans, reject all their criticism of the Cuban government and justify not sharing power with them. (478)56 Thus, we constantly have to fight the coercive policing situation from both the right and the left which dictates and controls what we can and cannot say about Cuba and about Cubans in the United States. As Ruth Behar points out, [a]‌ ll of us, Cubans of the second generation, ha[ve] lived through an internal struggle between capitalism and communism, between our need to question inherited dogmas and our loyalty to family and community.We [don’t] want to wage the same battles as our parents, yet we [are] still caught in the frameworks, fears, and silences of their generation. (403) Indeed, similar to our position in connection with the question of language use, when it comes to ethnicity and to our position vis-​à-​vis Cuba, we are all still receiving “palo porque boga y palo porque no boga.”

“No soy de aquí ni soy de allá” I am “white” when I wake up in Havana, but I am “other” because of my migratory experience. I am again “other” when I journey thirty minutes through airspace to Miami, because I am no longer White and because my commitment to return to Cuba and have a normal relationship with my home country makes me politically “other” among Miami Cubans. I arrive in Chicago, and again I am other, now because I am a Latina in a city which is defined in black and white. (Torres, 430) Torres’ predicament is precisely what the US Cuban performances analyzed in this book are addressing, namely, the negotiations between a wide array of identificatory models none of which alone is sufficient to account for that hybrid monster, in the Foucauldian sense, called US Cuban identity.57 Torres’ quote addresses the multiple “in-​between” and intersectional positions US Cubans occupy in relation to language, race, ethnicity, and nationality.The most telling implication here is the fact that whether in La Habana, Miami, or any other city in the United States, there seem to be different and even antagonistic regulatory mechanisms that dictate and control what constitutes the norm for white or Cuban. These coercive mechanisms suggest that these categories are socially constructed and, most importantly, since they are constructed through

54  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” opposition, their very construction depends on their opposite, on what they reject. In relation to nationality, for example, Torres focuses on how Cuban identity in Cuba is constructed against the “others” of its post-​1959 diaspora while in Miami, this very “others” is, indeed, Cuban identity, an identity which, in turn, has excluded until very recently any relationship to present-​day Cuba. Iraida López’s Impossible Returns is the first to focus on the role return to the island has played in narratives of the Cuban diaspora. While she does not consider theatrical productions, Marginality Beyond Return shares her use of return and of diaspora as important categories for analysis, as well as her conscious effort to include critical materials published on the island to establish a critical dialogue among materials produced on and off the island. The tensions between the simplistic constructions along linguistic, racial, sexual, political, and ethnic lines in which others see us and how we situate ourselves in relation to those constructions make all of us not so much border-​ crossers as border-​crossed, atravesados in Anzaldúa’s terminology (Borderlands 3). Crossed or marked by these multiple political and discursive constructions, the identities of Cubans and US Cubans are not coherent but a product of these intersections. As such, models of intersectionality and “identity-​in-​difference” seem more productive than the simplistic and exclusionary model of identity such as the ones previously presented insofar as they abandon a static pre-​ established position of a uniform entity and look at subject positions within a dynamic map of power. The construction of Cuban identity, both in Cuba and the United States, has followed an analogous logic of repudiation. The process of assuming a Cuban identity is constituted through the exclusion of its abject: the “gusano” in Cuba, the communist in Miami, and the queer—​the “maricon” and the “tortillera”—​ in both places.The plays I study, question this logic of repudiation.They do not present coherent identities or subject positions constructed through opposition, that is, through rejection, but “inappropriate/​d” subject positions that are themselves constantly “crossing” and thus crossed or “atravesados.” As hybrid performances, these productions also call for a spectator which can be a fellow traveler or crosser, at least metaphorically, of these “in-​betweens.” If bicultural or hybrid subjects occupy those incoherent positions of abjecthood, it could be said these performances are resignifying the very position of the abject by exploding and changing the normativity of its term (Butler 111). In other words, by refusing the regulatory norms of the fiction of cultural pluralism through processes of transculturation and rearticulation, US Cuban playwrights during the 1980s and 1990s, located themselves as Latines, as racialized US citizen-​subjects, and their audience as fellow travelers, as “atravesados/​as” at the borders of cultures. I am not suggesting that being at the margins of mainstream society is in any way desirable. Rather, through a process of social, political, sexual, linguistic, and aesthetic contestations, Latines are resignifying the mainstream by reconceptualizing the United States itself as a “living border” (Flores and Yudice 59). This resignification and the networks and coalitions established by and through these performances might also serve as a map for future community building.

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  55

Notes 1 I use Anglo in this book to refer to those monolingual English speakers of European descent who are usually referred to as “white” or “Caucasian,” and to differentiate from the many Latines and US Cubans who consider themselves phenotypically “white.” 2 “Mister Don’t Touch the Banana,” words by Marisela Verena, music by Willy Chirino (Chirino, 1991). 3 As a matter of fact, sociological studies corroborate that of all Latines, “Cubans are by far the group least likely to report discrimination” (Pérez, “Growing Up” 108–​9). 4 It is interesting to note that in 1995, about 50% of Cubans from Miami reported that they had never felt discriminated against in comparison to less than 30% of Mexican Americans in California. These figures come from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS). See López and Stanton-​Salazar, and Pérez, “Growing UP.” For an analysis of the CILS, see Rumbaut and Portes 1–​20. 5 These contacts underscore the existing ethnoracial inequality in the city in terms of “occupation, income, and poverty as well as related spatial inequalities” (Kohn-​ Wood, 387). Also see Gosin and Benson. 6 US literature on Cuban immigration has talked about four “waves” of Cuban immigrants. I avoid the use of natural metaphors because they strip migrants of their agency. The first group of immigrants came between 1959 and 1962. Historically, these dates coincide with the rise of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 until the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962; the missile crisis resulted in the cancellation of legal emigration from Cuba and the termination of all flights from Cuba to the United States. About 280,000 Cubans migrated legally and illegally to the United States during this first period. Gallagher subdivides this first “wave” into three stages: (1) the economic and political elite openly affiliated with the government of Fulgencio Batista, called the batistianos (about 3,000 who left during the first months of 1959); (2) the non-​batistiano economic elite who began to be affected by the revolutionary reforms enacted in Cuba (about 10,000 who left from mid-​ 1959 to early 1960); and (3) those who came from different social classes including intellectuals and others who had initially supported the Revolution (approximately from 150,000 to 240,000 who were not part of any economic and political elite). Between 1962 and 1965, there was no direct legal transportation between the United States and Cuba. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that about 56,000 Cubans still came to the United States during this period; about 43,000 did so indirectly via a third country (Boswell and Curtis, 48). The second phase of Cuban immigration began in 1965 when the United States and Cuban governments negotiated “el puente aéreo,” an airlift between Varadero, Cuba and Miami, Florida. These flights are also known as “freedom flights” and “family reunification flights.” The airbridge lasted until December 1973 and it brought about 325,000 Cubans. About another 5,000 came by boat during the initial boatlift from Camarioca. In April 1980, an economy in recession and government austerity programs resulted in the takeover of the Peruvian embassy in La Habana by over 10,000 Cubans. This precipitated the opening up of the port of Mariel which initiated the third phase of immigration. Between April and September 1980, over 125,000 Cubans arrived in the United States. For more information on Mariel, see Manzor and Bustamante.

56  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” The fourth phase of immigration consists of over 15,000 people who began arriving to Florida daily during the 1990s in makeshift rafts, the balseros, as well as legal and illegal immigrants from all walks of live, including large number of important and well-​known intellectuals and artists who have defected to the United States. This phase was prompted by Cuba’s economic crisis during the Special Period and changes in US immigration policies toward Cuba. Since 2017, when the US stopped processing visas in La Habana under the Trump administration, Cubans began to enter the United States through the US Mexico borders in increasing numbers. As I finish writing this book (January 2022), Cubans are the top nationality both enrolling in the Remain in Mexico Program and attempting to cross the border. For further analysis and comparisons between the different phases of immigration, see Boswell and Curtis, Cortés “Cuban Exiles,” Gallagher, Llanes, Pedraza “Cuba’s Refugees.” Contemporary migration and migratory changes will be discussed later in this chapter. 7 According to Jorge and Moncarz, there were about 40,000 Cuban-​born US citizens by 1958; 72% of them lived in New York and Florida (International 3). For a study of pre-​Castro immigration, see Pérez, Sugar; and Poyo. 8 For an analysis of the economic enclave see Portes. 9 See Martínez and Moncarz “The Golden Cage”; Stolzenburg and National Commission for Employment Policy. 10 For different accounts of this operation see Conde, de la Campa 37–​60, Oettinger and Thomas, Torreira Crespo, Torres The Lost Apple, and Triay. 11 There are many plays about the Pedro Pan experience which I do not study. Suffice it to mention Mario Ernesto Sánchez’s Matecumbe, el vuelo de Pedro Pan (1994), Nilo Cruz’s Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (2001), Melinda López’s Sonia Flew (2004), and even a recent musical, Rebecca Aparicio’s and Stephen Anthony Elkins’ Pedro Pan. For an analysis of Pedro Pan’s plays, see del Busto Ramírez. For more information on these productions, see their pages in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. 12 For further information see the important article by Pedraza Bailey and Sullivan, as well as Cortes, Cuban Refugee. 13 For a significant study of the development of bilingual education in Miami, see Mackey and Beebe. 14 As a matter of fact, in 1974 there were over 30 Cuban-​operated private schools in Dade County (Mackey and Beebe 45, 177). 15 Also see Pauline Rojas and the two reports The Cuban Refugee. 16 See Pérez, “Growing Up” 99–​103. 17 Bracero—​from the Spanish word brazo meaning “arm”—​is the term used to refer to manual worker. See Amott and Matthaei, Cockcroft, Estrada et al., González, Mirandé, and Ruiz. 18 For studies on the Mariel exodus, see Camayd-​Freixas, Capó Jr, Clark et al., Cros-​ Sandoval, Engstrom, Gastón A. Fernández, González-​Sarasa, Lindskoog, Lipman, Portes and Stepick, and Rivera. For contemporary analyses of the Mariel boatlift see “El efecto Mariel: Before, During, and After,” and Manzor and Bustamante. 19 Since 1964, US immigration policies have considered Cubans who arrived directly from Cuba—​whether “legally” or “illegally”—​to be refugees and were granted immediate entry (see, e.g., Gallagher). Those who went to a third country were considered aliens, thus submitted to existing immigration restrictions: “Once on

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  57 Spanish soil, the Cuban is like another one of millions seeking an immigration visa to the land of ‘golden opportunities’ ” (Smiley 23). 20 The “Wet Foot, Dry Foot Policy” is the informal name given to the US Cuba Immigration Accord that was enacted in 1995 as an amendment to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. This 1966 act allowed Cuban citizens who had been in the United States for two years to apply for permanent residency. The length of time was reduced to one year in 1976. The 1995 Accord established that the United States would only allow Cubans to enter its territory via a land point of entry to request parole status; those intercepted at sea would be returned to Cuba. See US Department of Homeland Security. 21 See Krogstad, Zamora. 22 Michael J. Bustamante gives us the following numbers in an informative Tweet: Number of Cubans declared inadmissible at US ports of entry: FY14: 17,109 FY15: 28,642 FY16: 41,523 FY17: 15,383 FY18: 7,079 [Reflects end of Wet Foot, Dry Foot Policy] FY19: 21,499 FY20 (till December 2019): 1,497 Number of Cubans physically removed from the United States (i.e., actually sent home not just administratively deported) FY16: 64 FY17: 160 FY18: 463 FY19: 1,179 23 See Pérez and Grenier for an analysis of US academia’s sociological approaches toward the study of Cubans in the United States. 24 For literature on terrorist activity in Miami, see America’s Watch, Pressley, and Torres, In the Land. For a counter-​critique from a Manichean perspective, see Blazquez. For its effects on theater, see Manzor, and Manzor and Rizk. 25 Portes and Stepick have an interesting analysis of the relationship between the creation of a sense of belonging by sharing an intolerant extreme right political view and the economic growth of the Cuban enclave in Miami (Chapter 6). 26 See Lisandro Pérez, “Cuban American,” for an excellent study of the role of Cuban Americans in the formulation of US Cuba policies. 27 For an analysis of the transnational nature of Miami-​Cuba, see Eckstein, Eckstein and Barberia, and Valencia. 28 I should add that later in 2001, the 2nd Latin Grammys were moved from Miami to Los Angeles because of protests by Cuban exiles over the invitation of musicians living in Cuba to perform at the Grammys. 29 The history of cultural exchanges is documented in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive under the tag “cultural exchanges-​US-​Cuba.” 30 For an analysis of this in relation to music, see Cantor-​Navas. 31 Arrizón uses transculturation in order to explain the processes of hybridization and mestizaje especially within the context of queer mestizas. Like her, I use transculturation throughout this book to look at “cultures modified, altered, or influenced through their contact with another culture” (10). But I am interested

58  Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana” in seeing transculturation as a multidirectional process through which all cultures coming into contact with one another change. 32 Rafael Rojas reads mestizaje, syncretism, and transculturation as processes that are part of a Cuban metanarrative of identity which defines national culture based on similarities and confluences, in other words, identity as synthesis. My reading of Ortiz’s theory of transculturation argues that it is one of those moments in which the metanarrative of identity as synthesis is subverted. 33 Information on this committee comes from Hattam’s detailed analysis. 34 As García Canclini notes, “capitalism does not only restructure and isolate: it also reunifies and resets the scattered pieces into a new system: the globalization of culture” (Transforming 64). 35 A few exceptions are de la Nuez, R. Rojas, and Vera León. 36 For an analysis of “oblique power,” see García Canclini, Culturas 263–​327. 37 For an exploration of Cuban culture on the island along with Caribbean culture as a chaotic, nonlinear system, characterized by noise and opacity, see Benitez Rojo. 38 García Canclini refers to these two processes in the following manner: “la pérdida de la relación ‘natural’ de la cultura con los territorios geográficos y sociales, y, al mismo tiempo, ciertas relocalizaciones territoriales relativas, parciales, de las viejas y nuevas producciones simbólicas” (“the loss of culture’s ‘natural’ relation with its geographic and social territories, and, at the same time, certain relative and partial territorial relocations of odd and new symbolic productions,” Culturas híbridas 288). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are my own. 39 “De más está decir que existe . . . un teatro cubanoamericano, representado en varias obras de José Corrales, Matías Montes Huidobro, José Sanchez-​Boudy y Dolores Prida.” 40 “A pesar de que los rasgos de su literatura nos muestran que el cubanoamericano no se ha asimilado ni lingüísticamente ni culturalmente a los Estados Unidos, la asimilación estructural de muchos de ellos, es decir, su éxito económico y su participación en la actividad comercial y financiera de este país ha sido casi total.” 41 See Baltodano, Rosa, and Woolard. 42 Most bibliographical indexes of works until 1980 demonstrate that Spanish was the prevalent language of these writers. In Fernández and Fernández, for example, of 612 literary works cited, only 7 are in English. Of these, 2 are bilingual editions (González Cruz and Pau Llosa). The entries for theater seem to take into account only works published—​ an incomplete selection, nevertheless—​ and not those staged. All these entries are of plays written in Spanish. A similar conclusion can be reached after reading Maratos and Hill’s handbook. Of over 1,400 entries of books published until 1985, 25 were written originally in English. The entries for theater are more extensive and they do list unpublished manuscripts. 43 A notable exception is the Norton anthology New Worlds of Literature. Starting in the mid-​1990s, anthologies and bibliographies of Latine theater started to include US Cubans. See, for example, Arrizón and Manzor, Latinas on Stage; Marrero and Svich, Out of the Fringe; Peterson and Bennett, Women Playwrights of Diversity; and Sandoval-​Sánchez and Sternbach Stages of Life. 44 For an analysis of language education and language loyalty in the United States, see Fillmore, Fishman, Kloss, and Mackey and Beebe. 45 These plays are available at the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries (Theater Scripts Collection), as well as within the more than 80 collections related to theater artists.

Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  59 46 Preston, for example, explains that “considerable neurolinguistic evidence suggests that a bilingual is not a double monolingual. The best of this evidence comes from fairly recent studies of localization of brain functions, in particular the discovery that a number of language functions seem to specialize in one hemisphere of the brain (usually the left) at a certain period in one’s linguistic development—​a process referred to as lateralization. If, of course, a second language is stored in a different way or if the storage of more than one language ‘creates’ a different brain, then numerous tasks, linguistic as well as nonlinguistic, may be different for bilingual and monolinguals. If that is the case, the monolingual’s behavior is an inappropriate norm for the multilingual” (275). 47 See Carter and Lynch for a discussion of the varieties of English in Miami’s language scene. 48 For a critique of different approaches to reader-​response criticism, see Mailloux. 49 See, for example, Bobo. 50 “[a]‌diferencia de la literatura mexicoamericana y la nuyorriqueña, en la literatura cubanoamericana la etnicidad queda definida no como diversidad y diferencia en continuo choque con la cultura dominante, sino como apego a los antepasados y a las tradiciones del país de origen.” 51 Rivero, for example, noted that many Nuyoricans and Chicanos view CubanAmericans as “reactionary carriers of a certain ideology which is perceived to be imbued with selfish, materialistic middle-​class values” (“Hispanic” 187). 52 See Antonio López, and Richardson. 53 As Vasquez has stated, “the diversity of views regarding US Cuban writers, ethnicity, and the mainstream is an indicator of the vitality and multiplicity of the Cuban experience in the United States, literary expression of it, and critical approaches to this ever-​growing body of literature” (34). 54 In an earlier essay, Rivero assumed a different position arguing that the literature by Cuban immigrants could not be considered ethnic because of their favorable ideological stance toward middle-​class American values (“Hispanic” 187). For an analysis of the exile versus ethnic debate, see K. Christian. 55 I borrow this phrase from Senel Paz’s private conversations with me during his first visit to the United States. 56 Also see Behar, Boero, and Torres, “Beyond.” 57 See Sandoval-​Sánchez for a study of Latino identity as a hybrid monster.

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Uno. “Mister, Don’t Touch the Banana”  63 Kloss, Heinz. The American Bilingual Tradition. Newbury House, 1977. Kohn-​Wood, et al. “Race, Social Identity, and Generative Spaces: Miami as a Microcosm of Categorical Complexity in a 21st-​Century Global City.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 59, no. 3, 2015, pp. 386–​405. Krogstad, Jens Manuel. “Surge in Cuban immigration to U.S. continued through 2016.” Pew Research Center, 13 Jan. 2017, http://pewresearch.org/​fact-​tank/​2017/​01/​13/​ cuban-​immigration-​to-​u-​s-​surges-​as-​relations-​warm/​. Leonin, Mia. “From Ports to Puertas.” Miami New Times, 17 May 2001. http://ctda. library.miami.edu/​media/​publications/​mnt_​From_​Ports_​to_​Puertas_​_​_​Miami_​ New_​Times.pdf Lindskoog, Carl. Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System. U of Florida P, 2018. Lipman, Jana K.“‘The Fish Trusts the Water, and It Is in the Water That It Is Cooked’:The Caribbean Origins of the Krome Detention Center.” Radical History Review, vol. 115, winter 2013, pp. 115–​41. Llanes, José. Cuban Americans: Masters of Survival. Abt Books, 1982. López, Antonio. Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-​ Cuban America. New York UP, 2014. López, David E., and Ricardo D. Stanton-​Salazar. “Mexican Americans: A Second Generation at Risk.” Children of Immigrants in America, edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, U of California P, 2001, pp. 57–​90. López, Iraida H. Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora. U of Florida P, 2015. López, Iraida H., and Eliana Rivero. Let’s Hear Their Voices. SUNY P, 2019. Lynch, Andrew, and Phillip M. Carter. “Multilingual Miami: Trends in Sociolinguistic Research.” Language and Linguistics Compass, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 369–​85. Mackey, William F. and Von Nieda Beebe. Bilingual Schools for a Bicultural Community: Miami’s Adaptation to the Cuban Refugees. Newbury House, 1977. Mailloux, Steven. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. Cornell U P, 1998. Manzor, Lillian. “Archiving US-​Cuban Performances.” Caribe, vol. 13, no. 2, 2011, pp. 71–​94. Manzor, Lillian, and Alberto Sarraín, editors. Teatro cubano actual: Dramaturgia escrita en Estados Unidos. Ediciones Alarcos, 2005. Manzor, Lillian, and Beatriz Rizk. Cuban Theater in Miami: 1960-​1980, http://scholar. library.miami.edu/​miamitheater/​section2.html. Manzor-​Coats, Lillian, and Alicia Arrizón, editors. Latinas on Stage. Criticism and Practice. Third Woman Press, 2000. Maratos, Daniel C., and Marnesba D. Hill. Escritores de la diáspora cubana: manual biobibliográfico /​Cuban Exile Writers: a Biobibliographic Handbook. Scarecrow Press, 1986. Martínez, María del Carmen. “ ‘Her Body Was My Country’: Gender and Cuban-​ American Exile Community Nationalist Identity in the Work of Gustavo Pérez Firmat.” Latino Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2009, pp. 295–​316. Masud Piloto, Félix. With Open Arms: Cuban Migration to the United States. Rowman and Littlefield, 1988. Miranda, Leticia, and Julia Teresa Quiroz. The Decade of the Hispanic: An Economic Retrospective. National Council of La Raza /​Office of Research Advocacy and Legislation, 1990. Mirandé, Alfredo. The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective. U of Notre Dame P, 1985.

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2 Dos. “Momento renacentista” US Cubans and Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway

Introduction There are many studies of the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement of the 1950s and 1960s. However, the role of Latines in Off-​Off-​Broadway, with the exception of María Irene Fornés who is considered a major force of this movement, has been absent from its historiography. Off-​Off-​Broadway, traditionally white and US American, has never been read in relation to the incipient Latine theater in 1960s New York. Neither has the development of Latine theater in New York been analyzed vis-​à-​vis Off-​Off-​Broadway, bar Fornés. As I demonstrate in this chapter, an analysis of both Latine theater and Off-​Off-​Broadway theater archives now available show many points of contact between the two. This chapter focuses on the role US Cubans and Puerto Ricans played in Off-​Off-​Broadway. I present how the process of hybridity and transculturation analyzed in the previous chapter were at work in their theatrical productions. Furthermore, I demonstrate how their retooling of themes and aesthetics coming from non-​US traditions were key to their theatrical processes. However, it was that very aesthetics and the use of Spanish language that remained unreadable to English-​language theater critics who pushed their work away from Off-​Off-​Broadway to the then-​nascent Spanish or Hispanic theater, as the newspapers referred to Latine theater in New York during its early years.1 Methodologically, I carry out some historiography of the period. I analyze archival materials related to their theater-​making practice and reconstruct the performances by reading not only the manuscripts but also photographs, stage and costume designs, musical scores, documentary videos, theater reviews, and other archival ephemera. I analyze the relationships between various actors and spaces that produced the network I call Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. I begin the chapter with an analysis of María Irene Fornés’ La viuda (The Widow), a play that has not been analyzed previously. Although many consider this play to be a precursor to her dramaturgy (Cummings 2012, 10), I argue that this play, regardless of the language in which it was written, should be considered Fornés’ first play, chronologically speaking, as well as the first play in which many of Fornés’ characteristic dramaturgical elements appear. I analyze La viuda relating it to other works from Fornés’ Off-​Off-​Broadway period, namely, Tango Palace DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-3

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  69 and Promenade, to prove that La viuda already contains the theatrical techniques and language used by Fornés in her later work. The second half of the chapter is devoted to Manuel Martín Jr.’s early work as actor, director, and playwright to demonstrate how he, alongside actress Magali Alabau, and other Latine artists latinized Off-​Off-​Broadway.The main objective of this chapter is to bring back three key US Cuban theater artists, put them into dialogue with their Off-​Off-​ Broadway contemporaries during the 1960s and 1970s in New York, and demonstrate how this assemblage produced what I name Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. Although Latine identity politics is not directly addressed by these experimental plays, they perform an unquestionable Cubanity through the haunting of ghosts from the past. However, despite their experimental aesthetics, they were not read as Off-Off-Broadway plays because that Cubanity was performed from a Cuban/Latin American perspective.

Off-​Off-​Broadway María Irene Fornés (b. Havana; d. New York; 1930-2018), Manuel Martín Jr. (b. Artemisa; d. New York; 1934–2000), and Magali Alabau (b. Cienfuegos, 1945) were some of the oldest, most active, and most creative participants of the US Cuban stages. Fornés left Cuba in 1945 with her mother and older sister, settling in New York. According to Cummings, [i]‌n 1947, she took a folk dancing class at the New School for Social Research and found a new community in the postwar counter-​culture of Greenwich Village. It became her home for most of her adult life . . . Eventually, she took an apartment at One Sheridan Square in the heart of the West Village where she lived for the next forty years. (7) At the New School for Social Research, there was already another Cuban artist, Andrés Castro, working with Erwin Piscator, as well as the Puerto Rican Miriam Colón—​the first Latine to be accepted into Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop and into Actors Studio. Castro attended acting and movement classes with Stella Adler and direction with Lee Strasberg, as many other Cuban-​born actors such as Manuel Martín Jr. did in the 1950s. Erwin Piscator (1893–​1966) was a famous German theatrical director and producer, originator of epic theater with Bertolt Brecht. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1939 and founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1940. He returned to Germany in 1951 at the height of the McCarthy era when the United States denied his application for citizenship. In the Dramatic Workshop, he enacted his vision of a “ ‘theater of commitment’ by restoring to contemporary drama the communal purpose and moral seriousness of classical drama” (Rutkoff and Scott 173). In addition to Piscator who was in charge of direction, the workshop included professors from the

70  Dos. “Momento renacentista” Group Theater such as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg who taught acting; others were in charge of music and playwriting. He expounded the concept of total theater that required much more than new theatrical architecture and effects. He believed that theater artists had to know the craft of theater and needed to be well-​versed in all its aspects. “He insisted that students could not become dramatists without writing, producing, directing, and performing their own plays” (Rutkoff and Scott 186).To that end, he founded the Studio Theater first (1940–​1944) and then the President Theater (1945–​1951) and Rooftop Theater (1947–​1950). Piscator’s impact on US theater has been amply documented. He shared the need to have a politically committed theater that was also experimental. Furthermore, “the Dramatic Workshop filled a gap between the decline of American Left theater and the rise and recognition of off-​Broadway, whose way it helped to pave” (Willett 15). As we will see, the transculturated legacy of Piscator through Andrés Castro’s work in New York and Cuba left an indelible imprint on Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. Manuel Martín Jr. arrived in New York in 1955 to study acting at the Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, precisely when Fornés had left New York to live in Europe (1954 and 1958). In New York, he found that commercial theater had consolidated with Broadway. These big theaters located around Broadway and

Figure 2.1 Photograph of Manuel Martín Jr. Photo by Felipe Nápoles. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  71 42nd Avenue had more than 300 seats, and they primarily produced musicals. Playwrights and directors who were interested in a different kind of theater started to function in smaller spaces—​100 to 300 seats—​close to the Broadway theater scene giving rise to what is known as Off-​Broadway. After 1958, several artists like Fornés and Martín, who rejected Off-​Broadway aesthetics and were tired of Broadway commercial productions, started to work in small non-​performing spaces and experiment with the plays’ form and content. Caffe Cino in the West Village, Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the Lower East Side, and Al Carmines’ Judson Poets Theater in Judson Memorial Church were some of the most important artists and spaces of what became the Off-​Off-​Broadway theater movement. The name Off-​ Off-​Broadway appeared for the first time in The Village Voice theater listing on November 24, 1960.2 Using coffee houses and unused lofts, experimental plays were performed and remained, in the beginning, off the circuit of reviews and theater criticism. One of the most important aspects of these spaces is that they served as a theater lab for a generation of playwrights and directors who would eventually change US theater (Crespy 21). Off-​Off-​Broadway is exemplary of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. The underground artists who started the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement and the audience they had, “saw the overt culture of the United States in the 1960’s as a gigantic corporate complex of massive government and quasi-​ governmental agencies which breeds wars of ‘righteousness’ that no one seems to start and no one knows how to end” (Schroeder ix). In those alternative spaces, artists experimented with form and content; they often had nudity on stage; the audience participated actively in the performances; and they erased the boundary between theatrical genres and artistic media. Originally a space where playwrights could experiment, by the end of the 1960s theater directors and producers practically displaced the role playwrights previously held as creators and originators of theatrical concepts and language. Perhaps the best analysis of this was Tom Eyen’s satirical piece in The New York Times, “The Discreet Alarm of the Off-​Off-​Broadway Playwright,” where he describes/​ imagines a dinner with the 20-​plus playwrights who founded The Playwrights’ Strategy. In this article, Eyen underscores that “playwrights need more than financial support.They need public and critical affirmation . . . New playwrights are being produced and reviewed by their fathers, who live in a world they have lost touch with” (15). During the Off-​Off-​Broadway effervescence of the 1950s and 1960s, several Cuban theater artists were active in New York. In addition to Manuel Martín Jr. who never left New York because of his studies, René Buch, future founder of Teatro Repertorio Español, was studying at Yale during the 1950s and then moved to New York. Andrés Castro, who had studied with Piscator during the 1940s and had been working in Cuba during the 1950s, emigrated to New York in the early 1960s where he joined Buch and other Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Latine artists already living in the city. During the 1960s, Martín acted in several plays in both English and Spanish, and he became a key figure in

72  Dos. “Momento renacentista”

Figure 2.2 Al Carmines, María Irene Fornés, Harry Koutoukas, and Larry Kornfield sitting at Caffe Cino. Photo by James Gossage ©Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

the creation and development of the independent theater movement in Spanish in New York. Many forget that the nascent Latine theater movement in this city emerged parallel to the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement. The literature and press of the time subsequently moved Martín and others to the “Hispanic” theater scene thus pushing them away from Off-​Off-​Broadway, in spite of the fact that because of his aesthetics, as I demonstrate later in this chapter, he should be considered part of the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement. Off-​Off-​Broadway welcomed Black theater artists from the very beginning. The Greenwich Mews Theater, La MaMa, and Joseph Papp, for example, “pioneer[ed] in what is frequently termed non-​traditional casting, freely mixing actors of various races, especially in Shakespeare” (Gussow 199). However, there rarely is a mention of Latine artists who worked in Spanish and, when they are mentioned, the critics do not differentiate between Latine companies. A good example is Mel Gussow. In an article on Off-​Off-​Broadway, he remarks how Tisa Chang founded the Pan Asian Repertory Theater at La MaMa and then continues to name Repertorio Español, Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, and the Nuyorican Poets’ Café as “the Hispanic companies, appealing to a bilingual

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  73 audience” (214). There is no reference to Duo Theater at La MaMa and no differentiation between the Off-​Off-​Broadway aesthetics of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café versus the more traditional theater companies. The role of Cubans and Puerto Ricans in the Off-​Off-​Broadway theater movement is practically nonexistent in the historiography of both Latine theater and Anglo-​American studies of the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement. This absence could be due, in part, to the fact that the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement coincides with what has been considered the beginning of “modern” Latine theater: 1965 is the year that Luis Valdés founded El Teatro Campesino on the Delano Grape Strike picket lines of César Chávez’s United Farmworkers Union. As I have analyzed elsewhere, traditional historiographical studies underscore how El Teatro Campesino and other groups primarily in California and the US South became emblematic of El Movimiento, the Chicano theater movement.3 Following the 1960s goals of El Movimiento and Nuyorican Consciousness, analyses of Latine theater usually connect it to studies of identity/​community politics. In addition, its origins are always set in community-​based activism: this is a guerrilla theater for the times when it was still believed that “a revolution” was possible (Manzor 2017a). The factual and historical inexactitudes of this teleology reflect both the challenges to and possibilities of conducting Latine theater research in the 21st century: (1) the lack and need of archival resources for Latine theater; (2) the lack and need of cross-​geographical, interdisciplinary, and transnational approaches to Latine Theater Studies; and, as I stated in the Introduction, (3) the need for the continued collaboration among four fundamental “actors” or cultural workers in the production of knowledge from within, for, and about Latine theater: the artist/​researcher, the researcher/​artist, the artist and researcher working together, and the participating researcher (not an artist) who produces knowledge based on the theatrical event itself (Dubatti). As the materials of Miriam Colón /​Puerto Rican Traveling Theater Collection at Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies, or INTAR Theater Records and the multiple theater collections at the University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection make abundantly visible, before 1965, there was ample theatrical activity by Latines in New York, Miami, and elsewhere: Miriam Colón was in René Marqués’ La carreta in 1953, and by 1964 she was acting in two traveling plays in Spanish directed by Osvaldo Riofrancos and produced by Joseph Papp in New York. Latine artists were nominated and won important awards such as Obies since José Quintero’s best director (1956) and María Irene Fornés’ distinguished play (1965), before El Teatro Campesino’s special citation (1968).4 Off-​Off-​Broadway, traditionally considered white, has never been read in relation to the incipient Latine theater movement of the late 1960s. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the archives allow us to establish pan-​Latine artistic networks, as well as Latine and Anglo-​American ones. Through these networks, processes of transculturation took place via the many points of contact—​as well as differences—​between Latine and Off-​Off-​Broadway theaters (Manzor 2017a).

74  Dos. “Momento renacentista”

María Irene Fornés’ La viuda (The Widow) María Irene Fornés traveled to La Habana in the summer of 1960 with Susan Sontag, and they stayed at her brother Cuco’s home. La viuda is based on a series of letters written by her great grandfather’s cousin at the turn of the 20th century. According to her nephew, Rafael Fornés, it was in Cuba that Fornés found the letters and where she wrote La viuda (2020).5 As previously mentioned, scholars do not consider La viuda Fornés’ first play, so much so that La viuda does not appear in many of the indexes of published works on Fornés. The play revolves around a woman, Angela, who lives in Sevilla, Spain, and dictates to a scribe a series of letters addressed to her cousin David who lives in La Habana, in order to re-​establish her legal rights as the widow of Francisco de Arenal—​nicknamed Paco in the play. As I will demonstrate, La viuda includes all the elements that characterize Fornés’ playwriting: found or borrowed texts, the double, off-​ center humor, collage, miniature scenes, or “emotigraphs” (Cummings), the innocent, theater within theater, and so on. Like Fornés’ last play, Letters from Cuba—​ based on letters exchanged between her and her brother Cuco (Rafael Fornés)—​her first play, La viuda, demonstrates Fornés’ interest in the found object or text. In addition to the letters, the play also incorporates information from newspaper clippings of the time, a death certificate, and other written documents. Susan Sontag, in her outstanding presentation of Fornés’ early plays, noted Fornés’ interest in the “pre-​literary” and “the authority of documents,” although La viuda actually questions the truth-​value of these various documents. The play is structured around six scenes; therefore, La viuda is really her “first experiment in writing a play in a series of brief, episodic, often inconclusive scenes” (Cummings 25) and not Successful Life of 3 as Cummings contends. Much like this later Off-​Off-​Broadway play, La viuda is “a dizzying, deadpan comedy that exemplifies Fornes’s delightful, often mischievous sense of humor” (Cummings 25). The play opens with what we now consider a typical Fornesian visual tableau. The stage directions set the scene, describing the room first and then the main character. In the room description, there are a few seemingly incongruous elements—​a cage and a Black hat box; their relevance will be revealed during the play: The main piece of furniture to the right is an enormous writing desk with infinite small drawers and placed in a platform one-​foot-​high with a step. In front of the writing desk there is a tall stool and a lectern.The surface of both is too small to serve comfortably as stool and desk respectively. In the rest of the room, there are chairs, rocking chairs, a table with a small chest, a sofa and a cage, a black box for hats. To the left there is a door; on the back wall there are two large windows and a painting with a portrait of a young man. (9)6

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  75 Fornés’ first play already displays all the elements that would become the trademark of her scenographic design: “long, straight lines and flat textured surfaces; isolated, iconic pieces of furniture; a lack of decorative detail; and architectural elements that lead deeper inside” (Cummings 133). Angela, the protagonist, is described by her movements and in relation to the room we have seen: Angela is an energetic woman, about seventy years old. Her strict character is immediately revealed by her gestures and the state or order and sobriety of the room. Angela carries on her waist a keychain with hanging little keys that open the desk drawer and that give the impression of being a rosary full of small medals. Angela knows, without hesitation, the key that belongs to each drawer. It’s 1899. (9)7 The first part of the initial tableau is indicative of the importance Fornés gave to architecture. As scholars have noted, in her plays she created “jewel-​like rooms of precision and order” (Reagan) in which her characters’ lives unfold. Always inside with practically no information of what is happening outside, she carefully delineates the spaces in this room.The one slightly raised with the writing desk is Angela’s space of memory and creation where she safeguards the letters she has received, as well as drafts of the letters she dictates. The importance Fornés gave to rewriting and editing has been amply documented. In La viuda, this editing process is already suggested through the many instructions and orders Angela gives to the scribe while dictating: erase this, change that, and so on. She also takes drafts away from the scribe and exchanges them with other pieces of blank paper of various colors. Susan Sontag was the first one to notice the importance Fornés gave to directions and instructions: “Character is revealed through catechism. People requiring or giving instruction is a standard situation in Fornes’ plays” (9). Scenographic design, room within a room, found letters, instructions, and rewriting are all present in the first few pages of La viuda. The stage directions indicate that Angela’s letters appear in quotation marks and that when she dictates the punctuation, such as commas and periods, “she draws [the punctuation] in the air with her hand” (11).8 They also point out who should play Angela’s character and how: “Angela should not be played by a young woman in character, rather by an elderly woman, or perhaps by a young man, since he would have in his favor energy, firmness, agility, without lacking grace and elegance” (10).9 The fact that Fornés discards a young woman dressed as an elderly one but considers the possibility of having a young man in drag play Angela is significant. We will never know whether this is one of Fornés’ jokes or whether, indeed, she took this option seriously. Regardless, it tells us much about how Fornés envisioned Angela, and the possibilities she imagined for her performance of gender, as I demonstrate further on. Through the letters that Angela dictates, Angela becomes first and foremost both a speaking and

76  Dos. “Momento renacentista”

Figure 2.3 Production photograph of María Irene Fornés, La viuda. ©The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

writing subject. This is unquestionably underscored by the last words she utters at the end of the very first scene, addressed directly to the scribe: “Let me sign” (“Déjeme firmar” 18). After the initial visual and introspective tableau, Fornés continues with a series of movements, in complete silence, that we now recognize to be a characteristic of both her playwriting and directing. One hears dogs barking and Angela, who has been on stage motionless for a few seconds, hurries to the right window and looks to the outside softly lifting the lace curtain. There is morning light. Realizing who has entered, she runs to the writing desk, opens a drawer, takes out a letter (every time she takes out something from the drawers, she closes them immediately) and runs to the left window where she reads the letter one inch away from her eyes.The acting must be as contained and stylized as possible even when words or gestures are exaggerated in content. The scribe enters, a squalid and dusty individual. Angela points to the lectern and stool without turning her head.The scribe sits down and opens his threadbare leather

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  77 portfolio, takes out yellowish paper and a golden adorned fountain pen. Angela turns around. (9–​10)10 Cummings has named these miniature scenes emotigraphs in order to emphasize their brevity, their pictorial quality, and their affective content . . .They operate on the principle of a tableau, but they last longer and have a more contemplative dimension. Whether as brief as a few seconds or as long as a few minutes, these vignettes are always rigorously composed, iconographic, marked by stillness, and pulsing with emotion. (108) As I mentioned, the play is composed of a series of letters that Angela dictates to a scribe. These letters, in addition to establishing the conflicts she wants to resolve, also address, inconspicuously as will be the case in her future work, political topics related to the historical time of the play: from Cuba’s First War of Independence in 1868 to the role of the United States in Cuba in the early 1900s, right after the Spanish-​Cuban-​American War and Cuba’s independence from Spain.11 The date that frames and ends Angela’s opening description above, 1899, is significant. During the first months of 1899, the Spanish forces finally left Cuba (January), the US Senate approved the Treaty of Paris (February), and the Treaty of Paris was announced (April). This treaty marked the end of the Spanish-​Cuban-​American War; it stipulated that Spain would remove its armed forces from Cuba and recognized the rights of the US to occupy Cuba; additionally, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US. There are various comments about the United States throughout the letters, which are linked to the 1898 historical and political scene. Often times funny à-la-Fornés, they acquire a different meaning in relation to the time in which the play was written and published. The Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959; in July 1960, while Fornés was in La Habana, Cuba nationalized businesses and commercial properties, and, in October 1960, the United States imposed a commercial embargo on the island. Throughout the 1960s, the CIA trained Cuban exiles for a covert invasion of Cuba and Cuba was on high alert.The Bay of Pigs invasion took place in April 1961, and La viuda was published in August 1961. It is within this 1959–​1961 historical context that Angela’s comments about the United States need to be seen. The first one appears in a letter dated 1899 in which she is referring to the aftermath of the 1898 war: The Cuban problem I am not sure how God wants to resolve it. But I think there will not be a War with the United States because these people are very practical and they would not undertake a battle that would harm their interests. (13)12

78  Dos. “Momento renacentista” With the Bay of Pigs in the background, the above passage, as well as those uttered by Angela about her husband’s death from a heart attack, acquire different meanings: “They tell me that his health could not resist the disappointment of witnessing the Americans enter Cuba” (15).13 Angela’s comments about exile in that same letter are also telling when read in relation to 1960–​1961. She dictates “I have never been able to morally acclimate here in Spain. Nothing sparks a real interest in me. I always considered myself as in passing” (13).14 By 1961, there were around 250,000 Cubans living in exile who, like Angela a century before, also thought they were in a strange land temporarily. Angela’s matter of fact comments, however, are devoid of the nostalgia that was prevalent in 19th-​century exile writing, as well as in early Cuban exile writing. US immigration laws in the early 1960s, as explained in Chapter 1, favored Cuba and encouraged Cubans to come to the United States. The same thing happened toward the end of the 19th century, when Angela’s husband migrates to the United States, becomes a US citizen, and is thus able to get a divorce. Angela, however, cannot understand those laws in the United States that “encourage a man to abandon a woman and their legitimate children to start, as if the past did not exist, a new life with any woman and with illegitimate children” (26).15 I am proposing that Fornés’ contemporary audience must have also become aware of the historical and legal parallelisms between the first years of the 1900s and the first years of the 1960s. Cummings has beautifully suggested that Fornes’ use of the Found—​the already owned object, the already occupied space, the already written text—​recuperates the past without altogether assimilating it into the present. The tension that results lends a kind of truthfulness or ontological depth to her plays, as if the immediacy of the Now is fortified by the historicity of the Already. (87) In La viuda, the boundaries between the Now and the Already are blurred, and it is up to the spectator to assign meaning to them. These historical references are framed by one of the main themes treated in the play, morality. Angela formulates the conflict with her deceased and estranged husband as a moral conflict. And she transposes that moral conflict to the ways in which the United States pretends to resolve issues. She ends one of the letters she dictates in that first scene, with the following: “P.D. It’s interesting to see how the Americans resolve moral issues before anything else” (14).16 Both within the time frame of the play’s actions and read in relation to the 1959–​1961 time frame, it becomes evident that “moral issues” are never Black and white. Moral or ethical issues were and are the United States’ excuse to intervene in Cuba’s affairs. And Angela’s need to reclaim her civil and legal rights as the wife of Francisco de Arenal is also couched in moral or ethical terms. The characters in La viuda have at least two sides. Angela presents herself as a dutiful wife, generous and loving mother, and daughter, in spite of her husband’s

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  79 and father’s violent nature. The intricate and complex relationship between violence and love, a theme that Fornés will continue to develop in many of her later plays starting with her 1963 Off-​Off-​Broadway play Tango Palace, is introduced in La viuda. Angela presents herself, at first, as a woman who believes in the sacrosanctity of marriage as an institution; in other words, she seems to be the epitome of the period’s ideal woman, the “angel in the house” who was morally superior. It is not by chance that her name is the feminine rendition in Spanish of an angel. For example, Angela explains in a letter to her cousin her reaction when she found out about her husband’s “infidelity”: I did not want my mind to be contaminated with the impurities of that couple . . . I didn’t complain about my bad luck, nor did I pester others with my moaning. Rather, I stoically accepted my destiny. But now that I am being challenged by a usurper of my position, not only socially . . . but officially in the press, I abandon my old position. I will smear my name appearing in court, I will not give up the defense of my civil and moral rights . . . I must exert my rights and recover my honor.17 However, throughout the play, all those characteristics will be deconstructed. Right after her ironic comment about the United States and morality, for example, Fornés presents the second emotigraph of the play. It involves a carefully scripted set of actions around the small chest on the table and several pieces of candy of various colors. She walks toward the chest and pulls out a piece of green candy for herself. She then pulls out another piece of green candy for the scribe, but she hesitates. Eventually, after playing with several pieces, she decides to give the scribe a smaller piece of candy.18 Through the use of colorful pieces of candy, this scene undermines Angela’s assertions about being a generous and righteous woman and demonstrates that she is not as bighearted as she claims to be. The carefully scripted set of movements will be repeated throughout the play in various situations. For example, when pulling letters from the writing desk, the letters, all faded because of time, also have different colors like the candy. But Fornés is careful to note that “Angela’s movements between letter and letter represent the synthesis of her thoughts and anxieties during long and agonizing periods of waiting.Those moments must have great clarity, precision, and intensity” (15).19 In other words, like the previous candy emotigraph, these movements are used to unveil the interior world of the characters. Sound effects play an important role in this play. She incorporates the sound of a noisemaker (matraca in Spanish) every time there is a disconnect between what Angela dictates and her analysis of the situation. The first use appears early on in the play when the scribe, the only character who never utters a word, appears to make fun of her grotesquely: “A noisemaker is heard; its sound seems to come out from within the scribe; at the same time his abdomen makes contractions as if from a guffaw” (15).20 After that first scene, the word matraca by itself announces that there is something more to her story, as when

80  Dos. “Momento renacentista” she explains, for example, that she could not go to France to join her husband because it would be “an immense disruption” for her and her son. But then, after the matraca sound, she dictates: “Besides, I didn’t want him to interpret such a trip as an approval of his frivolity” (33).21 It also signals that what she is saying is part of her own metaphorical matraca, pestering comments that are repeated over and over again. The first scene, then, sets the general atmosphere of the play and presents the protagonist’s conflict: from her perspective, this seems to be a play about honor. It also includes the quirky sound of the matraca, which serves as a signpost for nonrealistic acting and the tone of the rest of the play. Scene two opens with a slight change in scenography. The door of the first scene is replaced with another enclosed space, described in the stage directions as follows: To the left there is a platform about four feet tall with steps descending to the stage, through which characters that Angela sees in her imagination will appear as she dictates her letters . . . Neither Angela or the characters that appear in the platform should react to the words that are said, nor appear to see each other, unless indicated otherwise. (19)22 Scenographically, various critics and collaborators have noted Fornés’ preference for this use of an area higher than the rest or a “space within.” Set designer Donald Eastman and lighting designer Anne Militello, who worked with Fornés throughout the years, shared with Alice Reagan: [Eastman] “She always loved the enter above. Something up above, floating there, or a niche that would be in the wall that would become a major acting area.” Militello recalls how Fornes would use these spaces apart: “She’d have a character in the foreground in complete darkness with somebody very far upstage, often on a second level in half light, and that would be the only thing. And the person in the foreground was doing a monologue, while the person in the background wasn’t speaking at all. It was mind-​blowingly stunning. These were her ideas.” (Reagan 13) The door, which functions as a door to her memory, in the first scene leads to nowhere, and it is replaced by the platform in the other scenes. As in Letters from Cuba, the rest of La viuda progresses as a counterpoint between the information Angela gives through her letters in either of the other two spaces and what the characters unveil on this platform. Paco, Angela’s husband, is the next character to appear.While Angela tells her story of separation pointing out his irresponsibility and bad decision making, his violent temper, his threats of taking her son away from her, and everything she had to do to take care of herself and her son, Paco explains his side of the story, how he lost his job in the newspaper, why he has been accosting her, and his desire to have his son next to him.

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  81 Father Cravet, the priest, also appears on the platform. Stage directions explain that the only things defining him as a priest are his “abundant priestly gestures and perhaps a crucifix” (21). Angela Buena (Good Angela) is next to him. She is dressed exactly as Angela and, as Angela’s double, represents Angela’s image of herself. After giving Angela his absolution and preparing her “with divine assistance for the sufferings to come” (“con auxilio divino para los sufrimientos venideros,” 23), Father Cravet transforms on stage into Don Modesto, Angela’s father. The stage directions describe this transformation in a funny, metatheatrical move: “Father Cravet runs to center stage as if he had forgotten that he has to play the role of Don Modesto. He transforms into Don Modesto changing his wig in front of the audience. Now he has white hair” (23).23 The fact that Father Cravet also plays the role of Angela’s father and that he does so in an exaggerated manner conveys a subtle social commentary. Angela seems to be trapped within the gender role of the “good woman” established by the patriarchal society of her time and enforced by the institution of the Church. The cornerstone of that role is motherhood, the role aptly played by Angela Buena. The next character to emerge on the platform is Salvador Niño (Salvador Child) who is comforted by her loving mother, Angela Buena. Salvador Niño

Figure 2.4 Production photograph of María Irene Fornés, La viuda. ©The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

82  Dos. “Momento renacentista” is aware of the irony surrounding his name. Although he is named savior, he cannot save anyone, not even his mother. Angela dictates in a letter that “This charitable spirit was always with him, when he was older, he would often tell me, ‘Mother, I only want to make you happy.’ He understood how much I had suffered throughout my life” (25).24 Salvador Niño presents the image Angela wants to portray of herself. However, Fornés in a Brechtian move has him slowly repeat, word by word, the phrase that conveys the morally superior, abnegated, and loving mother: “A—​woman—​so—​superior—​how—​miserable—​you—​ have—​been,—​mother” (26).25 Like the Brechtian gestus, this has a distancing effect that forces the reader to question what Salvador Niño is saying about Angela. As Pavis has argued, Instead of fusing logos and gesturality in an illusion of reality, the Gestus radically cleaves the performance in two blocks: the shows (the said) and the showing (the staging). Discourse no longer has the form of a homogeneous block . . . Far from assuring the construction and the continuity of the action, it intervenes to stop the moment and to comment on what might have been acted on stage. (45) That utterance is immediately followed by another sequence of actions that has a metatheatrical effect: “Angela throws herself on the floor covering her face and emitting a wailing sound. Paco, Angela Buena, Don Modesto, Salvador Niño, and Salvador Grande surround her slowly. Angela scurries outside the circle and returns to her seat” (26).26 Although she is surrounded, apparently “caged,” within the gender role upheld by her husband, her father, her son, and the role of good mother, she is able to escape that vicious circle and return to her space as a speaking and writing subject in order to utter the last words of that second scene: “I write to you as if I were speaking to you” (26)27. The Brechtian distancing effects and metatheatricality continue throughout the play and are used to introduce and ridicule the other male characters, Paco’s illegitimate son—​ Manuel—​and Casimiro, Angela’s “good friend” and admirer: “Manuel enters. He carries a sign like those used by photographers in amusement parks. The sign has a drawing that caricatures Manuel, and three holes through which Manuel’s head and arms protrude. Manuel places himself squarely facing the audience” (39). Then, “Casimiro comes out with a similar sign. He carries a bouquet of flowers. He places himself next to Manuel” (41).28 The play leaves no doubt that both Manuel and Casimiro should be read as belonging to the patriarchal system that Angela is slowly undoing and mocking. As a matter of fact, the above penultimate scene ends with a playful set of movements in which Angela pins a tail on them, and on Paco, transforming each one of them into the donkey upon which children pin a tail: “Angela opens a drawer carefully and takes out three paper tails and puts one on Manuel, another one on Casimiro and another one on Paco. When she is done, she leaves the scene quickly”

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  83 (44).29 Metatheatricality is one of the many strategies used by Fornés to draw attention to the fact that what we are watching (or reading) is theater. Most importantly, by marking a difference between presence, acting, and representation, it underscores the different levels of meaning-​making and possible affective responses in theater. As I have been demonstrating, Fornés deployed metatheatricality first in La viuda; it will appear again in Tango Palace and in many of her later plays. The final scene is the most theatrical and parodic of the play. The characters Salvador, Salvador Niño, Paco, Moncita, Manuel, and Casimiro jump from the platform to the stage, and they form a tableau first, which then becomes a chorus that will dance and sing using the zarzuela as a model. Zarzuela is a type of lyric theater that alternates between spoken word and sung scenes. Popularized in Spain during the 19th century, Spanish and transculturated Cuban zarzuelas were staged all over Cuba by the end of the 1800s. As I have analyzed elsewhere, zarzuelas’ plots portrayed female roles that followed the “virgin” /​“whore” dichotomy thus playing an important pedagogical role for Cuba’s nascent “liberated” women.30 Furthermore, “the zarzuela evidenced the emerging economic and cultural power of Cuba’s white female bourgeoisie to influence the entertainment industry” (Thomas 107). Fornés, however, utilized the model of the zarzuela chorus to comment mockingly upon the action and to parody zarzuelas’ female roles and the genre of the zarzuela itself. Although she did not use the zarzuela again till 1986—​in Lovers and Keepers, with musicians Tito Puente, Fernando Rivas, and Francisco Rodríguez—​this Brechtian use of music appeared in Fornés’ Promenade, where she teamed with Al Carmines, her collaborator at Judson. While the importance of music in Fornés’ playwriting and directing has been amply documented, it is not well known that Fornés was the mastermind of the short-​ lived Hispanic American Music Theater Laboratory (1984–​1987) at INTAR. She designed, organized, and wrote the initial grants for this program. During the program’s three years, Fornés was also the lead of INTAR’s famous Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Laboratory (HPRL). As a matter of fact, most of the playwrights studied in this book are alumni of HPRL. The mockery, playfulness, and metatheatricality continue as Angela transforms into a witch visibly on stage by painting Black bags under her eyes and placing a witch’s nose and a hump on her back. Various hats come down and each one of the characters, as well as Angela, put them on. Through the chorus, the characters unveil the fact that she preferred to be a widow rather than a wife, that as a widow she had bad intentions, and that she was really in love with her dignity more than anything else. Derisively, they sing the refrain “Oh Angela, how tragic and how elegant!” (52), which has the same distancing metatheatrical effect as the slow, matter of fact utterance of Salvador Niño previously analyzed. As in Promenade through vaudeville and musical reviews (Cummings 157), in Fornés’ first play it is through the zarzuela and the dressing and undressing on stage that the characters put on a show.

84  Dos. “Momento renacentista” La viuda ends with the scribe occupying Angela’s seat after a widow’s hat comes down and he puts it on. He moves his mouth but it is Angela’s recorded voice that one hears. She tries to silence him stuffing his mouth with the candies that had come out in a previous scene. Through her recorded voice, we hear her acknowledgment of what she has done and her recognition that she can no longer differentiate good from evil. Only in the name of her son, Salvador—​ the savior—​can she do good. But the record scratches and the phrase “In your name, Salvador” gets repeated over and over again. Angela and the scribe change place one last time and she orders the scribe to send 15,000 copies of the edited note she has prepared clarifying her situation and/​by erasing the name of Paco’s other wife. The scribe in this play is presented almost as a writing machine that works only through Angela’s orders. Both instances in the play when pre-​recorded sound comes out of the scribe/​machine are the first time Fornés incorporates quirky, strange elements in a play. In The Office (1966), for example, the portrait of a dead character begins to speak, declares his love for the protagonist, and then sings and dances with her. However, in La viuda, it appears that Angela’s moment of recognition and confession comes only through the disembodied, writing machine, through writing itself. It is through dressing and undressing, through stylized gestures, and through the various uses of props that these characters play their theatrical roles and that prescribed gender roles are unveiled. As a matter of fact, in La viuda, Fornés experiments and puts on stage, for the first time, the concept that “el hábito hace al monje” (the suit makes the man). As the photographs of the New York production show, Angela Buena is dressed in white whereas the other Angela is dressed in Black. All characters assume their roles depending on the clothes, props, and accouterments that they don. This is at the center of her Off-​Off-​ Broadway play, Promenade, in which the characters sing: “You see, a costume /​Can change your life. /​Be one and all. /​Be each and all. /​Transvest /​ Impersonate /​‘Cause costumes /​Change the course /​Of life” (Fornés 1987, 21). In La viuda, like in many of Fornés’ plays, the characters are types that escape psychological explanations (Sontag).These types put on a show throughout the play, a show that questions the apparent conflicts of the protagonist. Angela is not much of an angel. She uses the excuse of honor. But, unlike Rosaura of La vida es sueño—​the Spanish classical honor play which Fornés translated and directed in 1988—​who feels she has been stripped of her honor and needs to reclaim it, in La viuda, honor is really an excuse for Angela to transgress the gender roles of her time. It is significant that the only prop in the play that remains untouched and unused is the cage (jaula in Spanish).There are no other references in the play to the cage nor to anything associated with it, with the exception of one reference to her husband: “Arenal has been alone for a year; they tell me that he gets like a caged lion when he is alone” (32).31 The fact that the cage is there, empty and useless, and that it is the husband who acts caged in his gender role, is highly symbolic. While it might seem that Angela is the one “caged” within gender, the play has demonstrated otherwise: she has

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  85 done what she wanted all along. She chooses a life that includes leaving her country behind, leaving her husband and refusing to get together with him in spite of his many requests and in spite of the damage caused to her son, and living without a man next to her. The real intentions of Angela’s actions are muddled. As Sara Ruhl has pointed out in relation to her other plays: “her characters rebel with willful opacity against American theatrical notions about the clarity of intention” (194). What is crisp, however, is the methodical way in which Angela chooses to dictate, to write, and to amend her story. In the end, Angela becomes the widow, not as a result of Francisco de Arenal’s death. It is through the successful legal editing of his death certificate, the erasure of the name of Arenal’s second wife, and the writing of the social note that Angela inscribes herself socially and legally: she creates the role of the widow for herself through writing. Fornés said in an interview “My writing has an off-​center quality that is not exactly deliberate, but that I have not tried to change because I know its origin lies in the temperament and language of my birth” (Delgado and Svich 268). That off-​center quality is already present in La viuda, her only known play written in Spanish, and in the notes and lists that one finds in the marginalia of her archives. In spite of the lack of critical attention that La viuda has received, I have demonstrated that it is precisely through the techniques utilized in this first play that María Irene Fornés became the “Mother of the Avant-​Garde” in the Americas.

Manuel Martín Jr. and Magali Alabau Latinize Off-Off-​Broadway During the 1960s, Manuel Martín Jr. was in New York taking acting lessons first with Carolyn Brenner and then with Andrés Castro (1964) who had returned to New York and had founded the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Between 1967 and 1969, Martín studied with Lee Strasberg—​like Fornés—​ where, according to Martín, there were only two Latines: “my accent seemed to shake up the foundations of the Carnegie Hall building where Strasberg had his studio and projects with Actors Studio” (Martín Jr. 2003, 9).32 In New York, he acted both in English and Spanish and was interested in avant-​garde Off-​ Off-​ Broadway aesthetics. But he found himself at a crossroads: “I became disenchanted for having to play Latin characters the way that North Americans see us (not how we are)” (Martín Jr. 2003, 9).33 Indeed, Puerto Rican actors Raúl Julia and Miriam Colón had been playing stereotypical Latin characters since the mid-​1950s. In 1956, for example, Colón starred in Walt Anderson’s comedy Me, Candido! about an orphaned Puerto Rican boy in New York; the play was one of Off-​Off-​Broadway’s biggest hits for the 1956–​1957 season (Bordman and Hischak 339). In 1967, Martín met actress Magali Alabau in the Spanish production of La Celestina. Alabau had recently arrived in New York after one of the plays she had directed in La Habana, Los mangos de Caín, was censored, and she fell victim to the persecution of homosexuals.34 When La Celestina’s run finished, both swore

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Figure 2.5 Photograph of Magali Alabau. Courtesy of Magali Alabau.

that they would never do that kind of theater ever again (Barquet 12). Dissatisfied with the nascent theater in Spanish in New York, the lack of directorial and acting training in Spanish in the city, and the lack of opportunity for Latine actors with an accent to play interesting characters in English, they decided to found Duo Theater, one of New York’s earliest Latine theater companies.35 In 1969, they opened Teatro Duo, a tiny 27-​seat theater in New York’s East 12th Street. The name reflected its dual artistic and community goals: to produce experimental and avant-​garde Latin American and Spanish plays in English for an Anglo audience and experimental North American playwrights in Spanish for a Latine audience. Their first production was Penitents, written and directed by Roberto Rodríguez Suárez (b. Naguabo, PR, d. New York; 1923–2001), an important Puerto Rican playwright, director, and acting instructor. As a playwright, Rodríguez Suárez is considered the father of Nuyorican theater. He was probably the first Puerto Rican playwright in New York to write a play in English, Home for Christmas (1964). Although his earlier plays straddle thematically and dramaturgically New York’s el Barrio and Puerto Rico, his later plays, like Penitents and Lillie XVI, are more experimental and closer to the Off-​Off-​ Broadway aesthetics of the 1960s. As a matter of fact, in New York, he followed closely avant-​garde and experimental theater, especially the work of The Living Theatre and The Open Theater (Ramos Perea 2021).

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  87 Rodríguez Suárez was also a very important theater director. Oscar Colón called him “the Lee Strasberg of Puerto Rican Theater” (1992, 44). He directed the first New York production of La carreta in 1953, which led to his cofounding with Miriam Colón of Círculo Dramático Puertorriqueño. Both director and actress looked for a space and eventually found one in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street. They named it Teatro Arena, and their first production was ¿Dónde está la luz? by Cuban playwright Ramón Ferreira, directed also by the Cuban Humberto Arenal. Círculo Dramático Puertorriqueño and Teatro Arena have entered the recent history of Latine theater as the first Puerto Rican and Latine theater group in New York to have its own space. Martín and Rodríguez Suárez knew each other well. Martín, as I have mentioned, looked for every opportunity he had to act in newer and more experimental plays.As a matter of fact, he played the role of Tonton in Rodríguez Suárez’s Lillie XIV in 1968, along with Virginia Arrea (Nuyorican), Roberto Robles (Cuban), and Paul d’Alba (Cuban), all actors who later performed in various productions of Duo Theater. Thus, it is not surprising that Martín and Alabau decided to open their theater with Penitents, an English rendition of an experimental play written in Spanish by the father of Nuyorican theater. First of all, Penitents’ aesthetics fit within Duo Theater’s mission. Second, staging a Puerto Rican play in 1969 in English was an important move of coalitional politics if we take into consideration the socio-​political situation of Latines in New York in 1969. This year marked the height of the Puerto Rican student movement in New York. There were sit-​ins at major universities demanding courses and programs in Puerto Rican Studies. Some theater groups, such as Teatro Rodante Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Traveling Theater), began to stage plays in English trying to reach an audience that was not only Spanish-​ speaking. This sparked a debate within the Puerto Rican theatrical community in relation to language. Some felt that they should be focusing on plays in Spanish; others believed that it was important to produce plays in English to reach not only a wider audience but also those members of the community who were English dominant or bilinguals.36 Finally, Penitents was a golden opportunity for what Duo Theater was searching: experimental plays from the Latine tradition that could show other ways of “being” or performing Latinidad in both an Anglo-​centric Off-​Off-​Broadway movement and in the aesthetically more traditional “Hispanic” theater. The network resulting from the articulations of Latine theater artists from various national origins in New York with non-​Latine artists and the spaces in which they performed was expanded through the plays that followed Penitents since Duo Theater continued with the experimental vein in both Spanish and English and used Latine and non-​Latine actors. Their second production was a double bill of two world premieres in English: Abelardo Estorino’s Cain’s Mangoes, directed by Magali Alabau—​the play that was banned in Cuba but was now performed in English—​and Impossible Loves by exiled Spaniard Fernando Arrabal, directed by Elaine Williams. New York had seen two of Arrabal’s plays

88  Dos. “Momento renacentista”

Figure 2.6  Theater program for Cain’s Mangoes and Impossible Loves. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club—​The Executioner (1962) and Picnic in the Battlefield (1966). Let’s remember that La MaMa was very interested in connecting with avant-​garde and non-​Anglo theater makers since the early 1960s. Duo’s production in 1969, immediately after Bettina L. Knapp’s translation of Les amours impossibles appeared in The Drama Review (Autumn of 1968), marked the first time Arrabal was performed in English in New York after he was jailed in 1967.37 As a matter of fact, we could say that Duo Theater initiated Arrabal’s revival in Off-​Off-​Broadway where La MaMa had many productions of his plays throughout the 1970s. Duo Theater then staged the first plays of Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera in the United States: Falsa alarma (False Alarm) in English, directed by John Strasberg while he was teaching at his father’s Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, and Dos viejos pánicos (Two Old Panics) in Spanish, directed by Mario Peña.38 The US premiere of Dos viejos pánicos, a year after its publication in Cuba, could be considered its world premiere.39 Piñera, in an article published in Conjunto, had stated: “I think that one would have to look for the key to my theater in what we call a limit situation” (71).40 I believe that it was that “limit situation” that seduced the two Duo directors who were living their own “limit

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  89 situation” as immigrants and exiles in New York trying to produce avant-​garde theater in Spanish in a city in which the only recognized avant-​garde theater was the one produced in English. Tabo and Tota’s fear and negation in Dos viejos pánicos, a Cubanized and now latinized version of the absurd, were perfect for the Off-​Off-​Broadway aesthetic and for Duo Theater’s space. Zilia Sánchez, an abstract painter from the Cuban group Los Once who had moved to New York in 1961, created the stage set design during the period in which she was painting her “Erotic Topologies.”41 Thus, abstraction and eroticism framed Duo Theater’s early experimentation with the theater of the absurd. While in Cuba Piñera was condemned for being a homosexual and for clinging on to those old obsessions that did not reflect the new revolutionary society, in the United States Martín and Alabau selected him in order to bring a breath of fresh air to the theater in Spanish in New York. Between Spanish and English, eroticism and experimentation, these two productions added another layer to Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. These early productions of Duo Theater are a perfect example of transculturation and articulation of various traditions: Cuban avant-​garde theatrical practices, Cubanized European theater of the absurd, and latinized Off-​Off-​Broadway aesthetics. In 1970, Martín directed José Triana’s famous La noche de los asesinos and El bebedero, a Spanish adaptation (not a translation) of Leonard Melfi ’s Birdbath. Birdbath had premiered in 1965 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club directed by Tom O’Horgan, the director of Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). El bebedero was the first Spanish production of Melfi ’s play. They staged it as a double bill with Raúl de Cárdenas’ La palangana in a very small space where actors rehearsed and worked without a heater. Oftentimes, they would enter the stage shivering where they would meet the spectators who were also trembling from the cold. Despite these less-​than-​ideal conditions, both La noche de los asesinos and El bebedero in Spanish were a milestone for the nascent Latine theater in New York and for Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. I would like to return briefly to Eyen’s previous concerns about the Off-​Off-​ Broadway playwright in order to address the situation of Latine theater artists in New York at the time, especially those who were producing in Spanish experimental plays with avant-​garde techniques. We find that the fate of Latine artists was similar to that of the Off-​Off-​Broadway playwright. Since they didn’t have producers, they were producing their own work using the salaries from their day jobs. It is important to keep in mind the time period.The year 1970 saw the recession deepening across the United States and theater was not immune to it. Even Broadway had to resort to giving away “twofer” discount coupons (Hischak 34). Latine productions seldom received critical affirmation in the press in English; when reviewed, it was primarily by the Spanish press, which oftentimes was out of touch with what was going on in contemporary Anglo theatrical circles. As is still often the case, anything produced in Spanish was lumped together and labeled Spanish-​speaking theater. The years 1969 and 1970, as I have been demonstrating, were key years for Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. Dos viejos pánicos was advertised in the New York Magazine on the same page as Fornés’ Promenade and

90  Dos. “Momento renacentista” three traditional comedies in Spanish by the Greenwich Mews Spanish Theater—​ precursor of Repertorio Español. In 1970, an important article in The New York Times, aptly titled “Spanish Theater Seeking a Foothold,” addressed the different theatrical companies that were producing in Spanish in the city, including Duo Theater (Narváez). Again, the article’s main point was the use of Spanish and not the different aesthetics of the various groups. Surprisingly, The New York Times’ critic Clive Barnes published a review of a non-​Latine production of Triana’s La noche de los asesinos (The Criminals). I say surprisingly because there had long been complaints about the power the Times held now that there were so few daily newspapers in New York. It seemed to have a monopoly on both advertising and reviews. Times critic Clive Barnes was British and had more background in dance than theater, but his ability to close a show was unmistakable. (Hischak 19) Spanish theatrical productions seldom were covered in The New York Times until October 1973, when Richard F. Shepard published in the Going Out Guide a section which started with TEATRO (in capital letters and bold) where he asserted that “Spanish-​speaking theater has undeniably become a New York staple” (32). In 1972, Martín returned to the stage with La estrella y la monja, the Spanish version of Off-​Off-​Broadway Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player. La estrella became the most important event of the year for Latine theater in New York. Furthermore, it passed on to history as being the first Latine play to put complete nudity on stage. Magali Alabau played the star, a sensual and ethereal character roughly based on Marilyn Monroe’s life. Gabriela Más played the nun, its masochist and deranged alter ego. Both would transform from one character to another changing costumes in front of the audience who was already used to this technique. A review in Spanish underscored “the feline movements of the star when they dress and adorn her with fatuous accessories that enhance her charms, yes, but that take her away from her intimate self ” (Nilda Tapia).42 Martín’s version set in a madhouse, added a Greek chorus with nine male lunatics who offered nuances absent from Eyen’s play. The New York Times’ review highlighted the importance of this play in Spanish, even when the choice of words “othered” the group: What these people, the INTAR workshop unit, have done with and to Mr. Eyen’s one-​acter provides a dazzling tour-​de-​force of make-​believe and a numbing theatrical experience. It will hook you and shake you, even if you don’t understand a word of Spanish. We do not. (Thompson 41) Photographs and reviews aptly captured the visuality and theatricality of this production, which also impressed the reviewer: “And the lighting, the visual

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  91

Figure 2.7 Magali Alabau and male chorus in Manuel Martín Jr., La estrella y la monja. © Max Waldman Archive, USA. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

trickery, the music and the addition of nine silent actors as sanitarium inmates all meshes vividly, underscoring the text” (Thompson 41). The theater critic García Oliva was the first to realize what this production meant for Latine theater in New York: “The remnants of conventionalism of our Hispanic theater have been completely eliminated.”43 While Repertorio Español presented the Spanish classic Don Juan Tenorio and the classic in English, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Manuel Martín Jr. and Magali Alabau dared to transform Eyen’s text with exercises that culminated in a series of visual collages. I argue that this staging unquestionably inserted Latine theater in Spanish into Off-​Off-​Broadway’s experimental theater. Such is the case that Ellen Stewart invited Duo Theater to become a resident company at La MaMa starting with their 1972–​1973 season. Manuel Martín Jr. and Magali Alabau had been regulars at La MaMa since the mid-​1960s and Martín was Ellen Stewart’s personal friend. Alabau remembers: “In that small and cold basement, Ellen’s charismatic personality with her little bell and her Creole accent transported us to that dream that germinated in us of creating an avant-​ garde Latin theater” (Alabau 133).44 In January 1973, they did the same staging of La estrella in two versions, one in Spanish and the other one with its English

92  Dos. “Momento renacentista”

Figure 2.8 Photograph of Candy Darling dedicated to Manuel Martín Jr. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

title, The White Whore and the Bit Player. In May of the same year, they repeated both productions at the Theater at St. Clements. Graciela Más’ character of the nun was played by Hortensia Colorado (Chichimec Otomi), the cofounder of Coatlicue/​Las Colorado Theater Company. Magali Alabau was replaced by none other than Candy Darling, the great trans actress who had become one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. According to Martín, Alabau was replaced because of her accent (Barquet 17). Before I analyze the reasons why this replacement is both interesting and problematic, I must return to the issue of accents, particularly on the US stages.As I began to address in Chapter 1, sociolinguists have demonstrated that everyone speaks with an accent. People’s linguistic variations depend on the area where they were raised, social, regional, and stylistic. In other words, Standard American English is an abstraction, and accents are a social construction.The reason why in the United States a French accent tends to be acceptable while a Spanish accent is not is the result of language ideology and power differential. Mary Matsuda, in her groundbreaking article on accent discrimination, explains that When the parties are in a relationship of domination and subordination, we tend to say that the dominant is normal, and the subordinate is different

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  93 from normal. And so it is with accent. Everyone has an accent, but when an employer refuses to hire a person “with an accent,” they are referring to a hidden norm of non-​accent-​a linguistic impossibility, but a socially constructed reality. People in power are perceived as speaking normal, unaccented English. Any speech that is different from that constructed norm is called an accent. (1361) Matsuda’s analysis informs my reading of Alabau’s replacement. It is well-​ documented that La MaMa was the place where one could see European avant-​ garde influences on experimentation. As Gussow has written, “It is where the avant-​garde comes to practice its art” (198). In other words, La MaMa audiences were accustomed to European accents, which were associated with avant-​garde aesthetics. In nonartistic realms, most European-​sounding accents were and are considered prestigious and intelligible whereas a Spanish accent was and is considered low-​status and incomprehensible. Matsuda clarifies that “the ideological dimension of accent discrimination is the creation and maintenance of a belief system that sees some as worthy and others as unworthy based on accent, such that disparities in wealth and power are naturalized” (1399). Secondly, Ellen Stewart herself spoke with undistinguishable peculiar accents depending on where and to whom she was speaking. Sometimes her speech sounded a bit like French, others like Geechee (McLeod); Alabau characterized it as a Creole. Wickham Boyle, La MaMa’s Executive Director during the 1970s, remarked that her accent morphed. It was different when she spoke to the press, her adoring audiences or to her bad “babies,” and it could range from Geechee Louisianan, to across the world or become the grittiest street-​ corner banter. Like the theatrical form she spawned, global, multicultural, cross-​ disciplinary and just damn undeniably La MaMa, Ellen Stewart herself was a hybrid before anyone else envisioned that possibility. There are many videos where we can hear Ellen Stewart speaking different varieties of English (see, e.g., Winer). In the video that documents one of Duo Theater’s performances of The White Whore and the Bit Player, we hear La MaMa’s customary bell announcing the beginning of the performance followed by Ellen Stewart’s typical welcome since November 1963:45 Good evening, ladies and gen’lmen. Welcome to La MaMa [pause] Repertory Theater dedicated to z’ playwright and all aspects of z’ theater. Tonight, we are very proud to present Tom Eyen’s White Whore and z Bit Player. Z play is presented by [pause] z Duo Theater [pause], a resident group of La MaMa. Z ensem’ is directed by Manuel Martin [French pronunciation] . . . Our guest star zis night is [pause] Miss Candy Darling. (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, C5)

94  Dos. “Momento renacentista” We don’t know why Ellen Stewart pronounced Manuel Martín’s name à la française—​[manɥɛl maʁtɛ̃]—​as opposed to a la española [manwel maɾtin]. But it makes us wonder how the audience would have decoded a Spanish pronunciation of the director’s name in an English Off-​Off-​Broadway production. Was the French pronunciation part of her theatrics? Or might she have been avoiding unconsciously the negative connections La MaMa audience could make between a Spanish accent and the ethnicities associated with it based on prejudiced evaluation? Although I cannot offer a definitive answer, Alabau’s replacement because of her accent is an unfortunate but perfect example of the contradictory ways in which accented speech and immigrant performance aesthetics suffer under racism in Latine theater, even in a space that welcomed other cultures such as La MaMa. Martín’s transcultural directorial style—​part camp, part Grotowski—​led to his success at La MaMa, but this initial triumph came at the expense of a Latina lesbian being replaced by an Anglo trans star. After the great success of La estrella y la monja and The White Whore and the Bit Player productions, Alabau encouraged Martín to write. He conducted research and wrote his first plays, Francesco: The Life and Times of the Cenci (1973) followed by Rasputin (1975). Francesco focuses on violence and its after-​effects while Rasputin is an analysis of evil. Both works, in the writing and staging, incorporated the Latin American process of “creación colectiva” (collective creation or what in English we now know as devised theater) and were staged following the experimental aesthetics of the moment, including Grotowski.46 Martín interweaved Latin American theatrical aesthetics, avant-​ garde European theater—​ primarily Artaud, Brecht, and Piscator—​ , Grotowskian techniques, and US experimental theater in these two Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway plays to address indirectly some of the ghosts and traumas of the 1950’s and 1960’s Cuban culture, as well as traumas of US history as they impacted its citizens during the 1970s. The Cuban traumas were not Martín’s personally because he did not directly live the turbulent events that marked the 1960s in Cuba—​censorship, persecution of homosexuals, UMAP labor camps, and so on. He lived them second hand, through the experiences and stories of recent immigrants, especially Magali Alabau. She was a young “country girl” who was able to study at the Escuela Nacional de Arte because of the Cuban Revolution’s policies of opening art education to everyone across the island. However, as I mentioned before, she fell in disgrace and was accused, harassed, and persecuted for being a lesbian. Alabau shared her memories of conversations with Martín as follows: Since the events that took place at the beginning of the Revolution and in the 1960s in Cuba were not part of his experience, he listened with inexhaustible curiosity to my experiences of those years, story after story: my studies in Cubanacán with professors who were almost all foreign artists invited by the Cuban government and, finally, the expulsions carried out in 1965, when the National Council of Culture headed by

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  95 Carlos Lechuga—​the Grand Inquisitor—​openly pronounced itself against homosexuals, expelling students from art schools and closing other theater groups. These repressive measures caused a wave of shock, fear and horror in the artistic and cultural environment of Havana. Manuel had a born talent to identify and perceive the experience of others as his own. (Alabau 131)47 These two plays, while historically placed elsewhere—​Renaissance Italy and late imperial Russia—​addressed issues of excess of power, mob violence, simulation at the level of Church and State, inquisition-​like trials, and political Machiavellianism which resonated with Alabau’s and other gays’ experiences in Cuba during Batista in the 1950s and during the first decade of the Revolution, as well as with what was going on in the United States with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and other US military interventions and their portrayal by the US media. I am not suggesting an allegorical reading. Rather, I claim that at the core of these two plays is an analysis of violence, of good and evil, of the thirst for power, and, ultimately, of human behavior under dehumanizing conditions. Like Grotowski, Martín reinterpreted classical texts and stories

Figure 2.9 Theater program for Manuel Martín Jr., Francesco:Vida y milagros de los Cenci. Photo and Design Irene Vilhar. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

96  Dos. “Momento renacentista” through social and political readings of his time so that his theater “confronts our very roots with our current behavior and stereotypes, and in this way shows us our ‘today’ in perspective with ‘yesterday,’ and our ‘yesterday’ with ‘today’ ” (Grotowski, 52). Francesco was produced in English in June 1973 and Ana María Simo’s Spanish translation in November 1973, both at La MaMa. Developed with actors from Duo’s then recently created acting workshop, it was announced as “a history of crime, passion, and violence during the Italian Renaissance.”48 The plot revolves around Francesco Cenci, the evil count who abused everyone around him, including his daughter Beatrice whom he raped. Martín chose specific moments of the Cenci’s story, such as his birth, intimate life, and calculated rape of his daughter, sexual aberrations, his treatment of court slaves, tortures, Francesco’s murder, his daughter’s and wife’s judgment, the Pope’s execution of Beatrice, and so on. While nudity, homosexuality, and bestiality were commonplace in Anglo Off-​Off-​Broadway performances, this was not the case in theatrical productions in Spanish.49 Thus, it is not surprising that several reviews, especially the ones in Spanish, focused on the sexual aberrations and the erotic nature of the staging. Martín, like Fornés, was a director who really focused on the visual elements and plasticity of his plays. He used cinematographic and experimental techniques that were close to Grotowski’s and Brook’s work, in the sense that the actors became the visual medium to transmit the ideas and images of the play. Grotowski had been the highlight of the 1969–​1970 theatrical season when his Teatr Laboratorium presented in Polish his three plays, The Constant Prince, Akropolis, and Apocalypsis cum Figuris. Music also plays a key role in my analysis of the English and Spanish productions of Francesco as Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. Martín conducted extensive research for this play. He must have read Antonin Artaud’s Les Cenci and seen La MaMa’s most awaited production of The Cenci in 1971. Thus, he knew that sound was key for Artaud’s theater of cruelty and that Artaud’s Paris staging of Les Cenci was, actually, his only production of the theater of cruelty. Furthermore, Désormière’s use of music in Artaud’s Les Cenci is important because it was the first time that stereophonic sound was used in theater. As Curtin has studied, “Artaud pioneered the use of stereophonic sound in theater, employing four loudspeakers at cardinal points in the auditorium, and instituted a sound design avant la lettre” (2010b, 251). Although the script does not make reference to sound design, Martín asked Enrique Ubieta to compose original music for the staging. The choice was not gratuitous. Ubieta was a Modernist Cuban composer who studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Aram Khachaturian in 1960 and who is credited with having invented both bimodalism and phonochromy.50 He belongs to the 1940s musical “vanguardistas” who, like other Cuban “vanguardia” artists, searched for an artistic practice based on experimentation and political commitment. They shifted toward neoclassicism by going back to Baroque

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  97 music. Their compositional foundation was neoclassical to which they incorporated vernacular elements. This approach continued during the 1950s when Ubieta started experimenting with bimodality as opposed to polytonality or atonality. According to Ubieta, In this era, where serialist and polytonal decadence force us to invent extramusical avant-​garde procedures, or lead us to excavate the remote past—​as the minimalists have done—​in search of magical formulas that might aerate the blood of our contemporary music, the chance to return to the realm of harmony presents its most novel and piquant option in bimodalism. (2009) Like other musical “vanguardistas” at the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Ubieta participated actively in the social tasks of the new revolutionary society. He composed the music for “Himno Agrario” (Agrarian Hymn), the official hymn of Cuba’s agrarian reform in 1959, and he also composed the music for Realengo 18, the first feature film of the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industries (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos or ICAIC). He left Cuba for Paris in 1964 where he resided for several years before settling in New York in 1967. When he left Cuba, La Habana’s musical world was immersed in the debate around the supposed anti-​ revolutionary nature of new musical techniques such as atonality and aleatoric music. “Vanguardia” musicians rejected “East German and Soviet composers and musicologists whose views aligned with Stalinist—​Zhdanovist aesthetics, which denounced serialism, atonality, and harsh dissonance as too complex for the general public and inadequate for relaying an appropriate ideological message” (Quevedo 16). Cuban “vanguardista” composers considered Aram Khachaturian, Ubieta’s mentor, conservative both aesthetically and ideologically. Ironically, Ubieta, the exile who arrived in New York in 1967, “capitalized” on his fame as a “vanguardia” composer although his compositions were, like those of his master, musically less revolutionary than those of his peers who stayed in Cuba. To reconstruct the theatrical soundscape of Francesco, I analyze Ubieta’s “Momento Renacentista,” video recordings of both productions, and I also address the acoustic horizon of expectations of Martín’s and La MaMa audiences.51 Ubieta’s music track for Francesco was inspired in Renaissance music, but it had a Modernist harmony and rhythm that may sound to the untrained ear strident at times and not melodic, almost atonal. He directed the quintet for the recording that was used on stage. He later edited the piece as chamber music for bassoon, French horn, fagot, piccola trumpet, percussion, and piano, and titled it “Momento Renacentista.”52 In this piece, as well as the pre-​recorded music used onstage, he took a major 3rd and a minor 3rd, and used two versions of the scale, with the same root. So, he created two

98  Dos. “Momento renacentista” independent melodic lines that complement each other, one major and one minor, but you can discern between the two. The result was a sparse texture with a few instruments and without thick chords that, at times, sounded almost like noise.53 Transculturating Grotowski’s methods of “poor theater” and using Ubieta’s original music as integral to the structure of this staging, Martín had all the actors dress and undress on stage, thus breaking the fourth wall between actors and spectators, process and spectacle. Grotowski suggests in Towards a Poor Theater that the actor’s total act, paradoxically, can only be accomplished through an encounter with the spectator—​intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a . . . wardrobe mistress, stage designer or make-​up girl—​in direct confrontation with him, and somehow “instead of ” him. The actor’s act—​. . . opening up, emerging from himself as opposed to closing up—​ is an invitation to the spectator. This act could be compared to an act of the most deeply rooted, genuine love between two human beings—​this is just a comparison since we can only refer to this “emergence from oneself ” through analogy. (256) Unfortunately, the video documenting the English version which premiered in June 1973 starts when the narrator begins to speak after the actors have already dressed in front of the audience. In the video documenting the Spanish version, however, we can see the production from the very beginning, as the actors enter the stage with Ubieta’s pre-​recorded music (it is almost the same as “Momento Renacentista,” Ubieta 1980, 00:02:52). The music in this opening scene diegetically frames the play as it helps to support the fictional universe and set the historical time of the story:54 Cenci’s Renaissance Italy. It also serves to both set up and to subvert expectations given that the audience was not familiar with Ubieta’s bimodal musical compositions. The audience might recognize the sections that sounded like Renaissance music, but the use of minor chords and quasi-​minimalist repetition and atonality disrupt those expectations. Furthermore, there is a “conceptual resonance” (Murch xix) at work between the sound and the Grotowskian act of the actors becoming the characters on stage: the music makes us see the image differently and the image makes us hear the music differently creating a metatheatrical moment from the very beginning before the narrator begins to speak. Such recognition might be the reason why one can hear the audience giggle between 00:01:20 and 00:01:24 in the video recording (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club C34). José Erasto Ramírez’s costume designs used neutral colors, except for the exterior capes. All actors wore the same robe; only the different capes and the acting signaled specific characters. The characters put on their capes while one hears the drums in the music and began to assume their characters, posing like statues either seating down or standing up (Ubieta 1980, 00:01:47–​ 00:02:49). Each male actor played the role of Francesco Cenci—​the abuser and

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  99 rapist—​and each female actor the role of Beatrice Cenci—​Francesco’s daughter and his main victim who commits parricide. Additionally, all the actors played the roles of servants and stable boys as well as judges and guards, forming part of homogeneous groups that resembled a Greek chorus. The actors’ performance, emerging from themselves in front of the audience, underscores that each survivor or victim of cruelty, such as Beatrice and Cenci’s wife, could end up perpetrating the same violence of which they were victims. During the jury scene, for example, when Beatrice and the witnesses are questioned about Francesco’s murder and tortured, Lucrezia playing Beatrice says, looking at the audience: “Yes, I planned it all. . . and I would do it again. . . Can the jury blame me for what I have done? Wouldn’t you have done the same?” (68). Like in Grotowski’s plays, the acting itself, especially in the English staging, is oftentimes mechanical “alienating all emotional participation” (Cascetta 121). The end of the Spanish version is also exemplary of the concentration of signs typical of Martín’s directorial style that latinized and trasculturated Grotowskian poor theater techniques. After the Pope condemns Beatrice, he leaves slowly to the music of a trombone and percussion (Ubieta 1980, 00:14:44–​00:15:23) that connotes the solemnity that usually accompanies Popes but that is in direct clash with his last words:“I am going to take my siesta.” Furthermore, the Pope’s costume is kitschy, over the top, and his hand and body movements queer the supposed legality and religiosity of the scene.55 One of the actresses playing Beatrice enters while the music starts softly in the background. As she reads her final words, the music plays louder eventually drowning her voice. In the first part of the movement, we hear the piano and female voice, then piano and bassoon, and finally piano and voice (Ubieta 1980, 00:13:15–​00:14:42, 00:15:24–​ 00:17:01). The female voice first and then the wind instrument almost sound like a cry; it could be the cry or scream not only of Beatrice but of all the victims of this tragedy and of any society where male aggression and female victimization is naturalized and condoned by the Church, the state, and the legal system. Beatrice walks slowly backstage as the other actors create a circle and cover her with their capes; the stage goes dark, and you hear all the wind instruments and loud, dissonant chords of a piano suggesting her decapitation. When the music finishes, lights go on and the narrator states: “And this is how this cruel history of the Cenci ends.”56 Actors shed their costumes in front of the audience, put on their normal clothes, and the narrator facing the audience says the play’s final words: “Cruelty engenders cruelty. Good evening and thank you.”57 In the documentary video, you can actually hear audience members murmuring after the lapidary phrase about cruelty. Although Beatrice is killed at the end, the play foregrounded how a woman rebels against authoritarianism and systemic violence committing one of the most heinous crime, parricide. Martín, like his Off-​Off-​Broadway contemporaries, avoided psychological characterization and emotionally based acting and reimagined the relationship between performer and spectator. But he did so latinizing Grotowskian techniques and taking advantage of Ubieta’s bimodal music. The repetition of musical motifs with minimalist variations in harmony

100  Dos. “Momento renacentista” (not following the rules that determine what chord should follow) and tonal dissonance that bordered on atonality, reflected contemporary, avant-​ garde aesthetics. However, the inspiration of Renaissance motifs typical of Cuban “vanguardia” composers was a strange sound in Off-​Off-​Broadway circles. The repetitive structure of the music, along with the rest of the elements of the play, must have made Francesco’s spectators to ask themselves, like those of Grotowski’s Akropolis, “under similar circumstances, what would I do? What would happen to all my polite, civilized values? Would I too crack? What would become of me?” (Findlay 5). To all these theatrical elements, we need to add the performance energy that must have been able to reach the English-​and Spanish-​speaking audience alike. The eleven actors performed on a small stage that was practically empty, but Martín was able to fill and expand the physical space of the stage with Ubieta’s music. It is no wonder that Alberto Oliva, critic for ABC de las Américas, named Francesco “the first purely experimental play of the local Hispanic scene.”58 In 1974, Manuel Martín Jr. wrote and directed Rasputin. Once again, he utilized a historical character to create a play based on a series of collages that erased the boundaries between fact and fiction. The play presented the life of the controversial Rasputin, the Russian mystic who became an important figure in Moscow at the beginning of the 20th century as a result of his friendship with the family of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, the last monarchs of Russia, supposedly executed by the Bolsheviks. The play had two important seasons. It premiered in English in April 1975. It was then invited to be the US representative at the Caracas International Theater Festival in 1976. In preparation for the festival, Victoria García translated the play and Martín presented it in October-​December 1975, in both Spanish and English. The advertisement for the second season in The Village Voice quoted from a previous review from Showbusiness, “Too superb to be missed”; the shows’ success was also advertised as “Held over by popular demand.”59 In Rasputin, Martín consolidated and transculturated many of Piscator’s and Grotowski’s avant-​garde techniques he had employed previously. In addition to research, Martín’s connection to Piscator was mediated by Magali Alabau and the director Andrés Castro. Alabau and Martín met in New York in 1969 at an acting workshop given by Antonia Rey and Andrés Castro. Castro, as I mentioned before, had studied with Piscator in the 1940s at the New School. Martín’s interest in the Romanovs and Rasputin came, partly, from his interest in Piscator who had directed Rasputin, die Romanovs, der Krieg und das Volk das gegen sie aufstand (Rasputin, the Romanovs, the War, and the People Who Rose Against Them) with his first Piscator-​Bühne in Berlin in 1927–​1928. That staging is considered one of Piscator’s most technically ambitious and complex given his use of projections mixed with live actors, multilevel sets, wax masks, and jazz interludes. As a matter of fact, “this production added to Piscator’s career a new dimension of opulency, for the director had never amassed his many devices so extensively in one production” (Loup 220).

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Figure 2.10 Theater program for Manuel Martín Jr., Rasputin. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Martín’s Rasputin was written for the ensemble of six actors and the stage directions noted, as in Francesco, that all the actors were supposed to play all the characters. Furthermore, “the personal pronoun used in the stage directions refers to the character not the actor” (Martín Jr. 1975, v). Inspired by the early

102  Dos. “Momento renacentista” Piscator whose plays had no main characters played by star actors, the programs for Martín’s various productions had the actors listed in alphabetical order above the characters on the center with the “collective” characters—​soldiers, society ladies, revolutionaries—​on the side. Written as a “creación colectiva” piece, like Francesco, Martín brought with him to rehearsals outlines of the scenes; he then connected a tape recorder and began to improvise with the actors. At home, he would listen and revise the original text with the collaboration of Magali Alabau and Graciela Más (Barquet 19). This development process was akin to Grotowski’s process where [t]‌he words of the performance do not grow out of the text and move towards the stage but grow out of the stage and become the text. Even when an existing text is adopted, . . . it is used only after being edited and reduced dramaturgically by Grotowski, as suspended matter, a kind of summary script—​not fixed but furnishing a basis for the actors’ improvisations: We know that the text per se is not theater, that it becomes theater only through the actors’ use of it—​that is to say, thanks to intonations, to the association of sounds, to the musicality of the language. (Grotowski 21) Stage directions indicate and photographs of the production show that there were six dummies used throughout, reminiscent of the use of a dummy in Grotowski’s Akropolis.60 Before the audience entered the theater, the dummies dressed in costume were seated throughout the small house. Costumes suggested the characters’ roles and type: Nicholas II was the dummy dressed in military garb; a crown and excessive, over the top jewelry marked Alexandra the empress; their son, Alexis, was the dummy dressed in a sailor suit; Anna, Tsarina’s best friend, had a Black hat; Prince Felix was extravagantly dressed to suggest court excesses; and Rasputin was the dummy dressed in peasant clothing with the huge unrealistic head (Martín Jr. 1976, vi). Throughout the play, the actors acted behind the dummies or donned the dummies’ clothing and props such as a crown, rags, a cape, a veil, and so on. A giant mask on an actor signaled that s/​ he was portraying Rasputin. The use of a mask is a Piscatorian trait also found in other theatrical groups in the Lower East side like the Bread and Puppet Theater.61 The actors, like in Francesco, wore their rehearsal clothing—​visible most of the time underneath the capes and other accouterments—​and, at the beginning of the play, were on stage looking at the audience (Martín Jr. 1976, 1). When the last audience member was seated among the dummies, the actors, one by one, began to make an intermittent, metronome-​like sound, which suggested the clicking of a clock and the passage of time. An important prop on stage was a large hypnodisc spiral that also suggested the passage of time as well as Rasputin’s supposed hypnotic powers. This clicking continued until the narrator uttered the first words: “Good evening. We are going to present to you, in our own peculiar manner, the story of Rasputin . . . But now, I want you to sit comfortably on your seats so you can enjoy the performance” (Martín Jr. 1976,

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Figure 2.11  Production photograph of Manuel Martín Jr., Rasputin. Photo by © Charles Corujo. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

1, 2). Martín used the narrator throughout to interrupt the dramatic illusion and make the audience face the historical events to underscore the horror and violence surrounding these recreated historical characters. Once again, we see Martín’s transculturation of an emblematic element of Brechtian training and dramaturgical techniques. This opening scene set the stage and the atmosphere for the play as it marked the nonrealistic acting style of the actors with the dummies, reminiscence of Grotowski’s Akropolis in which the singer carrying a dummy announces that he will recite some scenes of the Akropolis. Martín exhibited the fruits of his acting workshop in Rasputin, and his Off-​ Off-​Broadway audience saw a hybrid, transculturated, and latinized mixture of Grotowski’s “total act,” Piscator’s “objective acting,” and Brecht’s epic theater through the sieve of Andrés Castro, Stella Alder, and Lee Strasberg. He shared with the European maestros a belief in the need to break down the fourth wall on stage and to avoid excessive emotionality. Piscator explained: We don’t want the modern actor improvising his emotions from beyond the “fourth wall,” but we want him to give us commentaries on those emotions—​playing not only a result but the thought which created the result. We want to see the roots and not the fruit alone, the seed and not

104  Dos. “Momento renacentista” the plant alone. To do this, the modern actor needs a superior control so that he will not be overcome by his emotions. He needs what I have called “the new objectivity.” (cited by Cole and Chinoy 289) Most importantly, Martín placed the focus of acting on the spectator and, like Piscator, strove for “intensity without emotion in the communication. If this was authentic, it would induce the actor to find the means to make the communication complete” (Malina 150). The actors playing all characters added to Martín’s Piscatorian goals. Additionally, it underscored, like in Francesco, that any of us, regardless of gender, could be part of those actions. At the same time, by depicting the masculinist and heterosexual revolutionaries who overthrew that society and took advantage, like Rasputin, of their male powers to seduce and abuse women, it served to unveil the violence inherent in heterosexist patriarchal societies. An important difference between Martín’s and Piscator’s productions is the use of technology. Martín’s Rasputin, like many Off-​Off-​Broadway productions, was low-​budget and not very sophisticated technologically. There were many costumes, and they were all visible to the audience. In addition to the hypnodisc, the giant mask, and other props, there was a cross in the center of the stage backwall with two beams at the bottom, and two Russian “icons” on the stage walls made by Manuel Yesckas. However, these were not created to resemble Russian Orthodox icons; on the contrary, they were stylistically close to the human figures designed by Yesckas for the cover of the various programs. The ornamentation surrounding the figures also resembled the ornamentation in the programs. In many ways, the cross, the icons, and the rest of the props substituted Piscator’s use of moving images. The narrator has a dual role in the play. On the one hand,“he” is the one who introduces the various scenes, places, and locals where the action takes place. Most importantly, “he” has a distancing effect as he underscores throughout that this is a play that we are seeing, a show that the actors and dummies are putting on, and that this is one particular version of the story. Comments throughout such as “Who is he? Let’s go back to see” and “Now let’s leave our friend Rasputin and go to the theological academy” exemplify his dual role of guiding the audience throughout the performance while underscoring that this is theater and not real life.62 The play ends with the narrator speaking directly to the audience: They burned the body [Rasputin’s] and scattered his ashes to the wind. But it will take more than fire to erase Rasputin’s enigma from our minds and from the minds of generations to come. The two contradictory sides of his nature: the mystic and the pagan, the good and the evil, are not any different from the contradictions faced by any of us. The resourcefulness of his psychic powers and how he made use of them is still a matter of controversy. Oh … about his philosophy—​that one must reach holiness

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  105 through the practice of sin . . . Well, it’s a good thing to think about it on our way home . . . Perhaps you are dead wrong. Or we are. Or will be. Good evening, the play has ended. (Martín Jr. 1976, 61) Most importantly, then, the narrator helps the audience understand that this play is questioning ideology then and now. By placing this play in Tsarist Russia, some Latine spectators may have made connections to pre-​ revolutionary dictatorships more than communist Cuba, especially given the role the Church had before 1959. However, various scenes display the clash between justice and injustice, the arbitrariness in the exertion of power, the use of violence as systemic and not specific to the one society being represented, the power and effects of mob violence, and the hypocritical and self-​serving manipulations and simulations of institutions such as the Church, medicine, and state. Martín’s goals differ from those of Piscator’s Rasputin, die Romanovs. Piscator’s early work was interested in having the audience connect specific causes with particular effects. He used documentary material “to link that private drama [the lives of the Romanovs] to a Marxist analysis of how the Old-​World monarchies toppled after being driven to war by industrial capital” (Youker 77). Martín, on the other hand, used documentary material so that the audience could connect the play to present-​day reality, the characters’ private dramas to the multifarious contemporary personal dramas resulting from the ethical questions addressed through these two plays. Although the play was documentary theater avant-​la-​lettre, it was praised in both the Spanish and English press first and foremost for its visual and spectacular elements. The relevance of the story and its theatrical quality must have played a key role for its selection to participate as the US representative in the Third Caracas International Theater Festival in 1976.The festival was created in 1973 by Carlos Giménez, Founding Director of Rajatablas, one of Latin American most important theater companies. Its worldwide reputation—​it is ranked as one of the five most important theater festivals worldwide—​stems from the festival’s goals: “A platform that confronts diverse aesthetics, from classical theater to the most innovative currents of avant-​garde theater . . ., it has served as a meeting point for theatrical creators world-​wide” (“Festival Internacional de Teatro de Caracas”).63 Throughout the years, it brought to Venezuela important theater directors and companies and created a perfect platform for exchange among theater artists from Europe, the Americas, and Africa.64 For this reason, the Fundazione Internazionale di Venezia awarded the festival its highest honor, Il Leone di San Marco. Duo Theater’s participation in this festival provides another example of the contradictory ways in which its “identity” as a group was read in Latin America. Martín shared with Jesús Barquet how it was in Venezuela that he realized for the first time what it meant to be Cuban in the 1970s outside the United States. In an interview in Venezuela, Martín said that he was Cuban without clarifying anything else. Although he was the only Cuban in the production—​the others

106  Dos. “Momento renacentista” were Nuyoricans—​this fact predisposed other festival attendees who thought that, since he was an exiled Cuban, he was anti-​Cuba. As a result, the group felt certain coldness from other festival participants who, in fact, avoided them in social functions. It was not until Martín gave a workshop in which he talked about his work and his life experiences that the other groups attending the festival changed their attitudes toward him and the other members of Duo Theater. This was mid-​1970s, at the height of the Cold War and of US-​led anti-​ communist military missions in Latin America. Many important Latin American theater groups at the festival presented plays with an overt political message, most of them were the results of “creación colectiva,” and their directors and members were leftists. Puerto Rico’s La Rueda Roja, for example, brought La pulga, a play about the Americanization of the island: “Collective creation, an appeal to the audience’s complicity, denouncements with good humor that does not exclude aggressiveness; in sum, a student review that wants be an instrument of consciousness-​raising without being too hard to digest” (Rozenthal 66).65 Colombia’s La Candelaria, the pre-​eminent “creación colectiva” group at the time, brought what would become their emblematic play, Guadalupe, años sin cuenta. After years of interviewing witnesses and listening to “corridos” of Colombia’s 1950s Llanos guerrilla, the play performed the life and eventual assassination of Guadalupe Salcedo—​the guerrilla chief—​and the original support and eventual betrayal by the liberal political party. Argentina brought Eduardo Pavlovsky’s El señor Galíndez, a play about torture. It is not coincidental that many of the “creación colectiva” Latin American groups attending the Caracas festival also participated in the First Festival of Latin American Popular Theater, organized by Teatro Cuatro in New York’s Lower East side a few months later. As the festival program noted: This First Latin American Popular Theater Festival reaffirms our identity, our culture, our voice of protest in this society and our determination to struggle. Finally, it reassures us that our geographical location does not affect our relation to the rest of Latin America, but rather confirms that right where we are, we are part of the whole.66 Martín’s refusal to play the card that he was not a Cuban exile and his acceptance of his bicultural identity did not go well in that highly politicized theatrical setting: I told them that I did not have to offer any explanations, but that I was Cuban and a US citizen at the same time and that I did not deny either one of those conditions, that I had left Cuba in 1956 but I could have also left Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution. (Barquet 21)67 Martín was not a communist, but he was not reactionary either. Unfortunately, at the time, Cubans were deemed reactionary in many artistic and intellectual

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  107 circles if they did not overtly identify with the Revolution. Martín had too many homosexual friends like Magali Alabau who had suffered persecution and imprisonment and, as a homosexual himself, it was difficult to share other artists’ uncritical view of the Cuban Revolution. The prejudice and marginalization experienced by Martín at the Caracas International Theater Festival was also operating in the early festivals of and academic work about Chicano/ Latino theater in the United States: US Cuban theater artists were usually left out because they were presumed to be exile artists and not Latino artists. Furthermore, to be Cuban in the United States meant to be stigmatized as anti-​Cuba and anti-​political. In the end, Martín was not interested in giving a political message through his plays. The politics that appear in his works are always related to the nature of the texts which, as I have explored, connect the character’s individual dramas to larger ethical questions that transcend historical periods and political tendencies. Unlike Piscator who illustrated political theses through form, Martín used experimental and avant-​garde forms to illustrate ethical questions. For him, theater was the moral force of contemporary society.

Conclusion María Irene Fornés, as is well known, went on to create the important Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Laboratory at INTAR and train several generations of Latine artists; some of them are taken up for study in the following chapters. Manuel Martín Jr., on the other hand, was not aware of his contributions to Latine Off-​Off-​Broadway. He thought that these plays were a result of “his need to belong without realizing the risk of being assimilated by a culture different from mine” (Barquet 11).68 Martín enrolled in Fornés’ INTAR Lab in the 1980s and wrote and staged many important plays with overt Latine themes. Besides being the founder and artistic director of Duo Theater, each of Martín’s plays marks a “first” in US Cuban theatrical production. As director, he was the first Latine to use male and female nudity on stage in Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player—​La estrella y la monja (INTAR, 1972). His play Swallows (INTAR, 1980) staged the personal and emotional effects of the Cuban Revolution on a split Cuban family. Based on interviews he conducted in Cuba and in the United States, it was one of the first plays to give an active and personal voice to characters who had decided to stay in Cuba, to address the theme of reunification of the Cuban family, and to stage the effects of homophobia. This documentary theater piece written after his first return visit to Cuba in 1979 deals with different generations of Cuban exiles and immigrants in counterpoint with those who remained on the island, including the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba during the 1960s with a reperformance of Alabau’s banned play Cain’s Mangoes. It had to play with a guard at the door and under strict security because anonymous callers warned that a bomb was going to be placed in the theater. He was also the first to write about racism within Cuban society in Rita and Bessie (see Chapter 3). Additionally, he was

108  Dos. “Momento renacentista” the first to include lesbian characters in US Cuban theater, both in Swallows and Union City Thanksgiving (1983). Magali Alabau, through the Off-​Off-​Broadway artistic networks in which she was an important node, continued her career as an actress with Medusa’s Revenge, the first lesbian performance group in New York, which she cofounded with Ana María Simo in 1976. Duo Theater, renamed in the 1980s as Teatro Duo Theater, was for many years the refuge of younger Latine playwrights and actors eager to start their career in New York. When Magali Alabau left Duo in 1974, Gloria Zelaya joined as assistant director and actor. After Martín’s departure, Gloria Zelaya (US Honduran), Ilka Tanya Payán (US Dominican), and Dolores Prida (US Cuban) became Duo Theater’s directors. Until the late 1970s, Duo Theater was the only truly experimental avant-​garde Latine theater in New York. As I have shown in this chapter, María Irene Fornés, Magali Alabau, Manuel Martín Jr., along with Roberto Rodríguez Suárez latinized the Off-​Off-​Broadway theater movement. Additionally, they were the first US Cubans to address many of the themes studied in this book, and they laid the groundwork for the playwrights who will become famous during the Latine boom. The rest of this book analyzes, precisely, the aesthetic and political ways in which the work of US Cuban playwrights engaged with both Cuban exile and US cultural traditions between 1980s and 1990s.

Notes 1 Throughout this chapter, I will use “Hispanic” theater when I refer to the ways in which the plays were characterized in the 1960s and 1970s. I will use Latine theater when analyzing them from present-​day perspective. 2 For a history of the Off-​Off-​Broadway movement, see Bottoms, Crespy, Fernández-​ Caparrós Turina, Olsen, Poland, and Mailman. I need to underscore many of the European playwrights that this movement introduced in New York—​ Beckett, Ionesco, Genet—​Alabau and other Cuban theater artists had already seen them in La Habana in the 1950s and early 1960s. 3 See Manzor 2017a. 4 José Quintero was born in Panama and is cofounder of the Circle in the Square Theater in Greenwich Village, considered the first Off-​Off-​Broadway theater. He directed many Eugene O’Neill plays and is considered the director who rekindled interest in and rediscovered O’Neill. He directed plays by European and US playwrights such as Jean Cocteau, Noel Coward, Jean Genet, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams. Although he traveled to Mexico in 1968 to direct Dolores del Río—​a project that never materialized due to Quintero’s problems with alcohol—​ he never directed a Latin American or Latine playwright. For more information on Quintero, see Barry, Bauersfeld, Gelb, and Millstein. 5 La viuda was staged in New York around 1961. I use the photographs of this production in my reading of the play. See Fornés, The Widow. 6 “El mueble principal situado a la derecha es un enorme escritorio con infinidad de pequeñas gavetas y colocado en una plataforma de un pie de alto con un escalón. Frente al escritorio hay una banqueta alta y un atril. La superficie de ambos, el atril y la banqueta, es demasiado pequeña para servir con comodidad de asiento y escritorio respectivamente. En el resto del aposento hay sillas, sillones, una mesa con un cofre,

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  109 un sofá y una jaula, una caja negra de sombrero. A la izquierda hay una puerta; en la pared del fondo hay dos grandes ventanas y entre ellas un cuadro con el retrato de un joven.” 7 “Angela es una mujer enérgica, de unos setenta años. Su carácter estricto se revela inmediatamente por sus gestos y el estado de orden y sobriedad del aposento. Angela lleva a la cintura un llavero del cual cuelgan llavecitas que abren las gavetas del escritorio y que da la impresión de ser un rosario cargado de medallitas. Angela sabe, sin vacilar, la llave que pertenece a cada gaveta. Es el año 1899.” 8 “la dibuja en el aire con su mano.” 9 “Angela no debe ser representada por una mujer joven caracterizada, sino por una mujer de edad, o quizás por un muchacho, pues estaría a su favor lo enérgico, lo firme, lo ágil, sin carecer de gracia y elegancia.” 10 “Se oyen ladridos de perros y Angela, que ha estado en escena inmóvil unos segundos, se apresura hacia la ventana derecha y mira hacia afuera alzando ligeramente la cortina de encaje. Hay claridad de mañana. Al comprender quien [sic] ha entrado, corre al escritorio, abre una gaveta, saca una carta (siempre que saca algo de las gavetas las vuelve a cerrar inmediatamente) corre a la ventana izquierda donde lee la carta a una pulgada de sus ojos. La actuación debe ser lo más contenida y estilizada posible aún cuando se trata de palabras o gestos exagerados en su contenido . . . Entra el escribiente, un individuo escuálido y polvoriento. Angela le señala, sin volver la cabeza, el escritorio. El escribiente se sienta en el escritorio y abre su portfolio de piel raída y polvoriento, saca papel amarillento y pluma ornada en oro. Angela se vuelve.” 11 Cummings has analyzed that “political issues whose presence are at the heart of a Fornes play is more implied than explicitly invoked and commented upon” (31). 12 “El problema cubano no sé como [sic] quiera Dios resolverlo. Pero me parece que no habrá guerra con los Estados Unidos, porque este pueblo es muy práctico y no emprendería una contienda que perjudicaría sus intereses.” 13 “Me dicen que su salud no pudo resistir el disgusto de presenciar la entrada de los americanos en Cuba.” 14 “Yo nunca he podido aclimatarme moralmente aquí en España. Nada me inspira verdadero interés. Siempre me consideré como de paso.” 15 “No sé que [sic] clase de leyes tienen los Estados Unidos que alientan a un hombre a abandonar a la esposa y a los hijos legítimos para comenzar, como si el pasado no existiera, una vida nueva con una mujer cualquier y con hijos ilegítimos.” 16 “P.D. Es interesante ver como [sic] los americanos resuelven los asuntos morales antes que nada.” 17 “Quise impedir que mi mente se contaminara con las impurezas de esa pareja . . . Ni me quejé de mi mala suerte, ni asedié a otros con quejumbres, sino que me resigné estoicamente a mi destino. Pero hoy que me retan usurpando mi posición, no solo socialmente como lo han venido haciendo, sino en forma oficial por medio de la prensa, abandono mi antigua posición. Mancharé mi nombre compareciendo ante la corte, no pasaré por alto la defensa de mis derechos civiles y morales … Debo ejercer mis derechos y recuperar mi honor.” 18 “Angela se levanta, va a un gran cofre en una mesa. Saca un caramelo verde, mira dentro del cofre como buscando algo. Saca otro caramelo verde. Mira al escribiente y decidiendo no ser tan generosa devuelve el segundo al cofre. Se mete el primero en la boca.Vuelve a mirar al escribiente y decide que debe darle un caramelo. Saca un caramelo naranja y da unos pasos hacia el escribiente, siente que es demasiado

110  Dos. “Momento renacentista” generosa y devuelve el caramelo al cofre. Hurga entre los caramelos hasta encontrar uno mucho más pequeño. Camina hacia el escribiente. Se lo pone en el bolsillo del pecho.Va al escritorio. Saca una carta. Se sienta en un sillón y lee la carta en voz baja meciéndose rápidamente. Saca el caramelo de su boca. Lo envuelve en su papel, se lo pone en el bolsillo.” 19 “Los movimientos de Angela entre carta y carta representan la síntesis de sus pensamientos y ansiedades durante largas y angustiosas esperas. Esos momentos deben tener gran claridad, precisión e intensidad.” 20 “Suena una matraca cuyo sonido parece salir de dentro del escribiente; al mismo tiempo su abdomen hace contracciones como de carcajadas.” 21 “Además, no quise que interpretara un viaje así como aprobación a su frivolidad.” 22 “A la izquierda hay una plataforma . . . con escalones para descender a la escena, por donde van a aparecer personajes que Angela ve en su imaginación mientras dicta sus cartas . . . Ni Angela ni los personajes que aparecen en la plataforma deben reaccionar a ninguna de las palabras que se dicen, ni aparentar haberse visto, a no ser de la manera indicada.” 23 “El Padre Cravet corre al centro de la escena como si se le hubiera olvidado que tiene que hacer de Don Modesto. Se transforma en Don Modesto cambiándose la peluca frente al público. Ahora lleva el pelo blanco.” 24 “Este espíritu caritativo permaneció siempre con él, cuando era mayor me decía a menudo, ‘Madre, solo quiero hacerla feliz’. Comprendía lo mucho que yo había sufrido en mi vida.” 25 “Una—​mujer—​tan—​superior—​que—​desgraciada—​ha—​sido,—​madre.” 26 “Angela se echa al suelo cubriéndose el rostro y emitiendo un gemido. Paco, Angela Buena, Don Modesto, Salvador niño y Salvador grande la rodean lentamente. Angela se escurre fuera del círculo y vuelve a su asiento.” 27 “Te escribo como si te estuviera hablando.” 28 “Entra Manuel. Lleva un cartel como los que usan los fotógrafos de parques de diversiones. El cartel tiene un dibujo caricaturizando a Manuel, y tres agujeros por donde salen la cabeza y los brazos de Manuel. Manuel se coloca de frente al público.” “Sale Casimiro con un cartel como el anterior. Lleva un ramo de flores. Se coloca al lado de Manuel.” 29 “Angela abre una gaveta cuidadosamente y saca tres rabos de papel y pone uno a Manuel, otro a Casimiro y otro a Paco. Al terminar sale de la escena rápidamente.” 30 See Manzor 2012 and Manzor and Rizk. 31 “Arenal lleva casi un año solo, me dicen que cuando está solo se pone como un león enjaulado.” 32 “mi acento parecía sacudir los cimientos del edificio del Carnegie Hall donde Strasberg tenía su estudio, proyectos en el Actor’s Studio” (Martín Jr., 2003, 9). In 1950, Stella Adler already had warned Spanish-​Cuban actress Adela Escartín of the risks good actors with an accent would run if they stayed in New York: they could only aspire to play small roles as prostitutes, housekeepers:“Stella Adler, knowing the difficulties that her disciple still had with the English language, and her high acting qualities, recommended that if they offered her good roles in Cuba, that she accept them, that in New York she could only aspire to small roles as Hispanic prostitutes and maids, and that her artistic talents deserved to be invested in larger projects” (Stella Adler, conociendo las dificultades que aún tenía su discípula con la lengua inglesa, y sus altas cualidades interpretativas, le recomendó que si le ofrecían buenos papeles en La Habana, que los aceptase, que en Nueva York solo podría aspirar a papeles pequeños de prostitutas hispanas y de mucamas, y que su talento artístico

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  111 merecía ser invertido en proyectos más grandes), Vizcaíno, 2010. Cummings has studied the important role of Actors Studio in Fornés’ career (21, 27, 53, 119). 33 “desencantado por interpretar personajes latinos de la forma que nos ven los norteamericanos (no como somos).” 34 See Manzor 2013. 35 Cain’s Mangoes was the second play of this young company. For a history of Duo Theatre from Manuel Martín Jr.’s perspective, see Barquet 2003; for Magali Alabau’s remembrances of the founding of Duo Theatre, see Alabau. For production information on this and the rest of the plays discussed in this chapter, see the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. 36 For a good analysis of Puerto Rican theater in New York between 1965 and 1975, see Fragoso, and Ramos Perea 2009. 37 Two of his earlier plays, Pique-​Nique en campagne and Guernica, were staged in French in May of that same year by Le Tréteau de Paris at the Barbizon Plaza Theater. 38 A shorter version of Duo Theater’s involvement in Off-​Off-​Broadway was published in Spanish; see Manzor, 2013. 39 The world premier had taken place a few months before in Bogotá, Colombia, at the Club de Teatro Experimental Café La MaMa, the Latin American “arm” of La MaMa, directed by Eddy Armando Rodríguez. 40 “creo que la clave de mi teatro habría que buscarla en eso que llamamos, referido al ser humano, una situación límite.” 41 Zilia Sánchez had worked with Andrés Castro in Las Máscaras in La Habana in the 1950s. In New York, she designed for him Antigone, which premiered in April 1969. See Bauldree. 42 “Los movimientos felinos de la estrella cuando la visten y engalanan con fatuos aditamentos que realzan sus encantos, sí, pero que la alejan de su yo íntimo.” 43 “Los residuos de convencionalismo de nuestro teatro hispano han sido totalmente eliminados” (García Oliva). 44 “En ese reducido y frio sótano, la carismática personalidad de Ellen con su campanita y su acento creole nos transportaba a ese sueño que germinaba en nosotros de crear un teatro latino de vanguardia.” 45 Many people have called Ellen Stewart’s bell a cowbell but in an interview, Stewart has said: “it wasn’t a cowbell, dear; it was a bell” (Winer). 46 For a brilliant analysis of “creación colectiva” and Latinx affect, see Mayer-​García, 2018. 47 “Al no formar parte de su experiencia los eventos ocurridos al principio de la Revolución y alrededor de los años 60 en Cuba, escuchó con su curiosidad inagotable mis vivencias de aquellos años, historia tras historia: mis estudios realizados en Cubanacán bajo profesores casi todos artistas extranjeros invitados por el gobierno cubano y, finalmente, las expulsiones llevadas a cabo en 1965, cuando el Consejo Nacional de Cultura encabezado por Carlos Lechuga—​el Gran Inquisidor—​se declaró abiertamente contra los homosexuales, expulsando alumnos de las escuelas de arte y cerrando otros grupos de teatro. Estas medidas represivas causaron una ola de asombro, miedo y horror en el medio artístico y cultural de La Habana. Manuel poseía un talento nato para identificarse y percibir la experiencia ajena como propia.” 48 “una historia de crimen, pasión y violencia durante el Renacimiento italiano.” 49 Mayer-​García, in his careful analysis of theatricalized sadomasochism in this play, demonstrates that the staging opened up a space for embodying queer desire. See Mayer-​García 2016.

112  Dos. “Momento renacentista” 50 Phonochromy is a method of musical notation using color to designate sound dynamics in a musical score. 51 I borrow the concept of “acoustic horizon of expectations” from Curtin, which in turn is based on a reformulation of Hans Robert Jauss’ “horizon of expectations.” My analysis of the play’s theatrical soundscape is informed by Curtin’s methodology (2002a). 52 Ubieta 2013. 53 I thank my colleague Marysol Quevedo for giving me the language to talk about Ubieta’s bimodalism. 54 My analysis of the music in this play utilizes the concepts developed by Baston. 55 Mayer-​García has studied the routes of theater of cruelty focusing on the ways in which Francesco undoes Cuban patriarchal nationalism and misogyny while it opens up a space for expressions of queer desire. He suggests that by having “[b]‌oth men and women in the cast embody Cenci and his usurper, . . . they undid his power as the very image of patriarchy and misogyny. Having every actor play the role, unhinges character from actor, but also locates the character in a set of gestures, behaviors and costume pieces (a fur cloak) that can be exchanged and transferred, critiqued and subverted, distorted and satirized, denaturalized and uprooted” (2016, 221). 56 “Y así termina esta cruel historia de los Cenci.” 57 “La crueldad engendra la crueldad. Buenas noches y gracias.” 58 “esta es la primera obra puramente experimental de la escena local hispana.” 59 The play had a very small advertisement in The New York Times in April and May 1975; it was also advertised in October. 60 Findlay notes that “Early in the production, a limp, light bluish, headless dummy was brought on: the dummy served to represent a corpse, the figure of Christ on the cross, and ironically by the end the figure of the resurrected Christ” (7). 61 In Rasputin, die Romanovs, for example, Piscator used a mask to portray Lenin as well as the actors playing the three emperors (Loup 215). 62 Judith Malina has commented that “[i]‌t is astonishing that he [Piscator] believed the role of the Narrator was the essential solution to the problem of the audience’s ignorance. Perhaps it is a German didactic idea, this notion that a wise teacher can make everything clear” (169). 63 “Plataforma para la confrontación de las tendencias más diversas, que van del teatro más antiguo en sus tradiciones a las corrientes más innovadoras del teatro de vanguardia, de los lenguajes más alejados a las estéticas más encontradas, ha sido punto de encuentro de todos los creadores de teatro del mundo.” 64 Tadeusz Kantor and Andrezj Wajda (Poland), Berliner Ensemble (Germany),Antunes Filho (Macunaíma, Brasil), Peter Brook (England), Giorgio Strehler (PiccoloTeatro di Milano), Yves Lebreton and L’Esquisse (France), Peter Schumann, La MaMa, and José Limón Dance Company (USA), Oleg Efremov (Rusia), Kazuo Ohno and Ushio Amagatsu (Japan), Germaine Acogny (Senegal), Luis de Tavira (México), Santiago García (Colombia), Salvador Távora and Alberto Boadella (Spain) were some of the many important theater artists who participated throughout the years in the festival. 65 “creación colectiva, apelación a la complicidad del público, denuncia con un buen humor que no excluye agresividad. En suma, un tono de revista estudiantil para un teatro que quiere ser instrumento de concientización, sin resultar indigesto” (Rozenthal 66).

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  113 66 Program to the First Latin American Popular Theatre Festival, August 5–​15, 1976. Quoted by Vásquez 2004, 37. 67 “les dije que no tenía que dar explicaciones de nada, pero que era cubano y ciudadano norteamericano a la vez y que no negaba ninguna de esas dos condiciones, que había salido de Cuba en 1956. Pero que igualmente podía haberme ido de Cuba después del triunfo de la Revolución” (Barquet 21). 68 “necesidad de pertenecer sin darme cuenta del riesgo de ser asimilado por una cultura diferente a la mía.”

References Alabau, Magali. “Teatro Dúo: la perseverancia del teatrista.” Celebrando a Virgilio, edited by Matías Montes Huidobro and Yara González Montes, Plaza Editorial, 2013, pp. 131–​9. Antush, John V. “Roberto Rodríguez Suárez: Transcultural Catalyst of Puerto Rican Drama.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, vol. 4, no. 2, 1992, pp. 42–​53. Arrabal, Fernando and Bettina L. Knapp. “Impossible Loves.” The Drama Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1968, pp. 82–​6. Barquet, Jesús. “Un cubano en el teatro neoyorkino: Entrevista a Manuel Martín Jr.” Ollantay Theater Magazine, vol. 11, no. 21, 2003, pp. 10–​22. Barry, Jackson. G. “José Quintero: The Director as Image Maker.” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 1962, pp. 15–​22. Baston, Kim. Scoring Performance:The Function of Music in Contemporary Theatre and Circus. 2008. La Trobe University, PhD Dissertation. Bauersfeld, Erik. “The Hairy Ape: Introduction to the José Quintero Rehearsal Notes.” Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, 1991, pp. 337–​40. Bauldree, Kimberle. “Zilia Sánchez.” 11 Intervisual Cubans /​11 cuban*s intervisuales, edited by Lillian Manzor, University of Miami Lowe Art Museum, 2020, pp. 68–​72. http://​byc​ell.mobi/​msgst​ore/​gbc/​c226/​wap1​935/​doc/​226-​102​544-​159853​5567​ 587.pdf Bordman, Gerald M., and Thomas S. Hischak. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-​1969. Oxford UP, 1996. Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-​Off-​Broadway Movement. U of Michigan P, 2004. Boyle, Wickham. “Ellen Stewart, 91, Doyenne of La MaMa and All Avant Drama.” AM-​NY, 25 Jan. 2011, https://www.amny.com/news/ellen-stewart-91-doyenneof-la-mama-and-all-avant-drama-2/​. Cascetta, Annamaria. Modern European Tragedy: Exploring Crucial Plays. Anthem Press, 2014. Corujo, Charles. Production photograph of Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rasputin. 1975. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC 5064, Box 2, Folder 6. Crespy, David A. Off-​Off-​Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. Back Stage Books, 2003. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. Directed by Lillian Manzor, University of Miami Libraries and College of Arts and Sciences, in cooperation with Cuba’s National Council for the Performing Arts, 2011. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org Cummings, Scott T. Maria Irene Fornes. Routledge, 2012.

114  Dos. “Momento renacentista” Curtin, Adrian. “Defining and Reconstructing Theatre Sound.” Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, edited by Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010, pp. 218–​22. –––​. “Cruel Vibrations: Sounding Out Antonin Artaud’s Production of Les Cenci.” Theatre Research International, vol. 35, no. 3, 2010, pp. 250–​62. De Cárdenas, Raúl. “La palangana.” Teatro cubano en un acto. Antología, edited by Rine Leal, Ediciones R, 1963, pp. 111–​25. Delgado, Maria, and Caridad Svich. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes. Smith and Kraus, 1999. “Dos viejos pánicos en Colombia.” Conjunto, vol. 3, no. 7, 1969, pp. 69–​71. Dubatti, Jorge. Filosofía del teatro III. Atuel, 2014. Estorino, Abelardo. “Cain’s Mangoes.” Writers in the New Cuba, edited by J. M. Cohen, Penguin, pp. 115–​35. Eyen, Tom. “The Discreet Alarm of the Off Off Broadway Playwright.” The New York Times, 23 Sept. 1973, pp. 13+​. –––​. La estrella y la monja. Translated and adapted by Manuel Martín Jr. Unpublished typescript. 1972. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, CHC5064, Box 2, Folder 17. –––​. The White Whore and the Bit Player. Hill and Wang, 1968. “Festival Internacional de Teatro de Caracas.” Ateneo de Caracas. https://​aten​eode​cara​cas. wordpr​ess.com/​festi​val-​intern​acio​nal-​de-​tea​tro/​ Fernández-​Caparrós Turina, Ana. “Ciudades libres: La dramaturgia subterránea del Off-​ Off Broadway neoyorquino en los años sesenta.” Revista de filología románica, Añejo 6, no. 2, 2008, pp. 144–​50. Findlay, Robert. “Grotowski’s Akropolis: A Retrospective View.” Modern Drama, vol. 27, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1–​20. Fornés, María Irene. “La viuda.” Teatro cubano: Cuatro obras recomendadas en el II Concurso Literario Hispanoamericano de la Casa de Las Américas. Casa de las Américas, 1961, pp. 7–​55. –––​. Promenade and Other Plays, edited by Michael Feingold, Winter House, 1987. –––​. Lovers and Keepers: A Musical Play. Theatre Communications Group, 1987. –––​. Letters from Cuba and Other Plays. PAJ Publications, 2007. Fornés, Rafael. Personal interview. 25 Aug 2020. Fragoso, Víctor. “Notas sobre la expresión teatral de la comunidad puertorriqueña de Nueva York.” Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, vol. XIX, no. 70, 1976, pp. 21–​6, https://​issuu.com/​cole​ccio​npue​rtor​r iqu​ena/​docs/​prime​ra_​s​erie​_​n_​_​mero​_​70. García Oliva, Manolo. Newspaper clipping. 1972. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 2, Folder 17. Gelb, Barbara. “Tribute to José Quintero.” The Eugene O’Neill Review, vol. 22, no. 1–​2, 1998, pp. 4–​5. Gossage, James. Photograph of Al Carmines, Irene Fornes, Harry Koutoukas, and Larry Kornfield sitting around a table at Caffe Cino before performance of ‘The White Whore and the Bit Player,’ by Tom Eyen. 1967. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://​dig​ ital​coll​ecti​ons.nypl.org/​items/​503ba​410-​3e96-​0131-​9421-​58d38​5a7b​928 Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre, edited by Eugenio Barba, Routledge, 2002. Gussow, Mel. “Off-​and Off-​Off Broadway.” The Cambridge History of American Theatre. Volume Three: Post-​ World War II to the 1990s, edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 196–​223.

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  115 Hischak, Thomas. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1969-​ 2000. Oxford UP, 2001. Loup III, Alfred J. The Theatrical Productions of Erwin Piscator in Weimar Germany: 1920-​ 1931. 1972. Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, PhD dissertation. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Video recording of The White Whore and the Bit Player /​ La Estrella y la Monja. Jan 1973. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Video Collection, 1970–​1980. M2018–​041. Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives and Museum. Owned by the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, Madison, WI. C1_​WhiteWhoreandtheBitPlayerSpanishTape11973_​VidA C2_​WhiteWhoreandtheBitPlayerSpanishTape21973_​VidA C5_​WhiteWhoreandtheBitPlayerTape11973_​VidA C7_​Carmilla1973_​VidA –––. Video recording of The White Whore and the Bit Player /​ La Estrella y la Monja. Feb 1973. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Video Collection, 1970–​1980. M2018–​041. Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives and Museum. Owned by the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, Madison, WI. C6_​WhiteWhoreandtheBitPlayerTape21973_​VidA C36_​TheWhiteWhoreAndTheBitPlayer1973_​VidA –––​.Video recording of Francesco: The Life and Times of the Cencis. Jun 1973. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Video Collection, 1970–​1980. M2018–​041. Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives and Museum. Owned by the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, Madison, WI. C34_​FrancescoTheLifeAndTimesOfTheCencis1973_​VidA C35_​FrancescoTheLifeAndTimesOfTheCencis1973_​VidA –––​.Video recording of Francesco: The Life and Times of the Cencis. Nov 1973. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Video Collection, 1970–​1980. M2018–​041. Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives and Museum. Owned by the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research, Madison, WI. C56_​ArtaudsTheCenciATragedyinFiveActs1973_​VidA C57_​ArtaudsTheCenciATragedyinFiveActs1973_​VidA C58_​Francesco1973_​Coyote1973_​VidA Malina, Judith. The Piscator Notebook. Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. Manzor, Lillian. Sites that Speak: Miami Through its Performing Arts Spaces in Spanish. 2012. https://​sca​lar.usc.edu/​hc/​sites-​that-​speak/​index –––​.“De homosexual marginado a ñángara:Virgilio Piñera en las tablas norteamericanas (1969-​1987).” Celebrando a Virgilio, edited by Matías Montes Huidobro, Universal, 2013. –––​. “Latino/​a Theater.” Keywords for Latina/​o Studies, edited by Lawrence LaFontaine Stokes et al., New York UP, 2017, pp. 232–​35. –––​. “Theater and Reconciliation: The Power of the Digital Diaspora.” Cane Talks, Apr. 2017, canetalks.miami.edu/​cane-​talkers/​lillian-​manzor/​index.html. Manzor, Lillian, and Beatriz Rizk. Cuban Theater in Miami: 1960-​1980. University of Miami Libraries, 2012. http://​scho​lar.libr​ary.miami.edu/​miami​thea​ter/​secti​ on2.html

116  Dos. “Momento renacentista” Manzor, Lillian, et al. “Cuban Theater Digital Archive: A Multimodal Platform for Theater Documentation and Research.” ECLAP 2013, LNCS 7990, edited by P. Nesi and R. Santucci, Springer-​Verlag, 2013, pp. 138–​50. Martín Jr., Manuel, adapter. El bebedero. Translated by Cirilo Rodríguez. 1970. http://​ cuban​thea​ter.org/​pro​duct​ion/​4076 –––​. Francesco: La vida de los Cenci. Unpublished typescript. 1973. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 1, Folder 10. –––​. Francesco:The Life and Times of the Cenci.Translated by Ana María Simo. Unpublished typescript. 1973. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 1, Folder 11. –––. Rasputin. Unpublished typescript. 1976. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 2, Folder 5. Martín Jr., Manuel. “¿Una biografía?” Ollantay Theater Magazine, vol. 11, no. 21, pp. 8–​9. Matsuda, Mary J.“Voices of America:Accent,Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 5, Centennial Issue, 1991, pp. 1329–​407. Mayer-​García, Eric. “Feeling Brown Like You: Creación Colectiva and Latinx Affect in Fornés’s Cap-​a-​Pie.” Chiricú, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018, pp. 23–​48. –––​. Cuban Routes of Avant-​Garde Theatre: Havana, New York, Miami, 1965-​1991. 2016. Louisiana State University, PhD dissertation. McLeod, Kembrew. The Downtown Pop Underground: NewYork City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Queens who Revolutionized Culture. Abrams Press, 2018. Melfi, Leonard. “Birdbath.” Encounters: Six One Act Plays by Leonard Melfi. Samuel French Inc., 1967, pp. 11–​41. Millstein, Gilbert. “José Quintero.” Theatre Arts, vol. 44, no. 5, 1960, pp. 10–​12. Murch, Walter. “Foreword.” Audio-​Vision: Sound on Screen, by Michael Chion. Columbia UP, 1994, pp. vii–​xxiv. Nápoles, Felipe. Photograph of Manuel Martín Jr. 1971. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC 5064. Box 5, Folder portraits: nd, 1971, 2000. Narváez, Alfonso A. “Spanish Theater Seeking a Foothold.” The New York Times, 1 Sept. 1970, p. 30. Oliva, Alberto. ABC de las Américas. Newspaper clipping. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 1, Folder 12. Olsen, Christopher. Off-​ Off Broadway: The Second Wave, 1968-​ 1980. Create Space Publishing, 2011. Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage, PAJ Publications, 1982. Photograph of Candy Darling. 1973. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC 5064. Box 5, Folder portraits: nd, 1971, 2000. Piñera,Virgilio. Dos viejos pánicos. Casa de las Américas, 1968. Piscator, Erwin. “Objective Acting.” Actors on Acting: the Theories,Techniques and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times as Told in Their Own Words, edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, Crown Publishers, 1949, pp. 284–​91. Poland, Albert, and Bruce Mailman. The Off, Off Broadway Book;The Plays, People,Theatre. Bobbs-​Merrill, 1972. Program for Abelardo Estorino’s Cain’s Mangoes and Fernando Arrabal’s Impossible Loves. Duo Theater, New York. Playbill, 1969. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org

Dos. “Momento renacentista”  117 Program for Manuel Martín Jr.’s Francesco: Vida y Milagros de los Cencis. Photograph and Design IreneVilhar. La MaMa Experimental Theatre, NewYork. Playbill, 1973. https://​ dig​ital​coll​ecti​ons.libr​ary.miami.edu/​digi​tal/​col​lect​ion/​thea​ter/​id/​6595/​rec/​8 Program for Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rasputin. Duo Theater, New York. Playbill, 1975. https://​dig​ital​coll​ecti​ons.libr​ary.miami.edu/​digi​tal/​col​lect​ion/​thea​ter/​id/​6592/​ rec/​23 Production photographs of La viuda. Circa 1961. Maria Irene Fornés Papers, The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, MSS.143, Box 15, Folder 8. Quevedo, Marysol. “Experimental Music and the Avantgarde in Post-​ 1959 Cuba.” Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, edited by Ana R. Alonso-​Minutti et al., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 1–​45. Ramos Perea, Roberto. “La patria en el objeto: panorama de la literatura dramática nuyorican y puertorriqueña en Nueva York.” Boletín del Archivo Nacional de Teatro y Cine del Ateneo Puertoriqueño, no. 7, 2009, pp. 62–​7. –––​. E-​mail to the author. 24 Jan 2021. Reagan, Alice. “Maria Irene Fornes, World Builder.” American Theatre, July 2017, www. amer​ican​thea​tre.org/​2017/​07/​05/​maria-​irene-​for​nes-​world-​buil​der/​. Rodríguez Suárez, Roberto. “Penitents.” 1979, Cuban Theater Digital Archive, Playscript, ctda.library.miami.edu/​ m edia/​ p ublications/​ 1 979_​ P ENITENTS_​ d e_​ R _​ RODRIGUEZ_​SUAREZ.pdf. Rozenthal, Genevieve. “Caracas, Tercer Festival Internacional de Teatro.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 10, no. 1, sept. 1976, pp. 65–​71. Ruhl, Sara. “Six Small Thoughts on Fornes, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness.” Theatre Topics, vol. 11, no. 2, 2001, pp. 187–​204. Rutkoff, Peter M., and William B Scott. New School. A History of the New School for Social Research. Macmillan The Free Press, 1986. Schroeder, Robert J., editor. The New Underground Theater. Bantam Books, 1968. Shepard, Richard F. “Going Out Guide.” The New York Times, 12 Oct. 1973, p. 32. Sontag, Susan. Preface. Plays, by María Irene Fornés, PAJ Publications, 1986, pp. 7–​10. Tapia, Nilda. Newspaper clipping. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 2, Folder 17. Thomas, Susan. Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage. U of Illinois P, 2009. Thompson, Howard. “Stage: Last Outcry of a Sequined Soul.” The New York Times, 15 May 1972, p. 41. Triana, José. La noche de los asesinos. Casa de las Américas, 1965. Ubieta, Enrique. “Momento Renacentista.”Variety Recording, 1980. Ubieta, Enrique. “Phonochromy.” Enrique Ubieta Composer. https://​web.arch​ive.org/​ web/​201​6110​4033​047/​http://​www.ubi​eta.com/​phon​ochr​omy –––​. E-​mail to the author. 2 Jan. 2013. Vásquez, Eva C. Pregones Theatre: A Theatre for Social Change in the South Bronx. Routledge, 2004. Vizcaíno, Juan Antonio.“Adela Escartín o el arte de la transfiguración.” FronteraD: revista digital, 29 Sept. 2010, www.fronte​rad.com/​adela-​escar​tin-​o-​el-​arte-​de-​la-​tran​sfig​urac​ion/​. Waldman, Max. Production photograph of La estrella y la monja. 1972. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC 5064, Box 3, Folder 1. Willett, John. “Erwin Piscator: New York and the Dramatic Workshop 1939-​1951.” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, winter 1978, pp. 3–​16.

118  Dos. “Momento renacentista” Winer, Linda. “Women in Theatre: Ellen Stewart.” League of Professional Theatre Women. 2005. Youtube, uploaded by CUNY TV, 11 June 2011, www.yout​ube.com/​ watch?v=​hi0S​BvnT​r34. Yesckas, Manuel. Program for Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rasputin. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC 5064, Box 2, Folder 6. Youcker, Timonthy. The Destiny of Words. Documentary Theatre, the Avant-​Garde, and the Politics of Form. 2012. Columbia University, PhD Dissertation.

3 Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Gender, Ethnicity, Blackness, and Racism

Introduction ¡Ay mama Inés! ¡Ay mama Inés! Todo lo negro tomamo café. (Rita Montaner)1

This chapter moves to New York in the 1980s, the decade of the Hispanic, and to San Francisco in the 1990s, the decade of the Latino (see Chapter 1). Let’s picture two different moments and spaces. The first one is in Teatro Duo Theater, the Off-​Off-Broadway space in New York, 1988. Rita and Bessie, written and directed by Manuel Martín Jr. (b. Artemisa; d. New York; 1934–​ 2000), stages a fictional encounter between two subjects coded as minoritarian in the United States, the Blues singer Bessie Smith and the Cuban “mulata” singer Rita Montaner, and the negotiations among their multiple intersections.2 The second one is ten years later in Campo Santo Center for the Arts, a community theater in San Francisco, 1998, presenting Maleta Mulata, a world premiere non-​Equity production. During these ten years, different alternative ways of thinking and feeling in coalition were being developed. Maleta is one of the very few US Cuban plays that openly confronts the constructions of Blackness in Cuba and in the United States. Written by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas (b. Miami, 1967), it was directed by Brazilian-​Japanese Paulo Nunes-​Ueno and had a multiracial cast of actors. Based on the story of two sisters who left Cuba after the Revolution, it unfolds as a “contrapunteo” (counterpoint in Ortiz’s sense) between these two sisters and the ghosts of race and racism in Cuban culture with a highly poetic and evocative use of language reminiscent of the expressionistic techniques of María Irene Fornés. Rita and Bessie and Maleta Mulata staged the transcultural experiences of younger US Cubans in New York and San Francisco who have lived with other racialized Latines and who have experienced discrimination. First and foremost, these two plays perform the impossibility of separating race/​ethnicity DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-4

120  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.1 Jannis Warner and Jill Romero in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Photo by Marbeth. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Figure 3.2 Poster for Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Maleta Mulata. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  121 from gender, sexuality, and class. They reoriented themselves toward a politics of representation which legitimates the African legacy in Cuban culture, a legacy that has been discursively and materially essentialized as a product of the historical processes of contact, conquest, slavery, colonialism, and modernity. It was also essentialized by the Cuban Revolution and discursively erased by the exile rhetoric of nationhood. By discursive erasure I mean the process of being left out of spaces of knowledge creation. And it was one of the first time that this re-​dress was done on the US stages.3 Most importantly, this chapter demonstrates how US Cuban theater’s staging of racialized constructions of Cuban Blacks and of the performative markers of Blackness antedate academic scholarship on this issue. I argue that despite the infrequency of Black characters and actors in the US Cuban stages and despite the US Cuban theater’s “strategic evasiveness” (Kutzinski 8) around racial issues during the period studied in this book, there are several plays that reinscribe culturally and performatively Blackness into Cubanity. The title of this chapter comes from the Cuban song “Mama Inés,” a version of which the character Rita sings in Rita and Bessie. This song is considered one of the most famous “tango congo,” and it is well-​known throughout the Hispanophone Caribbean. Both “tango” and “congo” are African-​derived words although we have come to associate tango with a Río de la Plata (Argentina) genre. Thus, the name of this Cuban rhythm already suggests that while it is African-​influenced, it is neither purely African nor purely Caribbean, but a mixture of the two: indeed, the “tango congo” uses African rhythmic combinations within the Western measure of two by four.4 As in most Afro-​Cuban music, these rhythmic combinations disarticulate the segmentation and displacement of musical accents “imposed” by Western measures. Musical accents are not necessarily displaced; instead, the accents are “freed” from their regularity by the accommodation of a new rhythmic sense within that same musical space (León 132). Juxtapositions and syncretisms, disarticulation of Western measures—​musical or otherwise—​are precisely the processes at work in transculturation. What is paradoxical in this “tango congo” is that, despite the syncretism at work in its musical structure and composition, its lyrics evoke an essentialist Black culture in which racist stereotypes are invoked. In other words, one of the best examples of Afro-​Cuban music’s syncretism, at the level of musical composition, cannot escape from racist constructions of Blacks in its lyrics. Cuban exile culture has acknowledged African-​influenced artistic forms, the “tango congo” being a perfect example, but it has been imagined in a deracialized way. It has followed Antonio Maceo’s and José Martí’s homogenizing rhetoric of “aquí no hay blancos y negros, solo cubanos” (there are no whites or Blacks, only Cubans). As Nancy Mirabal has argued, “One of the strategies that Martí used to accomplish this tenuous balance was to both name and ‘erase’ the meanings and impact of race” (192).This homogenizing rhetoric is not unique to Cuba; it is in fact at the center of the project of Latin America and Latinidad since before Martí’s time, as evinced by the work of Ramón

122  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Emeterio Betances, Eugenio María de Hostos, and Gregorio Luperón, among others. Rita and Bessie and Maleta Mulata unveil, precisely, that homogenizing deracialized discourse. The validation of the African legacy in Cuban culture took place through the deployment of Afro-​Cuban or Afro-​Caribbean elements or of elements historically coded as Black in music, dance, and religions such as santería. The re-​articulation of Afro-​Cuban cultural elements has several purposes. They are performative markers of “ethnicity” outside of essentialist paradigms. They are used as markers of a hybrid, transcultural US Cuban identity which unsettles the homogenizing and “whitening” impulse in exile identity politics. Most importantly, they are utilized to underscore common cultural elements with other “ethnic” minorities, as well as their differences, by US Cuban playwrights who were part of various artistic networks operating outside of Miami. In this sense, through the performance of identity-​in-​difference in which it is impossible to separate race/​ethnicity from gender, sexuality, class, and language/​accent, I argue that in their performance of Blackness, they also serve as a springboard for future theories of “the sense of Brown” as elaborated by José Esteban Muñoz (2020). Manuel Martín Jr. and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas were working during this period in New York and California, respectively. They are transcultural hybrid subjects who occupy a similar place in US society: a place that is a result of a series of very different geographical, economic, historical, racial, and sexual displacements. It is precisely the staging of transcultural processes of subject formation against the backdrop of a dominant culture’s persistent racialization and “objectification” that I want to theorize here. Focusing on the intersections, the “in-​betweens” of gender and Blackness in Cuba and the United States, of differing models of femininity and masculinity along class, racial, and national boundaries, and of sexuality, I will explore how configurations of “identity-​in-​ difference” are constructed and represented in and through these performances, performances that I argue attuned their audiences to a “sense of Brown.”

From Race to Racialization Ortiz’s theory of transculturation, as pointed out in Chapter 1, tried to account for the processes at work when different cultures come into contact.While race was an important factor in Ortiz’s oeuvre, it was not until the 1930s that Ortiz developed a coherent critique of traditional discourses on race and formulated a consistent analysis of race as a sociohistorically constructed category.5 This critique went against his own early writings in which, as Moore and others have demonstrated,“Ortiz has little but contempt for many forms of lower-​class Afro-​ Cuban expression, and freely suggests that many celebrations involving music and dance should be suppressed or eliminated altogether” (“Representations” 37).6 In his El engaño de las razas (The Deceptiveness of the Races), Ortiz began by tracing the roots of the word “raza” (race) and the development of the different scientific discourses around race. He explained that race could not be

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  123 defined by either somatic or psychological characteristics and suggested that the word “race” should be used when referring to “social conglomerates formed by historical agglutinations detached from biology such as people, nation, cast, class, tribe” (204). In other words, Ortiz was fully aware that race was a construct conditioned by historical processes during specific time periods and that this construct was then deployed in its “conventional discriminatory application” (167). Furthermore, he even studied the ways in which everyday language (both Spanish and Cuban Spanish) was (and is) shaped by popular and fallacious raciology in order to prove how racist idiomatic expressions, common in Cuba at the turn of the century, derived from specific historical experiences (255–​60). Ortiz’s theories about race and its discursive constructions, his analyses of the interplay of material conditions and cultural forms, predated by at least 30 years contemporary theories which address the ways in which race must be looked at as a sociohistorical construct.7 In reality, Ortiz’s reconceptualization of race was quite similar to Omi and Winant’s concept of “racial formation.” Based on a new social movements approach, Omi and Winant have elaborated this term to refer to the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meaning. Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social relations which cannot be subsumed or reduced to some broader category or conception. (61–​62) To talk about race, for example, contemporary social scientists abandoned biologistic and essentialist-​based theories and consider it a sociohistorical as well as a political category. By essentialist theories I mean those which define race and ethnicity in culturalist terms independent of other social experiences such as gender, class, sexuality, political affiliation, and which, by reclaiming a pre-​given ancestral past, offer a constructed version of that heritage. The favored racial narrative in Cuba has been that of “mestizaje” or racial mixing.8 Taylor and Yudice have analyzed how “mestizaje is caught in a double bind that only the force of a normalizing social order can prevent from catapulting society into the recognition of its violent foundation” (318). This narrative has supported a discussion of cultural identity and difference in which class has been the over-​determining category over that of race and ethnicity. In a common version of Cuba’s history, for example, we learn that after the end of the Ten Years’ War (1868–​1878), a war that was fought by anti-​colonial landowners, peasants, urban poor, and free slaves; the colonial government was forced to decree the abolition of slavery in 1880. This decree signaled the most important social transformation process in four centuries of Spanish colonialism. The landowners who fought during the war were ruined. The slave-​ owning landowners also disappeared; some moved to the industrial sector—​the beginning of the Cuban bourgeoisie—​and others were to become owners

124  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” of small sugarcane plantations—​later called “colonos.” Blacks and “mulatos” (mixed race) joined the white urban poor thus marking the beginning of the working class.9 This working class, from its very inception, was racially diverse. It was composed not only of Blacks, and “mulatos,” but also of Cuban “criollos” (people born in Cuba who were direct descendants of Spaniards), and Spanish whites.10 It is this working class, in coalition with Cuban workers in exile, who fought the War of Independence against Spain. Absent from this narrative until very recently are the stories and the history of Afro-​Cuban intellectuals who argued that racial equality had not been earned on the battlefield. During the series of pseudo-​republics and dictatorships that followed independence from Spain, citizens’ uprisings, even those that came from Afro-descendants, are usually characterized in terms of class uprisings, if they are recognized at all. The case of the Partido Independiente de Color (1908–​1912), a party founded by former enslaved men who were veterans of the War of Independence from Spain, is a case in point.11 In a similar move, given the imperial relationship between Cuba and the United States during the first half of the 20th century, narratives also tend to differentiate Cuba’s “racial democracy” from the racist and repressive society in the United States.12 This narrative of “mestizaje” and “mulataje” as opposed to that of racial purity, as I have been arguing, has been the preferred racial narrative in Cuba, as well as in the Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin America.13 Since this narrative has privileged class differences over racial ones, it indeed has resulted in “an ideology of racial harmony” (Rowe and Schelling 18) or “racial democracy” (Skidmore 28), which hides the power imbalances in race relations and is incapable of looking at race, class, gender, and sexuality from an intersectional perspective. The narrative of transculturation or syncretism—​the selective mixture of indigenous and nonindigenous elements and the resulting re-​articulation of existing practices and relocation of dislocated practices—​has been deployed less often in competing versions of Cuban history and the construction of national identity. Regardless of whether one talks in terms of “mestizaje” or transculturation, Cuba’s nationalist discourse, from its very inception, favored an agenda that homogenized whites and Blacks into a community of Cubans. Antonio Maceo, a Black revolutionary during the War of Independence against Spain, is credited to have said: “There are no white nor blacks, only Cubans” [aquí no hay blancos y negros, solo cubanos] (quoted by Foner 261). José Martí’s famous dictum follows suit: “Cuba, for all and for the wellbeing of all” (Cuba, con todos y para el bien de todos), in spite of the fact that during the independence wars, as Ferrer (1999), Helg (1995), and others note, anti-​colonial forces were divided over the place of Blacks in “Cuba libre.” This homogenizing nationalist rhetoric, a rhetoric cast in masculinist terms that privilege national over racial forms of identification, has in turn been invoked by both revolutionary and exile constructions of “Cubanness.” Nancy Morejón, for example, based on her

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  125 studies of Nicolás Guillén who talked about “el color cubano” in his prologue to Sóngoro cosongo, stated that Cubans are characterized for having sought to build a nation that is homogeneous in its heterogeneity, defined by a political end beyond any cultural or racial controversy. Whence, the rightful application of the term transculturation to our cultural history. . . . With a highly creative spirit, in a constant quest for nationhood, we have produced a mixed people, no longer either Spanish or African, but Cuban. (232) This “mixed-​race” nationalism is often invoked as a culture where neither Black nor white predominate (A. López 7). Although the Revolution legally abolished racial discrimination, as it abolished gender discrimination, racial and gender inequalities and prejudices are still rampant in contemporary Cuba. Poet and scholar Lourdes Casal, whose understanding of Cuban racialization was informed by a post-​Civil Rights US climate, was probably one of the first to point this out: The egalitarian and redistributive measures enacted by the revolutionary government have benefitted Blacks as the most oppressed sector of the society in the pre-​revolutionary social system. This does not imply that all forms of prejudice have been banned or that the consciousness of all the people has been thoroughly transformed. (“Race” 479)14 In the United States, on the other hand, race and ethnicity were confounded until the 1980s, the decade in which Rita and Bessie was performed. The constructed nature of both categories is nowhere more evident than in the legal use of generic racial and ethnic terms in application forms and census categories after the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since the reference point for this legislation was the African American community, “race” and “color” were the terms at work. Indeed, as LatCrit legal theorists have studied,15 Latine invisibility and subordination in the United States is a result of the Black/​white paradigm in US law and culture: “the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White” (Perea 1219). Lorgia García-​Peña has since argued that looking at race only as a social construct fails to account for the empirical experience of subjects negotiating racial identity in an increasingly transnational world. In other words, the “social construction of race” does not provide a solution to institutionalized racism, white supremacy, and the everyday life struggles faced by racialized peoples of the world.The “social construction of race” does not account for the vaivén of blackness,

126  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” but that theoretical phrase assumes blackness to be locally contained within its construction. (18) For García-​Peña, the “vaivén” (coming and going) of Blackness is a result of “the movements, translations, and negotiations of racial ideology” (11) across local and global politics and markets. Studying Dominican Blackness, she demonstrated how that “vaivén” is intrinsically part of “the economic and political expansion of the US Empire over Latin America after the Civil War” (11). Cultural critic Antonio López explored that “vaivén” of Blackness in the case of Afro-​Cubans in the United States in the early to the mid-​20th century. In his study of various writers and performers, he analyzed the ways in which Afro-US Cubans navigated and complicated the Black-​white divide in the United States, demonstrating how they lived, worked, and performed on “U.S. soil despite the fact of Anglo and Latino racisms” (3). He reads them as an example of “afrolatinidad: the Afro-​Latino condition in the United States, which Afro-Cuban Americans share with other Latinas/​os of African descent” (4). As he convincingly argues, Afro-US Cubans were racialized as Blacks by both Anglo white supremacy and Latino white supremacy which privileges white over Black and “mulato.” However, their use of Spanish or “Spanish-​accented” English could whiten or blacken them in the Anglo imaginary, depending on the context (A. López, 31).16 Indeed, the linguistic construction of race remains a relatively understudied field in both the United States and in Latin America, and the Caribbean. Afro-​Cubans, then and now, operate in “in-​between” spaces, as Nancy Mirabal has argued: The multiple uses and articulations of race, was common among Afro-​ Cuban migrants who chose to operate within, and continually cultivate, the spaces “in-​between.” It was in these “in-​between spaces” in these particular sites of contestation and convergence that definitions of race were rescripted to suit a shared diasporic imaginary. (198) It is precisely in these “in-​between” spaces, in the “vaivén” of Cuban Blackness between the United States and Cuba, where I situate the intersectional identities performed by the various characters in Rita and Bessie and Maleta Mulata, and these performances attuned the audience to temporarily occupy those very intersectional “in-​ between” spaces. Furthermore, both performances unveil precisely the linguistic constructions of race in the case of US Cubans. The early 20th-​ century examples of Afro-Latinidad however, remained invisible or unreadable in the US Census. The translation of “whiteness” versus “non-​caucasianness” to the “Hispanic” experience gave rise to baffling “racial” categories in the United States such as “Spanish surname,”“white not of Spanish descent,” and “black not of Spanish descent.” It also resulted in courts’ findings as essentialist, and confusing as the Manzanares v. Safeway Stores Inc.:

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  127 In this holding we consider that Mexican American, Spanish American, Spanish surname individuals, and Hispanos are equivalents, and it makes no difference whether these are terms of national origin, alienage, or whatever. It is apparent that a group so described is of such an identifiable nature that the treatment afforded its members may be measured against that afforded the Anglos. (2, emphasis mine) Other than the misconception about the use of Spanish as a common language, it would be difficult to ascertain what is the common “identifiable nature” among Mexican Americans, Spanish Americans, Hispanics, and Spanish surname individuals—​ terms that were used interchangeably since 1964.17 Nevertheless, the language of these rulings and the rulings themselves are important for many reasons. On the one hand, the courts’ rulings continued to invoke misconceptions and dubious notions such as “common perception” and “identifiable nature” which point toward the confusion and misunderstanding about this heterogeneous group. For, indeed, what could be the “common perceptions” among a Mexican of Mayan origins whose first language is not Spanish, a light-​skinned Chilean with a British or Jewish last name, an Afro-​ Nuyorican with an American name who does not speak Spanish, and an Afro-​Cuban who does not speak English? These rulings also demonstrate that, although many “Hispanics” are phenotypically white, they have been racialized in a homogeneous fashion in the United States as non-​white. Most importantly, in all these constructions, Afro-US Cubans and Afro-​Latines remain invisible.18 They also demonstrate that, as a group, Latines are not “Black enough” for the civil rights model, and they are not “White enough” for the immigration model. Indeed, as Rachel Moran has studied, Latinas/​os are served by neither model for different reasons: the civil rights model was designed to redress the nation’s era of institutionalized slavery and its aftermath while the immigration model was designed primarily to assimilate White ethnic arrivals from northern and western Europe. (61) LatCrit Theory focused on demonstrating that the Black-​white paradigm was insufficient to address Latine concerns. Some scholars also argued that the issue of white supremacy and its impact on Latines communities tended to be lost (Chang and Gotanda 1015–​1016). This became evident in the 2000 US Census, the closest to the period studied in this chapter. As usual, the census asked respondents first whether they were “Spanish/​ Hispanic/​ Latino” and then separately to specify their race. A Pew Research Center report aptly titled “Shades of Belonging” stated that 48% of Hispanics identified as white, 2% as Black, 6% as belonging to two or more traditional race categories, and 42% as “some other race.” An important fact is that 46% of foreign-​born Latines said they were of some other race versus 40% of US-​born. Cuban-​born immigrants,

128  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” however, were the exception. Though not all the compounded data is available for the 2020 census, 5% of Latines self-​identified as both Black and Hispanic/​ Latino. Almost 50% of Latines chose to identify themselves as white thus not differentiating themselves from the dominant majority.While beyond the scope of my study, it is important to note that this reticence to not step out of the sphere of whiteness has a long history.19 US’ strong anti-​ miscegenation laws and a racial narrative based on a notion of “racial purity” eventually resulted in a society in which people are categorized along a white versus non-​white axis, as demonstrated by the Civil Rights legislations and the US Census. Indeed, as Torres-​Saillant demonstrates, “the early ruling elites imagined the United States as a white, European-​ descended, monolingual nation, leaving outside the contours of Americanness those segments of the population that diverged from the imagined profile” (“Inventing,” 125). In Latin America and the Caribbean, however, societies characterized by constant miscegenation and the co-​existence of many indigenous languages produced multiple racial categories, which is not to say that racism and anti-​Blackness have disappeared; they are both still rampant throughout. And this anti-​ Blackness carried over to the United States. As LatCrit scholar Trucios-​Haynes has argued: Latinas/​os, more than other groups of color, are vulnerable to the seduction of whiteness. We carry the desire for whiteness, inscribed on our souls, from Latin America and transported across the border or from our neighborhoods where our parents and generations before have lived. Latinos/​as, more than others, are seduced by Whiteness because we are not called Black, we are not even identified as a race—​at least not officially. We are seduced by whiteness because we do not see that the foundation of the Master’s House, the Black-​White paradigm, includes the racialization of our language, our culture, our history. (1) This seduction of whiteness and anti-​Blackness have marked conversations about Blackness in the field of Latine Studies to this day. The relatively recent advent of Afro-​Latine Studies has helped us to get beyond the Black-​white binary of LatCrit Theory as they underscore the “triple-​consciousness” at work in Afro-​Latine identity: race (Blackness), ethnicity (Latinidad), and nationality (US American).20 Colorism is still present in such a way that if you do not respond to conversations about and constructions of US Blackness you are not considered Black, as the 2021 debates around colorism in the movie version of Lin-​ Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights demonstrates.21 On the one hand, Latines and Hispanophone Caribbeanists may see discourses of US Blackness as colonizing. On the other hand, however, the seduction of whiteness has resulted in anti-​ Blackness in both fields.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  129 This seduction of whiteness and anti-​Blackness is also present in exilic constructions of Cubanidad in “life on the hyphen” (Life 1994). They have tended to follow the Cuban strategy of homogenization discussed above. Antonio López has demonstrated how the representations of Afro-​Cuban identity in white Cuban-​American culture, are, among other things, cosa de blancos (a white thing): a displacement, through Afro-​Cuban figures, of the way Cuban American whiteness, as an articulation of privilege, might shame and hamper its very own subjects, white Cuban Americans. (189) Additionally, Alan A. Aja has shown how anti-​Blackness has created in Miami-​Dade County what I view as a local tri-​racial order, where whites (read: what’s left of white Anglos/​exilic Cubans), honorary whites (light-​skinned Cubans/​Latinos), and the collective black (Afro-​ Cubans, Afro-​Latinos, African Americans, Afro-​Caribbean groups) comprise the socio-​racial strata. (215) Indeed, with few exceptions, the different communities that comingle on the hyphen imagine themselves and have constructed themselves white: whether it is the exiled “cubano” or the Cuban-American “cubiche” or “cubanazo,” the unnamed race in this construction is white and the marked gender is masculine. Maleta Mulata, I argue, unveils and presents an alternative precisely to CubanAmericans’ whiteness as a privilege.

From Blackness to “Feeling Brown” José Esteban Muñoz also was acutely aware that the term Latino does not subscribe to a common racial, class, gender, religious, or national category, and if a Latino can be from any country in Latin America, a member of any race, religion, class, or gender or sex orientation, who then is she? What, if any, nodes of commonality do Latinas and Latinos share? How is it possible to know latinidad? (The Sense 8) This conundrum serves partly as the basis for Muñoz’s theorization of Brown in his posthumous book The Sense of Brown. Informed by continental philosophy, Chicana and other feminists of color theories, queer theorists, and performance artists, this book brings together various published and unpublished essays in which we can see how he developed “his concerns with ethnicity and affect

130  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” and his investments in theorizing black, brown, queer, and minor structures of feeling” (The Sense x). Taking as a starting point W. E. B. Du Bois’ question, “What does it feel to be a problem?” (The Sense 36), for Muñoz, the “sense of Brown” comes from subjects coded as minoritarian who feel apart and separate from mainstream society. However, it is a feeling that creates a sense of belonging; difference can generate a shared feeling of being a problem. For him, feeling brown “also connotes a sense of group identification . . . Feeling brown is feeling together in difference. Feeling brown is an ‘apartness together’ through sharing the status of being a problem” (The Sense 39). It is this “feeling together in difference” that allows him to theorize the possibility of a “Brown commons” in the first chapter of his book. For him, “things are brown, or what makes them brown, is partially the way in which they suffer and strive together but also the commonality of their ability to flourish under duress and pressure” (2). In other words, the response, especially the artistic and performative responses to feeling like a problem and the ways in which those responses “attune” the members of the common and the audience to the feeling that “sense of Brown” is just as if not more important than their feeling of being devalued. Key to this attunement is being alongside, next to, and with others; the being in contact or the conviviality that a performance facilitates, including the spaces, audiences, buildings, and networks of those contacts. As the book’s introduction underscores, the contact in Muñoz’s “Brown commons” is akin to Juana María Rodríguez’s theorization of “proximity”: Latin@ is therefore always already formed through embodiment and context. Yet our proximity to these other racialized forms of identifications inflects how we move in the world.These proximities create the conditions for social and sexual enactments that bring us closer to others touched by the African diaspora, to mixed-​raced people everywhere, to the politics and passions of indigenous communities. . . . Through our friendships and sexual encounters, we become fluent in other political and erotic modalities, other gestures that mark ways of caring for each other. (35) In other words, the Brown commons, as Muñoz elaborated, is characterized by “intraracial empathy” as opposed to “intracial sympathy.” Throughout his various readings of queer artists, many of whom though not all are connected to Cuba, he brings out the Brownness in their art and the ways in which their art attunes the audience to a feeling Brown. Concepts that are key to his thoughts and to my reading of Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rita and Bessie and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata in this chapter are the various queer ecologies in the Brown commons, the possibilities of intraracial empathy, and the utopic potentiality of thinking and imagining otherwise. While Muñoz’s collection of essays was ahead of its time, his thinking may fall short within the current US discourses around Blackness and colorism. In other words, although

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  131 the theorization of Brownness was and is an important intervention in US racial discourses traditionally framed around the Black versus white axis – Indigenous Studies scholars have been calling attention to this for over 50 years – it may not be sufficient because of its failure to account for the seduction of whiteness and to recognize the difficulty for Hispanic Caribbean Latines to see race. Furthermore, since Muñoz is relying on a Black Studies tradition, which is embedded in Muñoz’s deep friendship and intellectual conversation with Fred Moten and Tavia Nyong’o, his theorization of Brown is not in conversation with the discourses around “mulataje” developed in Latin American Studies. I read Rita and Bessie and Maleta Mulata as precursor texts that led to Muñoz’s “Brown commons” and, most importantly, as texts that foreground the need to underscore multiple racial formation frameworks that exceed both the Brown commons and US discourses around Blackness and whiteness.22 In other words, I argue that these plays attuned their audiences to the intellectual racial conversation that will come in the field of Afro-​Latino Studies two decades later. As I demonstrate, both plays suggest that these discourses are historically and culturally specific and, at the same time, multiple and shifting when they encounter each other in the United States. For both Martín and Cortiñas, like for Muñoz, this was a product of the playwrights’ research on African American cultural production, their engagement as queer subjects with African American communities on the East and the West coasts of the United States, and their experiences of “feeling like a problem” shared with both African Americans and other Latines. In the case of Martín, he was acutely aware of the racism against Blacks in the United States and wanted to unveil how that racism worked in Cuba and in Cuban communities in the United States. Martín himself points out that part of the research for this play came from his studies on the history of Black theaters in the United States. He commented the following in an interview: I was appalled when I found out that in 1900, the year that Rita was born, Blacks were lynched in the US. Among them actors that were working and had to flee the theaters in which they were acting. That’s when I started researching to see if Rita, given that she was so white, had tough encounters with racism. (quoted in Minero 1)23 The unveiling of Cuban societies’ racist impulses discussed above is one of the issues performed in Rita and Bessie, along with the stereotypification of Latines in the United States. Additionally, Martín’s connections with La MaMa and friendship with Ellen Stewart, as I discussed in the previous chapter, also gave him a glimpse of the then-​nascent Black underground theatrical productions and multiethnic audiences’ engagement with them. These experiences and networks allowed Martín to bring together a multiracial cast and artistic team. The play’s musical director was the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner in music, Afro-US Cuban pianist, composer, and director Tania León.

132  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.3 Photograph of Manuel Martín Jr. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

She was a founding member of Dance Theater of Harlem and music director for its Musical Department, and conductor for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company. The choreography was done by none other than dancer, choreographer, and teacher Walter Raines. The first Black choreographer to work at the Royal Opera in London, he was a charter member and director of the Dance Theater of Harlem (1968–​1978), chairman of the Ballet Department of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company during the 1980s, and director of the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1990. These two Black artists, along with US Cuban Randy Barceló, whose research on Afro-​ Cuban religious systems and culture infused his theatrical designs, were responsible for shaping the play’s sonic, visual, and spectacular image, an image that attuned the audience to the multilayered conversations performed in the play around Brownness and Blackness in the United States, and around whiteness as a privilege and the seduction of whiteness in both the United States and Cuba. In the case of Cortiñas, his engagement with African American cultural production, specifically Queer Black, is visible in the staged production but more subtle in the playscript. Cortiñas included two verses from Essex Hemphill’s poem “Heavy Breathing” as an epigraph for Maleta Mulata: “What kind of

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  133

Figure 3.4 Photograph of Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas. Photo by © Marlene Cancio Ramírez.

mutants are we now, /​Why is some destruction so beautiful” (1998).The preface is followed by a dedication to Cortiña’s maternal and paternal grandmothers. Essex Hemphill was an African American gay poet, performance artist, and activist whose poetry and essays were groundbreaking for African American literature. “But his reality as a black man, and as a black, gay man in America was virtually invisible, marginalized within the gay community, denied within much of the Black community, and feared and erased by the larger American community” (Guerrero, 40). I argue that Hemphill’s poem is key to understanding Cortiñas’ approach to memory, to racial imaginings, to constructions of masculinity, to queerness, and to the importance of beauty in this play. The poem takes the reader on a bus ride through 1980s Washington, DC, the X2 route specifically, which the poetic voice calls “a slave ship . . . A cargo of block boys, urban pirates” (Hemphill 6). We get a glimpse of the violence against Black men and women, urban poverty, homophobic and misogynistic violence, and the funerals of Black men under the AIDS epidemic, all part of “slavery’s afterlife” (Hartman). But we also read about the pleasures and dangers of sexual encounters between Black men from the perspective of “an oversexed /​well-​hung /​Black Queen /​influenced /​by phases like /​‘the repetition /​of beauty’ ” (Hemphill 10–​11).

134  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” “Heavy Breathing” begins with a preface from Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, a poetic move that connects Hemphill to one of the poets of the Négritude movement whose work was so influential for Hemphill’s reconstruction of Blackness. Whereas we can read the radical poetics of Négritude in this poem, the poetic voice quickly distances him from Négritude’s nationalism: “Nationalism disillusioned me. /​My reflections can be traced /​to protest slogans /​and enchanted graffiti” (Hemphill 4). It is precisely in Hemphill’s critique of nationalism and in the poetic forms, he used to express it in “Heavy Breathing” that I connect him to Cortiñas. Hemphill’s “wondering” where he comes from “beyond my mother’s womb,” his literary and political awakening, results in the poetic voice stating, “I may not recognize /​the authenticity /​of my Negritude, /​so slowly I awaken” (5). Toward the end of the poem, the poetic voice returns to a questioning of his ancestral memories: At the end of heavy breathing /​I engage in arguments /​with my ancestral memories. /​I am not content /​with nationalist propaganda. /​I am not content /​loving my Black life /​without question. /​The answers of Negritude /​are not absolute. /​The dream of King /​is incomplete. (20) In Maleta Mulata, the placement of Hemphill’s preface right above the dedication to Cortiñas’ grandmothers subtly suggests where Cortiñas comes from literarily speaking and announces the playwright’s arguments with his own “ancestral memories” as performed in the play. I believe Cortiñas shares and admires not only Hemphill’s imagery, but he was also inspired by the theatricality of this poem and its critique of stereotypical Black masculinity. Hemphill’s poetry “explores the African American community and tradition to expose, celebrate and criticize its strengths and weaknesses” (Holland 287) and that exploration informed Cortiñas’ questioning of the exile community and its tradition, as well as the ambivalence toward his cultural inheritance. Furthermore, both artists explored queer and hybrid subject positions that are marginal within the marginal. Hemphill was interested in how these marginal subjects cobble an identity that makes sense to fractured psyches that are the result of the ruins of colonialism. And there is a spectacular beauty in those ruins. (Cortiñas, Personal) Most importantly, Maleta Mulata performs a sense of collectivity and futurity that we find in Hemphill’s poem, as well as in his other writings. In other words, Hemphill informs the ghost of race that haunts Maleta Mulata along with its sustained questioning of a deracialized and unquestioned Cuban masculinity.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  135

Gender, Blackness, and Racism in Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rita and Bessie In 1984, Manuel Martín Jr., Randy Barceló, and Ilka Tanya Payán signed the lease on a 99-​seat space on East 4th Street and ran the theater until its then–​ managing director Michelangelo Alasá (aka Michael Alasá) took it over. Under new management and branding, Teatro Duo Theater continued producing mostly plays in English focusing on musicals.24 Rita and Bessie opened in 1988 in this new theatrical space introducing the element of race to the Spanish-​ English duality. In 1982, Martín participated in the first INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​ Residence Lab, directed by María Irene Fornés. The other participants were the Los Angeles-​based Chicana Edit Villareal, New York-​based US Cuban Ana María Simo, New York-​based Crispín Larangeira, Juan Valenzuela, and New York-​based US Cuban Roberto Monticello. Much has been written about Fornés’ direction at INTAR. She taught them how to craft plays and, most importantly, she helped playwrights find their own unique voice. Caridad Svich remembers how Fornés’ practice used intensive creative visualization as a way to open the unconscious and allow writers to discover the story worlds and characters that would eventually make their plays. But I would add that while the early stages of free writing were essentially about unlocking habitual patterns in order to truly be receptive to new ones, the greater emphasis later in the workshop process at the lab was on framing and shaping raw material, and it was there that you were witness to Irene’s extraordinary ability to teach writers about form and structure without ever directly calling it so. (“Fornés”) Indeed, the plays I study in this book, along with that of other Latine playwrights who studied with her, bear the Fornesian signature of dark humor, a departure from realism and naturalism, highly spectacular construction of short scenes, and “strategic obliquity” (Muñoz, Disidentifications 170) in relation to identity. However, there has not been much analysis of what the various playwrights gained from reading each other’s works and how the networks they created nurtured their playwriting and future work, nor of the ways in which these playwriting workshops allowed them to construct a “sense of Brown.” INTARs Hispanic American Music Theater Lab (HAMTL) was created in 1984 and the first group ran from March 3, 1984, through July 4, 1985, with staged concert readings July 1–​3, 1985.25 Its focus was to develop original and innovative musical theatre work that would emerge from the collaborative efforts of recognized Hispanic artists in non-​theatrical disciplines. This artistic outreach was supported by a non-​academic

136  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.5 Photograph of Tito Puente and María Irene Fornés. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

experimental laboratory environment in which the emphasis was on the collaborative process rather than on the product. (Nance) The Lab was conducted in English, but the participants could write in either English or Spanish as long as they provided translations in English for the staged concert readings, which were done by professional actors and musicians. The program was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Institute of Music Theater, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and New York State Council for the Arts. The contract and bylaws were created based on those developed by María Irene Fornés for INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Lab, and Fornés was an active participant of HAMTL, as the various materials in INTAR Paper’s HAMTL folders demonstrate. The director was US Hungarian George Ferencz who is known for his innovative stagings of Off-​ Off-​Broadway plays and musicals, as well as for his extensive collaboration with the New Federal Theater and La MaMa. Nuyorican Tito Puente was the music advisor, and the first participants were US Cuban Lourdes Blanco,

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  137 Nuyorican Sandra María Estévez, US Colombian Miguel Falquez-​Certain, US Cuban Sergio García-​Marruz, Chicana Cherríe Moraga, US Cuban Germán Pifferrer, US Cuban Fernando Rivas, and Nuyoricans Roberto “Bobby” Sanabria and Juan Shamsul Alam. Each creative team consisted of a writer, a lyricist, and a composer. Although Rita and Bessie did not emerge from INTAR’s HAMTL, Martín was part of the Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Lab when HAMTL was formed. There was cross-​pollination across artists from both Labs, resulting in a shift toward musicals in Martín’s creative process. Rita and Bessie was Martín’s first “play with music” to receive a full production.26 It stages a fictional encounter between the Blues singer Bessie Smith and the Cuban “mulata” singer Rita Montaner. While the two protagonists of this musical have as reference two “real” female singers, their fictionalized characterization is based on the constructed nature of these characters as legends of two different musical traditions. Moreover, the play itself unveils this discursive construction as it connects it to two different histories of racism. The artists on which the characters are based lived in two previous historical moments. The play, however, using well-​known African-​influenced Cuban songs and African American Blues transforms their meeting into an encounter between two ethnic minorities who are struggling for a space in a society riddled with racism, discrimination, and commodification of music, not unlike the 1980s United States when the play was performed. While the historical Bessie Smith (1894-1937), the Empress of the Blues, does not need an introduction, Rita Montaner might be an unknown figure to some readers. Rita Montaner (1900–​1958) was a Cuban singer, actress, and radio personality who sang and acted in many famous Cuban zarzuelas (operettas) such as Lecuona’s María La O and Roig’s Cecilia Valdés. In her first acting role in Ernesto Lecuona’s Niña Rita, she played the character of the “calesero” (calash driver) José Rosario donning Blackface.27 Her rendition of Grenet’s “Mama Inés” in the eponymous zarzuela was considered to be scandalous due to the sexual overtones of the dance movements in spite (or because) of her male drag (Díaz Ayala, Música 142). Rita Montaner is usually described in Cuban music history books in ambiguous racial/​racist terms that defy translation. Díaz Ayala’s description is representative: In a real and symbolic sense, Rita, the whitened mulata, is an intermediary step between the white Lecuona and the black Bola de Nieve. (Música 141, emphasis mine)28 It is telling that Rita’s description as a “whitened mulata” (mulata blanconaza) echoes Ortiz’s description of one of the two protagonists in his Contrapunteo, “la blanconaza azúcar” (“the whitened sugar”). But Díaz Ayala’s description of Rita Montaner is significant because it rhetorically partakes in Cuba’s masculinist imagination in relation to race and sexuality. In the racial hierarchy, Rita, as a

138  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.6 Cover photograph of pamphlet honoring Rita Montaner. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

“mulata,” becomes a “step” between white and Black. Rhetorically, however, men are the chosen representatives of “pure whiteness” and “pure Blackness.” In this messy hypervisual entanglement of race and sexuality, the “mulata,” as woman, becomes an emblem for Cuba’s racial diversity.29 But in this becoming “pure figure” she is also made unrepresentable given that the Black woman’s “real” participation in the historical processes which led to transcultural racial mixing (or the “mulata’s”, for that matter) is suppressed. The problematic racialized and racist depictions of Rita Montaner are present even in the language of photographs and illustrations. For example, in a catalog on Rita Montaner published in Cuba by the Teatro Rita Montaner (see Rita Montaner), the cover illustration placed on top of her name is a Cuban version of the Mammy character, a jolly Black woman with thick lips which shape a wide smile and a head scarf. Inside the catalog, we find Black and white photographs of Rita which present her as the “whitened” or deracialized seductive world star next to stereotypical illustration of a “mulata” dressed in turn of the century “Cuban” garb: long white dress and beads around her neck (possible religious connotations) and a Spanish “mantilla” (lace or silk veil or shawl). While this could be an illustration of the ways “mulatas” appeared on

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  139 the Cuban stage at the turn of the century—​Black and “mulato/​a” characters were typical in Cuban “teatro bufo” (vernacular theater)—​this illustration is borrowed from the visual arts, specifically Víctor Patricio Landaluze’s lithograph La mulata. On the last two pages of the catalog, we find a stereotypical illustration of a “calesero” as a musician—​the Black “calesero” is one of the favorite Cuban characters of 19th-​century Cuban visual culture—​next to a photograph of Rita’s face, half covered by a fur or plume shawl, again in a seductive deracialized gaze. The juxtaposition of photographs and illustrations present theatrical, posed constructions of Rita and of Blacks and “mulatas.” But what is disturbing in these contemporary sets of illustrations/​photographs is the ways in which they participate in the very same racist and misogynous visual discourse in existence since the 19th century. On the one hand, the illustrations chosen to mark Rita’s Blackness—​ necessary because it remains unmarked in the photographs—​construct her, and the “mulata,” as a sexualized object to be enjoyed by the male gaze. Rita’s hypervisuality and sensuality are marked in the photograph by her bare back, the “mulata” body by her “mantilla” which draws the viewer’s attention to the breasts it delineates and the buttocks it covers. Rita’s bare back and the “mantilla” ultimately function as a marker of theatrical artificiality associated with the “fallen” woman, whose prototype is none other than the actress (see Gilman and Kutzinski). On the other hand, in the case of the “calesero,” one finds precisely the racist, stereotypical depiction of the “civilized” Black as a musical entertainer in Cuban/​European garb (notice the resemblance of the “calesero” ’s costume to typical Andalucian clothing). The “calesero” ’s placement right next to Rita’s photograph has the same accessory function it had in Landaluze’s lithographs. As Kutzinski has argued, the “calesero’s” presence “helps contemporaneous viewers identify the mulata’s hidden Blackness as a condition of socio-​sexual delinquency” (71), already suggested in Rita’s visual construction and in her position as a renowned actress in the United States, Cuba, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. Rita’s discursive unrepresentability as “mulata,” her “mulatez,” and her class position allowed her to pass as white in the early years of her career.30 She thus partakes in a long tradition of light-​skinned Cuban passing. As Robin Moore has studied, Black and mulatto entertainers such as Montaner and Ignacio Villa served as cultural mediators, performing rumbas and other genres in a “sophisticated” manner yet with an aura of authenticity. They translated working-​class musical expression into a form acceptable to the middle-​class public yet legitimized its associations with Afro-​Cubans through their very presence. These artists adopted multiple personae in song and crossed social boundaries of race, class, gender to an unprecedented degree. (Nationalizing 174)

140  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” As a typical well-​to-​do Cuban “lady” at the turn of the century, she had a classical (European) conservatory education and began singing in recitals for charitable causes. By 1926, her visual constructions in terms of (sexual) excess and her whitened “mulatez” did not signal or were not read as Blackness in the United States. They indicated, instead, an exotic Latin tinge that brought her a contract with “Schubert Follies” where she played the lead in a sketch called “A Night in Spain.” They weren’t read as Black either in France where she substituted Spanish vaudeville performer Raquel Meller at the Palace (“Rita Montaner. Nuestra embajadora” 38; Rodríguez Sosa 12–​13). In this “vaivén” of Blackness between the United States, Cuba, and France, her dark but not quite Black skin allowed her to perform the role of the exotic racialized female “other”; that is, her “mulatez” became a marker of Latinness which was easily “whitened” and (con)fused with Spanishness. It is precisely this exoticization that guides Rita’s performance in Martín’s play. Like Rita’s own (historical) hybridity and its problematic visual depictions, her musical career constantly straddled earlier versions of Cuban music patterned after European classical tradition and the later incorporation of African musical elements characteristic of Cuba’s musical transition during the 1920s and 1930s. When she returned to Cuba, she continued singing and performing, mainly Lecuona’s music such as “La canción azul” and “Galanes y damiselas.” These songs were typical of Lecuona’s earlier period which, following “the true European musical values,” at the beginning renounced vernacular elements, especially the African-​influenced ones. By the 1930s, however, “the Black Rita begins to emerge” (Díaz Ayala, Música 142). After singing in Mexico with the Black musician Bola de Nieve, she becomes associated with Afro-​Cuban songs and rhythms such as “tango congo,” Bembé, and Ogguere. Ortiz demonstrated that the “tango congo” rhythm comes from the music enslaved peoples performed during the “Día de Reyes” festivities (1960). This rhythm and others were forbidden at various historical moments in Cuba. Moore (Nationalizing) has analyzed the development of the composition and recording of “Ay Mama Inés” starting with the original version of enslaved people to Grenet’s 1920s “teatro bufo” dance music including its exaggerated bozal lyrics ending with the many recordings made during the 1930s and 1940s. He concluded that while heavily influenced by Hispanic traditions, they nevertheless reflect the marginal status of the Afro-​Cuban working classes by incorporating cultural forms unknown and/​or unacceptable to dominant society. In contrast, those sones popularized nationally during the 1930s and 1940s more often play down such references. (95)

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  141 As Michael Birenbaum Quintero has argued for the Colombian champeta, “[t]‌ he transnational circulation of musical recordings and music playback technology—​exchange” (4) was also foundational for “Ay Mama Inés” and the son. Their wide distribution in the Americas and the ways Cubans and others listened and danced to “Ay Mama Inés” demonstrate how the son was “transnationally networked and cosmopolitan in taste” linking individual consumers “with international popular music production from varied Caribbean and African settings” (Birenbaum Quintero 4).The global circulation of the son as emblematic of Cuba’s musical modernity is yet another proof of Paul Gilroy’s argument that Black aesthetic forms are foundational to modernity (The Black Atlantic). Rita’s musical career took place during this transition period of “Afrocubanismo” in Cuba’s quest for a modern national/​musical language. Her ambiguous visual and discursive constructions, along with her own hybrid position as half white and half Black, middle class, Cuban with a European education, negotiating the contradictions of “Afrocubanismo” musical genres, and the fictional transcultural encounter with Bessie Smith, situate her in the psychological, sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic borderlands which Anzaldúa theorized: In fact, the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (preface) It is in these sexual and aesthetic borderlands where I situate Martín’s Rita and Bessie. Playing with the multiple “in-​betweens” these two characters traverse, the play articulates how subject positions in the 1980s US “multicultural” society might be constituted through a set of exchanges between race, gender, class, and sexuality. It places side by side different linguistic and performance codes and musical registers to create a Black women continuum. Within the borderlands of the 1980s United States, it is precisely in this continuum that I read the utopic and anti-​essentialist importance of this play. The action takes place in an office of a theatrical agent on the top floor of the Chrysler Building in New York. The decor, costumes, and music serve as unstable temporal and social indexes. The set is a decadent 1930s movie set. Bessie, played by African American singer Janis Warner, is wearing a purple satin dress, also 1930s style, with a bow that adds a touch of theatricality to her costume. Rita, played by mixed-​race Jill Romero, has a red turban, clear plastic platform shoes, and a matching purse. The turban and platform shoes suggest right away that she is playing the role of the Latin star of the 1940s and 1950s. Spanning the 1930s to the 1950s, the decor and costumes

142  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.7 Randy Barceló’s costume design for Rita in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

designed by US Cuban Randy Barceló do not allow the spectator to determine one specific time or social space. Other stage props have a symbolic function: there is a window, covered from the outside by iron gates, and framed in the inside by heavy burgundy drapes; moreover, the whole place seems to be suspended in mid-​air. It is not until the end of the play that the spectator/​reader can assign meaning to this symbolic function. That the suspension in mid-​air signals other-​worldliness and that burgundy suggests death is corroborated at the end when the characters also realize that they are dead. The language used by the two characters suggests their racial, class, and regional positionality. Bessie, from the very beginning, uses Black American Vernacular English (AAVE). The language of the opening dialogue allows us to see that Bessie’s idiomatic expressions (such as “honey,” “sugah’,” “you bet your sweet ass”) mark her in terms of class, as well as regionalism. The historical Bessie was from Tennessee, and in Martín’s Bessie her idioms are also branded Southern African American speech, not northern.31 Her use

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  143

Figure 3.8 Randy Barceló’s costume design for Bessie in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

of curse words surprises Rita and makes her uncomfortable. Rita’s standard English, although spoken with an accent, makes her seem like a proper, educated lady: R I TA : 

I don’t understand. I have an appointment. So do I, honey. R I TA :  But he’s expecting me. B E S S IE :  He expects a lot of people, sugah’.You bet your sweet ass he ain’t especially waiting for you. R I TA :  I beg your pardon? (252) B E S S IE : 

Therefore, both characters have their own accents and sense of diction. The use of language as an index of class status is soon corroborated. While both singers are waiting for the agent, Rita tells Bessie that she is the daughter of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher, that she went to the best schools in La

144  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Habana, that she had a classical musical training with the best teachers, and that in Cuba “color pigmentation didn’t make a difference” (257). Bessie, on the other hand, never went beyond the sixth grade. In the United States, as she says, “no siree, no high-​class school for a nigguh’ ” (253). Most importantly, the contrast between Bessie’s use of Southern AAVE and Rita’s accented standard English may be read as a struggle not between these two women as individuals but their different group interests. Language, as Bakhtin has taught us, is a site of contestation between different groups. It reveals the characteristics of one group and the structures of social relations and/​as power relations.32 Thus, it is conditioned by the social positionality of the participants and by the immediate conditions of their interactions. Although Bessie talks about her experiences in the United States and Rita about hers in Cuba, the language differences in the transcultural encounter the play stages underscore 1980s social and class differences between African Americans and Latines racialized as non-​white as a group, although individual Latines who are light-​skinned enough can pass as white. A Latine accent is positioned above AAVE thus marking class and race within Blackness. Rita’s accented language is what allows her to stay on the safe side of the border.

Figure 3.9 Jannis Warner and Jill Romero in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  145 Martín’s theatrical Rita is the perfect example of those Caribbean subjects under colonialism that Frantz Fanon studied in Black Skin, White Masks, who suffer under three categories of oppression: stereotyping, cultural domination, and sexual objectification. She has culturally assumed a racial identity, a white mask, which is not directly related to her racialized body in the United States. The epistemic violence, which results from a racism that Bessie acknowledges, operates from within and without and leads to Rita’s internalization of the self-​as-​other. Rita’s “hallucinatory whitening” is in sharp contrast with Bessie’s revaluation not only of Blackness but of the N-​word. Every time Rita tells Bessie that she was the first Cuban woman to do something, to perform on Broadway, for example (253), Bessie corrects her and tells her that she was the first “nigguh’ ” Cuban woman. Rita constantly asks her “Why do you insist on repeating that word? It’s such a horrible word!” (255). Bessie, on the other hand, is not only used to the N-​word—​as she says, “in this country it’s become a household word” (255)—​but she wants to raise it to a “higher” level: “Honey, wouldn’t it be nice if someone bottles up a perfume named . . . Nigguh’! [Laughs] Oh, Lord. Can you imagine? The best stores in the country selling ‘Nigguh’ ” (255). This is a powerful moment because Bessie is underscoring a racial formation that Rita is refusing. Additionally, in bottling a perfume named the N-​word, Bessie is also addressing the commodification of Blackness in the United States through the commercialization of goods often consumed by whites while Blacks’ subjects and bodies are being kept at a distance from whites. Bessie’s inflection of the N-​word is informed by the “Black moment” in United States and Britain’s cultural politics of the 1960s “when the term ‘black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization” (Hall 246) and which Martín had researched. Although the use of the N-​word goes back to the era of reconstruction as Zora Neale Hurston’s oral histories amply demonstrate, the play’s intertext is the 1960’s Black Power Movement active repurposing of the N-​word connected to US’s long history of racism.33 A good example is James Baldwin’s response to the question of why he used the N-​word and not Blackman: It was not I or any Black man in America who invented the word Negro. It is not I who wrote that on my birth certificate. I may not change my vocabulary overnight . . . Your generation not mine will call itself Black; that’s good enough for me. My mother’s mother called herself a nigguh. You must understand the nature of oppression, the most subtle effect of oppression is what it does to how you think of yourself . . . and I had to learn to use those terms to survive and even to triumph. (Ové)34 This Black radical 1960s use of the N-​word is further underscored in the play during the following exchange:

146  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” R ITA : 

I don’t know about your experiences, but mine were very different. D’ya know a thing that makes all nigguh’s equal? R ITA : What? BES S IE : The color . . . Ain’t no way we can hide. So, a nigguh’ is a nigguh’ all over the world. (255) BES S IE : 

The use of the N-​word must have been jarring to Duo Theater audiences in 1988, which included Blacks and Afro-​Latines. In this exchange, Bessie is politicizing the global position of Black subjects whereas Rita, based on her own (constructed) history, suggests that Blacks have been racialized differently through distinct histories and traditions. However, there is a linguistic dissonance in Bessie’s use of the N-​word since that Southern usage is precisely not globalist, so it would be difficult for another Black subject to see him or herself interpellated, regardless of context. The very regional specificity of the term makes that moment dissonant for someone who understands that indeed Rita and Bessie have different racial signifiers both in this context, in Cuba, and elsewhere. This dissonance, along with the constant exchanges and contrasts in the play between Rita’s “whitening” and Bessie’s “Blackening,” serves to underscore the “vaivén” of Blackness, the ways in which “racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded” (Omi and Winant 60). The very language used in these exchanges may also be read following José Esteban Muñoz’s analysis of María Irene Fornés’ use of language in Mud: It may be her resistance to the capture of Anglo-​ American theater’s prevailing discourses of realism and naturalism. But I think of her language, which is both strangely minimalist and excessive, as a kind of illegitimate speech, to invoke Jacques Rancière. Illegitimate speech is a theoretical scandal where every event, among speakers, is tied to an excess of speech in the specific form of a displacement of the statement. It is “an appropriation ‘outside the truth’ of the speech of the other . . . that makes it signify differently. (The Sense 126) Indeed, Martín’s use of Southern AAVE in Bessie’s lines, the apparent excess of Bessie’s use of the N-​word, and Rita’s excessive and over-​the-​top accented language elicit a sense of being-​in common despite their differences. That is, despite being almost total opposites, they share something in common in their use of suprasegmentals, those elements of spoken language that include variations in stress, accent, tone, and intonation, and are not related to the referential aspects of speech. The ironic equivalence of the characters is achieved via their suprasegmentals discussed above. The playwright and the actors invest these characters with the suprasegmentals that, along with the sonic register of the play and the erotically charged nature of both actresses’ performance, attunes

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  147 the audience to an affect that “traverses the rhythmic spacing between those singularities that compose the plurality of a Brown commons” (The Sense 3), as well as exceeds that commons. Eventually, Rita’s “hallucinatory whitening” and her middle-​class lady-​like etiquette, that is, her internalization of the self-​as-​other, is unmasked for the audience through conversations that she has with imaginary characters off-​ stage. These characters appear only through a pre-​recorded voice. The function of these recorded voices can best be analyzed as analogous to what in film theory is called “space-​off,” that is, “the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible” (de Lauretis 26). In that space-​off, we hear a younger Rita in Cuba talking to an imaginary character who is using her rehearsal space: What? . . . that she’s having an affair with the station’s producer? Listen, sweetheart, you better clear out of this place before the whole radio network knows you are getting laid by that miserable imbecile hick who’s running the station. What? . . . That it has been a hard way to the top? And how would you know, when your only talent lies on a mattress and at the very bottom! Cunt! you are nothing but a cheap cunt! (257) We also hear two women’s voices commenting on a Cuban show where a white character falls in love with the character Rita is performing: VOIC E OF WOMAN # 1 : 

But she is a Negress . . . She’s almost white. # 1 :  There’s no such thing as almost . . .You are either Black

VOIC E OF WOMAN # 2 :  VOIC E OF WOMAN

or White. VOIC E OF WOMAN # 2 : 

Please! It’s only a play. it’s a play. Tomorrow it may be happening in your own home. Something must be done . . . A demarcation must be established and the sooner the better! (258)35

VOIC E OF WOMA N # 1 : Today

These conversations unveil the fallacy of Cuba’s “aquí no hay blancos ni negros,” the racial prejudices and the Cuban anti-​Blackness Rita has been denying. Most importantly, they unveil instances of everyday racism. Grada Kilomba’s analysis of everyday racism and its connection to colonialism is pertinent to a reading of these space-​off scenes. Kilomba conceptualizes the experience of everyday racism as traumatic.The psychoanalytic account of trauma carries three main implicit ideas: first the idea of a violent shock, or an unexpected event to which the immediate response is shock; second separation or fragmentation as this unexpected violent shock deprives one of one’s link to society; and third the idea of timelessness where a violent

148  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” event that occurred sometime in the past is experienced as if in the present and vice versa with painful consequences that affect the whole psychological organization. (141) For her, the trauma of everyday racism conveys violent shock, separation, and timelessness (142). We see the three operating in Rita. The initial shocks of everyday racism lead to her sense of separation or alienation from Blackness. And the immediacy of the racist event in the past is lived as if it were in the present. Rita’s denial of her Blackness, “an ego defense mechanisms the Black subject goes through in order to become aware of her/​his Blackness and experience reality with everyday racism” (Kilomba 153), is also paralleled by her refusal to see the cultural and ideological influence that the United States exerted in Cuba at the turn of the century, an influence that Bessie rightly calls colonialism. Rita still holds on to some abstract notion of idiosyncratic national character saying that in Cuba everything was different as she also upholds the notion that art and politics do not mesh. But this is contradicted in the space-​off where the censors try to shut her voice, a voice that she considers to be the voice of her people.

Figure 3.10  Jill Romero and Jannis Warner in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  149 The recorded voice of a policeman saying “Just a little laxative to clean your tongue. You’ll never use a microphone to insult our President” (264) alludes to the infamous “palmacristazos” (torture through Castor Oil) typical of the 1950s Batista regime, as well as to the censorship that closed Rita Montaner’s (historical) television program in 1954. In that space-​off, Bessie’s constructed stories are also unveiled. In contrast to her “dream of a childhood” (259), the spectator learns of her father’s violent physical and psychological assaults, Bessie’s alcohol problems, the car accident, and US segregationist policies that led to Bessie’s (historical) death. In that space-​off, we also discover Bessie’s sexual and emotional relationship with a younger woman: G I R L’S VOIC E : 

I feel funny about this. what? G I R L’S VOIC E : Well . . . about being with another girl. B E S S IE : There is nothing to worry about . . . G I R L’S VOIC E :  I don’t know . . . B E S S IE :  Give mama a kiss . . . G I R L’S VOIC E : You promised to teach me a new dance routine . . . B E S S IE :  I’ll teach you after . . . B E S S IE :  About

(259–​60) In 1988, when Rita and Bessie was produced, scholarship about the queer divas of the Blues and the queering of the Harlem Renaissance was nascent.The only publications were Chris Albertson’s biography of Bessie Smith, Sandra Lieb’s study of Ma Rainey, and an article by Hazel Carby. Without analyzing Bessie Smith’s same-​sex relationships, Carby brings to the fore that What has been called the “Classic Blues,” the women’s blues of the twenties and early thirties, is a discourse that articulates a cultural and political struggle over sexual relations: a struggle that is directed against the objectification of female sexuality within a patriarchal order, but which also tries to reclaim women’s bodies as the sexual and sensuous objects of song. (12) Martín’s staging of Rita’s and Bessie’s stories also participated in that early recuperation of minority women artists to underscore their independence, including in the realm of sexuality. The character of Bessie is a composite of Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, and other Blues singers, all of whom had same-​sex relationships. The above scene may have as its referent the relationship of Bessie Smith with Lillian Simpson, a dancer who became a chorus girl in Smith’s touring show, Harlem Frolics, when she was 16 years old. The last thing the show needed was another chorus girl, but Ruby knew how to soften Bessie’s stance, and when it turned out that Lillian’s mother

150  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” had briefly served as Bessie’s wardrobe mistress, the deal was all but clinched . . . She even got up and started teaching her more steps, and she got Mrs. Simpson, Lillie’s mother to agree that we could take her with us. (Albertson 133) The various accounts of this affair underscore Bessie’s openness toward physical body contact with other women except in the presence of her husband. She walked up behind Lillian, leaned forward, and kissed her. Embarrassed, Lillian threw a glance at Ruby and jerked away. “Don’t play around with me like that,” she said. Bessie grabbed her around the waist. “Is that how you feel?” “Yes!” Lillian said. “That’s exactly how I feel.” “The hell with you, bitch,” said Bessie.“I got twelve women on this show and I can have one every night if I want it. Don’t you feel so important, and don’t you say another word to me while you’re on this show, or I’ll send you home bag and baggage.” (Albertson 138) They also suggest Bessie’s proclivity for excess and her desire to live her independence, as well as her violent outbursts of anger. Most importantly, they demonstrate how Bessie, like other queens of the Blues, enacted agency paradoxically by participating in a culture of role reversal and sexual boasting (Davis, Lieb, and Harrison).The play’s scene addresses Bessie’s same-​sex desire in an elliptical fashion, when we hear her husband’s voice say: “I’ll tell the judge how my wife . . . sleeps with any young man in our company, and . . .” (254). Bessie’s highly suggestive and erotic body language filled in the gaps of those ellipses.The staging of Bessie’s performance in this scene seemed to underscore Bessie’s agency and same-​sex desire. However, the Girl’s Voice and the ellipsis suggests hesitation on her part. In her analysis of Bessie Smith’s lyrics and music, Angela Y. Davis asserts that While the overwhelming majority of Bessie Smith’s 159 available recorded songs allude to rejection, abuse, desertion and unfaithful lovers, the preponderant response, as is the case with Ma Rainey, is not resignation and despair. On the contrary, the most frequent stance assumed by the women in these songs is one of independence and assertiveness, indeed defiance, which often borders on and sometimes erupts into violence. (245) The use of ellipsis and of voice-​off allows for a contradictory reading whereby the enactment of Bessie’s autonomy and sexual agency may be at the expense of a younger woman who is there, in principle, because she wants to become an artist. In other words, Martín’s recuperation of these Black divas is not just a celebratory reclamation; he captures their fullness, including the messiness and complexities of their lives.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  151 When the agent finally arrives in the form of a pre-​recorded off-​stage voice, the exoticism that made Rita famous and which she has also internalized as part of herself does not get her anywhere. In a scene that takes place in a contrapuntal manner, much like a hip hop mc battle, Bessie and Rita try to outdo each other. The end of each of Bessie’s Blues rendition (“Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” “All Of Me,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “You Don’t Understand”) lead into Rita’s Afro-​Cuban numbers performed in their English version (“Yours/​ Quiéreme mucho,” “Jungle Drums/​ Canto karabalí,” “The Peanut Vendor/​ El manisero,” and “Ay Mama Inés”). The play’s musical director Tania León has said that “the traditions that we carry today are traditions that have been enmeshed with other traditions. It’s like I speak with an accent, so my music has an accent” (Osuji). And it is this accent that guided the musical direction of the duel scene (Rita and Bessie videorecording). We could say that Rita and Bessie is a precursor for León’s Stride, the 2021 Pulitzer musical piece. What León staged in 1988 as a duel, by 2021 she hybridized in a transculturated piece inspired by a woman (Susan B. Anthony) and characterized by “powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean” (“Stride”). Rita and Bessie’s multiracial artistic team shows us that there were sustained proximities of Black and Latines communities in New York during the 1980s. Tania León further corroborates this. Reminiscing her first experiences in the US in the late 1960s, she has said: It was a time of great tension in the country; it was the first time I saw the Martin Luther King marches on television . . . When I entered college, there were many protests about the Vietnam War and classes were cancelled so we could go on strikes in Washington Square Park. My friends were Puerto Rican and they told me what I had to shout in English at those demonstrations. They explained to me what was happening. (Lazcano)36 The regional theaters’ playwriting projects of the 1980s and 1990s participated in the discourse of cultural pluralism as I argued in Chapter 1, and they did so by separating minoritarian artists by ethnicity or race, like INTAR’s Hispanic American Music Theater Lab.This was the first time that Duo Theater incorporated Black US and Afro-​Cuban elements not only in the play’s content but, most importantly, in its performative codes and styles thus complicating and intervening in the period’s multicultural narrative of pluralism. Specifically, Rita and Bessie counters this narrative. The musical scene between Bessie and Rita staged the contesting nature of the duel utilizing Black diasporic aesthetic codes and allowed for the interpersonal response which is achieved at the end of the play. That is, this scene strategically takes place in the middle of the play and marks a change in Rita’s and Bessie’s mode of communication.This duel does not impress the agent who tells Bessie that the Blues are out and tells Rita that she is too ethnic; neither one of them is marketable anymore. The agent’s voice takes the place of distribution in

152  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” the music industry. That rejection is also representative of how the marketing and distribution of music is disarticulated from the production and consumption of music. The artist is finally alienated from their music once its listening becomes commodity fetishism. Furthermore, this scene highlights the increasingly evident commercialization of Blackness that is going in the United States in the 1930s. Black music such as the Blues was marketed to sell. Black figures appeared on screen and on stage if they were related to domestic items (such as the perfume discussed above) or related to music.The play highlights the ways in which Blackness was being commercialized; it lays bare the hypervisualization of Blackness as a commodity that allowed entrance for Blacks on the stage and on the screen. Blackness became more acceptable because either it is performative as in Bessie’s case or it is the exotic other as in Rita’s. The audience could take it in as art but from a safe distance. The stage was and is part of that commodification process, and Bessie seems to be more aware of this because this speaks to American capitalism where Rita might be less attuned to it. The commodification of their music and the artists’ alienation are further suggested in the play through images suggesting enclosure, heat, and suffocation, which are well captured by the scenography. Rita and Bessie are literally and metaphorically caged in the agent’s office; there is a power failure so they cannot use the elevator; the window is barred so they cannot be heard, nor can they get any ventilation.They are both confined to the role and the space the industry has created for them, a role that has dictated the kind of music they are going to perform and a role that is analogous to the racial and gender role society has dictated for them. Finally, it is this very industry that is going to silence their voices. No longer marketable, they are doomed to disappear from the music industry.37 The two distinct spaces I have been discussing—​on-​stage and space-​off—​ are presented as coexistent, in a contradiction that is never resolved. Rita as the subject moves from white mask to Black skin, from educated and proper to the “chusma criolla” (local riffraff),38 from the perfect star to the sexually exploited artist, from the apolitical singer to a socially and politically committed artist, and from a famous ethnic singer to a non-​marketable one. It is in the transcultural encounter with Bessie, and in and through this back-​and-​forth movement between on-​stage and space-​off, that the ideological representation of race, class, gender, and sexuality is constructed and performed. Eventually, Rita becomes aware that she is the product of that music industry, the product of capitalist ideological simulation: Hell! I made them accept me . . . Me, touring the world with a basket of fruit on my head and yards of muslin ruffles hanging from my waist . . . Impersonator! I became an impersonator. A Latin woman impersonating the Latin image that was demanded and expected. (270) She realizes that the imposed exoticism vindicated as a form of one’s own personality is nothing more than an illusion.39 But even at the moment of

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  153 “self-​discovery,” Rita is unable to discern between self and mask. She has become a living cliché of what the US market has defined as Latinness. Always moving between on-​stage and space-​off, between reality and hyper-​reality or simulation, between self and other, the resulting language performs once again Rancière’s “theoretical scandal”; indeed, Bessie and Rita’s incorporation of each other’s speech acquires a different signification. In this analysis of Rita’s representation of the Latina Black subject as simulation, I am not suggesting that the play is another ludic postmodern move of the politics of difference. Nor am I suggesting that the play be interpreted as a revisionist recuperation of a past that has exploited Black and Latina artists in a similar fashion. Throughout the play, there are allusions to the fact that, although it seems that the power relations that were operative during the plantation years have changed, these power relations remain in place and are at the core of 1980s US society. As Bessie says toward the end of the play: Talk about impersonations! What else you wanna hear? That my name is not Bessie, and the real story is that I’m a bastard, my name is Ethel. No, no, my name is Josephine . . . I’ve got so many names that they have swollen my fat body. Fat accumulated for one hundred years. One hundred years draggin’ my fat body through the American wasteland. (272) I don’t know whether Martín had read Hortense J. Spillers’ groundbreaking essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” but Bessie’s words certainly echo Spillers’ grammar book of Black womanhood. My analysis underscores the need to insert a reading of the play at the intersection of or through the “vaivén” of Blackness and womanhood across the Americas. The continuation of the plantation mentality set the stage in which Rita and Bessie and other minorities are now playing their roles. At this stage, exoticism is constructed and utilized in a similar fashion. Be it in the form of the “negro exhibit” during abolitionist meetings (Bennet 137), or the “mulata” ’s body sexually (un)covered with a “mantilla” in Cuba, or the hypervisuality of the heavy body of a Blues singer in New York, or of a Black woman’s body with bananas on her waist as her only attire, in all of these examples, the Black female body, acting for a predominantly white male audience, becomes an erotic sign of servitude (Baker Jr. 13). It was precisely the eroticization of servitude which paradoxically marked Rita’s Blackness in the set of photographs and illustrations previously discussed. The stage and props where this sign is displayed might not be identical: the fugitive slave’s stage was the social, liberational discourse of white abolitionists; the stage of the naked woman dressed in bananas is that of the search of the primitive discourse of the early 20th century; and the stage for the Blues singer is that of the record industry as a new capitalist enterprise taking advantage of the commodification of Blackness. In these stages, exoticism eventually wears off.The mask is dependent upon the fashion/​market, and accents eventually become undesirable. Finally, the stage of Black and Latina

154  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” middle-​aged artists looking for a job is that of the fictional discourse of cultural pluralism in the United States of the 1980s. In this arena, minority artists were turned against each other in their struggle to attain a piece of the pie. The historical Bessie and Rita are precursors of what was happening in the 1980s; they are progenitors of the cultural commercialization of Blackness and Latin(a)ness that is fully blown by the 1980s. Rita and Bessie grappled with this hypervisuality and commodification of Blackness which, by the 1980s, are squarely on the stage and on the music studio. Martín demonstrated in an interview that he was aware of this: In the United States, when they see that you have an accent, they cast you in the stereotypical Latino character; that is, your character will never be very intelligent nor do his actions follow any logic . . . This is why I wrote Rita and Bessie, where I present a Latin impersonating a Latin. (Barquet 17–​18) The performance, however, also unveils this fiction. It ends when the characters and the audience realize that they are dead. There is a move toward identification and coalition between the two characters. Not only they do a final song together and walk out holding hands, but Rita has incorporated aspects of Bessie’s language. By calling Bessie “sister,” Rita has become aware that they both share common subject positions: manipulated Black women artists in a capitalist society. Their ethnic, sexual, and artistic differences—​Cubanness and North American ness, Blues and Latin, heterosexual and lesbian—​give way to their commonalities. It is through their coming together, already suggested via their common use of suprasegmentals and now performed through the homosocial “harmonization” of their final song, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” that they can finally burst out from the restrictive roles majoritarian society has constructed for them.“Motherless Child” is a traditional Negro spiritual dating to the time of US slavery.40 This song uses the image of a child being separated from his/​her parents—​a painfully common experience in slavery—​as a metaphor for the enslaved peoples’ separation from home, family, and kin. As a “true believer,” their final home is “way up in de heab’nly land” (“sometimes”). The use of minor chords and lyrics conveys the pain and suffering of Black people. However, the play’s final words right after this song, “Finally we can burst the gates of heaven” (276), imagines another place for them and for Black people, beyond “de heab’nly land” and “invites the audience into a different spatiality” (McKittrick 141). As Katherine McKittrick argues, Black expressive cultures do not communicate whole geographies. Instead, the mixture of presentation, music, noise, bodies, performance, and musical arrangements are used to exploit existing geographic arrangements and push narratives of normalcy out of the comfort zone. The geographic act of expressing blackness and black femininity illustrates what happens when gender and race are overtly attached to public space. It points to

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  155 how uncomfortable the normal can be and how the “sayability” of place is caught up in the expressive economy of the racial-​sexual. (140) Indeed, the sonic register of the play calls on music to conjure various affective temporalities (The Sense 21) and spatialities. But by putting them side by side, these sonic registers, first of all, attune the audience to question their own connections to musical traditions and what they have come to represent. Most importantly, what these two musical traditions have in common is that their sounds, rhythms, and beat are recognizably “different and decidedly dissident in relation to structuring codes of U.S. [majoritarian and white] national affect” (The Sense 21), although, by the 1980s, Black music was being consumed in the United States and became the soundtrack for American life. This final scene is a culmination of what should have been foreshadowed in the middle scene of the duel. Here, Rita’s and Bessie’s double consciousness, a result of slavery’s, colonialism’s, imperialism’s, and heterosexism’s “othering,” prompts their attempt to return to a community, a community of women that is not based on nationality or ethnicity. By walking off the stage saying: “Finally we can burst the gates of heaven,” the play inscribes linguistically a “collective subject” that resists society’s persistent “othering.”41 The identification between the two characters, in other words,

Figure 3.11  Jannis Warner and Jill Romero in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

156  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” [i]dentifications with other Black people, their history, their biographies, their experiences, their knowledge, . . . prevent the Black subject from the alienating identification with whiteness. Instead of identifying with the white other, one develops a positive identification with one’s own Blackness leading to a sense of inner security and self-​recognition. (Kilomba 154) The characters and the audience share the intraracial empathic recognition that they have been read as a problem, in Muñoz’s sense of “feeling like a problem” adapted from Du Bois. This expressive and political return to community cannot be based on solely gender, racial, national, ethnic, or homosexual identity.The play itself moves away from simple oppositions of Black and white, Black and Latina, heterosexual and lesbian, into a conceptual, affective, and experiential Black women continuum.

Re-​dressing the Ghost of Race in Cuban and US Stages: Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas is one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the United States today. He was born and raised in Miami and studied in Washington, DC, where he received his BA from Georgetown University. He then moved to the Bay Area where he worked for many years in progressive Latine and queer organizations as an AIDS activist and where he also graduated with an MPH from the University of California, Berkeley. He studied playwriting with Chicanes Octavio Solís and Cherríe Moraga, and with María Irene Fornés. He also has an MFA from Brown University. A 2018 Guggenheim fellow, he is based in New York where he is Artistic Director of the Obie winning company Fulcrum Theater. I begin with this short biographical note not to suggest that we read the play through his life’s details but to underscore the various networks of artists and activists of which he is an important node. Cortiñas has poetically reminisced, “When you were young and moved to San Francisco, new friends took you in and made you anew. San Francisco and your friends made you anew” (2016). His playwriting, I argue, is a product of the multiple assemblages resulting from those various artistic and activist networks in which Cortiñas participated between Washington, DC, San Francisco, and New York, and from the different performance spaces and playwriting workshops where his plays were nurtured and performed. His first play, Maleta Mulata, is not one of the plays Cortiñas likes to discuss. Although he has said,“I shudder when I think about the obvious choices I made in that script” (Alvarez and Cortiñas 2014), this play was already breaking away from the tendencies of realism prevalent in much of US theater at the time. Maleta, as I mentioned, addresses the ghosts of race and racism in Cuban and Cuban exile culture and the role of memory and haunting is crucial in this play. Memory for Cortiñas “is not any one person’s task; memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden” (“Notes”).

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  157 If from today’s perspective and that of Cortiñas’ later plays, it may seem that he made “obvious choices,” those choices were not obvious at all in the 1990s. As a matter of fact, they are nothing short of groundbreaking for US Cuban, Latine, and American theaters, as well as for Cuban, US Cuban, Latine, and American Studies. Focusing on the characters’ development on stage and on their affective relationships, I argue that this play artfully and performatively constructs a politics of memory based on a contrapuntal articulation of affect, race, and desire that allows us to imagine very different Cuban and US futures. Maleta Mulata remains unpublished. I work primarily with the script dated May 14, 1998, provided by the author. There is an earlier development script dated June 8, 1997, available at the Center Theater Group Papers, Latino Theater Initiative, at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, which I have also consulted.42 The play was developed as part of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at the South Coast Repertory (SCR) in Costa Mesa, California, in 1997. The Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP) was founded in 1986 by José Cruz González who, as a recent graduate from UC-​Irvine’s MFA program in theater, was nominated by the then-​director of the SCR, Michael Bigelow Dixon, for a National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellowship.43 Cruz González has explained that when he started working at SCR as Assistant Director, What really interested me was working on new plays. So I began thinking about new Latino plays and talking about that with people there. Everyone was supportive and the company put about $10,000 into it. I received funding from TCG [Theatre Communications Group] and SCR to promote it. We got about 109 plays submitted our first year and our artistic team chose three plays to workshop. It got a lot of buzz around the country. That was 1986.The program’s success continued the following season when we produced two of the plays. And I was invited back. By 1996, when I left SCR, we had workshopped more than fifty plays. (Mason 161) Cruz González eventually transitioned to playwriting after taking a playwriting workshop at HPP with María Irene Fornés in 1987. Juliette Carrillo became HPP’s director in 1996 and directed the program until 2004.The project involved Latine playwrights who participated in a two-​day pre-​conference; they then attended a two-​week playwriting workshop that ended with staged readings of the author’s plays. The project’s main goal was to give Latine playwrights more visibility on the US stages. “It was a hub, a center where many of us—​writers, directors, actors, dramaturgs—​met one another, saw each other’s work, forged relationships, and took the pulse of Latino/​a theater in that moment” (Portes). Cortiñas participated in HPP in 1997 where he workshopped various versions of what became Maleta Mulata and worked with fellow Chicanes Octavio Solís and Joann Farías.44 It should come as no surprise that the play’s world premiere was at Campo Santo in San Francisco, the city where Cortiñas had been working and a city that welcomed so many Mariel homosexual migrants. Campo

158  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Santo is “an award-​winning multi-​cultural ensemble committed to developing and premiering new Performance and Theatre and to nurturing diverse new audiences for the performing arts” (Campo Santo History). It was founded in 1996 by Margo Hall (African American), the late Luis Saguar (half-​Mexican half-​Spanish), Sean San José (half-​Filipino half-​Mexican), and Michael Torres, and it has been in residence at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts since 1997. The multiracial nature of its founders needs to be underscored because it informed the nature of their productions and the audience they cultivated. They were all strong advocates of artists of color and strongly believed in the need to have a multicultural institution that served as an incubator for new plays by artists of color. Maleta Mulata was the company’s seventh play, and the third play penned by a Latine. Given Campo Santo’s interest in showing “the audience the world we live in and see in the audience the world we come from” (Campo Santo History), it is befitting that Maleta Mulata followed plays by two of Fornés’ mentees, Octavio Solís’ Santos & Santos and Migdalia Cruz’s Fur, also a world premiere. Maleta Mulata unveils the homogenizing nationalist rhetoric of “Aquí no hay blancos ni negros, solo cubanos” analyzed above and redresses the impact of that rhetoric on Cuban communities in the United States. In an e-​mail dialogue on Maleta Mulata in 1998, Cortiñas told me the following: Maleta was written in a sort of dialogue with several precursor’s texts, one of those being Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano. But I was of course also trying to find a way to talk about the strange relationship of my generation towards the United States, towards the promise of whiteness. I am thinking here of Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and those who are my age and take him very seriously (the Generation ñ people), but also those who have never heard of him. How is it that some Cuban-​Americans, like GPF, are able to so steadfastly avoid ever imagining themselves as people of color? And what’s the price we pay for this type of amnesia/​(de)racial imagining? (E-​mail) Maleta Mulata is a response, in part, to those questions. The action takes place in 1980s Miami, after the Mariel boatlift (see Chapter 1). It unfolds as a “contrapunteo” (counterpoint in Ortiz’s sense) between two sisters and the ghosts of the past, most importantly the “real” (as opposed to metaphorical) spirit/​ghost of Barbarito, a “mulato” musician who stayed in Cuba, and between the two sisters and their lives in the “present” with the two teenagers in the family. I say “present” because it is a life that is permeated by all the baggage of the past which keeps on piling up. Maleta deals with the ghosts of race and racism in Cuban culture with highly poetic and evocative use of language reminiscent of the expressionistic techniques of María Irene Fornés. Affect and memory are crucial to the construction of character in this play. Informed by residual specters of willed and unwilled forgettings enacted through silence, memory is something that haunts both those who stayed in Cuba and those who left.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  159 The unveiling of a deracialized past starts at the very beginning, with the cast of characters. Each one of the characters is described not only by age and familial relations but also by racial phenotype. In 1998, this was the only play in the US Cuban stages written with a set of characters that underscores racial variety: Cari Torres. Fifteen-​year-​old. Cuban American. Bien clarita, con rastros de Jabao. Papo Torres. Eighteen-​year-​old, Cari’s brother. Trigueño. Juan Carlos Orestes.Young Marielito, friend of Papo’s. Mulato. Eighteen. Olga Delfin de Torres. Cari and Papo’s mother, forty. Can pass as Gallega. Gustavo Torres. Olga’s husband, lawyer. Color de Cabriso. Barbarito Torres. Gustavo’s brother, remained in Cuba, musician/​singer . . . he is dead, but corporeal, in no way ghost-​like. Color de Mulato. (“Maleta”)45 The language used to describe the cast of characters already exhibits the transcultural nature of this community. On the one hand, the characters are described in English and Spanish. On the other, the racial categories utilized to describe these characters and the grammar used in those descriptions exhibit that this is neither standard Spanish nor standard Cuban Spanish, for that matter. The odd use of “color de mulato” and “rastros” instead of “huellas” is a case in point. The most glaring one, however, is the description of Cari as “con rastros de Jabao” as opposed to “de jabá.” This difference is dramatic because, interestingly enough, Jabao is usually used in its female grammatical form, as Ortiz reminds us in his Nuevo catauro: “se aplica a la mulata de piel y pelo algo rojizo” (“it’s applied to a “mulata” whose skin and hair are somewhat reddish,” 300). For those of us involved in Cuban/​Caribbean theater studies, not using Jabá becomes even more odd, because we do have as a pretext Carlos Felipe’s famous character La Jabá in Réquiem por Yarini. Maleta Mulata’s cast underscores the racial and linguistic heterogeneity of the US Cuban community, as Nuyoricans Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-​Manuel Miranda’s 2005 staged musical and 2020 movie In the Heights does for the Latine community in Washington Heights, New York. Maleta also signals the splits within it along the generational and migratory lines (Juanqui is a Marielito), and along those who chose to stay in Cuba, namely Barbarito, and the rest of the characters who chose to leave. These splits are going to be developed throughout the play, and they are essential to both plot and character development. The staging creatively captured the complexities of racial categories through a multiracial and multiethnic cast of actors, some of whom had worked for years in the Bay Area, and many became award-​winning artists on the US stages. Olga was played by Wilma Bonet, Puerto Rican actress born in New York who moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s. She worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe for six years, and she also acted with most top-​tier Bay Area theater companies. She is also a playwright and director founder of Latina Theater

160  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Lab. Marina was played by actor, director, and playwright Lisa Ramirez. She has performed extensively at theaters on both the East and West Coast such as the Cherry Lane Theater, Atlantic Theater, Working Theater, Oakland Theater Project, Magic Theatre, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She currently serves as the Associate Artistic Director at the Ubuntu Theater Project in Oakland, where she also performs as a company member. Gustavo was played by Michael Torres, actor, director, and founding member of Campo Santo. He worked with El Teatro Campesino and has also performed in the most important Bay Area playhouses such as Shotgun Theater, San Francisco Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Festival, and Magic Theatre. He is currently chair of theater at Oakland’s Laney College where he directs its theater company, Fusion. The younger members of the cast were Cristina Frías, Roberto Robinson, and Colman Domingo. Cari was played by the Chicana Cristina Frías. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and has become an award-​winning actor, storyteller, and teaching artist. She worked with Latins Anonymous, Culture Clash, and Teatro Luna. She is known for having created the role of Dolores in MacArthur Genius Fellow/​Playwright, Luis Alfaro’s celebrated Black Butterfly (Mark Taper Forum/​Kennedy Center/​Smithsonian, 2000) and for her work in Real Women Have Curves (Pasadena Playhouse, 2015). Juanqui was played by Afro-​Latino (Black Central American) Roberto Robinson, and Papo by Timothy Rodríguez; both have also acted on television and film. Colman Domingo played the role of Barbarito in Maleta Mulata. Domingo is an award-​winning African American gay actor, director, and playwright who is a passionate advocate for social change in the United States. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s where he started acting with Theater Rhinoceros and Berkeley Repertory Theater. He moved to New York in 2007 where he acted in numerous Broadway and Off-​ Off-​Broadway productions, and where he directed Lisa Ramirez’s first play, Exit Cuckoo (nanny in motherland), in 2009 at the Working Theater in New York. He is best known for his film roles Ralph Abernathy in Selma (2015) and Cutler in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). He joined the theater faculty at the University of Southern California in fall 2021. The play was directed by Paulo Nunes-​Ueno, a Brazilian-​Japanese director who came from New York’s experimental theater scene. Cortiñas met him when Nunes directed a play at HPP. James Faerron was the set designer. He was born in San José, Costa Rica, and his career began in Miami, Florida, where he worked for the Actor’s Playhouse and the Area Stage Company as a set designer and technical director. He moved to San Francisco in 1996 where he became the Technical Director and Production Manager for The Magic Theatre and developed a long collaborative relationship with Campo Santo and other Bay Area theater companies. He has designed sets for over 40 world premieres written by some of the best US playwrights. The original soundtrack was done by Scheherazade Stone, a Detroit native who was raised in San Francisco. “A superb musician and a stunning singer with a magnetic stage presence” (Hurwitt 1998, 39), she has received numerous Grammy nominations

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  161 throughout her career. Chicano poet and playwright Ricardo Bracho consulted throughout the production and followed the play’s rehearsal process. He continued to attend rehearsals and to do dramaturgical work on various other Campo Santo productions; after leaving the Bay Area, he returned to see their shows until 2005 (Bracho). Nuyorican performer, writer, and curator Marlene Cancio Ramírez was the play’s dramaturg and linguistic coach. She was part of Latina Theater Lab in San Francisco (1997–​2000) and is co-​founding director of Fulana, a Latina performance collective. Her curatorial work focuses on the intersection of the arts and social justice. All these artists were also part of other artistic, theatrical, and activist networks. Bracho studied at Berkeley with Frías and Robinson. Bracho knew Colman from the gay community, and both had worked at the nearby gay theater Theater Rhinoceros. Ramírez, Bonnet, Frías, and Bracho were also closely linked to another Mission-​based theater, Brava Theater, where Cortiñas had the first reading of Maleta Mulata with a different cast and director. Bonnet, Frías, and Cancio Ramírez worked with Latina Theater Lab. Bracho had been going to Campo Santo shows since their first production of Santos & Santos in a different space, and he knew Sean San José, one of Campo Santos founding members from the underground house club/​nightlife scene. Cortiñas and Bracho had participated in and led writing workshops at Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida (Project Against AIDS and for Life), a Mission District Latine multigender HIV service agency.46 They were also members of a writing group led by Cherríe Moraga and another one at Intersection with Octavio Solís. Bracho had been involved in political organizing against the first Gulf War and during the Rodney King riots with Roots Against War (RAW), a group of young people of color who came together to fight against the Gulf War in the early 1990s. RAW fused militant direct action, sharp politics and exciting cultural work. In doing so it laid the groundwork for the next decade of revolutionary politics among young people of color in the Bay Area. (Jones et al. 5) Cortiñas was a member of Act Up-​San Francisco, and both Cortiñas and Bracho were arrested during the Rodney King demonstrations in San Francisco. Maleta Mulata, then, brought together cast members and an artistic team that formed part of various networks where there were multiple overlapping relationships not only between theaters and playwrighting groups but most importantly between nonprofits, movements, and communities.47 The director remembers what it meant to do this production at that time and place with that amazing group of artists: The multi-​racial aspect of the project was really rich and yet unrooted in complicated ways. It was a strange free-​floating experience of diaspora inside diaspora to be in San Francisco doing a play about Miami and the

162  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Caribbean Latinidad with Latino actors from many different backgrounds. The fact that Domingo is Afro-​ Caribbean was really important and I remember Jorge really feeling that he brought an essential quality to the role that maybe is hard to pin down in words . . . But I have a clear memory of these conversations with Jorge and seeing and feeling that from Domingo. This sort of unrootedness yet being of a place was resonant for me in that time in my life as a Brazilian/​Japanese director who felt most at home with Latino artists in America. (Nunes-​Ueno) It is precisely that “unrootedness” and the diaspora within a diaspora that, as I will argue later, must have attuned the audience to a sense of feeling Brown. The fact that the play was staged in Campo Santo in the Mission district is crucial. This area in the 1990s had replaced the bohemian life of 1970s and 1980s New York’s East Village. The play’s multiracial and multiethnic cast was representative of the Mission’s population in the 1990s: “multiethnic, multicultural, multinational, multigenerational Latino community” (Rodríguez 75) who lived alongside other non-​Latines multiethnic and multiracial communities. Race, class, and religion are intertwined in the playscript and its staging. From the very beginning of the play (Act 1, Scene 1: “Radio Waves”), Cari’s entrance displays the social forces and antagonisms at work in this community of Cuban/​American characters: Mulata! That’s what he called me.Yelled it. Can you imagine? Thank God Juanqui wasn’t there. See, Juanqui would have thought that was funny. Ay, cause he’s too fresh off the boat for me. Juanqui’s cute and everything, but he’s, well, chusma. It’s always oye, oye with him. Did you now that Juanqui’s mother is a santera? Maggie says they have an altar in the house with a statue of Changó. Hello! Too Cubanaso [sic] for me. I can never tell if he is looking at me, or looking at my tits, like he thinks that’s where my voice is coming from. (6) Although this scene reminds us of Fanon’s “look a negro” scene, it is enmeshed in the racialization processes I discussed above. The description of Juanqui as “fresh off the boat” refers to the 125,000 Cubans who came to the United States through the Mariel boatlift. The press and literature characterized them as “young, black, unmarried and that they were shiftless and dangerous people: prostitutes, homosexuals, mental defectives, and thugs” (Aguirre et al. 155). As this quote demonstrates and Maleta Mulata performs, “gendered understandings of Cuban migrants became entangled with newer racializing discourses about Mariel Cubans” (Hampton). That entanglement quickly resulted in their stigmatization as the “other” of the Cuban exile community in more ways than one (see Chapter 1). Juanqui corporeally marks the racial and class/​educational differences of Cubans both there and here. His language use

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  163 and bodily presence are a constant reminder of that devalued, unmarked, and even unnamable presence within the community: M A R INA : 

I can see why your mother does not like him. Look at those eyes. her finger on her arm] His eyes aren’t what mami sees. M A R INA :  No. Me imagino que no. She has never been fond of that particular shade. She sang me the same complaint. (59) CAR I : [Rubbing

I say unnamable because it is only through the Cuban/​Caribbean body language that signals Blackness—​rubbing one’s finger on the forearm—​that race is suggested in oral conversations. Cuban Blacks were and are often stigmatized as the chusma working class, the darker member who aligns him/​herself with the Afro-​Cuban religious traditions. Paradoxically enough, precisely because of his exaggerated “fresh” display of “cubaneo,” characters such as Juanqui are both rejected and desired by some members of this community. I am using “cubaneo” the way that Pérez Firmat used it to distinguish from “cubanidad” and “cubanía”: Rather than naming un estado civil, cubaneo names un estado de ánimo, a mood, a temperament, what used to be called a “national character” . . .Thus, cubaneo finds expression in all of those habits of thought and speech and behavior that we know as typically criollos—​the informality, the humor, the exuberance, the docility. (“A Willingnes” 4; emphasis mine) Pérez Firmat’s formulation of“cubaneo”is different from José Esteban Muñoz’s “cubanía” (Cubanity). Although they both refer to “a way of being in the world,” Pérez Firmat’s “cubaneo” is more a way of doing that he traces back to “criollos”—​white, male national character—​whereas Muñoz’s “cubanía” is “a structure of feeling that supersedes national boundaries and pedagogies” (The Sense 456). Most theories and performances of exilic “cubaneo,” like Pérez Firmat’s, have constructed themselves as white. What is interesting here is the ways in which the play racializes both this construct of “cubaneo” and its monstrous demonic hybrid product, the “Cubanaso.” I use monstrous in the sense that Foucault theorized the monstrous in modern societies. For him, the monstrous is a hybrid, elusive category that signals those gestures of exclusion that a culture uses to expel to an outside that which is threatening to it (Foucault 1961). Furthermore, the monstrous for Foucault occupies the spaces of subversion and resistance to governmentality. The monstrous is a conduct that breaks an established social order usually described as “natural” and thus threatens the social body. It is, after all, irreducible to the logic of identity and difference as it unveils the very genesis of difference (Foucault, Les mots 170).48 And I borrow demonic from Katherine McKittrick. Focusing on the ways in which Black populations have been

164  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” despatialized or made “ungeographic,” McKittrick repurposes Sylvia Wynter’s concept of “demonic ground” to argue how “race” functions to distinguish Man from his human (black, native, female) others. Her . . . demonic model serves to locate what Wynter calls cognition outside “the always non-​arbitrary pre-​prescribed,” which underscores the ways in which subaltern lives are not marginal/​other to regulatory classificatory systems, but instead integral to them. (xxv) For both Foucault and McKittrick, society’s others are pushed aside from the natural order of things and from geographic spaces, but the monstruous demonic suggests that “geographies of domination” be understood as “the displacement of difference,” wherein “particular kinds of bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category of ‘human being’ ” (McKittrick xv). Most importantly, as McKittrick underscores, this “displacements of difference” “also outline the ways in which this place is an unfinished and therefore transformative human geography story” (xxvi). In many ways, Muñoz’s theorization of the “sense of Brown” is akin to both Foucault’s construct of the monstrous and McKittrick’s demonic. In the case of Juanqui, I am marking a difference between “Cubanaso,” as spelled in the playscript with an “s” and capitalized according to English conventions, and “cubanazo,” the standard spelling in Spanish with lowercase “c” and a “z.”49 Furthermore, as I will demonstrate, there is a discrepancy in the performances of a Cuban “cubanazo” and its diasporic “Cubanaso” version. Because of and through that performance, the “Cubanaso” may be read as monstrous demonic insofar as he subverts, challenges, and unveils the naturalness of the Cuban deracialized exilic social order. Juanqui, the “Cubanaso,” performs from the very beginning those habits, social functions, mode of dress and speech, behavior, etc. that signal Cuban masculinity, in its post-​Mariel diasporic moment. Let’s return to Pérez Firmat’s essay. Toward the middle, he describes “cubaneo” as a community-​building enterprise epitomized in “the oye, tú syndrome.” This “oye, tú,” according to Pérez Firmat is “a plea for communication,” and he proceeds to give the following infelicitous example: “Oye, tú’: reach out and grab someone” (“A Willingness” 5–​6). Although he might not have meant to suggest what I am reading into it here, it is precisely this macho attitude of “oye, tú” and grab someone which the male characters have assumed and perform in this play.50 The “cubanazos” par excellence are the two brothers, Gustavo, the one who migrates to Miami, and Barbarito, his “mulato” brother who stays behind and whose spirit comes to Miami to haunt the play and the racialized-​as-​ white Cubans in Miami. As a matter of fact, both Gustavo and Barbarito have assumed the same codes of Cuban masculinity and, as I will argue, their gender performances are intrinsically the same, with a slight circumstantial variation of

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  165 the “cubanazo” in Cuba or the “cubanazo” in Miami. Barbarito, the description in the cast of characters tell us, is “genuinely charming” (n.p.). He had three wives, several lovers, all females that we know of. He is, as he says, “a man of few words, preferring to say it all in boleros” (33). Gustavo is a hardworking lawyer who immigrates with his family and soon becomes the absent father. In Act 2, Scene 5: “Dominoes Fall,” he is playing dominoes with Olga while she is recovering from surgery in a hospital room: down a piece] I flirt with the blond receptionists at the office. They like my sexy Cuban accent . . .  . . . G U S TAVO : [places down his last piece] Domino. I leave you. I send a check once a month. I do not visit. [Gustavo sits back triumphantly] (79) G U S TAVO : [placing

Barbarito can seduce women via his singing voice; in Cuba he can afford to maintain his genuine charm because revolutionary culture does not threaten his Cuban masculinity in any way. Gustavo is, indeed, very much like the Ricky that is re-​constructed in Pérez Firmat’s phantasmatic world of “cubaneo” in Life on the Hyphen. For Gustavo, in exile, the situation is different. His charm is now transformed into the macho Cuban who seduces the blond American. Indeed, the game of domino aptly suggests that “grab someone” attitude described by Pérez Firmat. Pérez Firmat thinks that “Cubaneo isn’t a power move but a homing device; it doesn’t aim at conquest but at communion; it doesn’t shove, it embraces” (“A Willingness” 6). However, in Gustavo’s performance of masculinity, Cortiñas unveils precisely the opposite: “cubaneo” is all about power moves, conquests, and shoving. In Cuba, the “cubanazo” can be genuinely charming. In exile, however, never quite under control, the “cubanazo” needs to reassert constantly his masculinity to dominate the situation because of the social emasculation of the exiled Cubans. The rules of the game—​of this domino game of masculinity—​are not taught in books. According to Gustavo, “Learning how to play dominoes, that took me a long time. My father taught me, and his father before that. I didn’t read it in any book” (79). Although both Gustavo and Barbarito have internalized, have assumed the rules and the codes of domino-​masculinity, ironically enough, the “cubanazo” is never completely under control, neither in Cuba nor in Miami. In Miami, the “dominoes fall” with the younger generation.Thus, Gustavo’s son Papo and Juanqui do not perform the “cubanazo” role perfectly. Papo is raised by his mother Olga. His story, according to his mother, is the following:“O L G A : He grows up and gets a girl whose last name I cannot pronounce pregnant” (79). Act 2, Scene 6, “Mannequin,” stages the day of Papo’s wedding as he is getting ready for the ceremony. There is “a faceless mannequin dressed in a black tuxedo” (80) and throughout the scene Gustavo undresses the mannequin and dresses Papo in the mannequin’s clothes. The dialogue between Gustavo and Papo lets the audience know of Papo’s doubts about the wedding. It also underscores

166  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Gustavo’s penchant for women and how proud he feels about his son marrying a beautiful one: “I’m really proud of you. Coño, it’s not every day your only son gets married. And she’s a looker, hehe, saw her on my way in . . . I could tell. Porque eso sí, este hijo mío has a Torres’ taste in women” (80). I read this scene of Gustavo’s undressing of the mannequin and the dressing of Papo as Gustavo’s enforcement of the codes of the “cubanazo” masculinity discussed above and its inherent violence. The violence is underscored at the very end of this scene when Gustavo throws the mannequin to the floor and exits dragging the mannequin behind him off-​stage (83). This reading is reinforced by my conversations with the director. When I asked Paulo Nunes-​Ueno whether he remembered any impactful scenes, he answered: I remember feeling that I wasn’t sure whether I had brought to life some of the under tones that Jorge meant the play to have. There is a scene where the patriarch knocks down a mannequin and drags it off stage and Jorge was adamant that pointed to the political violence that happened in Cuba. I couldn’t see a clear connection with the rest of the play. And in retrospect all these years later, I think that should have made me more curious about where else this undercurrent should have been brought to the surface. (Nunes-​Ueno) While Nunes-​Ueno remembers this scene as a connection between violence and politics, I argue that the undercurrent here is the violent codes of masculinity that also undergird politics both in Cuba and in Miami.51 Although Papo ends up marrying the girl “he grabbed” with his “oye, tú, cubanazo” attitude, we know that marriage is doomed to fail because it is evident that he does not love her. The play has already suggested that there might be another side to this “cubanazo.” Throughout the play, Papo has internalized the feeling of being on a “dead end street” literally and metaphorically. His way of dealing with the restrictive codes the “cubanazo” model imposes on him, restrictive in its intersection of ethnicity and masculinity, is through escape via speed: “This is the only happiness I have ever known, this desire for speed, and if I was moving then I was everywhere at once which is my nowhere, which felt like home, that forever gotta be going that has no return” (83). This recurrent escape is really a symptom of another “symptom.” In the first scene of the play, Juanqui introduces what seems to be a santería story in the following manner: JUANQU I : 

But you have to be careful with beauty, . . . it can paralyze you. Like Narcisscón. PAP O : That Greek guy in love with his own reflection? Qué plástico, ¿no? JUANQU I :  No men, Narcisscón, the Cuban monkey. (11) The elusive reference to the myth of Narcissus and homosexual love is aptly captured in another monstrous demonic hybrid of Narcissus and “maricón,”

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  167 the Spanish word for faggot. What is merely a playful allusion in the first scene of act one reappears again in the first scene of act 2, one of the most poetic moments in the text, which is also a highly charged homoerotic moment.Titled “Papo’s Dream,” Papo appears on stage, alone, telling us/​himself a dream that he has: In my dream my father and I cannot speak. All I hear is the engine of the speed of a boat, so loud it becomes a type of silence. The boat hits a wave, it rises, then falls. My father is standing behind me, I feel the hairs of his stomach against my back, his feet outside of my feet, holding me in place in front of the steering wheel, his fingers between my fingers, his hands over my hands, so that I cannot let go. The water is blue and lit up from underneath, it glistens at points, . . . sparks we cut through like so many points of no return left behind two never ending lines of wake that close at the bow of the boat, . . . my father’s hands turn my hands turn the steering wheel turns the boat under the draw bridge . . . racing now, barely touching the sea, that becomes sky that is the sun, wind on my face, sea sky sun, till there is nothing in front of us, sea sky sun, no land . . ., sea sky sun, not the end of this dream, sea sky sun, and nothing to cover us, sea sky sun. Not even the past. (51) Indeed, the “cubanazo” can perform his masculinity script differently. As a matter of fact, Papo does, even if it is in his dream world. Juanqui also performs this role with a difference, a monstrous demonic difference already announced by the spelling changes from “cubanazo” to “Cubanaso.” Juanqui, the “Cubanaso,” is supposed to embody the “chusma,” son of a “santera,” who does not yet handle the standard codes of American English like Cari and Papo are able to. But this linguistic characterization is no limitation at all. On the contrary, being for Juanqui and the “Cubanasos” of his generation in Miami can only be imagined, however hesitantly, as a subject in process. And the language of this subject in process is precisely Spanglish. Juanqui closes Scene 4, of Act1, “In which Juanqui discusses place and in which we learn why Changó was a Mujeriego,” in the following fashion: JUANQUI : 

I am from this place, you can tell by the way que I talk. Now anyway.At first, when I was brought here I only wanted to go back. But not anymore, not for a long time now. It’s not que I don’t remember Cuba because I do. Pero now it’s too late.This city es the only place que I am. I think. (43)52

Genderwise, the “Cubanaso” has already changed the masculinity codes of the “oye, tú and grab somebody” attitude. He maintains his “oye, tú” pose through his verbal and body language; his gaze is still a masculine gaze (“he is always looking at my tits”), but he actually does not grab women, neither literally nor

168  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” metaphorically. As a matter of fact, Juanqui is sweet and charming throughout the play. The directorial aesthetics, the use of Spanish and Spanglish, and the body language in Campo Santo’s production added to the “uprootedness” that the director suggested. Nunes-​Ueno directorial style went against the naturalistic style typical at the time. “He had a brilliant visual and rhythmic sense. He loved the body in space and imbued the staging with a fluidity and beauty that was accented by the sonic landscape” (Cortiñas, “Personal”). Some of the actors—​ Colman, Frías, Ramirez, and Torres—​were not bilingual so they had a hard time in the beginning with the Spanish and Spanglish in the play. Colman’s and Robinson’s Caribbean gestures and body language were organic to them but there was also a question of class. As Bracho notes: “Campo Santo and many of the actors were from working-class backgrounds whereas the play was about middle-class/​bourgeois Miami Cubans” (Bracho). Campo Santo’s audience, although racially and ethnically mixed, was composed primarily of English speakers. Bracho remembers that “Roberto Robinson’s best work as Juanqui was done in rehearsals but I was saddened that audiences took his performance as mostly comic relief ” (Bracho). But the other actors were also funny in a way that was not for comic relief. The audience response may have been due to Juanqui’s use of Spanglish. As a matter of fact, when I have read quotes from Juanqui’s use of Spanish in the play, my listening audience—​both bilinguals and monolinguals—​has also responded with laughter. Lisa Ramirez also acknowledges the difficulty she had at first playing her character because of Marina’s use of Spanish. One of the memorable scenes for many of the actors involved in the play with whom I spoke was Marina’s fight with Olga. For Ramirez this was a key moment not only for the play on stage but for her off-​stage: I remember specially my fight with Wilma, me fighting with her and Wilma correcting my Spanish. I was raised by my mother and was ashamed about not being fluent. I had mostly played non-​Latinas; this was the first time I was embodying a Latina role after twelve years of acting in the Bay Area. Personally, I was just getting to know my father who had moved to Miami from El Salvador. During one of the moments backstage, I confessed to Wilma, “I am so scared,” and she just hugged me. I told her my truth; I admitted my vulnerability, and she helped me. We ended up being very close after that. As a result of that experience, I learned Spanish and got to travel to Central America. (Ramirez) The cast’s hardships with Spanish and Spanglish are an example of the differences in language use and affective relationship to language between different Latine groups, as I analyzed in Chapter 1. If we approach theater as a finished product, it might lead us to think, as Bracho does, that “in some ways the play was mis-​ cast in terms of language abilities and phenotype which are crucial to the text . . . And this split has often been the problem of staging East Coast, Caribbean

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  169 and Miami works in San Francisco.”53 However, taking into consideration the theatrical process, Ramirez’s personal story is proof of the transformative power of theater and of the ways in which theater offers us a space to “imagine otherwise” both on and off-​stage. Rather than mis-​cast, Cortiñas and I see the play as a performance of the differences among various Latines communities. “The diverse cast of actors came together in a play that unveiled the secret connections to Miami and to Caribbeanness. Juanqui and Barbarito completely nailed the Caribbeanness. Ramirez, despite her background, beautifully performed white entitlement” (Cortiñas 2021) and the seduction of whiteness characteristic of her character’s bourgeois upbringing. At the end of the decade of the Latino, the play staged the differences within various Latines communities underscoring that Latines were not all the same. But it also placed an accent on a sense of belonging that was based on an affinity of feelings and not on ethnic or racial identity.The play, after all, begins and ends with feelings as it performs how characters trace the meaning of rupture (Cortiñas, “Personal”). Returning to the play’s analysis, although Juanqui can only be in Miami and in Spanglish, he is the intermediary between those here (Cari and Papo) and those there, namely Barbarito the spirit. It is not gratuitous that Juanqui, the believer, is the one who can actually communicate with Barbarito. The play opens with a “Prólogo: Cuartos de Memoria.” This scene gives us the background for the conflicts and the actions that will be developed and reenacted later: the last physical encounter between the lovers Marina and Barbarito, the day before Marina is to leave for Miami. Marina is packing her suitcase while Barbarito unpacks it. Every time Barbarito materializes on stage, the play’s directions suggest noise of static announcing his entrance, and when he exits the static fades.The didascalia of this first scene poetically read: “Lonely static, full of memory. barbarito, wearing his elegant cabaret outfit, carrying a guitar. marina. An open suitcase between them” (1). In the play’s nonrealistic staging, this static was suggested and achieved with Scheherazade Stone’s “haunting recorded vocals” (Hurwitt 1998). Faerron’s stage design was minimalist; it had the skeleton of bronze and silver metallic walls that were fixed, and side walls were the actual walls of Intersection. Faerron painted the back wall to match the tone of the actual walls, and he painted the floor to evoke the ocean (Faerron, “Personal”). The light design included different lights every time Barbarito was on stage. The atmosphere the lights created was eerie, not in the sense of frightful but of strange. Lisa Ramirez, who played Marina, Barbarito’s lover, remembers: Colman [the Black actor who played Barbarito] was lit differently. His movements were slower or different than those of us who were supposed to be living. The lighting was weirdly magical. It’s not something you see every day and it was not something we had seen done on theater. It was beautiful and it also gave you the feeling that this guy is haunted, this guy is screwed up. (Ramirez).

170  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”

Figure 3.12 James Faerron’s scenography for Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Maleta Mulata. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Ramirez and other artists remember a specific scene during one of Barbarito’s exits when the music plays Rose Royce’s “Wishing on a Star” and “they lit the stairs; Colman was walking up the stairs very slowly, elegantly like a dancer, and I was mesmerized, watching him ascend on the stairs, with a suitcase, illuminated by that light” (Ramirez).54 Rose Royce’s “Wishing on a Star” is a late 1970s soul music classic. Its female lead, Gwen Dickey, was born in Mississippi but was working in Miami when Norman Whitfield, an ex-​Motown producer, “discovered” her: I was living in Miami and I was singing in a local club in a house band and I got discovered. The next thing I know, I was flown to LA and I met the late Norman Whitfield who produced and also wrote for The Temptations. The rest of it is history. (Waring) The playscript, however, associates Barbarito to “boleros,” a song genre that originated in Santiago de Cuba around 1885 (Díaz Ayala, The Roots 24–​25). Composed originally in 4/​4 time and characterized by its love lyrics in which the separation motif is central, it has become the quintessential love song genre in Cuba and in Latin America and the Caribbean. Given Barbarito’s construction as a version of the quintessential “cubanazo,” it is apt that the bolero, “a

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  171 sociomusical practice closely linked to patriarchy and to its male-​gendered voices and lyrics” (Aparicio 128), is his song genre. The staging, however, in its inclusion of a 1970s soul music classic, maintained the “bolero” ’s separation motif but placed the sonic register squarely within a Black diasporic aesthetics tradition as opposed to a Cuban/​Latin American tradition. The play’s performance chose to contribute to the spatialization of diasporic Blackness and it attuned the audience to listen to “the contradictions, possibilities, and histories of blackness” (McKittrick 139). Static, the electric charge that remains stationary, underscores the nature of Barbarito and always accompanies him during the staged performance. He is that dead spirit who refuses to leave the earth; he is heard but not seen and is in constant search for the opposite energy. Barbarito himself later describes it in the following manner: “Static. Stuttering memory . . . When two parts of the same thing move away from each other, they leave static, protesting” (39), a protest that was underscored by both the music and the lighting. I read Barbarito the spirit/​ghost, his embodiment on stage, and haunting in this play in two ways: first as an actuality, a spirit connected to African based Caribbean religious beliefs where the dead are able to communicate with the living, and second, as a conceptual metaphor that is “capable of bringing to light and opening up to analysis hidden, disavowed, and neglected aspects of the social and cultural realm, past and present” (Blanco and Peeren 21). But I argue for the need to read haunting and spectralities in this play through an intersectional theorization that puts into dialogue spectrality studies, critical race theory, and queer theories. Jeffrey Weinstock reminds us that ghosts are unstable interstitial figures that problematize dichotomous thinking . . . As an entity out of place in time, as something from the past that emerges into the present, the phantom calls into question the linearity of history . . . the ghost suggests the complex relationship between the constitution of individual subjectivity and the larger social collective. (62) These ghosts do not refer only to the dead. As Avery Gordon has argued, they are also “a social figure, and investigating them leads us to that dense place where history and subjectivity become social life” (4). For her, and for me, haunting as a methodology, “describes the process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography” (19). Most importantly, haunting, like theater, allows us to “imagine otherwise,” a phrase that is repeated throughout Gordon’s book. This is possible because, as Jenny Sharpe has argued, “the crevices of power” (xxi) that were part of the enslavement of Black people, offer a space from which to recast the traumatic effects of slavery and everyday racism. In Maleta Mulata, the playscript and its on-​stage performance, the embodied ghost of Barbarito allows the reader/viewer to glimpse a constructed deracialized

172  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” past that is absent but made present in the performance, always intertwined with the stories and personal experiences of subjects who are attempting to rewrite their own history despite or precisely because they are trapped in the middle of great and small conflicts. Furthermore, Barbarito performs a kind of nostalgia in reverse. Rather than focusing on the nostalgia typical of the Cuban exiles’ cultural production, Maleta through Barbarito stages the nostalgia felt by those who stayed in Cuba. The temporal rupture, together with the ghost embodied on stage, is precisely what gives us access to understand the past (and history) as something that is not static but is multiple and conflictive. Most importantly, like theater, it allows us to “imagine otherwise.” Indeed, Barbarito plays the role of the other half of the Cuban community, viewed from the diasporic point of view. He stands for those who chose to stay behind and who also feel the trauma of separation. But he also functions conceptually as the ghost of everything the Cuban communities in the United States have repressed about their past and their history, including race in its intersection with gender and sexuality, everything they packed into the suitcase and never unpacked, as well as everything they left behind. That is why Barbarito says: “That maleta is a lie. Packing up the past, very carefully, so you can preserve it, and look at it like a thing behind glass, in a future where you don’t exist” (2). Indeed, Barbarito stands in for Cuba’s racialized past, for the Blackness that the Cuban exile community continues to forget. The embodiment of Barbarito problematizes binaries of body/​spirit, life/​death, Black/​ white, presence/​absence, here/​there. His presence/​absence troubles the norms and attunes the spectator/​reader to revise given constructions of Cuban history and to imagine a different future. On stage, “the sense of Barbarito’s separateness, of him as memory, as La Habana, as the return of the racially/​sexually repressed” (Bracho) was achieved by lighting, music, and isolation, as I have demonstrated. Barbarito forces us to “imagine otherwise,” to feel and see that those stories cannot be erased or remain silenced and that those stories can be retold differently; his performance attunes us to feel what it means to be in-​ between cultures, in-​between times, and in-​between spaces. Recent contributions in queer studies have theorized how the ghost is inherently a queer form.They argue that the ghost in its being outside the normative coordinates of space and time represents a disturbance to normative temporality. The deployment of the ghost as a figure is literally as a transfiguration of the queer body into a shadowy presence-​which-​is-​an-​absence in the service of a protest against (imported) heterosexist premises. José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, for example, argued that the double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for a queer criticism that attempts to understand communal mourning, group psychologies, and the need for a politics that carries our dead into a battle for the present and future. (46)

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  173 It is precisely this double ontology that Maleta Mulata so poetically performs. As we saw in Papo’s poetic dream sequence, the play also attunes the audience to read between the lines or borders of the “real” and the “dream” world and see and feel the negative effects of repressed homosexuality and homophobia. But it also invites the audience into feeling that sense of community and futurity that allows us to “imagine otherwise.” The action of the prologue, as I discussed above, takes place in La Habana before the Torres’ departure for Miami. It ends with the following didascalia: and the static fades. marina is in bed . . . Through the open window the distant flash of lightning without thunder. As morning light rises, we see a room in a house in Miami. Marina has not slept. The alarm clock switches on, playing the opening strains of Funkytown, distorted. Crossfade to outside the Torres house, and to better reception. (5) barbarito

On stage, the transition from 1960s La Habana to 1980s Miami is suggested through lighting and music. The sonic register of this opening scene helps to make the audience feel and reminisce the not-​so-​distant past. The opening “haunting lyrics” of Scheherazade lead the audience to metaphorically wake up with the alarm clock distorted sounds of “Funkytown,” transporting them to a different time and place. Written by musician, composer, and record producer Steven Greenberg and sung by Cynthia Johnson, whose vocal and saxophone skills had helped her win the 1976 Miss Black Minnesota USA pageant, the song entered the US Billboard Hot 100 on March 29, 1980, and was the number one song in the US, from May 31 to June 21, 1980, at the height of the Mariel boatlift. Although the songwriter has said that the Funkytown of the song referenced what New York City meant to him as a bored resident of Minnesota (Swensson), Funkytown stood for that utopic place better than the one in which one lived and also for that other space of the dancefloor in which so many were able to forge alternative communities away from familial pressures. Adam Feldman has said that “Funkytown” expresses a simple, repetitive yearning for the pulse of a bigger city, goosed by a killer ten-​note synth riff. “Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me,” sings Cynthia Johnson in a robotic, vocoderized voice (a precursor to the Auto-​Tune sound) before busting out an unmodified, soulful wail, pleading for a trip to the party destination of her dreams. Released in 1980, “Funkytown” came late to the disco party, but gave it a jolt of electricity. (Feldman) Bringing back the sounds of the 1980s in 1998, San Francisco must have given the audience a jolt of electricity that also activated their memories of what the 1980s were in terms of music and what the 1980s had come to represent. But it

174  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” must have also made them think about how that decade ended, remember and feel once again the effects of the AIDS epidemic and the multiple artistic and political responses it incited in San Francisco and other communities. The prologue, then, sets the stage for that in-​between situation of these characters: A dismembered community, split into two halves, with a common suitcase in the middle which both separates and unites the two. The maleta is full of memories, full of phantasmatic sounds and memories of loss and passion, of love and hate, of rejection and desire for its other half.This maleta is “mulata” not only because it refers literally to racial mixing. Metaphorically, what comes out of the suitcase of memory and history can no longer be seen in binaristic terms of either Black or white, poor or middle class, there or here, English or Spanish, straight or gay. Memory, like static, is something that hounds both those who stayed on the island and those who left. Each character relates to it in a different fashion. On one side of the suitcase, we have Papo and his mother who respond to the past via different escape mechanisms. Papo, as we have seen, opts for constant movement and speed: “Up I-​95 and down US-​1, late at night ‘cause I hate traffic, the radio boomin’ thump, thump, thump . . . like so many memories from a time I never knew” (82). Olga, the mother, is the backbone of a family that, according to her, “is sinking into molasses, mugre” (47). The very first act has Papo playing on the radio Exposé’s “Point of No Return,” with Olga and Cari asking him to turn that music down. Written in 1984 by Lewis Martineé, a Miami disc jockey and producer, with his Pantera Productions, it featured Alejandra Lorenzo (“Alé”) as lead vocalist alongside Sandra Casañas (“Sandeé”) and Laurie Miller (Burn). The single quickly became a number one hit. It helped to introduce Freestyle and to consolidate what was known as the Miami sound.This song, like “Funkytown” discussed above, diegetically frames the play as it supports the fictional universe and sets the historical time of the story; sonically, it helps situate the audience in the 1980s. However, it is also used to suggest indirectly that “mugre” or dirt with which Olga associates part of her family. As Cari says, playing the radio full blast is “chusma” and, specifically, “That music is for oyes” (20). “Oyes” is used pejoratively to indicate those who are not well behaved or follow the norms, in this case, the musical norms of the older members of the community for whom the Black/​soul/​disco music also signals “chusma.” In this way, the play’s unique sonic landscape also served to mark a generational split which allowed the younger characters to counter-​ identify with the older generation’s sense of Cubanness. It is no wonder, then, that Olga literally has a bad back and does not want to tell anyone. Her failed attempts to maintain the family where she thinks it should be, to discipline its members (in the Foucauldian sense) into the gender, class, and racial codes she brought with her from Cuba—​codes that they play clearly suggest are as inoperable there as they are here—​result in her own paralysis: “You do what you have to. Immigrate. Learn a new language. Aguanta. And if your back hurts, you keep going. You do what you have to. Keep pounding” (63). Her way of dealing with memory and with the past is

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  175 ignoring it or erasing it: “If this is about the ones who stayed, I don’t want to hear it” (27). “It’s over. Let’s leave this in the past” (31). On the other side of the suitcase, we have Marina and Cari. Marina is Olga’s sister and Barbarito’s lover. In the earlier version of the play, Barbarito and Marina were named Víctor and Barbarita, respectively. The cast of characters stated that “in name and biography she evokes Changó/​Santa Bárbara, Santeria [sic] god of war and thunder” (“How to”). The 1998 version and the one that was used for the staging, however, already had Barbarito and Marina as characters. The title of scene 4 discussed above, “In which Juanqui discusses place and in which we learn why Changó was a Mujeriego,” alludes to the subtle santería references in the play. Obviously, the staged performance did not include the titles of the various scenes. Other than the title of Scene 4, the santería references in the 1998 and the staged version are more evocative, suggestive, and metaphorical than literal.55 Barbarito is the one who may be associated with Changó because of his connection throughout the play to lightning and thunder. Changó is one of the main Orishas in the Afro-​Caribbean religion of santería. He embodies virility and governs thunder, lightning, fire, and the religious drums and dance. The Catholic Saint Barbara is often associated with Changó. In the Catholic tradition, Marina, as we will see, is the one who in name—​Marina Delfín—​and biography loosely evokes Yemayá, the Orisha of the oceans.56 In the first scene, “Radio Waves,” Papo tells Juanqui the story he has heard many times of how his dad heroically had saved Marina from the riptides in Cuba. Papo’s story is interweaved with Juanqui’s Mariel story of how the boat motor quit the second day of the voyage. Marina swam against the current and almost died while Juanqui and his group let themselves be guided by the currents. The undercurrent here is that one should never fight or go against Yemayá. In act 2, Scene 7, “Two Duets. But Not With Each Other,” “Marina enters smoking a cigarette dressed in blue and white, the colors of Yemayá” (86) and explains to Papo that there were no heroes in that story; Gustavo never saved her. She was able to save herself when she remembered to swim parallel to shore, never against a riptide. But the riptide functions as a metaphor for those societal elements that push both Papo and Marina against their own sexual desires. At Papo’s wedding, Marina encourages him to try something different: “You are being dragged out by a riptide Papo. Just like I was. And just like I did you have picked the wrong spot to try and get back to shore. Pick another spot, try another way” (88). In her case, she was practically forced to leave Cuba with her family and abandon Barbarito, whom she met the day of the swimming accident: I reached the shore, seaweed around my ankles like the sea had just let go of me . . . and as I pant and look up I see Olga run past me shouting for Gustavo to come back in and past that I see Barbarito, sitting open legged with a devil’s grin on his burnt brown face, and I staggered up to him, towards the island of my own rebellion. (89)

176  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Marina is aware of the situation in which she finds herself. It is not until she finds out that Barbarito is dead that she really can cut loose both of her idealized memories of the past and of her present constraints, namely, her suffocating and unfulfilling marriage. The ocean current, like the earlier image of static, is also associated with memory. As Marina poetically explains, A current is a motion under the sea full of other people’s memories, pushing forward. I found out later that the gulf stream off that beach starts halfway around the world. It’s just like history, Papo, it isn’t about to slow down for anyone. (89) As a matter of fact, Marina is aware that she needs to deal with that past; she needs to really unpack the suitcase and assume that past: “[the] past that followed us, like a shadow, right into this house. Everywhere we arrive, we bring all ourselves with us” (71). Cari, finally, is a teenager dealing with issues typical of her age: her first menstruation, hairy legs, high heels, makeup, and guys. Her process of assuming “femaleness” is presented in the play as painful, and she protests at every single step. Although she is interested in guys, she seems to be aware of the trap that both her aunt and her mother fell into. As a matter of fact, the end of the play offers very different alternatives and futures for both Cari and Juanqui, the Cubanaso: CAR I : 

Juan Carlos, every time I look up I see you staring at me. I can look away, si te gusta mejor. CAR I :  No, I like it. JUANQU I :  Porque, . . . I wasn’t sure. I was thinking that maybe one day if you want to see if you could like me the way that I like you we could date y go out . . . And when I save enough plata I want to open my own restaurant and then a house, not in la sagüecera, in Hialeah, the houses are bigger there, . . . and almost every house has a floridarún, so the woman I marry . . . CAR I : Juanqui? JUANQU I :  ¿Sí? CAR I :  I don’t want to get married. JUANQU I : Oh.  [juanqui steps back and lowers his head. cari steps forward, lifts his head up and kisses him deeply.] (98) JUANQU I : 

This “cubanaso” has abandoned the “grab somebody” attitude of the “cubanazo” and is even willing to look away. Cari might have “rastros de Jabao,” but she does not have any trace of the Jabá, Carlos Felipe’s character, or if what that character stands for:

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  177 “La Jabá, one of the most authentic, grandiose and pathetic character of all of Cuban theater history, sometimes presents echoes of the classical nursemaid since she adds to her love for the macho Yarini the enormous tenderness of a woman who, beyond the threshold of maturity, confuses her life and her concerns with those of the person whom she loves and serves. (Escarpanter 49)57 Cari openly rejects the institution of marriage and the middle-​ class life associated with it. It has not worked for her mother, and it has not worked for her aunt. Furthermore, she is in control of her desire and her body as signaled not so much by the kiss at the final scene but by the ways in which she is able to redirect Juanqui’s gaze, and the audience’s expectations.

Conclusion The ghosts that Cortiñas’ play so poetically brings to life, the racialized pasts that Martín presents, and the characters that they have created force us to reconsider this “contrapunteo mulato” between past and present, between United States and Cuba, and between African Americans and Latines as they unpack race, loss, and desire. Martín’s and Cortiñas’ different engagement with Blackness and racism in Cuban culture intersectionally with gender and homosexuality was a pioneering gesture; and the spaces in which these gestures were first performed,Teatro Duo Theater in New York City and Campo Santo in San Francisco, are important for this argument. Teatro Duo Theater’s audience tended to be primarily white Anglos and Latines, whereas, Campo Santo’s audience was as multiethnic and multiracial as Maleta Mulata’s cast. But they both fostered audiences that could be attuned to these gestures. Their performance of Blackness and racism in Cuban culture antedated academic scholarship on the subject and presented Afro-​Latines on stage years before scholarship recognized the existence of Afro-​ Latines. Needless to say, Blackness and Brownness are lived very differently, as are Black and Brown gender and sexual differences. I am not suggesting that these two plays are equating or flattening those experiences. I argue that in their racialization of US Cubans, their critique of gender and sexuality, and their unique soundscapes they exposed differences and many points of commonality with other Latines in the United States. Their cultural specificity makes us think about the affective states of Black gay cultural activism and the points of commonalities and differences with Brown gay cultural activism. Furthermore, although the poetic language of Maleta Mulata is very different from the language used in Rita and Bessie, there is also something “Brown” in Cortiñas’ use of language. In the specific cases of Papo’s dream sequence, of Juanqui’s use of Spanglish, and of Marina’s dialogues with Barbarito, language gives us a sense of the ways in which these characters seem to be “lost in brownness, to feel isolated and not in sync with the brownness of a vaster commons. It is not a story of being with but, instead, a story of being without” (The Sense 127). In

178  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” other words, Martín’s and Cortiñas’ explorations of Blackness led them and their audiences to the Brown affect theorized by Muñoz. These two playwrights continued to write plays that did not have Cuban characters or subject matter. But their counternarrative to the repertoire of Cuban-American nostalgia, the beauty of language, the different sonic registers, and the spectacular nature of Rita and Bessie’s and Maleta Mulata’s performances attuned their audiences to that feeling of being-​in-​common.Their contrapuntal articulation of race, sexuality, memory, and desire gives us a sense of futurity, in that they allow us to imagine alternate relationships to memory and loss, and to envision very different Cuban and US futures.

Notes 1 “Oh Mah Ines! /​Oh Mah Ines! /​All of us Blacks /​drink coffee.” This reading of Rita and Bessie is based on a shortened and less developed version I published as “New York 1986: The Blues Meet El Manisero” (see Manzor-​Coats). 2 I use “mulata” with the Spanish spelling to refer to its use in Spanish. For more information on the performances discussed in this chapter, consult the Cuban Theater Digital Archive (http://​cuban​thea​ter.org). Additional information on this performance can be found in Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, Box 1, Folders 8 and 9. 3 In narrative, Piri Thomas’ memoir, Down These Mean Streets (1967), is perhaps one of the earliest texts that discusses Afro-​Latino identity. As Milián has argued, Thomas, “in an abbreviated but far-​reaching way, [shows] how the disparate ethnoracial categories in his Puerto Rican and Cuban household—​that is, black (‘negrito’), dark brown, almost black (‘moreno’), Negro (‘moyeto’), and dark-​skinned (‘tregeño,’ and ‘tregeña’)—​speak to . . . disparaging blackness, ‘lo negro’ ” (22). Black Cuban Evelio Grillo’s 2000 memoir is also important to understand the clash between Cubanness and African Americanness mid-​20th century Tampa. 4 My use of African-​influenced coincides with Robin Moore’s usage: “I refer to modalities unique to Cuba that are heavily influenced by African aesthetics but also by the expression of Spain and other sources” (Nationalizing 11). 5 Scholars tend to overlook Ortiz’s work in the 1930s. George Yudice (2001) is one of the few to have recognized Ortiz’s various acts and writings during this decade, that is, between his Los negros brujos (1906) and Contrapunteo cubano (1945). 6 By 1910, Ortiz was already engaged in a sociological approach to race which replaced common assumptions about biological factors as the basis of social progress with cultural factors. Also see Coronil. 7 See Gilroy “There Ain’t,” Hall, Omi and Winant. 8 For a historical delineation of the term, see Martínez-​Echazábal. 9 For an analysis of new class formation in Cuba, see Le Riverend. 10 For an analysis of the genealogy and differences between criollo, creole, and créolité, see Mazzoti, Murdoch. 11 See Casal “Revolution,” Ferrer, Helg. 12 For an analysis of racial democracy and the various histories of race in Latin America, see de la Fuente and Reed Andrews. For a critique of mestizaje as a harmonious process of miscegenation, see Torres-​Saillant, “Racism.” 13 In the Dominican Republic, it is the narrative of “mulataje” that prevails. Although “mestizaje” and “mulataje” are sometimes used interchangeably, for Caribbean

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  179 decolonial scholars like Yolanda Martínez-​ San Miguel “mulataje” refers to the opposite imaginary that defines the Caribbean primarily as a mulatto society produced as a result of the coerced migration of African slaves to the zone since the 16th century. The term was coined by Mistral in 1932 when she visited Brazil (Fiol-​Matta 2002) and was revitalized by Buscaglia-​Salgado (“Undoing” 822). See Buscaglia-​Salgado, “Undoing” and Race, Kathleen López. 14 Alejandro de la Fuente corroborates Casal’s analysis of racism in Cuba:“it takes more than structural change to build a racial democracy . . . Although the government’s educational and cultural programs were explicitly antiracist, the official silence on race allowed the survival and reproduction of racial ideologies that found a fertile breeding ground on in the remaining private spaces” (19). For an analysis of racism in revolutionary Cuba, see Casamayor Cisneros 2002 and 2018, and Zurbano Torres 2013 and 2015. For an analysis of Lourdes Casal’s groundbreaking work on race in Cuba, see Leving Jacobson, Lomas, and I. López. 15 LatCrit theory has been defined as “the emerging field of legal scholarship that examines critically the social and legal positioning of Latinas/​os, especially Latinas/​os in the United States, to help rectify the shortcomings of existing social and legal conditions” (Valdés 1089). For other LatCrit studies, see the following symposia publications:“Representing,” “LatCrit Theory: Latinas/​os,” and “LatCrit Theory: Naming.” 16 García-​Peña underscores that “[f]‌ or Latinxs, particularly Afro-​ Latinxs, speaking Spanish has, at times, allowed them access and privilege (helping Black Latinxs in the South to escape Jim Crow, for example), and at other times it has excluded them from larger conversations, actions, and even social benefits typically awarded to racialized minorities (scholarships, social services, a political space within the community, etc.)” (208). 17 Note that many “Hispanics” such as myself do not even have Spanish surnames. If one looks at the list of contributors of Michigan Quarterly Review’s first special issue titled “Bridges to Cuba,” 7 out of 29 Cuban or US Cuban contributors have names such as Behar, Fowler, Kozer, Lowinger, Risech, Shapiro, and West. See Trucios-​ Haynes for an analysis on how the US census has used the categories of race and ethnicity in a way that renders invisible Latines and other people of color who fall outside of the Black-​white paradigm. She demonstrates how that invisibility or indeterminate racial category leaves open social and legal spaces that allow for the construction of racial fears. 18 See Alyssa García for an analysis of how Afro-​Cubans navigate identity in the United States. 19 See Torres-​Saillant, “Inventing.” 20 See Jiménez Román, and Flores. 21 See Castillo, García et al., and Kaur, among many. 22 Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas read this chapter in June 2021. He shared with me that, as a matter of fact, Muñoz had a rough draft of a chapter on Cortiñas’ work which he left out of the essays that appear in The Sense of Brown.The chapter was found in his computer by Alexandra Vazquez (Cortiñas, “Email”). 23 “Me quedé horrorizado al saber que en el año 1900, cuando Rita nació, salieron a linchar negros. Entre ellos actores que estaban trabajando y tuvieron que huir de los teatros en que estaban actuando. Es allí donde empecé a averiguar si Rita, habiendo sido tan blanca como era, habría tenido encontronazos con el racismo.” 24 For information on the history of Duo Theater, see Pottlitzer and Manzor “Archiving.”

180  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” 25 Information about INTAR’s Hispanic American Music Theater Lab is taken from the Hispanic American Music Theater Lab Folders within INTAR Theater Papers. 26 Fight!, his first play with music, only had a work-​in-​progress production. 27 See Fajardo for Rita’s Blackface characterization here and throughout her theatrical and filmic career. For an excellent study of Blackface in Cuban teatro bufo, see Lane. 28 “En el sentido simbólico y real, la Rita mulata blanconaza es un paso intermedio entre el Lecuona blanco y el Bola de Nieve negro.” 29 As Kutzinski has demonstrated, “there is no place for the mulata in the culture and the society that so consistently represents itself through her. The iconic mulata, then, is a symbolic container for all the tricky questions about how race, gender, and sexuality inflect the power relations that obtain in colonial and postcolonial Cuba” (7). 30 As Valerie Smith has argued, the discourse on passing “is generally motivated by class considerations (people pass primarily in order to partake of the wider opportunities available to those in power) and constructed in racial terms (people describe the passing person as wanting to be white, not wanting to be upper middle class). Its consequences are distributed differentially on the basis of gender (women in narrative are more likely to be punished for passing than are men)” (43). 31 I thank Patricia Saunders for pointing the marked regionalism in Bessie’s language as well as the importance of commodification of Black music discussed later on in this chapter. 32 See Volosinov. For a discussion of language and Black feminist criticism see, among others, Carby, Christian, and Smith. 33 Bessie’s recuperation of “nigguh” might be informed by Martín’s experiences of the backlash against the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act in the formation of groups such as S.P.O.N.G.E. (“Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything”). See Yudice 2021. 34 I thank Nadia Ellis for bringing to my attention Ové’s documentary. 35 This scene is based on an anecdote about Rita’s life which relates that the first time a white man touched her on stage, it caused quite a commotion on theater goers. Martín Jr. explains that “es allí donde pensé con qué figura podría contraponerla para poder ahondar, así, en la hipocresía que existe en el racismo” (“that’s when I thought I could juxtapose her with Bessie in order to delve deeply into racism’s hypocrisy,” quoted by Minero 1). 36 “Era una época de mucha tensión en el país, fue la primera vez que vi por televisión las marchas de Martin Luther King. . . Cuando entré en la universidad, había muchas protestas por la guerra de Vietnam y nos cancelaban las clases para ir a las huelgas en Washington Square Park. Mis amigos eran puertorriqueños y ellos me decían lo que yo tenía que gritar en inglés en esas manifestaciones. Ellos me explicaban lo que estaba pasando.” 37 Gilmore, in her analysis of Rita and Bessie, analyzes the use of music in this play in relation to global capitalism and suggests that, in the end, “greater profits can be made by marketing music globally . . . As a result, the American queen of the Blues and the exotic Cuban chanteuse share an identical condition: hopeless unemployment” (8). 38 “Chusma” in Cuban Spanish connotes more than riffraff. It is commonly used to refer to someone considered to have no class as demonstrated by the body language, revealing clothing and gaudy accessories they use. In the United States, it has racial, class, and ethnic connotations often associated to low class Latines who defy white,

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  181 bourgeois norms of comportment. For an analysis of “chusma” in relation to Latina performance, see ­chapter 8 of Muñoz’s Disidentifications. 39 See Dávila for an analysis of the exotification and invisibility of Latines in the marketplace. 40 For a history of the various publications of “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child,” see Miyakawa. 41 Angela Y. Davis, in her reading of the blues, also suggests the importance of naming and community: “Through the blues, menacing problems are ferried out of the context of the isolated individual experience and restructured as problems shared by the community. As shared problems, they are less threatening and potentially can be challenged within a socio-​political context” (254). 42 For its development history, consult the various pages of Maleta Mulata in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. 43 See Marrero for an analysis of the early years of the Hispanic Playwrights Project. 44 An earlier version of the play was titled “How to Make Love to a Mulato” (Cortiñas). 45 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Maleta Mulata come from this unpublished version. 46 Bracho was Proyecto’s health education coordinator. Cortiñas taught various writing classes, including “Bemba Bilingüe: Double Tonguing” and led the discussion of a panel on “Latinos, The State, and the State of AID$.” Both took classes in Proyecto’s Colegio ContraSida which incorporated “various interpenetrating levels of teaching and learning. The distinctions between students, clients, volunteers, and staff blur as students from one class take on the challenge of teaching another, as a longtime volunteer becomes a paid staff member” (Juana María Rodríguez 60). For an excellent analysis of Proyecto ContraSida, see Chapter One of Juana María Rodríguez’s Queer Latinidad. 47 I thank Ricardo Bracho and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas for corroborating these various overlapping networks. 48 See Manzor “Más allá” and Nuzzo 2013. 49 Heritage speakers, like playwright Cortiñas, tend to spell words the way they hear it, thus they tend to switch “z” for “s” in written Spanish. 50 In the 2012 updated edition of Life on the Hyphen, Pérez Firmat eliminates the “oye, tu, grab someone” syndrome in his description of “cubaneo.” See María del Carmen Martínez for an analysis of the gendered dimensions of Cuban exile-​community nationalism in Pérez Firmat’s work. 51 Cortiñas underscored the entanglements of masculinity and violence. He said that he was interested in working through the entrapments of masculinity connected to some of the male characters’ womanizing attitudes, as well as to the political violence characteristic in Miami during the 1960s through the 1980s which he lived (2021). 52 Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish also presents a “subject in process” where Spanglish is the place to be. 53 In the Heights’ challenges with colorism have also been attributed precisely to the West Coast–​East Coast divide and to Hollywood’s continued systemic racism. 54 “Wishing on a Star” was included in the playscript on a different scene. In the play, Cari was listening to it on the radio and singing along as she is preparing to go to a dance (Cortiñas 1998, 30–​1). 55 Act 2 of the 1997 version had a ninth scene titled “Rumba” in which the references to santería were more literal.The scene was written as Víctor playing the Babalawao

182  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” and Barbara as the querent. There are sound of sea shells, batá drums, a chant in Lucumí, and a drawing of the Lucumí four directions (91–​4). 56 For more information, see Bolívar Aróstegui, Cros-​Sandoval 2006, and Murphy. 57 “La Jabá, uno de los personajes más auténticos, grandiosos y patéticos de toda la historia del teatro cubano, a veces presenta ecos de las nodrizas clásicas, pues une a su resignado amor por el Yarini-​macho, la enorme ternura de la mujer, que traspasados los umbrales de la madurez, confunde su vida y sus inquietudes con las de la persona a quien ama y sirve.”

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186  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” López, Kathleen. “The Asian Presence in Nations: Mestizo A Response.” Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited by Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 125–​32. Manzanares v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 593 F.2d 968 (10th Cir. 1979), pp. 1–​4. Manzor, Lillian. “Archiving US-​Cuban Performances.” Caribe, vol. 13, no. 2, 2011, pp. 71–​94. ––​–​. “Más allá del guión: El teatro usano-​cubano.” Teatro cubano actual: Dramaturgia escrita en Estados Unidos, edited by Lillian Manzor and Alberto Sarraín, Ediciones Alarcos, 2005, pp. vii–​xxi. Manzor-​Coats, Lillian. “New York 1986: The Blues Meet El Manisero.” Purdue Romance Languages Annual 1991. vol 3. West Lafayette: Purdue Research Foundation, 1992, 493–​9. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 1, Folders 8 and 9. Marbeth. Photograph of Jannis Warner and Jill Romero in Manuel Martín Jr., Rita and Bessie. University of Miami Libraries, CHC Digital Collections. Marrero, María Teresa. “1989 Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theater: the Issues, the Plays, the Contest.” Gestos,Teoría y Práctica del Teatro Hispánico, vol. 5, no.9, Apr 1990, pp. 147–​53. Martín Jr., Manuel. “Rita and Bessie.” 1992. Theatrical Script. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 2, Folder 8. ––​–​. “Rita and Bessie.” Presencia negra: Teatro cubano de la diáspora, edited by Armando González-​Pérez, Betania, 1999, pp. 249–​76. Martínez-​Echazábal, Lourdes. “Mestizaje and the Discourse of National/​ Cultural Identity in Latin America, 1845-​1959.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 21–​42. Martínez-​San Miguel,Yolanda. “Female Sexiles? Toward an Archeology of Displacement of Sexual Minorities in the Caribbean.” Signs, vol. 36, no. 4, Summer 2011, pp. 813–​36. ––​–​. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-​ Colonial Migrations in a Pan-​ Caribbean Context. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Mason, Susan V. “On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 43, no. 1, fall 2009, pp. 159–​165. Mazzotti, José Antonio. “Criollismo, Creole, and Créolité.” Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited by Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 87–​100. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. U of Minnesotta P, 2006. Milián, Claudia. Latining America: Black-​Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/​a Studies, U of Georgia P, 2013. Minero, Alberto. “Un musical sobre la vida de Rita Montaner.” El Diario/​La Prensa, 3 July 1988, p. 35. Mirabal, Nancy R.“Scripting Race, Finding Place: African Americans, Afro-​Cubans, and the Diasporic Imaginary in the United States.” Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos​, edited by Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 189–​207. Miyakawa, Felicia M. “ ‘A Long Ways from Home?’ Hampton Institute and the Early History of ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.’ ” Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–​49.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  187 Montaner, Rita. “Ay Mama Inés.” IMC Music, 2000. CD. Lyrics by Aurelio Riancho and Antonio Castells, Music by Eliseo Grenet and Ernesto Lecuona. Moore, Robin. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-​1940. U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. ––​–​. “Representations of Afrocuban Expressive Culture in the Writings of Fernando Ortiz.” Latin American Music Review /​Revista de Música Latinoamericana, vol. 15, no. 1, spring-​summer 1994, pp. 32–​54. Moran, Rachel, “Neither Black nor White.” Harvard Latino Law Review, 1997, vol. 2, 61–​100. Morejón, Nancy. “Race and Nation.” Afrocuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, edited by Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, Ocean Press, 1993, pp. 227–​37. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York UP, 2009. ––​–​. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota P, 1999. ––​–​. The Sense of Brown, edited by Joshua Chambers-​Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, Duke UP, 2020. Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Creole, Criollismo, and Créolité.” Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited by Yolanda Martínez-​San Miguel et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 101–​8. Murphy, Joseph A. Santeria: African Spirits in America. Beacon Press, 1993. Nance, Bradley W. “Confidential-​ Staff Only. First Draft.” INTAR Theatre Papers, INTAR’s Hispanic American Music Theater Lab, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Box 73, Folder 8. Nunes-​Ueno, Paulo. E-​mail to the author. 20 May 2021. Nuzzo, Luciano. “Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster.” International Journal for the Semiotocs of Law, vol. 26, no. 1, 2013, pp. 55–​72. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Routledge, 1986. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Translated by Harriet de Onís, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. ––​–​. El engaño de las razas. Páginas, 1945. ––​–​. La antigua fiesta afrocubana del “Día de Reyes.” Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, División de Publicaciones, 1960. ––​–​. Nuevo catauro de cubanismos. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985. Osuji, Simon. “Tania León: ‘My Music Has An Accent.’ ” LBNN, 2 Sep 2021. https://​ limit​less​beli​efsn​ews.com/​tania-​leon-​my-​music-​has-​an-​acc​ent-​backst​ory/​ Ové, Horace et al. Pressure;Baldwin’s Nigger. London: BFI, 2005. Perea, Juan F. “The Black/​White Binary Paradigm of Race: The ‘Normal Science’ of American Racial Thought.” California Law Review, vol. 85, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1213–​58, doi:10.2307/​3481059. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. “A Willingness of the Heart: Cubanidad, Cubaneo, Cubanía.” Cuban Studies Association Occasional Paper Series, 20 Jan. 1999. ––​–​. Life on the Hyphen:The Cuban-​American Way. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Photograph of Manuel Martín Jr. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Digital Collections. Photograph of Tito Puente and María Irene Fornés. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Digital Collections. Portes, Lisa. “Towards a Hub for Latina/​o Theater Artists.” HowlRound, 1 Nov. 2013, howlround.com/​towards-​hub-​latinao-​theater-​artists.

188  Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!” Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theater in the United States and Puerto Rico. Ford Foundation, 1988. Poster for Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. “Stride, by Tania León.” The Pulitzer Prizes. 2021. www.pulit​zer.org/​winn​ers/​tania-​leon Ramírez, Lisa. Personal conversation with author, 20 Jun. 2021. “Representing Latina/​o Communities: Critical Race Theory and Practice.” La Raza Law Journal, 1996. Rita and Bessie production photographs. New York, 1986. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Digital Collections. Rita and Bessie video recording.Theater Video Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5264, CHC5264 84 pt1_​0.mpg. Rita Montaner. Teatro Rita Montaner. 1980. Pamphlet. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 4. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org/​digita​lobj​ect/​17975 Rita Montaner in Memoriam. 1971. Pamphlet. Manuel Martín Jr. Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5064, Box 4. http://​cuba​ntha​ter. org/​digita​lobj​ect/​17976 “Rita Montaner. Nuestra embajadora folklórica en París.” Bohemia, 13 Jan 1929, pp. 37–​8, 56. Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York UP, 2003. Rodríguez Sosa, Fernando. “Siempre Rita.” Revolución y Cultura, Aug 1980, pp. 11–​18. Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America.Verso, 1991. “Shades of Belonging.” Pew Research Center. 6 Dec 2004. www.pewr​esea​rch.org/​hispa​ nic/​2004/​12/​06/​sha​des-​of-​belong​ing/​ Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives. U of Minnesota P, 2003. Skidmore, Thomas. “Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-​1940.” The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-​1940, edited by Richard Graham, U of Texas P, 1990. Smith,Valerie. “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing.” Diacritics, vol. 24, no. 2/​3, 1994, pp. 43–​57. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, 1926, pp. 30–​33. The Books of American Negro Spirituals, edited by James W. Johnson,Viking Press, 1940. Spillers, Hortense.“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–​81. Svich, Caridad et al. “Fornés and the Magic in the Room.” American Theatre, 7 Nov 2018. www.amer​ican​thea​tre.org/​2018/​11/​07/​for​nes-​and-​the-​magic-​in-​the-​room/​ ––​–​. “The Legacy of Maria Irene Fornés: A Collection of Impressions and Exercises.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 31, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 1–​32. Swensson, Andrea. “Steven Greenberg Talks About Creating Lipps, Inc. and Writing ‘Funkytown.’ ” The current, 27 Feb. 2014, blog.thecurrent.org/​ 2014/​ 02/​ steven-​ greenberg-​talks-​about-​creating-​lipps-​inc-​and-​writing-​funkytown/​. Taylor, Julie and George Yudice. “Mestizaje and the Inversion of Social Darwinism in Spanish American Fiction.” Literary Cultures of Latin Ameerica: A Comparative History, edited by Mario J.Valdés and Djelal Kadir, Oxford UP, 2004, pp. 310–319. Theater program for Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Maleta Mulata. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Tres. “¡Ay mama Inés!”  189 Torres-​Saillant, Silvio. “Inventing the Race: Latinos and the Ethnoracial Pentagon.” Latino Studies 1, 2003, pp. 123–​51. ––​–​.“Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar.” Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-​Latinos, edited by Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 281–​304. Trucios-​ Haynes, Enid. “Why ‘Race Matters:’ LatCrit Theory and Latina/​ o Racial Identity.” La Raza Journal, vol 12, 2000-​2001, pp. 1–​42. Valdés, Francisco. “Under Construction: Lat Crit Consciousness, Community, and Theory,” California Law Review, 1997, pp. 1087–​142. Volosinov,V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Seminar P, 1973. Waring, Charles.“A Rose By Any Other Name—​Ex-​Rose Royce Singer Gwen Dickey Talks.” Soul&Jazz&Funk, 30 Jul. 2015, soulandjazzandfunk.com/​interviews/​a-​rose-​ by-​any-​other-​name-​ex-​rose-​royce-​singer-​gwen-​dickey-​talks/​. Weinstock, Jeffrey A. “From Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 61–​8. Yudice, George. “The Color of Ghettoization.” Paper presented at 2° Congresso Brasileiro de Sociologia, Belém do Pará, Brasil, Jul 15 2021. Zurbano Torres, Roberto. “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun.” Translated by Kristina Cordero, The New York Times, 24 Mar 2013. ––​–​.“Racismo vs. socialismo en Cuba: un conflicto fuera de lugar (apuntes sobre/​contra el colonialismo interno).” Meridional, vol. 4, 2015, pp. 11–​40.

4 Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Carmelita Tropicana’s Performative Excess

Introduction In the previous chapter, I discussed theater as a live performance, analyzing the meaning of differently racialized and accented bodies on stage. Here, I focus on how the body is used in Carmelita Tropicana’s feminist and queer performances as both means of and repository for the historical and personal split memory of US Cuban women. I begin with an analysis of the performance persona of Carmelita Tropicana via theories of tropicalization. I then read Memorias de la Revolución /​Memories of the Revolution (1986) focusing on the intersectional use of “choteo” (humor a la cubana), lesbian racialized camp, and gestic signifying. Racialized camp, or “picuencia” (tackiness) in its Cuban version, consists of a scandalous mixture of objects and forms which are utilized as cultural signs; it is synonymous with bad taste—​of course, in relation to Eurocentric aesthetic codes of class, culture, and taste. I analyze how the gestic moments during the performance inscribe lesbian desire in a racialized sexual scene. The play de-​essentializes and racializes the “lesbian spectatorial community” in a culture and scholarly community prior to the advent of queer of color critique. The second half of the chapter focuses on With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit /​ ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? (2004). This one-​woman play rewrites the Spanish folktale of La Cucarachita Martina, a cockroach named Martina that eventually marries the mouse Pérez, anthromorphosizing the Elián González international conflict (1999–​2000), Cuban and Cuban-American politics and divisions. Tropicana performs a whole array of animals, parodies hardline political positions in Cuba and in Miami, highlighting the importance of affective relationships. My reading of this queer political fable and of the queer cabaret Memorias interconnects gender with race, sexuality and national identity, desire, and geopolitics at the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, it situates those performances historically and artistically as precursors of the cross-​ Cuban performances discussed in the last chapter.1 Alina Troyano, who performs as Carmelita Tropicana, left Cuba at a young age in the early 1960s and was raised in New York. Troyano began her professional work in white lesbian and feminist spaces, at the WOW Café (Women’s One World), in New York City’s East Village. WOW began with two theater DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-5

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  191 festivals organized by Pamela Camhe, Jordy Mark, Peggy Shaw, and Louis Weaver in 1980 and 1981.2 WOW’ first lights and dimmer packs were a gift from Medusa’s Revenge, the first lesbian theater in New York City. Founded in 1976 by Cuban exiles Magali Alabau and Ana María Simo, Medusa’s Revenge was “an experimental theatre of women dedicated to the creation of original plays . . . exploring a homo-​esthetic sensibility” (Davy, Lady Dicks 39). It operated as a lesbian-​only space till 1981, when WOW Café opened. Troyano started going to the first festivals at WOW where she was able to socialize with women “in all kinds of clothes and haircuts and colors—​not just your battle-​fatigue serious feminist! It was wonderful” (Román and Tropicana, 84). Troyano has discussed more than once why and how she found in WOW “her tribe”: WOW became a fertile playground. It was a theatre grounded in gender and sexual politics and a meeting place for like-​minded individuals to create work with a social critique. We could not make money at WOW, but the opportunities were great. We were encouraged to do it all: write, direct, design, and act. Our work was irreverent, raunchy, part of the counterculture.We did not focus on coming-​out stories because a lesbian identity was a given. We were then able to tackle other issues such as the impact of gentrification, the state of the economy, or the representation of lesbians in the arts. Our work was too edgy and raw to be “commercial,” but we were professional, and WOW was recognized with a prestigious Obie award. (Hughes et al. 11–​12) Alina Troyano’s first performance at WOW was to play two characters in Holly Hughes’ The Well of Horniness, Al Dente, Chief of Police, and Georgette. Troyano remembers the ease with which she played Al Dente versus the difficulties of playing a “butch girl”: The role of Al Dente became easier to tackle once Jack Smith . . . watched the rehearsal and gave me three magic words: Bark the part. Bark the part, of course. I had imagined Al Dente as a cross between Marlon Brando’s Grandfather and a bulldog. Playing butch hit closer to home. All those voices from my adolescence came back to haunt me: “Don’t laugh that loud.” “Don’t walk that way, pareces una carretonera.” “You look like a truck driver.” I had been sent to charm and etiquette school to cure my gruff demeanor. Now I was being asked to play a butch girl and revel in it.When I stepped on stage, took off my shirt exposing bare arms in a tank T-​shirt, and flexed my muscles, the girls went “Oooh.” I had a revelation: This wasn’t so bad. (I, Carmelita, XIV) Al Dente and Georgette allowed Troyano to perform and to make fun of stereotypes of US white masculinity and embody butch lesbian tropes.

192  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Alina Troyano created Carmelita Tropicana in 1984. This character was born almost by accident (Manzor-​Coats). Troyano was at the WOW Café one night when the M.C. did not show up. Shaw encouraged her to replace the M.C. After some hesitation, Troyano went on stage as Carmelita Tropicana and this performance persona, as she says, has never come off.3 Troyano’s use of the name Tropicana is intimately tied to white representations, cultural stereotypes, and tropicalized constructions of Latinidad, especially within the film and popular culture. Carmelita Tropicana inserts herself in and against an imperialist discourse that began in the 1930s with Hollywood’s productions of Good Neighbor Policy films.4 In performance, we could trace it back to Rita Montaner’s in the “Schubert Follies” where she played the lead in a sketch called “A Night in Spain,” to Broadway’s 1939 musical productions of The Streets of Paris with Carmen Miranda, and to Too Many Girls with Desi Arnaz (see Sandoval and Román). Some characteristics of this construction are familiar: tropical rhythms, exotic clothing, colorful locales, and exuberant body language and gesticulation.5 The intersection of the racial and sexual axes further complicates this construction. For the Latina, this conflation results in an exaggerated and exploitable sexuality configured as the “tropical bombshell” (Tafolla 41) or the “Latin temptress” (López 72).6 Tropicana is the name of a Cuban nightclub famous for its beautiful chorus girls. It opened in 1939 and during the 1950s it was the only Cuban-​owned cabaret casino. Even today, the Tropicana show, whether in Cuba or on world tours, exhibits Cuban musicians and dancers as specimens of a “national” culture commodified for foreign consumption and taste.7 Carmelita Tropicana’s appropriation of the name undoubtedly echoes the native’s performance for a foreign audience. As Xavier Lemoine has studied, the double reference to the performer’s and the nightclub’s name situates us within “a postcolonial exoticism (pre-​Castro Cabaret) at the time of commercial imperialism (global trademark)” (61).8 Tropicana, through her parodic self-​naming, assumed this spectacular identity of the exotic other. In so doing, she acquired both versions of the above construction: the harmless artist/​entertainer and the dangerous other. Her parodic appropriation, as a tactic of intervention, constitutes a repetition with a difference that is never perfect or seamless. For Tropicana, her parodic games and constant movement between self and other, English and Spanish, citizen and foreigner underscore that indeed for bicultural hybrids this seam is proof of the performative nature of that self-​naming and self-​making. The early descriptions of Carmelita Tropicana reflect the discursive construction of the Latina as the entertaining, fun-​loving exotic other.The press referred to her as a cross between Ricky Ricardo and Lucille Ball, probably because of her over-​acted accent and dyed red hair. The Village Voice, for example, in an article on Candela y Azúcar, described Carmelita as “a flame-​haired heroine who dreams of dance” (34). Marilyn Stasio in The New York Post wrote that Carmelita, “the fiery heroine, is played by the tempestuous Tropicana herself.” And Robert Sandla, of Dance Magazine, described Carmelita in the following fashion: “With her fiery temperament and impenetrable accent, Tropicana is

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  193 a cartoon of the hot tamale; she’s so outrageously Latin that she makes Charo look like Estelle Getty” (70). Flame-​haired, fiery, tempestuous, hot tamale: undoubtedly, these are the most predominant stereotypes of the outrageous Latin(a). But there is another agenda driving Tropicana’s performances which the magazine, Más, recognized: Carmelita pretends to play with Latin stereotypes but what she is really doing is playing with your head. She is a cultural terrorist, a Carmen Miranda cloaked in dangerous fruits.9 (Fernández 14, emphasis mine) It is interesting that even the Latin magazine Más used these constructions to refer to what it does not quite understand or does not want to name. Yet, the reader never finds out exactly what Más detects in Carmelita Tropicana that is both terrorizing and dangerous. The comparison to Carmen Miranda is appropriate and Carr also made that connection in the press in English: “one of the club scene’s most thoroughly–​realized personas, sort of a low-​rent Carmen Miranda” (82). Ana López has studied how Carmen Miranda, a construction of Hollywood, functions as a fantastic or uncanny fetish. Everything about her is surreal, off-​center, displaced on to a different regime: from her extravagant hats, midriff-​ baring multi-​colored costumes, and five-​inch platform shoes to her linguistic malapropisms, farcical sexuality, and high-​pitched voice, she is an “other,” everyone’s “other.” (74) Carmelita Tropicana wears and performs Carmen Miranda’s excesses, but with a difference. Whereas Miranda’s “validity as ‘Latin American’ was based on assuming a rhetoric of visual and performative excess—​of costume, sexuality, and musicality” (López 74), Tropicana’s excesses are re-​cast as stereotypes of Latinidad. In Carmen Miranda’s films, the rhetoric of excess “carried over onto the mode of address of the films themselves” (López 74). The mode of address in Tropicana’s performances is altogether different. As a queer self-​ parody, Tropicana’s performances open the space for a different kind of self-​ representation, one that constructs female bodies that resist fetishization while undermining traditional racialized, gender, and sexual representations.

Performance Art: The Body as Text It is not by chance that Carmelita Tropicana, as well as other Latinas, has chosen to work in the “genre” of performance art. Indeed, in the staged space of Latina self-​representation, the work of many Latina performance artists precisely highlights the incongruities between lived social reality and the racialized, sexualized fantasies of the Anglo imaginary.10 In feminist performance art, the

194  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” role of the artist is that of a representor of herself, “her body as text, herself as character or costume, her own movements as symbolic of the gestures and rituals of everyday life” (Goodman 182). It is considered an alternative practice in so far as it resists a representational system in which woman is made a spectacle. As Taylor has remarked, “it rejects the institutionalization of theater and tries to subvert a representational system accused of being an accomplice of a repressive social system” (49). Most critics and theorists of performance art rightfully underscore its foregrounding of the personal as well as of the role of the body as text. It is precisely the possibilities that performance art offers the Latina and other women of color artists to utilize their gendered and racialized body as a metaphor to intervene in the system of representation that makes it an attractive medium to Tropicana.11 When Tropicana began performing at WOW, she was one of four “women of color” at WOW. As she has stated, WOW mirrored the segregated gay community and New York City at large. We had countless discussions about how to bring new women of color into the fold. We had festivals, where groups would come, and we’d hope some would stay and become members, but it never materialized. (Hughes et al. 12–​13) As a woman of color performance artist, she uses her body as a script “to foreground the genderization of culture” (Forte 261) and the entanglements of racialization processes and the engenderment of culture. The Latina performance artist enters the scene of representation not as an otherwise absent or objectified other but as a speaking subject. Since the performance artist functions as a representor of herself, the sexual, racial, and class relations that mark the power structures of social performance and shape Latinas’ roles are going to be re-​scripted in performance art.The Latina artist assumes and attacks these roles in a multilayered fashion; for her, gendered and sexualized roles are inseparable from racial ones. In so doing, her performance underscores “the very process of social theatricality . . . for aims which go beyond purely aesthetic ones” (Taylor 59). Given that the same system of representation that has constructed women as spectacle has constructed people of color as other, in this system the woman of color, specifically, becomes the ultimate spectacle of otherness. How she sees herself and how she will perform herself on stage are intricately connected to that spectacle, to how others see and read her “accents” as a natural sign of otherness. These signs, when read as the grammar of a body, or as an embodied grammar, depict that body as speaking “with an accent.” In Latina performance art, then, the body cannot be, as Phelan has proposed, purely “metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of ‘presence’ ” (150). For women of color, paradoxically, one part of the performer’s “self,” as I have suggested, is an “other” for Anglo-​white spectators.The woman of color performance artist, thus, can never disappear in Phelan’s “plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability” (150)

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  195 because her accented and spectacularized body always already foregrounds embodiment and visibility. The question of reception and community for Latinas in both theater and performance art is a thorny one. While performance art during the 1980s was indeed “marginal” in relation to the theater and art establishments, it was “marginal” within the mainstream and dominant spaces of power. Tropicana performed in spaces in New York City such as Performance Space 122 and the Whitney Museum, in the New Langton Arts Center in San Francisco, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), as well as in many university galleries and performance spaces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe which are part of the global art market and institutions of knowledge production. These comments are not meant to be programmatic. At stake here is not whether we should (if we could) direct Latine artists to perform to an audience pre-​established as “their community,” rather, the question of audience and venue makes visible the fact that this “community” is no longer stable or fixed along clearly definable national, class, or racial lines. Borrowing from Latina, Third World, and Anglo-​European cultural traditions, their works critique concepts of time and space as well as of cultural values held dear to both the Anglo art establishment and to the older Cuban exile community. Most importantly,Tropicana has performed transculturally, and she performs transculturation relying upon strategies of fragmentation and disruption as well as of neo culturation with tools, images, and references collected from those very dislocations and relocations.

“A Fine Samurai Machete”: Tropicana’s Campy “Choteo” and “Picuencia” All critics and spectators of Carmelita’s work underscore that it “is accented by her outrageous, and at times unsettling humor” (Román 83). I was the first to connect Carmelita’s humor to the Cuban tradition of “choteo” (Manzor-​Coats). José Esteban Muñoz later elaborated on her use of “choteo” in Disidentifications, and Carmelita herself has acknowledged the “Cuban choteo tradition—​a kind of vaudeville cabaret style. Someone told me I had the Jewish borscht-​belt humor like that in the old-​time Catskills. We Cubans like to poke fun during tough times. I try to wield my humor like a fine samurai machete” (Morowitz 164). All analyses of “choteo” hark back to Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del choteo,12 and some include cursory reference to Fernando Ortiz’s definition of “choteo” in his Glosario de afronegrismos. Understandably, few critics have engaged with Ortiz’s unpublished work on “choteo.” His notes, however, are available in a published but not easily accessible version in Albur, a magazine published by students of La Habana’s University of the Arts (Instituto Superior de Arte, ISA) in 1992. My reading of “choteo” privileges Ortiz for several reasons: (1) in his analysis, he demonstrates that “The African black man is the father of choteo” (“El negro africano es el padre del choteo,” Albur, 9, note 46); (2) he includes a more complex analysis of how “choteo” works considering affects, politics, and

196  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” ethics; and (3) he also addresses the phenomenon of “picuencia” in relation to “choteo.” Although Ortiz’s notes on “choteo” reflect the language of anthropology during the period in which he wrote them (1937), he starts by underscoring how “choteo” is characteristic of Afro-​descendants throughout the Americas. Ortiz’s historical excavation reveals that Mañach’s attribution of the practice to Cuban criollos (racialized as white in Cuba) was inaccurate and ensued, rather, from the enslaved African populations in Cuba and throughout what he called the Cisatlantic, a term that could be understood as an early version of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. He defines “choteo” in his notes as a complex phenomenon of emotion of gaiety, primitive profanity and gregariousness. Emotionality contributes its invincible drive; gaiety lends its infectious appeal; glibness provides its intelligent expression; primitiveness its ways; and gregariousness its ethics, defense its motive.13 (Albur 3, note 4) He suggests that “choteo” appears in societies where several cultures are in conflict and that the phenomenon manifests itself in laughter, body movements, gestures, and words to resist an order that is imposed and considered abusive. Most importantly, he acknowledges that “ ‘choteo’ must be artistic in its form and ethical in purpose” (“el choteo debe ser artístico en la forma y ético en los fines”, Albur 96, note 293). In sum, Ortiz’s definition of “choteo” involves bursts of laughter, clever use of language, artistic delivery, contagious affectivity, the creation of a sense of community, and self-​defense. These are the qualities consistently and irreverently displayed in Carmelita Tropicana’s performances. The humor in Carmelita’s “choteo” can also be read as intersectional. Alicia Arrizón has argued that performance artists who are intersectional subjects subvert the imposed stereotypes in their performances when they “openly address the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, and disability, among many social categories” (34). Tropicana’s “choteo” as a form of intersectional humor is an empowering act that “mediate[s]‌between a space of identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes” (Muñoz, Disidentifications 135–​6). The humor in her “choteo” works like a “fine samurai machete” that cuts through the binaries of center and periphery. My use of campy as an adjective underscores that in Tropicana’s performances, we cannot pit camp against “choteo” and “picuencia.” As I will demonstrate, Tropicana’s use of “choteo” and “picuencia” is crisscrossed by queer camp and vice versa; we need to read her critical performative interventions in connection with her intersectional use of the two Cuban practices. In so doing, she repurposes both strategies from a Cubana/​Latina/​ lesbian positionality, thus rewriting the discourse of queer white camp as she unveils the heterosexist matrix and masculinist constructs of “choteo” and “picuencia” in Cuban diasporic contexts.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  197

Memorias de la Revolución /​ Memories of the Revolution Carmelita Tropicana’s performance pieces explore questions of self-​identity and biculturalism, specifically of gender, sexuality, and race. She began performing precisely at the time these issues were becoming an integral part of US cultural discussions and at the time that theory, especially feminist theory, was recasting the nature of these debates. I argue that Carmelita Tropicana’s work demonstrates and plays upon the constructed nature of gender and sexuality intersectionally with constructs of race. Her performances rely upon the staging of excess. This excess constructs the Latina body on stage via the redeployment of parodic stereotypes in such a way that it forces the audience to be aware of how it is that one reads a gendered and racialized body as a “natural fact” and not as a culturally constructed sign.14 Tropicana’s performances, then, may be read as underlining the performative nature of hybridity itself. In Tropicana’s Memorias de la Revolución /​ Memories of the Revolution, gender, sexuality, and race are presented outside of an essentialist paradigm, as evidence not of identity, but, rather, as costume, artifice, as a stylized sign of socially determined role. I am especially interested in three aspects of her performances which must be read through an intersectional lens. One is the staging of “racialized camp cross-​dressing” through “picuencia,” for example, by Anglo actors playing Latine characters. The second aspect consists of what her critics have called “gender bending” (Grubb 28) or “gender busting” (Stone), that is, an all-​woman cast who performs Cuban, Latina, and white constructions of masculinities and femininities, butch and femme, for a primarily (white) lesbian spectatorial community. The third one is intersectional humor in its Cuban version of “choteo.”15 Memorias/​Memories, written by Carmelita Tropicana and Uzi Parnes, was first produced at WOW in 1986 and then at Performance Space 122 in 1987.16 Troyano has described the downtown art scene in the 1980s as “the best of times: art was more about process than product, more about esthetic edification than career, more about transgression than main stream assimilation” (I, Carmelita xiii). Both WOW and PS 122 were part of that downtown experimental scene. I will be referencing a 1987 production that was videotaped, a 1994 theatrical script, and the 2000 published version. This “show extravaganza” in three acts is a parody of the famous Tropicana revue in Cuba and of thriller dramas, especially in the subversive dyke noir version staged at WOW in shows such as Holly Hughes’ The Lady Dick in which Tropicana performed Con Carne. Hughes has described how the artists at WOW looked at the movie stereotypes of dykes as ruthless, unruly women with murder in their hearts and we refused to get onboard with any movement that would offer up sanitized versions of ourselves. We were done with being nice girls. We were armed and dangerous and didn’t care who knew it. (Dolen et al. 100)

198  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Tropicana transculturated the dyke noir genre incorporating tropicalized movie and popular culture stereotypes of Latinas. Memorias begins in a 1955 La Habana ripe for a revolution where Carmelita Tropicana is the star of the famous Tropicana nightclub.The space of PS 122 was transformed into a nightclub so that both the stage where the different nightclub acts took place and the tables where the “audience” sat became part of the performance space.Thus, the PS 122 audience of Memorias was transformed into the audience of the Tropicana revue in the first act. The deliberate decision to use the revue format is an important political and representational choice for several reasons. First, if the primary aim of lesbian theater is the representation of lesbian experiences created by lesbians (Goodman 120), this format enables a wider and varied cross-​section of lesbian representation. Second, the revue format demolishes the “fourth wall,” a tactic characteristic of lesbian, minoritarian, and avant-​garde theater at the time.17 Since the whole space becomes the stage, the stage-​audience divide is put into question. Most importantly, within this reconfiguration of performance space as a stage, the audience becomes an accomplice in the performance and plays a significant role, particularly in the construction of a self-​conscious queer female gaze. As we will see, “narratives and acting styles thwarted the tendency to project onto characters and identify with them in heterosexual romantic ways” (Davy, Lady Dicks 137). This spatial transformation into the Tropicana nightclub uses “choteo” to make fun of La Habana’s original Tropicana. The splendor and grandeur of the club were reframed and reduced in the space of both WOW and PS 122. Both spaces in the mid-​1980s were very small, lacked the architectural sophistication

Figure 4.1 Production photograph of Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  199 of Tropicana’s various stages, and used recycled materials for their production. Alisa Solomon remembers WOW’s first storefront as follows: The stage, like the entire space, is barely 10 feet wide. With its floor of octagonal ceramic tiles, patterned along one side, the room seems like it might have been someone’s vestibule or, even earlier, half of a dining room. Now, impossibly narrow and maybe 20 feet long, it hardly contains a dozen or so rows of folding chairs. (79) The stage design and props of Memorias’ rendition of Tropicana are also a “choteo” subversion of the original. The set included fake palm trees and Black tinsel for side curtains. Troyano tells us how they repurposed materials for the performance: “Uzi was imaginative with the flaming red-​orange lamé and neon lime-​green polyester, using both for the curtains and the costumes” (I, Carmelita xix). This reduction of the original Tropicana through “choteo” is also a way for Troyano to question and make fun of those “bedtime stories of the greatest nightclub and memories of my relatives, exiles who romantically yearned for a prerevolutionary Cuba” (xix). Rather than resorting to Cuban exiles’ nostalgic remembrance of the club, Memoria’s club makes fun of the romantic version of 1950s Cuba which, as Troyano has said, We all know wasn’t so beautiful. And I . . . don’t have to be romantic with it . . . So I can take liberties with it and I can break it every which way . . . we take it to town. That way we give it more of a clear vision perhaps, because we put the good and the bad taste in, and sometimes bad taste is actually good. (López and Balderston) In Memorias, Carmelita, in addition to playing a famous nightclub performer, also plays a revolutionary. She is working underground with her brother Machito (Maureen Angelos) and Marimacha (Peggy Healy). They conspire to kill Capitán Maldito, sadistic chief of police. Machito, who despite his name, “Little Macho,” thinks of himself as the most macho of machos, flirts with two “Americanas” instead of following the plot. Carmelita makes an arm’s deal with Lota Hari (Dianne Jeep Ries), the grand-​daughter of Mata Hari. Capitán Maldito finds them, and they flee to the United States in a rowboat. Act 2 takes place in the rowboat while Carmelita, Lota, and Marimacha are fleeing. At sea, the Virgin Mary makes a pact with Carmelita.They will survive; Carmelita will remain famous and young if she agrees to remain “pure” like the Virgin. Act 3 is the ironic fulfillment of the promise to the Virgin. It takes place in 1967 in a New York club which is an imitation of the club in La Habana; Carmelita is famous, young, and making revolution as a lesbian feminist. Carmelita opens the performance singing Barbara Streisand’s “Memories” with a rose in her hand in front of a slide projection of a postcard of Cuba. She is

200  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” dressed in a tight red sequined gown and platform shoes; the stage directions of the unpublished theatrical script suggest that Carmelita looks like “a modern-​ day Carmen Miranda” (Tropicana and Parnes 1). After she finishes the song’s first verse, Carmelita begins to speak saying: “Memories, we all have them. You do. And I, Carmelita Tropicana, have them of my beloved country [pause as she histrionically looks back at the slide projection]: Cuba [pronounced, like in Spanish, Cooba]” (I, Carmelita 2).18 Both the singing and Carmelita’s first lines to her audience are delivered with an exaggerated Spanish/​Cuban accent. Her accent, her clothing, and her body movements on stage expressively embody the stereotypical construction of the tropical bombshell, of the Latina temptress. Yet, the self-​conscious exaggerated gestures and her constant pauses defamiliarize the racialized and gendered stereotype to create dissonance between Carmelita the performer and the role of tropical bombshell. This process is akin to what Elin Diamond elaborated as “gestic feminist criticism.” While Diamond focuses solely on gender issues and thus fails to consider race, her analysis of how gender is alienated via the V-​effect (“Verfremdungseffekt”) accurately explains how Carmelita Tropicana calls attention to the performative nature of transcultural identities. Through her foregrounding of the tropical bombshell topos, “the spectator is attuned to seeing a sign system as a sign

Figure 4.2 Carmelita Tropicana in Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  201 system—​the appearance, words, gestures, ideas, attitudes, etc., that comprise the gender lexicon become so many illusionistic trappings to be put on or shed at will” (Diamond 85). Although the general audience of this performance constitutes a hybrid community, each individual spectator is of course also gendered and racialized. Most of the WOW audience and artists in this period were white lesbians. Holly Hughes remembers how they worried about their whiteness: In the past, we invited women of color to do festivals, to use the space on specific nights. They were guests, with all that implied. At those infrequent moments when WOW had to act like it was a real organization in the world, we’d call on Alina Troyano and her sister Ela and designer Joni Wong to prove we were multicultural. We did so, I remember, with a sense of failure and shame. We didn’t care if people came to WOW and couldn’t deal with the campiness and sexiness . . . Good riddance. But we did mind the barrier of our whiteness. (Hughes et al. 5)19 Part of my interest in Carmelita Tropicana’s performance has been precisely in trying to theorize the ways in which spectators are differentially coded in the performances and thus have distinct participation. The divergence emerges in the reception of Memorias by a predominantly white lesbian audience; laughter and whistles, for example, came from that audience in actually different ways and at different moments than when they came from non-​whites. In the opening scene, for example, Carmelita enters the stage to wild applause and to audience whistling at the Latina bombshell. The extra-​scenic dynamics of desire created through the queer female gaze, actively positions non-​lesbian spectators in the roles of voyeur or outsider-​interloper. Within this lesbian-​to-​ lesbian dynamics of desire, actors and audience shift in and out of the positions of desiring subject and object of the gaze; the male gaze is completely absent from the performance space, even though the play was directed by a queer man. Memorias, like other WOW productions, constructs a “lesbian spectatorial community [that] tend[s]‌to drop from the performative address the heterosexuality that underpins hegemonic representations” (Davy, “From Lady” 2). If one adds race to those dynamics of desire, the categories become even more unstable. In the very first lines of Carmelita’s opening act, the heterosexual Latina, initially cast as an outsider in the sexual axis, becomes a partner/​accomplice in the racial axis, an accomplice insofar as she can read Carmelita’s second gestic movement: the looking back at the postcard. Although Carmelita’s lines are about memories of her beloved country, Cuba, the delivery of those lines and the exaggerated camp of this looking back creates a distance in which the standard Cuban exile’s rhetoric of longing for an absent fatherland is defamiliarized. Furthermore, the nature of what she really looks at brings into question precisely the exile’s mythic and nostalgic construction of Cuba.

202  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” From the very beginning of the performance these “memories of the way we were” do not participate in the exile’s nostalgic recuperation of the myth of Cuba as “Isle of Enchantment.” That is, one cannot read this “looking back” as Carmelita’s attempt to recuperate her lost La Habana (Flores Martínez 7). I read this looking back as a gestic moment that opens the play to the social, historical, and discursive ideologies that inform it (Diamond 90). Although in the back of the program the audience can read what may come across as “a curious history of 1950s Havana, subtitled ‘The Summerland of the World’ ” (Grubb 9), this history is not curious at all. The US construction/​presentation of Cuba in the 1950s—​like that of Puerto Rico and Hawai’i—​was precisely that of an “Isle of Enchantment,” “breeze-​drenched,” and “palm-​fringed.”20 In other words, US cultural penetration in Cuba, manifested in the use of English in the postcard, is precisely what this gestic moment unveils for the spectator who can actively participate in its reading. US cultural imperialism, whose traces are linguistically present in the postcard, is absent from Cuban exile’s rhetoric. It is this very construction of Cuba as an “Isle of Enchantment” that the Cuban exile’s rhetoric reproduces. Carmelita’s exaggerated looking back at the postcard, then, cannot miss Uncle Sam’s linguistic encroachment on La Habana’s otherwise beautiful skyline. The spectator is thus forced to look back to “the way we were” differently since the dissonance created by the gestic moment underscores what is implicit in the postcard: Cuba as “the Isle of Enchantment” was also Cuba under US economic and cultural control. Subsequent scenes present Cuba precisely as the backyard of the United States, a “whorehouse” for Americans in search of the fiery, tempestuous, “Latina lover.” Ramón H. Rivera-​Servera, in his analysis of the role of production and reception of “queer Latinidad,” suggests that we need to pay attention to the “dual function” of performance as “a set of expressive techniques” and a “social situation” (32). The “social situation” not only positions the spectator as a participant in queer Latinidad (36), it creates the space for the spectator to engage in an “inter-​Latina/​o encounter in performance” (37), which “insist[s]‌on the possibility of intersubjective intimacy or convivencia diaria” (71). Memorias performed that daily conviviality of the WOW performers and invited the audience to partake in that conviviality. The opening scene, then, creates a performative space in which lesbian sexuality and desire are articulated and centralized. At the same time and inseparable from it, it also creates a space in which nostalgia is defamiliarized through the unveiling of US imperialism. This intersection of the registers of sexuality and geopolitics calls attention, in turn, to the implicit, perhaps unconscious, racial/​ sexual imaginary within the lesbian dynamics of desire created in that very opening scene. On the one hand, the performance depends on the presence of a lesbian on stage framing and directing her own spectacle and addressing the audience as subject. On the other, it also relies on the stage presence of a femme Latina who, by performing excessively the role of “the tropical bombshell,” becomes the white lesbian audience’s potential object choice. By unveiling imperialism, Carmelita’s gestic moments inscribe the racialized sexual fantasy

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  203

Figure 4.3 Carmelita Tropicana in Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

within a lesbian dynamic of desire. I am suggesting here that in the complexity and ambiguity of these gestic moments, Tropicana addresses the intersection of sexuality and geopolitics to de-​essentialize and racialize the “lesbian spectatorial community,” doing so years before this racialization process was theorized. The opening scene could be more than unsettling to a typical Cuban exile audience, who for the most part would be reluctant to read Carmelita’s gestus at either of the two levels discussed.21 The performance of her other character/​ persona, Pingalito Betancourt, would no doubt be even more “offensive,” as The Miami Herald dance critic Laurie Horn suggested (4). As Pingalito, whose name literally means in Cuban slang “little dick,” Carmelita performs the trope of the “cubanazo” (Miami Cuban/​Latino macho)—​cigar smoker, guayabera wearer, crotch grabbing, and know-​it-​all—​discussed in Chapter 3. In many ways, “the macho” Pingalito is the male counterpart of Carmelita. Neither persona fits within “the iconography of butch/​femme culture” which many critics have analyzed (Davy, “From Lady” 23). And indeed, Pingalito’s performance is precisely about not fitting in. Different from the gender performativity of white butch/​femme, Carmelita needs “to wear the gender of the ‘other’ sex” (Davy, “From Lady” 23) to stage a gender-​inflected racial construct.

204  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Troyano’s inspiration for Pingalito allows us to better understand the type of character that Pingalito performs: Pingalito came about because of my mother. My mother one time calls me up and says, “Oh, my god! I can’t believe they’re telling me stories about this guy whose name is Pingalito.” And I went, “Wait right there.” All of a sudden, I didn’t even have to think of a character. I knew who this guy was. He’s a stereotype of Latino blah blah blah. (Horowitz 103) The “Latino blah blah blah” of the typical “cubanazo” is performed through an intersectional “choteo” of heterosexuality, his class and nationalist positionality, and his deracialized self-​construction as white, a product of the seduction of whiteness characteristic of Cuban exiles of his generation. Through the persona of Pingalito and through the other two “male characters,” Machito and Capitán Maldito, different versions of the “cubanazo,” and the simulation of Latino hyper-​masculinity are performed on stage. Their very names, as I have explained, signal the humorous and performative aspects of these characters. The performance of all three is informed by the ways in which WOW productions presented characters without the psychological depth typical of realism in the theater. They are “driven by parody-​parodies of classical narratives, genres, historical figures, popular icons, and cultural norms, sometimes all in the same show” (Hughes et al. 7). Troyano took advantage of WOW’s premise that “all signs and symbols were available and anyone had permission to indulge her wildest fantasies” (Hughes et al. 101). But she transformed it by incorporating tropicalized signs and symbols of Latinidad to suggest that these three were impersonations of male-​racialized stereotypes. In other words, while I fully agree with Davy that male impersonation has no “familiar institutionalized history in which women impersonating men say something about women” (“From Lady” 5), it does not have it in this context either, in the case of Pingalito, Machito, and Capitán Maldito the foregrounding of the impersonated male voice is always connected to and inflected by race and culture. Witnessing the stereotype in excess invites the spectator to read these characters’ gestic moments as ironic comments on the performative nature of the “cubanazo” and Latino “machismo.” As Karina Céspedes wrote about another of Carmelita’s performance, Carmelita Tropicana . . . speaks so directly to my own sense of being an outsider within normative notions of Cubanidad. Finally, someone addresses the systematic amnesia en este lado del charco where real Cubanos, delineated by race, class, epoch of migration, and anti-​revolutionary positioning, have made a politics and cultural movement out of erasing from their exilic imaginations the lives of the many Carmelita Tropicanas who queer the Cuban-​American scene. (7)

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  205 Carmelita’s male impersonation of Pingalito is tactically imprecise, that is, she lets her audience see the woman/​lesbian underneath. One of the first comments Pingalito says about Carmelita is the following:“In that tight red dress Carmelita was the symbol of Cuban womanhood. Like Carmelita, La Habana in 1955 was very gay [pause, and look at the audience] like the music: mambo, rumba y cha cha cha” (10). The play with the word gay of course points to the campy undertone of the whole scene. Thus, when Pingalito talks about “those chorus girls of Tropicana with the big legs, big breasts” (10), the lesbian audience can read the performance differently.They know that it is a lesbian underneath who is really talking about “those chorus girls.” WOW, as I have said, was primarily a lesbian space. Bisexuality was hardly accepted, and heterosexuality was tolerated. We used to joke and say that straight people had to pay double at the door, so everyone had to say they were queer to get in at regular price . . . Men were in the audience. We took their money. But they were not our focus at all. (Hughes et al. 45–​6) The complicity of the lesbian audience with the lesbian Latina performing Pingalito is signaled by their whistling and laughter because they knew that in that space, performers spoke to, by, and about women and reveled in loving and lusting after women. . . I remember this work as fierce, but it was also really fun. And funny. Because it proved that lesbian comedy could be fierce and funny and radical all at the same time. (Hughes et al. xiv) This could also be read as a “choteo” of colonial desire. The chorus girls often performed for Pingalito. In so doing, it is the white lesbians of WOW who perform for the immigrant Tropicana thus inverting the colonial stage relations where exoticized female bodies are at the service of the colonial male gaze (Lemoine, 64). This “multimedia, comedy extravaganza with music and a cast of ten lovely beauties, in English, that presents the personal memoirs of the daughter of the Cuban revolution and star of stage and screen, Carmelita Tropicana” (Davy, Lady Dicks 154) in no way follows the structures of realism. Carmelita knows, as Case has suggested, that realism’s consequences for women are deadly (297). What we have on stage is another version of camp, what I call “racialized camp,” or “picuencia” in its Cuban version. Carmelita’s “picuencia” depends on theatricality and humor, and it is synonymous with bad taste-​bad taste, of course, in relation to Eurocentric aesthetic codes. It consists of a scandalous mixture of objects and forms which are utilized as cultural signs. Fernando Ortiz was one of the first to theorize “picuencia”, and he associated it with “choteo.” For

206  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Ortiz, it is the sociopolitical situation of Cuba’s Republican period (1902–​ 1959) that gave rise to “picuencia” because of having based our ideology almost exclusively on rapid wealth rather than on substantial values, all of which dragged us into an orgy of ridiculous simulations, the hollower the more conceited and more despotic in their eagerness to impose at all costs their observance by the people.22 (Albur 175, note 106) It is reflected in the boasts in dress and decoration, as well as in speech. Ortiz reads picuencia primarily in relation to class; for him it is is a matter of social stratum” and it surfaces when the subject “belongs . . . to a humbler social class and from there he does not tire of aspiring. He has bad taste, because the models that are familiar to him are not the most recommended.23 (Albur 240, note 287).24 Memorias/​Memories is full of examples of a “picuencia” that intersects lesbian sexuality, irreverent humor, and pop recycling. Carmelita’s costumes, for example, were a result of her collaboration with Uzi Parnes and her sister, Ela Troyano, both filmmakers, directors, and writers.25 The three of them recycled materials and, according to Troyano, through their visuals, added a flamboyancy to Carmelita—​Uzi by creating fruited boas and hat chandeliers that light up my life and the stage, Ela by saving a charred sequined bustier from a fire I had in my apartment, adding glittered fruit to the burnt left breast so I could appear at a TV interview looking intact with just a hint of fruit. (I, Carmelita xvii-​xviii) The recycled “bad taste” of “picuencia” is transformed and is constitutive of Carmelita Tropicana’s persona: “As a triumvirate of two cubists and one Jewish (an Uzi-​ism), we created work that made Carmelita the protagonist, a super Latina heroine who, when pitted against evil forces, always triumphed in the end” (I, Carmelita xvii). Other examples of “picuencia” include Machito disguised as the Peanut Vendor, a popular Cuban character and the performance’s song, the parodic performance of the slowness of the tropics in sharp contrast with the fast rhythms of exaggerated accented speech, the depiction of La Habana as love capital of the world full of whorehouses with US flags on the door stating “American Surgeon General Seal of Approval,” and the Tropicanettes singing and dancing for Pingalito “Yes we have no bananas” (see Memorias documentary video and Figure 4.4). Holly Hughes has noted how WOW artists referenced pop culture and television shows

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  207 over and over again to conjure up family values that were subsequently spoofed or smashed . . . We valued humor above all; we loved cheap jokes best of all. We were not interested in merely breaking silence and certainly not in creating positive images of women. We wanted to insert ourselves into the lowliest forms of pop culture and bust up the joint with our messy, undomesticated sexy selves, always entering, always laughing. (Hughes et al. 30) Tropicana’s use of “picuencia,” however, referenced a different set of pop culture. In Memorias, she reappropriated and parodically re-​staged in a theatrical fashion vernacular codes and popular elements of racialized cultural stereotypes of Cubanidad and Latinidad. But these stereotypes are consciously parodic. The parody lies in the ancestral Cuban “choteo” – ​making fun of everything and everyone. It is also a result of the struggle to assert a certain cultural autonomy within the official hegemonic culture, which is characteristic of “picuencia.” US Cubans and other Latines live within a culture that tries to centralize and absorb millions of culturally diverse people.This drive to assimilate causes a break with their own popular culture, relegating it to the margin of “bad taste” or incorporating it into the mainstream through stereotypes such as Mambo Kings, Chiquita Banana, or Speedy Gonzalez. The answer that Memorias/​Memories gives to this double movement is “the savage assimilation of civilized forms” or the “primitivization of elements drawn from ‘mass culture’ ” (Mosquera, 54). Racialized camp or “picuencia,” then, presents itself as bad taste with a

Figure 4.4 Production photograph of Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

208  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” vengeance. It is an aesthetics of social inclusion that stands against a monist and prohibitionist aesthetics of exclusion. The epitome of the staging of “picuencia” is the character of Rosita Charo Rosita Charo. Rosita is the other “hot tamale” of the performance. Her very name immediately partakes of the excesses I have been analyzing. Rosita, a very common name in Spanish, was also the most often used name for Carmen Miranda’s on-​screen characters (López 76). Charo refers to the name of a Spanish singer and comedian popular in Latin American television shows in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Tropicana, Rosita Charo Rosita Charo not only participates in this history of typical Latines but also her ridiculous name underscores that she is as typical as she is artificial. Rosita Charo Rosita Charo, performed by Lisa Kron, a US American actress, speaks English with an overly exaggerated Spanish accent.Throughout the performance, however, she sings several traditional Cuban songs such as “Siboney” and “Bésame mucho” in Spanish, and in these songs, her Anglo accent is intentionally audible. If in Carmelita’s and Pingalito’s personas her heavy Spanish accent parodies accents as a sign of “otherness,” Rosita Charo’s very name and heavy accent in both languages unveil the artificiality of “otherness” in general. Their exaggerated Cuban accent, “its fast pace with dizzying accelerations derailing the tongue. . . [as signs of] a minority language, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, opens up the meanings of the English language. . . [Their] performance disarticulates the embodied identities of an orthodoxy of Americanness.”26 (Lemoine 62) Their over-​acted heavy accent has either a comic effect or decentering effect, depending on the audience. Yet, the use of hyperbole, exaggeration, and bad taste in all instances point to the performative aspects of race and to the stupidity of racialized stereotyping through accents. This performance is not just about racialized stereotypes, however. Rosita Charo, a white lesbian actress performing in excess the Latina femme, sings a duo with Marimacha.While the two are singing, the story of “Siboney” is staged through dance. As the directions state, “the dance is satire of cabaret style Indian dance in which there are two Indian maidens who love the Indian Siboney and a white hunter who kills Siboney. At the end of the dance Siboney is revived by the Indian Maidens” (11). Although the historical Siboney was male, in the parodic rendition of this dance/​story in Memorias all the participants are women, including the hunter. In this duo and throughout the play, Marimacha is played by a white actress performing the Latina butch. In Memorias, Marimacha is not “a girl who thinks she is a boy” (Stone) nor a “girl who wants to be a boy,” as several critics have suggested. Her very name, Marimacha, is the Spanish equivalent for butch or dyke. A combination of María and a linguistically marked feminine macho, Marimacha, as butch, represents her desire for other women.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  209

Figure 4.5 Production photograph of Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

210  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”

Rosita Charo Rosita Charo and Marimacha’s duo and Marimacha’s racialized performance and butch characterization queer “picuencia.” Moreover, this lesbian picuencia underscores a dramatic situation; that is, both performer and audience realize that each is playing a role. The subtext of this dramatic situation is society’s heterosexual matrix. The other quality of “picuencia” which is foregrounded in these examples is its humor. “Picuencia” is for fun and its aim is to make audience laugh. As with “choteo,” “picuencia” is full of irony and wit and is, in fact, a system of laughing at one’s own incongruous position. One of the best examples of “picuencia” is the Virgin’s apparition to Carmelita at sea. Visually, this scene has as its pretext the apparition of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre to the three Juanes (one Black, one white, and one mulatto) in Cuba. In Troyano’s transformation, the three Juanes have been replaced by three lesbian characters—​Lota Hari, Marimacha, and Carmelita. The apparition is staged through a film projection of a man in drag. Thus, the only male in the performance is a man playing the role of the Virgin. The voice of the Virgin—​with a Yiddish accent—​is completely out of synch with the image. The linguistic and visual registers are at odds. The two are also at odds with Carmelita, whose “religiosity,” suggested by the way she addresses the Virgin as “Madresita [sic] mía,” is visually undermined through her gestures and mundane requests. This tension between the visual and linguistic registers remains until the end of the scene with Carmelita’s obvious wink of complicity with her audience and her hand gestures signaling “so, so” or “perhaps.”

Figure 4.6 Production photograph of Memories of the Revolution. Photo by © Donna Ann McAdams.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  211 The scene in which the Virgin appears and Memorias/​Memories as a whole precisely capture the fluidity and multiple folds of hybrid female subjects and performance. As a hybrid performance, it stages precisely the various “in-​betweens” traveled by hybrid lesbian subjects who perform excess and artificiality. Those brief seconds in the performance, in which there is a discontinuity between the complicity in Carmelita’s wink at the audience and the ambivalence of her hand gesture, paradigmatically stage the ambiguous relation between performer and audience. In the case of Memorias, it is the relation between, on the one hand, women of color and their various communities and, on the other, feminists and lesbians of color and white feminists and lesbians at the scene of self-​representation. Carmelita undermines the racialized stereotypes through the excess of “picuencia”; her irony is shared with the audience. Simultaneously, Carmelita undermines gender roles in her staging of lesbian desires. But her accent, her temperament, and her body language will always give away her Latinaness. Intersectional excess, “picuencia”, and “choteo” destabilize and transform the interchange between sexual identities and gender roles, between a marginal racialized culture and the hegemonic white one.

From WOW and INTAR to Cuba, Los Angeles, and Back By the end of the 1980s, Carmelita Tropicana had become an important performer in the various clubs in NewYork’s Lower East Side. Carmelita Tropicana/​ Alina Troyano, along with her sister Ela Troyano and their collaborators, also started to participate in various projects sponsored by INTAR, a space key for the development of both Troyanos and other playwrights because, as discussed previously, it became an important node in the network of Latine theater artists. Carmelita herself recognizes INTAR’s significance: INTAR was the Latin hood where we could check out our roots. INTAR, an arts complex with two spaces—​one on 42nd Street and the other on 53rd Street—​nurtured Latino talent through its theatre, art gallery, and two significant workshops, the playwriting workshop led by María Irene Fornés and the musical theatre workshop led by George Ferencz and Graciela Daniele. (I, Carmelita xvi) Her sister and collaborator, Ela Troyano, participated in one of the first INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Lab and was an active member or observer between 1986 and 1990. Alina Troyano participated in INTAR’s Hispanic American Music Theater Lab (1986–​1987) along with composer Fernando Rivas who had participated previously as an observer in Fornés’ Lab. Not only did Alina Troyano get paid for developing work, she also had the opportunity to audit Fornés’ 1986 Lab at INTAR (Svich et al.) and to meet “other writers and musicians that were starting out, like Manuel Pereiras, Ana María Simo, Lorraine Llamas, Alfredo Bejar, Micky Cruz, Bobby Sanabria, Luis Santeiro”

212  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” (I, Carmelita xvii). She developed with Rivas her first musical theater piece, Carmelita’s Boiler Time Machine, which had a staged reading at INTAR January 13, 1987, and had full productions at PS 122 and La MaMa. Uzi Parnes directed and Ela Troyano conceived the character Ferdinando, one of Tropicana’s first performance of animals on stage. With this musical piece, Carmelita was able to create an assemblage of WOW’s lesbian and INTAR’s Latine aesthetics and artists. She had the opportunity to expand her aesthetics through her participation in the Latino Theater Initiative (LTI) on the West Coast. The LTI (1993–​2005) was a project developed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to remedy the dearth of Latine programming in this space.27 The Mark Taper Forum is part of the Los Angeles Performing Arts Center, one of the largest and most important in the United States. It was built in the 1960s after developers tore down and displaced a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. Although the Taper is dedicated to the development of new voices in theater, by 1990, the only Latine play that they had presented was Luis Valdés’ Zoot Suit (1978). LTI started in 1993 with a $1.4 million grant from the Lila Wallace-​Readers Digest Fund, following the steps of other projects such as INTAR’s HPRL and the Hispanic Playwrights Project in Orange County. José Luis Valenzuela, who had brought his Latino Theater Lab to the Taper, was its first director. In 1995, Diane Rodriguez and Luis Alfaro became its artistic directors until its closure in 2005. Despite the intention to promote multiculturalism, in the 1990s “regional theaters rarely stage[d]‌Latino plays and corporate support for minority theater . . . dropped dramatically” (Gurza 2004).28 LTI nurtured new play development by Latine artists such as Troyano, through fellowships, commissions, readings, workshops, and retreats. For example, between 1991 and 1995, María Irene Fornés conducted writing workshops (Svich et al.), which many Latine playwrights remember as life changing. And Tropicana led a performance workshop along with Latins Anonymous, Marga Gómez, and Monica Palacio around 1995 or 1996. LTI commissioned Alina Troyano in 2000–​2001 and 2002–​2003 for the writing of a new play, Tale of Two Cities, and she participated in a writers’ retreat in 2001 in which the play was workshopped and then had a staged reading with professional actors and an invited audience. This was the first version of With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit / Con Qué Culo SeSienta la Cucaracha. Finally, she was commissioned in 2004 to develop the final version of With What Ass. She also participated in a writers retreat and With What Ass was part of LTI’s New Theater for Now, a three-​week festival of 19 new North American staged play readings (Kirk Douglas Theatre, 2005), also sponsored by The Ralph Tornbe Trust. Alina Troyano remarks the importance of this initiative for the development of With What Ass and her future work: In 2001 I was at the writer’s retreat and reading of Tale of Two Cities. Irene [María Irene Fornés] was there. Every morning she gave us

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  213 exercises—stretching, yoga, and then prompts. Irene was beginning to lose her memory and every day, Luis [Alfaro] told me she would be in the lobby waiting with her luggage and Luis had to remind her that she wasn’t leaving for the airport but teaching the workshop in the morning. Despite Irene’s memory she was great at giving feedback in the afternoon during the readings. Eduardo was there, I think, not to present work but as a responder to the work along with Morgan Jenness and Luis [Alfaro] and Diane [Rodriguez] and maybe some other responders along with writers like Ricardo Abreu Bracho and other ChicanX. . . The impact of the LA workshop was enormous because I probably wouldn’t have been able to continue with Con Qué Culo . . . Having all those responders and being in that company of LatinX artists, especially those from the West Coast, was tremendous. (2021) An important outcome of the LTI was that it was able to bring together two generations of US Cuban, Nuyorican, and Chicano artists from the East and the West coasts with very different aesthetics and politics. It facilitated a safe, creative space in which Latine artists could share their cultural differences and work together despite those differences. This was perhaps one of the early spaces in which José Esteban Muñoz’s “sense of Brown,” that feeling together in difference, functioned as a creative catalyst. Alina Troyano has written about how María Irene Fornés, in her sometimes reductive but useful way, addressed those differences: The last time I was in an Irene workshop was in 2001 at The Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theater Initiative. At dinner, I flirted with her and was making double entendre when I was interrupted by a Chicano playwright who with bowed head thanked Irene the “Maestra” and I felt I’d been cheap and hadn’t given the Maestra her due, but Irene said you are Caribbean, a mix of the Spaniard and the African prone to sassy comments; he is a mix of Spaniard and the indigenous people, more prone to reverence. (Svich et al. 30) Furthermore, like HPRL in New York, LTI facilitated a network of Latine artists who continued to collaborate with one another. For example, a 2002–​ 2003 commission allowed Ricardo Bracho, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Marga Gomez, Josefina Lopez, Eduardo Machado, and Cherríe Moraga to collaborate on Amor Eterno: Nine Lessons in Love, short plays that were weaved together by Diane Rodriguez and which had a staged reading as part of Hothouse: Open Public Readings of New Work from the Mark Taper (Diane Rodriguez). In the case of Alina Troyano, through LTI she reconnected with Ricardo Bracho and recommended his work to Ela Troyano who eventually directed his A to B at INTAR (2002), which received outstanding reviews in The New York Times. LTI also allowed Alina Troyano to connect with Eduardo Machado who became

214  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Artistic Director of INTAR and produced the world premiere With What Ass. Troyano served as Associate Artistic Director of INTAR Theater from 2006 to 2009. Another important element in the development of her aesthetics is Alina Troyano’s return trip to Cuba in August 1993. Although she was originally going to participate in a Cuban and US Cuban playwrights encounter (see Chapter 5), when this event fell through, she decided to travel to Cuba and attend the Festival Internacional de Teatro (see Manzor-​Coats and Martiatu Terry). It was Troyano’s first trip back to Cuba.While I had met Troyano several times, our conversations and interactions until this trip had been purely professional. As a matter of fact, I knew just about everything there was to know about the performing Tropicana but hardly anything about Alina Troyano. It was uncanny being in La Habana together. This uncanniness was made even more awkward because memories and personal experiences are difficult to approach or address professionally while you are directly immersed in them, as was our case. Moreover, the very transnational/​transcultural act of being there created a complex situation in which our relationship of scholar/​investigator-​ performance artist seemed out of place in the then and there of La Habana, 1993. We talked about the oddity of feeling like tourists in what was supposed to be our own country. We commented on the incongruencies of contemporary life in Cuba. I even “translated” jokes and gestures for her since I had arrived two weeks earlier than she had; I had thus been able to get a “head start” in the joyful and painful game of return. One afternoon, as we were traveling from el Vedado to Machurrucutu, I told Alina that we were going to be very near where I thought she had lived. Do you remember your address? I asked her. She spat out “319 de la calle 8, entre quinta y tercera.” I asked “Do you want to stop there, see if we can find it? She responded “¡Claro! But I’m not sure if I’m ready. It’s all so quick!” I understood her doubts then. And now realize how lucky I was to have shared this experience with Alina. As we approached her neighborhood, she could not stop repeating, “Yes, this looks familiar.” We finally got close to 8th Street, and she reminded me that it used to be a one-​way street; we had to go around the block because it still is. We finally arrived at the house and found that it was under construction. She jumped right out of the car, hurled into the house, and bolted upstairs looking for her bedroom. I advised her to slow down; “let’s explain and ask if we can come in.” But it was too late. She was already in the middle of an air-​ conditioned office.The house was a construction company, a joint Italo-​Cuban venture. She looked everywhere, took a deep breath, and then proceeded to take pictures: the stairs, the bathroom with the same toilet and bidet, the door to her room which was turned into an office. I offered to take pictures of her. “You never know,” I said naively, “you might need them for a performance.” These photographs were incorporated in Troyano’s performance piece, Milk of Amnesia /​ Leche de Amnesia, Troyano’s most performed piece. The personal visit to her house was transformed, like my narration/analysis, into something else.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  215 Toward the end of the performance,Troyano says “These are star trek glasses. They form rainbows around everything you look at. Am I looking at Cuba from an American perspective? No es fácil. It’s not easy to have clear vision. In 7 days, I can only get sound bites” (22). I have read this phrase as a clearly designed objective of tactical intervention: to initiate a dialogue between two contradictory histories and trajectories, the diasporic Cuban and the island one (Arrizón and Manzor-​Coats). “No es fácil” proposes the link between the two. This phrase is repeated, as leitmotif, many times in the performance. It was the phrase we heard most often during our stay in Cuba (1993) since Cubans on the island use it to refer to their difficult conditions. In Milk of Amnesia, Troyano’s use of “No es fácil” is an insinuation that, albeit the many differences, life is not easy for Cubans on or off the island. In With What Ass Does the Cockrach Sit /​¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? Troyano fully develops that dialogue between the contradictory histories of those who stayed on the island and those who left with a poetics that merges queer as well as East Coast and West Coast Latine aesthetics.

With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit /​ ¿ Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? Alina Troyano introduced her anthology I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures with the following words: And now, dear reader, I hope that as you turn these pages, you’ll find that the work entertains you; that the work moves you, tugging at your heartstrings; but that the work is also thought provoking and ponders universal questions like the African saying that asks: ¿Con qué culo se sienta la cucaracha? With what ass does the cockroach sit? (I, Carmelita xxv) The original meaning of this saying denotes that you can only do things within your own means. She used this African saying as title and central question of her 2004 solo performance, which premiered at INTAR. In With What Ass, we do not see Carmelita Tropicana and Pingalito Betancourt. Instead, Troyano performs the role of various animals and other characters who play a part in the crisis that ensued in the Cuban exile community, in Cuba, and in US-​Cuba relations surrounding Elián González. Borrowing from the famous Cuban/​ Hispanophone Caribbean children’s story, La Cucarachita Martina y el Ratoncito Pérez (Martina the Cockroach and Perez the Mouse), Troyano transforms the fable’s characters and uses various musical registers to create an allegory of the hardships of daily life in Cuba and in Cuban Miami focusing on the feelings such hardships generate on both sides of the Florida straits. Elián González was a five-​year-​old boy who left Cuba with his mother—​ Elizabeth Brotons—​her boyfriend, and a dozen other people on an inner tube. He was separated from her in high seas, and his mother died on the journey,

216  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” along with the rest of the group except three. He was rescued off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in November 1999, and was eventually released to his paternal family, great uncle Lázaro Gónzalez and cousin Marisleysis González, who became his guardian.When the González’s notified his father, Juan Miguel González, in Cárdenas, Cuba, they found out that his father wanted custody and demanded repatriation. This resulted in an international custody battle that ended in April 2001, when INS agents raided his uncle’s home, took Elián, and returned him to his father in Andrew’s Air Force Base. The photograph of the INS agent removing Elián from his uncle’s home, taken by Alan Díaz, the Associated Press photographer who received a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for this image, quickly traveled the world. No one was more surprised by this raid and its photograph than the Cuban exile community who, unlike other migrant communities in the United States, was not used to deportation or immigration raids due to their special immigration status.This was, indeed, “the end of innocence for the Cuban American community,” as former president of the Cuban American National Foundation and US Representative for Florida’s 26th district Joe García has said (quoted in Gage). Elián finally returned to Cuba with his family after the legal battle ended in June 2000.29 To understand the custody battle and the ways in which Elián became a political pawn of Cuba and of Cuban exile politics in Miami, it is important to contextualize historically what was happening in both places. In the United States, the Clinton administration, despite its lack of vision for a consistent policy toward Cuba, had relaxed some of the US’ restrictions imposed on the island. The changes, supported by some Cuban-Americans and other groups advocating change, came mostly under Track 2 of the 1992 Torricelli Act, and they allowed people-​to-​people contacts including direct flights from US cities other than Miami for licensed travelers. They also included the reestablishment of direct mail service between the United States and Cuba. As a result, Cuban musicians, like the Buena Vista Social Club, played throughout the United States; US artists, politicians, and others started to travel to Cuba legally under the “people-​to-​people” license. Suddenly, Cuba had become chic. In the Cuban exile community, [t]‌he decline of broad conservative support for the blockade left Miami’s hard-​ liners almost alone, and they began to be concerned about the gathering momentum in favor of a softening of the blockade. They were also affected by a vacuum of leadership after the death of the chairman of the CANF, Jorge Mas Canosa, in 1997. (Castro Mariño 66) It is within this context that the Cuban exile community and political leaders rallied around Elián to demand that he be allowed to stay in the United States. Many Pedro Pans, like political scientist María de los Angeles Torres, connected their personal experiences to Elián’s and argued he should be returned to his father:

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  217 Emilio Cueto, a Washington, DC-​ based lawyer, thinks that given the impossibility of returning him to a free Cuba or having his father come here, Elián should be with his father in Cuba. To deny the father his patria potestad just because we may not like his country’s government is to do to him what our parents feared would be done to them. Elly Chovel, a Pedro Pan who lives in Miami, and who has helped organize adult Pedro Pans into a charitable organization, believes that we should be concentrating on the child’s emotional needs, something that has often been lost in the debate. Indeed, Jorge Mas Santos, chairman of the hardline, pro-​embargo Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), which has literally turned Elián into a poster child, has shown very little concern for the boy’s actual welfare and has used him to flag a host of other issues, primarily human rights in Cuba. (22) By the end of the 1990s, Fidel Castro was becoming more isolated from the international community. Additionally, younger Cubans had become disenchanted with the ways in which the ideals of the revolution were not being met. Exiles, which were always one of Fidel Castro’s favorite foes, became a target once again. María de los Angeles Torres explained, “[i]n calling for the return of Elián, Castro has found a popular cause and a way to fight the exiles, whom he now calls the Miami mafia, even as he evades the harder discussion of why Elián’s mother left on the first place” (23). As a result, mostly everyone on the island, including dissidents and church officials, rallied around Castro’s claim that Elián should be returned to his father. In this custody battle between two nations that were and continue to be political adversaries, Elián became a means for political ends. As María de los Angeles Torres convincingly argued: This vulnerable boy has simultaneously become a symbol of the American way of life and a niño de la patria, a child of the Cuban fatherland. In either instance, the actual boy has no voice or power, and his emotional rights, which logically should include reunification with his father, have no place in which they will be defined, much less defended. Elián has become a life raft onto which politicians in Havana, Miami, and Washington are holding for dear life. (24) This is the backdrop against which Carmelita Tropicana wrote and performed With What Ass, redeploying the children’s fable of La Cucarachita Martina not to focus on the macropolitics of the Elián case but to create an allegory of the emotional embargo and unspoken personal pains those politics generate, including Elián’s.30 Troy Hourie’s minimalistic scenographic design highlighted the split between Cuba and Miami and the “picuencia” aesthetics of the play. A bearded man against a wall is on the left, suggesting a rundown apartment in Cuba. A US flag against a faded wall with the outlines of chandelier suggests

218  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” a middle-​class apartment in the United States, with the “picúo” element of a chandelier, often found in Cuban exile homes in Miami. There is also a back wall painted gray with palm leaves that accentuates a tropicalized imaginary associated with both Cuba and Miami. On the left, there is a large, Black chest whose contours are projected onto the floor. Martina climbs several times on that chest, and the animal characters appear on its projected contours which, on the floor, look like a chair where they might be standing. The Cuban version of La Cucarachita Martina tells the story of various animals who seek Martina’s love. Martina finds a coin after a ferocious dog scare and decides to buy a powder box to look prettier. Dazzled by her beauty, the animals try to conquer her love. In the end, she chooses to marry the Mouse Pérez. One day, Martina leaves a soup cooking on the stove, and the Mouse Pérez falls into the pot because he is a glutton. This event gives rise to the verse many Cuban children know: “el ratoncito Pérez cayó en la olla por la golosina de la cebolla” (greedy for the onion, the Mouse Pérez fell into the pot). Martina returns and saves him. Lawrence La Fountain-​Stokes has done an excellent reading of With What Ass where he traces the coincidences between Troyano’s and Pura Belpré’s’ versions of the children’s story. However, the version that is best known to Cubans is the one used by playwright Abelardo Estorino in his play that premiered in 1966 and has been staged by different national and international theater groups. In my analysis, I will refer to Estorino’s play to underscore the similarities between Estorino’s fable and Troyano’s remake of the children’s story. I am not suggesting that Troyano had read or seen Estorino’s play, but there are many coincidences between the two, probably because Estorino bases his play on the Cuban version of the story which is the one Troyano also knows. As she states, [t]here is a very popular folktale throughout Latin America that uses the character of La Cucarachita Martina. I remembered some elements of the story but not many. I thought using a character in a fairytale that Latinos had associations with was good, and for an American audience it is appropriate because it was a story surrounding a child. (Morowitz 163) Thematically, both Troyano and Estorino highlight Martina’s and the other animals’ and human characters’ resilience in the face of adversity; their capacity to “resolver” or make do with what they have, their ability to conquer fear, and the importance of the interconnections established between humans and animals. Formally, both are metatheatrical and break down the fourth wall, using songs and music, and “choteo.” With What Ass begins with the sound recording of the Cuban national anthem on a Cuban radio station similar to “Radio Reloj” (“Clock Radio”), which gives its news with the tick-​tock sound of a clock in the background and uses a loud beep to announce every minute and to signal the transition

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  219

Figure 4.7 Photograph of Troy Hourie’s scenographic design for With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

220  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”

Figure 4.8 Photograph of Troy Hourie’s scenographic design for With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

from one section of programing to the next.31 The loud beep is transformed in Troyano’s performance into a ding sound which, often accompanied by light changes, is used to signal breaks between scenes or change of character. After the weather, a mambo comes on, and Martina the roach is lighted on stage. Speaking to the audience, Martina introduces herself sharing with them the difficulties of her life due to constant search for food and the anxiety she feels because “You never know where the danger is coming from” (Tropicana 2014, 69). In this opening scene, she also introduces Catalina the parrot—​a parrot is also a character in Estorino’s story—​and the Old Man, a singer for the Nueva Vista Social Club, a play on words that jokingly alludes to the Buena Vista Social Club, the ensemble of Cuban musicians whose first album, produced by Ry Cooder, became an international hit in 1997. Troyano is dressed in khaki cargo pants that look orange through the light design, a pink sleeveless shirt with green trim, and tennis shoes. She uses carefully articulated body movements and gestural vocabulary to animalize her body for parodic, comic effect. She also employs various accents and voice registers to personify the anthropomorphized animals and human characters she performs. Martina, for example, speaks fast with what the audience would recognize as “Latin” accent, often mispronounces words, and is always moving her fingers

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  221

Figure 4.9 Alina Troyano in With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit. Photo by © Michael Palma Mir. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

and knees to suggest cockroach movement whereas Catalina the parrot speaks slowly with an affected British accent, her arms moving like fluttering wings, and she often vocalizes like an opera singer. The Old Man’s voice is deeper, and he is usually behind a microphone stage right. Within the performance, most male human and animal characters are performed behind the microphone with a slightly distorted voice.The microphone is thus used to mediate, distance, and masculinize Troyano/​Tropicana. If in Memorias gestic moments are a fundamental strategy that attunes the audience to see how the female Latina body is “othered” on stage, in With What Ass Troyano adds sonic registers—​music, sound, microphone distortions, different voices and accents, code-​switching, and so on—​to achieve the same goals. Troyano’s attention to voice and to sonic registers was probably acquired in some of the Fornés’ workshops. As Svich remembers, one of the exercises of the workshop included the following: Think now how Voice(s) ARE your landscape, how the music of VOICE reflects, animates, contains the essences of your play’s landscape. Is the landscape inhabited by dry, barren, parched voices or melodious, smooth tones?

222  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Are there rough VOICES/​rough patches in the landscape? Write a scene for your play-​in-​progress . . . that is especially attuned to Voice(s). (Svich et al. 6) For Fornés, voice is inseparable from body, and playwriting was first and foremost a physical activity. Alisa Solomon elucidates: “ ‘The stronger the character,’ Irene told us one day, ‘the more I feel as if their voice is in my chest. I feel a contraction in my throat when I am writing or I find I may be mouthing of gesturing alone’ ” (Svich et al. 25–​26). Returning to Martina, she is hard-​ working, wants to improve herself through education, is always quick to escape from danger—​as she says, her name should have been “quick hide, quick hide”—​and helps the other animal and human characters in the play. Many of these characteristics we also find in Estorino’s Cuca/​Martina the Cockroach, whose neighbors often call on her for help. Catalina, on the other hand, is La Señorona de la Habana Vieja or Grande Dame of Colonial La Habana. As we will see, her characterization could be read as a parody of Cecilia in INTAR’s 2003 production of Havana Under the Sea: “an aristocrat who lost her position and was forced to compromise herself and her values. . . . Cecilia recalls her life and her loves with emotional songs filled with bittersweet memories” (Stimac 2003).The Old Man bears and wears many traits of Pingalito, the prototypical “cubanazo.” The music used in the opening scene has a diegetic function, as La Fountain-​ Stokes has suggested. The opening mambo squarely situates us in Cuba; the opera soundtrack, because of its connections to “high culture,” underscores Catalina’s aristocratic past; and Sara Montiel’s “La vida en rosa,” a Spanish rendition of Edith Piaf ’s “La vie en rose,” initially suggests the rose-​colored eyeglasses through which Catalina sees her life and her relationship with the Old Man. However, as I will demonstrate in the analysis of the theatrical soundscape, the performance subverts these early associations. The play begins in La Habana in the Old Man’s apartment where both Martina and Catalina live and where Martina happens to meet “el niño,” Elián González, because his mother’s best friend lives in the apartment below (even though the actual Elián lived in Cárdenas and not in La Habana).The Old Man travels to Miami on a singing tour and Martina goes along with him because she is caught in his suitcase. In Miami, the Old Man is reunited with his cousin, the Old Lady, after 40 years of separation, and Martina is hired to cover the events surrounding the Elián González’s saga. Catalina, lonely and patiently, waits in La Habana for the Old Man’s letters until Martina returns stuck in one of Elián González’s tennis shoes. The plot development of this absurd human-​animal story is not important. It only serves as a pretext for Troyano to present a snapshot of Cuba-​US macro-​ and micro-​politics from 1994 to the early 2000. Through her use of “choteo,” “picuencia,” and code-​switching, she parodies everything from the food scarcities of the Special Period and family remittances: “Thank God to those who leave who send dollars to those who stay. . . back then we were the only ones in

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  223 our building that didn’t have to fry grapefruit rind and call it steak” (I, Carmelita 73) to the rise of inequalities on the island where whiskey, available to only a few, is considered “the drink of the enemy.” “Choteo” and code-​switching are also at work where international politics are brought down, such as Pope John Paul II’s visit to La Habana (1998); Spain becoming the main investor in Cuba’s economy; Guantanamo as a detention camp; and US elections: “Pero ni se te ocurra mencionar Clinton, Gore, or Bush. . . No Hillary, tampoco. And no questions” (74). These techniques also allow her to make a strong critique of uneven relations of power within the art world as seen through art dealers going to Cuba to buy art on the cheap and the bribery or informal kickbacks in which Cuban artists often have to participate: “I made a deal with the officer from the Minister of Culture . . . and I have to give him CD player, Walkman, telephone answering machine. But it’s worth it” (74). Finally, the uneven flow of people between Cuba and the rest of the world and global migration are put at the same level—​“el vaiven [sic] que se trae la gente, the Queen, the pope, Leonardo di Caprio they all come to Cuba by plane, then others they go by boat” (23:17). The focus of the performance, however, is on the interpersonal relationships that are forged between humans and animals to overcome the emotional embargo created by those macropolitical situations. These interspecies relationships also undermine and make fun of the traditional, patriarchal family along with conventional constructions of masculinity and femininity in Greater Cuba. The strongest and most complicated affective relationship is the one developed by Martina the cockroach and Catalina the parrot. As introduced above, Martina is a clever Cuban survivor who has learned to “resolver” or make do with what she can find. She begins her life in the modest apartment of Olga, a friend of Elián’s mother, who lives below the Old Man and fortuitously ends up at the Old Lady’s home in “the United States of Miami” (82). Martina works hard in La Habana, doing chores for Catalina, especially reporting the comings and goings of the Old Man. Catalina, on the other hand, rose to become an aristocrat who is proud of her manners and her vocabulary. She lives for her Old Man and dreams of recording a duet with him of “Cucurrucucu Paloma.” Although she is a parrot who can fly, she is usually inside her cage, even when the Old Man is not at home. As she proudly shares, she lives “in such splendor—​ a cage that’s the exact replica of the Palace of Versailles, the mirrors, the Louis Quatorze chair, and my divan. Most people are hungry in Cuba, but I am like Marie Antoinette. I say let them eat cake o pastelito de guayaba” (70). Catalina, however, lives in a dilapidated apartment reminiscent of Estorino’s Cucarachita who dreams of a big mansion, but she finds herself living in a small room emptier than a desert.32 Catalina’s majestic cage modeled after French culture in that rundown apartment is a perfect example of the “picuencia” of the faux nouveau-​r ich. That “picuencia” is underscored by one of the first word of the day she practices, “petit pois. That is French for peas” (70). This moment is doubly funny because, as ridiculous as it may seem, the common Cuban word for peas is none other than “pitipuá,” petit pois in its Spanish phonetic version.

224  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” The cage, however, is also a metaphor for women who constrain themselves and rely on men for their happiness and sense of identity. The soundscape that is associated with Catalina—​opera,“La vida en rosa,” and “Cucurrucucu Paloma”—​has a double function in the play. On the one hand, music complements characterization diegetically, but on the other it unveils that characterization. That is, music also has a nondiegetic function because it is invisible; it is almost inaudible; and it is used as a signifier for emotions. Sara Montiel, the Spanish singer who popularized “La vida en rosa” in the 1960s, was considered the epitome of femininity and beauty during that period. As a matter of fact, she was an idol for many Latin American drag artists who constructed their female impersonations based on Montiel’s impersonations of femininity. Her version of “La vida en rosa” attributes her perfect life to her love partner: “Not a cloud over the sea /​Nor nights of regret. /​No sorrows to cry. /​ I have everything just because of you /​because in your arms I find myself in heaven. /​Since the day I saw you /​I got life and it was because of you.”33 But the performance soon subverts Catalina’s rosy life suggested by the song: her Old Man not only leaves her to go on his tour but also has an affair with Paloma, a US singer with a Castillian Spanish accent. “Cucurrucucu Paloma” is the perfect song to suggest Catalina’s new emotional state as well as contrast it with her previous state of bliss. Caetano Veloso’s version of this song appears toward the end of the performance when Catalina is reading and interpreting a letter written in code from her Old Man. Though barely audible, this scene performs through the music and the lyrics (crying, weeping, death, passion, sadness, and misfortune) the melodrama that is lost love. But Catalina’s exaggerated response and her fit of jealousy that drives her to pluck her hairs/​feathers unveil through “choteo” the shortcomings of stereotypical heterosexual love and stereotypical presentations of women’s hysteric responses to betrayal.The shortcomings were previously parodied when the Old Man encourages Catalina to sing the song to make her feel better and Catalina seductively and cooingly sings “cucurrucucu” but then wildly shrieks and screams “paloooma,” with a Spanish pronunciation (00:18:01). Martina returns to Catalina and consoles her suggesting that she will help Catalina regain her strength and grow some of her feathers back so they can both fly to and perch on the Malecón (La Habana’s seawall). Through “choteo,” once again, Catalina says that if her feathers don’t grow back, “maybe I can wear something lacy” (01:09:38). This return signals that they can re-​establish their previous relationship, although now it is Martina who is helping Catalina in her process of becoming. Martina turns out to be the stronger of the two, like Estorino’s Cuca who learns how to overcome fear and danger. But unlike Estorino’s Cuca who saves and returns to her husband, in this women’s space, a newly established interspecies animal family is created where they can comfort each other, tell each other stories about their experiences when they were

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  225 separated, and, as Catalina says, “Then we can close that chapter and begin anew” (01:10:00). The Old Man’s relationship with Catalina performs the tropes of traditional Cuban heterosexual relationships. When the Old Man first enters, Catalina tells him “Hola guapo, guapo, guapo, ohh” (73), but she screeches like a parrot and sensually contorts her body mimicking a woman when her man comes home. The Old Man, speaking in a deep, sexy voice amplified by the microphone, uses the typical flowery, excessive language full of “picuencia”: Catalina, how is the flower of my existence? I am so tired my hair hurts. But now that I see you, my princess, all my pains disappear. This is what I treasure coming home to you, mi cotorra del alma.You my rum and cigar—​ this is heaven. Catalina, you know how to listen.You are my confidante. (73) Furthermore, the Old Man adopts and adapts the language of Montiel’s “La vida en rosa” to make Catalina feel good, even if she is in a gilded cage. But as soon as he tells her about his impending tour and visit to his female cousin in Miami, Catalina is enraged and “flies away” to which the Old Man responds bossily, “Catalina [snaps his fingers], cuando papi dice vamoh, vamoh” (00:15:03). Catalina follows his instructions, perches on the Old Man’s arm, and eventually “flies away” again screeching “Miami! No Miami, no Miami” (74). The performance, through “choteo,” also pokes fun at men’s strategy of florid seduction, the pretense of sexual gratification, and male dominance in the domestic sphere.To calm down Catalina, the Old Man tells her “Are you ready for a little cuchi cuchi? . . . Let me get a pillow for my lap so your claws don’t damage my equipment. Is mademoiselle ready for her massage?” (00:19:37) To which Catalina responds, “Ay, sí, Papi, dámelo, dámelo. Dámelo, Papi. Give it to me” (74). Catalina’s bodily contortions, her low-​pitched voice imitating a woman’s voice, and the overall tone of her response elicits the audience’s laughter. The Old Man is always accompanied by boleros from the Buena Vista Social Club record, such as “Silencio,” by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo.These boleros are barely audible, but they help create the melodramatic mood of love typical of boleros. The Old Man’s bossy nature, hand and body gestures in contrast to the music’s suggestion of love and seduction unveil the underlying patriarchal lyrical perspective of these boleros (see Chapter 3). In other words, the music makes us see the image differently and the image makes us hear the music differently creating a metatheatrical moment that results in the audience’s laughter of recognition. Most importantly, the use of the Buena Vista Social Club’s boleros also serves as a critique of nostalgia, of a Cuba that is rescued, invented, and commercialized for a foreign audience.34 The Old Man maintains a very close human relationship with his cousin, the Old Lady. They were very tight when they were young, and they kept in contact despite 40 years of separation. This is important because it shows that the Old Man also broke Cuban rules in this aspect: Cubans were not supposed

226  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” to exchange letters or communicate with their family who left. We also know that the cousin had been financially supporting the Old Man throughout the years. Once the Old Man arrives in Miami, the performance parodies the encounter through Martina’s retelling: “Aqui [sic]. Cousin—​prima. Forty years, forty years. They sob and sob and sob. You look the same, no, you look the same. They catch up on their life. He’s got hypertension, diabetes. She’s got arthritis, cataracts, triple bypass. I don’t care who takes Lipitor, prednisone, or Synthroid” (76). The “choteo” litany of sobbing, diseases, and medicines brings down the trope of that first familial reencounter between Cubans, displacing it by foregrounding the tropes of old age. Most importantly, by making the Old Lady his cousin, as opposed to his sister, the play highlights the close familial ties that were maintained between Cubans on and off the island, despite George W. Bush’s redefinition of the Cuban family to include only the next of kin.35 Not acknowledging Cuban’s extended family, Bush’s “Initiative for a New Cuba” prohibited others than next of kin to travel to Cuba and to send remittances. It was part of the plan to hasten Cuba’s transition to democracy/​capitalism by tightening the travel embargo and reducing remittances. The characterization of the Old Lady is achieved through a crackling voice, slow movements, and a slightly hunched posture. She is humanized and, through her, the tribulations of those in Miami who have to take care of their relatives in Cuba is given voice and performed: When you wrote to me and told me you had an eye infection and couldn’t buy medicine I got a job so I could send you money. My one and only job ever. I worked in a factory making gift boxes. The kind with red felt lining. Muy fancy. . . Pero viejo, one day I remember I got scared, I blew my nose and saw red. I thought it was blood, but no, it was dust from the red felt. (00:43:40)36 Through the Old Lady, we also have access to the more recalcitrant voices of the Cuban exile community, performed by her son-​in-​law and his bulldog, Carlitos. The son-​in-​law’s monologue is performed following the stage directions: “(This speech is done with a microphone in hand.The sound is loud and there is reverb, so when the Son-​in-​Law is screaming, sometimes it’s not understood, but the rage is clear)” (77). It is full of the stereotypical conservative ideology that is characteristic of the right-​wing Cuban exile: ¡Qué! I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening in my house, I hope no one saw you come in . . . How could you? How could you? I am speechless. I can’t talk. Your cousin who gives concerts and has his picture taken with a dictator who has killed millions, ruined a country, and destroyed us.You bring him into my house? What, you’re leaving, Old Man? You can’t take hearing the truth? Are you a traitor, or worse, an opportunist who believes in nothing? Go, vete coño. Go back to Cuba

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  227 where you cannot say what you think. You want to see freedom, mira—​ listen to me, coño: se van todos pal carajo: Clinton, Castro, Janet Reno, fuck you fuck you fuck fuck fuck you all. (77–​78) The sound effects created by the microphone’s reverberations suggest the “actos de repudio” (repudiation attacks) typical on both sides of the Florida straits. Once again, Martina reduces through “choteo” his speech cursing and commenting “Coño! This is not a good family situation for me. . . But I know one thing, I gotta get outta here” (78). The characterization of his dog Carlitos, named after the Cuban patriot Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, is achieved using a deep, male voice, clasped fists, and imitation of barking. Furthermore, his monologue is accompanied by low sounds of marching soldiers, situating the scene in a sort of battleground that alludes, first, to Cuba’s Ten Years’ War (1868–​1878) that started when the historic Céspedes freed his slaves and made the declaration of Cuban independence. It also alludes to and performs Miami’s ideological battleground where US-​Cuba relations are often presented in simplistic Black and White terms:

Figure 4.10 Alina Troyano in With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit. Photo by © Michael Palma Mir. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

228  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” The General is from Cuba, the good Cuba, not the bad Cuba under the dictator. There things are bad, so bad. You and me, we couldn’t be Cuban. Why? There are no animals, no pets, no insects left. Cubans ate them all. They had to. My master told me. Our command post is in the yard. The lawn chair with the Cuban and American flag—​that’s our central command post. My master is informed. He knows what the enemy is thinking from the communist newspapers—​Granma from Cuba and the New York Times from New York. He reads them, I pee on them.We believe in freedom.You know what freedom means, roach? Freedom means having balls. Check mine out. (78) Martina uses “choteo” to critique reductive binaries and the association of freedom with masculinity and violence. When the bulldog lifts his leg to show her his balls, she responds with “Preeety,” closing her eyes in a way that elicits laughter from the audience.37 Martina’s “choteo” of Carlitos’vulgarity lowers him and makes his masculinist posturing seem ridiculous. Martina’s encounter with the bulldog introduces migration as an important theme in the play. When Carlitos asks her whether she is a traitor cockroach accompanying the communist Old Man, Martina quickly replies: “Noo. I’m Puerto Rican from Ponce. My cousins are all from Jamaica. Man (Jamaican accent), I love reggae” (78). These lines allude to Puerto Rican’s often misunderstood legal status in the United States—​they are US citizens—​as well as the proximity between Cuban and Puerto Rican cultures and colonial histories which allow citizens to pass as one or the other. The play performs a continuum of Caribbean nationalities and global migration in various ways. As La Fountain-​Stokes argues, “Troyano uses the cockroach or cucaracha as a symbol of subaltern, persecuted minorities, particularly of undocumented, poor transnational migrants” (86). Another moment in the performance, Martina climbs on the dresser and sits on a postcard from the Arizona desert and says: Manu Chao, that’s my favorite song, that’s like the cucaracha national anthem, Clandestino because that’s what we are, Clandestine. Yeah, I went to work in a city up north, that’s right, and my life I left it back in the old country. But what happens is I cannot pay when the police is after me the police is after me, and I’m clandestine, I gotta run, run, run, run and hide, run and hide. (00:35:20) Manu Chao’s song that is heard in the background became an international hit in 1998 by calling attention to the injustices toward immigrants and their situations; it condemns the marginalization and discrimination of immigrants coming from the Global South to Western Europe and the United States. Its inclusion in With What Ass right when the Arizona desert is mentioned evokes the plight of Latin American migrants to the United States while inserting it into a larger history of global migration. Furthermore, Martina criticizes

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  229 throughout the play the hard work to which she is conscripted, especially in the United States: “I work a lot, I can’t remember when was the last time I contemplated. I haven’t even had my chicken wing. Coño, como [sic] se trabaja en este país, all you do in this country is work, work, work” (81). The performance thus critiques capitalism and labor exploitation and makes the critique palatable through the “choteo” element of the chicken wings. Elián appears as a young boy toward the end of the performance “(the day the SWAT team was sent in to take him to his father so they can return to Cuba)” (82). Despite the difficulties of performing a child on stage, Troyano played Elián to great effect. Her body movements and voice perform the ambivalences and contradictory feelings Elián must have felt. Through “choteo” on the familial and macropolitics surrounding Elián, the focus is on Elián’s thoughts and responses amid the tug-​of-​war in which he found himself. The most powerful moments of Elián’s almost five minutes on stage are those in which Cuban exile material culture is foregrounded, along with his retelling of his grandmothers’ visit and his processing of his mother’s death. Martina, in her role as a reporter in Miami, goes to his uncle’s house to interview him. As many children, Elián is happy with his Nintendo, his television, and his jeans. He tells Martina: In Cuba we sit in chairs in school. Here you can lie on the floor. But I don’t like to cause I get my Fubu jeans messed up. I don’t like to get messed up. I never go outside without my hair gel.You gotta have good image if you are balsero, raft boy like me. Is important for balsero to have good hair. (82) We can see how Elián, in his short time in Miami, has incorporated the community’s ideals of consumerism and of always displaying a good image, especially if you are a “balsero.” The reference to the FUBU trademark is important. FUBU, an abbreviation for “For Us, By Us,” was a movement to support Black businesses. In the United States, FUBU was very popular among Black consumers first, then white suburban youth and immigrants adopted it. Indeed, FUBU jeans were an integral part of the turn of the century working-​class Cuban immigrants in the United States, a group to which Elián appears to be quickly acclimating, as well as youth of all races on the island. Undeniably associated with hip-​hop culture, in Cuba the trademark indicated a “Yuma” or US commodity placing the wearer within Miami diasporic remittance circuits. Although on the island FUBU carried the symbols attached to US imported goods, in both Miami and Cuba it was a sign of being well-​dressed as well as “representations of an imagined cosmopolitan, capitalist world” (Ryer 281). When Elián shares with Martina his grandmother’s visit, the story references the (in)famous event retold by media of one of his grandmother’s playfully opening the boy’s pants to see how much he had grown. Most of the media missed the ways in which making sexual jokes with children is culturally acceptable in Cuba and the Caribbean.38 Elián tells Martina:

230  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” I say, Abuelita, no. Only hillbilly hicks do that. You could get arrested for child abuse and I could sue you cause I got seven lawyers. Everybody sue each other here. No, I’m kidding, Abuelita. Besito, besito. But if you get arrested, Abuelita, is okay, because my uncles got DUI and two cousins got felonies. (83) In the play, the story is repurposed through “choteo” to signal cultural differences between Cuba and the United States. The references to the law unveil the less than clean background of Elián’s family in Miami, which had been portrayed by the media as a typical, perfectly fit Cuban family that could take care of and raise Elián better than his family on the island. Furthermore, to make the situation more palatable, the scene makes fun of the legal battle around Elián and the litigious nature of US culture where anyone can present a legal sue. The most powerful and moving moment of Elián’s performance, though not devoid of “choteo,” is Elián’s retelling of his tube trauma and his desire to return to his father: La bruja, the witch Reno, she wants to send me to Cuba on a tube. But I don’t have to go to Cuba on a tube. I can go by plane. And my mami is in the sky, en el cielo, and she got that sickness where you forget so she got lost. First she had to go down, down into the ocean, so she could jump up high into the sky, so I’m gonna pick her up on the plane. Oh, I think I hear a plane outside. I’m gonna go outside and yell: Hey plane take me back to my papi Juan Miguel Gonzalez[sic]. (83) Janet Reno was Attorney General at the time of Elián González’s dispute. After negotiating Elián’s safe return for several months, she ordered the raid when she thought talks had broken down. This provoked the rage in the Cuban exile community who continued to call her “witch” for years to come. This whole scene is performed with Elián kneeling on the floor and explaining why he is sad. After the “choteo” on Reno, which also parodies misogynistic portrayals of her, Elián tells Martina, from a child’s perspective, what happened to his mother; in these painful lines, we see how he has processed his mother’s death and his final desire to be reunited with his father. With What Ass reframes the Elián saga by “rejecting its original cast of characters (Attorney General Janet Reno, President Fidel Castro, the uncle Lázaro González, the father Juan González, President Bill Clinton, the Immigration and Naturalization Service)” (Hernández 2006, 175). Ultimately, through “choteo” and “picuencia,” it addresses political discussions that are delicate and painful for diasporic Cubans. It underscores the affective impact of those discussions in the Cuban community, politically divided between those who reside on and off the island, and in the diaspora between those who believe in and those who reject rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. It

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  231 breaks down the divide between state and economic ideologies—​communism and capitalism—​ and between Miami-​ based and La Habana-​ based Cubans, presenting the inter-​related and complicated histories of Cuba and the United States and its impact on people’s sense of belonging. It also presents islander and diasporic Cubans on the same plane, with their material, spiritual, and affective lacks and needs. This is important because cultural productions have tended to pit the two against each other and focus only on one of them. Regardless of where the audience members stand in relation to Elián’s custody battle, the play makes us “question ourselves and make deeper sense of what binds the everyday to the cataclysmic” (Jefferson B13).

Conclusion Both Memorias and With What Ass call for a redefinition of identity, especially national identity, making flexible and porous the categories of self and other, male/​female, human/​animal, Western/​hegemonic, and “primitive”/​subaltern, or, for that matter, La Habana/​Miami. Instead, they perform the multiple “in-​betweens” of intersectional, hybrid identities by radically humorous and insightful means. Their performances of excess are subject to the word, to narration and characterization in relation to a female body and a body of memories that know themselves to be a product of that very discourse. Tropicana’s ironic laughter through the parody inherent in both “choteo” and “picuencia” opens a feminist space for queer Latina self-​representation, one which resists the objectification of racialized female bodies. Her performances undermine the “natural” representation of gender and sexuality, exposing their racial, national, and class ideologies that undergird them. As I have demonstrated, the queer cabaret and the animal fable enact a ritual of recuperation of a split memory. Using fantasy and the creation of histories that are not factual and do not pretend to achieve verisimilitude, Tropicana’s excessive racialized, gender, and animal performances arrest the ideological closure of anchoring culture within a stable identity, in a specific geographical space, a linear time, and consecutive history. Both performances have open endings. Carmelita’s last lines in Memorias are: “Let us always remember que la lucha continúa and art is our weapon” (51). And With What Ass ends with Martina sharing that “Miami casi me acaba; tremendo fuacatazo . . .” (Miami almost finished me; what a whammy; 01:10:12). “The struggle continues” is a borrowed revolutionary phrase to underscore that the revolution is still an ongoing and unfinished project; Martina’s highlighting how Miami almost finished her suggests that the United States and migration may not be the answers to Cubans’ problems. There is hope in the future for Cubans in Greater Cuba and for Latines in the United States for new ways of being and doing in the world, a queer futurity “in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity” (Muñoz, Cruising 33). There is also an anticipatory illumination of another horizon of possibility (Muñoz) in art in general and performance in particular, as well as in revolutionary artists.39 Performance allows us to think critically about the world we

232  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” live in and to imagine a different future. In this case, futurity leaves a space for the physical encounters between diasporic and islander Cubans, for expressions of solidarity from below, which I will discuss in the final chapter.

Notes 1 A shorter and different version of my reading of Memorias was published in Ollantay Theater Magazine (Manzor-​Coats 1994). A shorter version of the theoretical section on Performance Art: The Body as Text and the paragraphs on Troyano’s return trip to Cuba were published in Latinas on Stage (Arrizón and Manzor-​Coats). 2 For an excellent analysis of the WOW productions, see Davy,“Constructing,”“From Lady,” “Heart,” Lady Dicks; Chansky; Dolan; Hughes et al.; and Solomon. 3 Personal communication with the author, and Solomon. Davy elaborates noting that “[r]‌eaching back to her country of birth as a source of inspiration,Troyano addressed the audience in a Cuban accent, recited some poetry, and sang the Cuban national anthem. The audience loved it, and Carmelita Tropicana was born” (Lady Dicks 5). 4 A genealogy of Latine constructions by the Anglo cultural imaginary has been undertaken by Latine cultural critics such as López, Muñoz, Noriega and López, Piedra, Román, and Sandoval-​Sánchez. 5 For an analysis of the “tropicalization” of Latines, see Aparicio and Chávez-​Silverman. 6 Villanueva-​Collado has called the male counterpart of this mystification of the Other’s sexual powers “The Mandingo Syndrome,” 42. 7 See Lowinger and Fox, and Stein for more historical information on Tropicana. For an excellent analysis of the performance of “tropicality” in Havana’s Tropicana, see Escher. 8 “un exotisme postcolonial (cabaret pre-​castriste) à l’âge de l’impérialisme commercial (marque globale).” 9 “Carmelita aparenta jugar con los estereotipos latinos, pero en realidad es con la cabeza de uno con quien está jugando. Es una terrorista cultural, una Carmen Miranda ataviada con frutas peligrosas.” 10 I am referring to the work of perhaps the most important Latina performance artists: Monica Palacio (Chicana), Latin Lezbo Comic, and Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche; Laura Esparza (Chicana), I Dis/​Member ‘The Alamo’; Marga Gomez (Cuban/​Nuyorican), Memory Tricks and I’m Marga, Pretty, Witty and Gay. See Manzor-​Coats and Arrizón. 11 The term “woman of color” began to be used in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It signaled a coalition between women who had participated in the Civil Rights, Chicano, Gay, and Feminist movements, and realized the insensitivity of these movements to issues of gender and racial oppression. Moraga and Anzaldúa’s collection This Bridge Called my Back, published in 1981, crystalized this coalition and the use of the term. As a matter of fact, although the category woman of color seems to privilege the racial axis, I have appropriated this term to underscore a coalition between women who, because of their gender, perceived non-​whiteness, and class have remained on the margins of society and academia, that is, women who, as we are used to reading, “bear the triple burden of oppression.” 12 Title is misquoted by Muñoz, Disidentifications as “Indignación” (136). 13 “un fenómeno complejo de emoción de jocundidad, facundia primitiva y gregarismo. La emotividad le da su impulso invencible; la jocundida le presta su

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  233 atractivo contagioso; la facundia le aporta su expresión inteligente; la primitividad sus maneras; y el gregarismo su ética, la defensa su motivo.” 14 George Yudice, in a different context, has called this “the social imperative to perform” (Expediency). 15 For an analysis of this play focusing on the queering of Cuban history, see Caballero. 16 For a production history of the performances analyzed in this chapter, consult their pages in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. 17 This attempt to eliminate the “fourth wall” is noted by other critics of Tropicana’s performances. Dolan, for example, in a review of Carmelita Tropicana at Club Chandalier, writes that: “The spectators mingle freely; many seem to know each other and are comfortable in the space. Performers are difficult to distinguish from spectators” (“Carmelita” 27). 18 Text in brackets refer to the performance text on the video recording, not to the stage directions on the script. 19 For another analysis of whiteness in WOW, see Davy, “Outing Whiteness.” 20 On the topic of the Cuban exile’s rhetoric versus a Cuban American or US Cuban construction of the island and nostalgia, see Manzor-​Coats and Rivero, “From Immigrants,” “(Re)Writing.” 21 Although I am falling into the trap of essentializing the typical Cuban exile audience, I am referring here to the attitude of most Cubans in Miami who were theater goers during the 1980s. While it is very unlikely that any of them would have wandered into the WOW Café or P.S. 122, Carmelita’s different personas traveled, and newspaper critics also brought them to the Miami audience. 22 “a causa de haber basado nuestra ideología casi exclusivamente en el adineramiento rápido más que en los valores sustanciales, todo lo cual nos arrastró a una orgía de simulaciones ridículas, tanto más huecas cuanto más engreídas y más despóticas en su afón de imponer a ultranza su acatamiento por el pueblo.” 23 “el picuismo es cuestión de estrato social;” “pertenece . . . a una clase social más humilde y desde ella no se cansa de aspirar.Tiene mal gusto, porque los modelos que le son familiares no son los más recomendables.”) 24 George Yudice had studied a similar phenomenon in the case of “músicas plebeyas” or “commoners music:” “Por ‘plebeyas’ me refiero a prácticas culturales de las clases de bajos ingresos y/​o de grupos racializados o subordinados que no se han domesticado al negociar su entrada en las esferas mediáticas nacionales o globales” (“By ‘commoners’ I mean cultural practices of low-​income classes and /​or racialized or subordinate groups that have not been domesticated by negotiating their entry into national or global media spheres”, “Músicas” 1). 25 Uzi Parnes and Ela Troyano were owners and managers of Club Chandelier, located at Avenue C between 8th and 9th streets in New York’s Lower East Side, or Loisaida. Carmelita has a number of multimedia works written and produced with them; among them are The Boiler Time Machine, The Conquest of Mexico as Seen Through the Eyes of Hernando Cortés’ Horse, and Milk of Amnesia. 26 “son rythme rapide avec des accélérations vertigineuses faisant dérailler la langue. Cette langue minoritaire, comme le suggèrent Deleuze et Guattari, ouvre les significations de la langue anglaise, . . . Sa performance désarticule les identités incorporées d’une orthodoxie de l’américanité.” 27 For an excellent analysis of this initiative see Chantal Rodríguez. The materials of the Latino Theater Initiative are housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library, under The Latino Theatre Initiative/​Center Theatre Group Papers.

234  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” 28 As a matter of fact, despite its Latino Theater Initiative, only 10 out of 70 plays produced by the Taper as part of its mainstage productions were penned by Latine playwrights, and not all were part of the Taper’s main season. 29 For a summary of the Elián González’s saga and analysis of this play, see Allatson. The literature on Elián González is extensive. For analysis of how he became a spectacular media event in the US and the contradictions surrounding this event within US/​Cuba relations framed by the Cold War see Banet-​Weiser, Casavantes, and Guerra. For a Cuban perspective, see Madan. 30 Emotional embargo is a concept created by Richard Blanco. “For it is not simply a political and economic embargo that needs to be ‘lifted,’ but also the weight of an emotional embargo that has kept Cubans collectively holding their breath for over fifty years. As poet and author, Richard has dedicated his life’s work to understanding that embargo, dealing with matters of the heart and spirit that policies and politics don’t really address. Namely, those stories sprung from a deep well of thought and feeling that need to be told in order to emotionally reconcile the diaspora of our various Cuban identities and claims as we move toward the post-​ embargo world of tomorrow” (Behar and Blanco). 31 You can hear Radio Reloj live at www.rad​iore​loj.cu/​mul​time​dia/​radio-​reloj-​ audio-​en-​vivo/​. For this analysis I am using the published, shortened version of With What Ass as well as the documentary video recording that Daniel Correa and I filmed for the Cuban Theater Digital Archive, with Equity’s permission. I include parenthetical notes with minutes when quoting from the recording and page numbers when quoting from the published text. 32 “Yo quería cuando niña /​tener una gran mansión /​. . . Ahora vivo en este cuarto /​. . . más vacío que un desierto” (“As a child /​I wanted to have a large mansion /​. . . Now I live in this room /​emptier than a desert, 83). 33 “Ni una nube sobre el mar /​Ni noches de pesar /​Ni penas que llorar. /​Todo lo tengo tan solo por ti /​Pues en tus brazos me encuentro en el cielo. /​Desde el día en que te vi /​La vida conseguí y fue por ti.” 34 I thank Lilianne Lugo Herrera for this comment about the Buena Vista Social Club, as well as her insightful comments about the importance of the sonic registers in With What Ass in contrast to the gestic registers in Memorias. 35 See López 2015, and Manzor. 36 Troyano adapts here her own grandmother’s story of working in a factory making the felt lined boxes (E-​mail). 37 It is important to note that the son-​in-​law character is closer to an animal than Carlitos the bulldog. As a matter of fact, the Son-​in-​Law practically barks his words, reminiscent of Carmelita’s barking when she played the part of Al Dente in The Well of Horniness. 38 For an exception, see Montero. 39 Tropicana herself has addressed the importance of her revolutionary take as an artist and the need “to go against what is given to us, to go against the social norms that have me shaken up and need reinvention” (E-​mail).

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Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  235 Aparicio, Frances. “Woman as Absence Hetero(homo)sexual Desire in the Bolero.” Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, Wesleyan UP, 1998, pp. 125–​41. Aparicio, Frances R. and Susana Chávez-​Silverman. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, U Press of New England, 1997. Arrizón, Alicia. “Martha Chaves’ ‘Staying Alive’ Narrative: Comedy, Migration and Feminism.” Latin@Canadian Theatre and Performance, edited by Natalie Alvarez, Playwrights Canada Press, 2013, 17–​35. Arrizón, Alicia and Lillian Manzor-​Coats. “Introduction.” Latinas On Stage: Criticism and Practice, edited by Alicia Arrizón and Lillian Manzor-​Coats,Third Woman Press, 2000. Banet-​Weiser, Sarah. “Elián González and ‘The Purpose of America’: Nation, Family, and the Child-​Citizen.” American Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2, 2003, pp. 149–​78. Behar, Ruth, and Richard Blanco. Bridges to/​from Cuba Blog. 23 July 2020, bridgestocuba.com. Caballero, I. Carolina. “The Queering of Cuban History: Carmelita Tropicana and ‘Memories of the Revolution.’ ” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2004, pp. 127–​40. Carr, Cynthia. “Loisaida Talking Pictures.” On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, Wesleyan UP, 2008, pp. 78–​83. Casavantes Bradford, Anita. “Remembering Pedro Pan: Childhood and Collective Memory Making in Havana and Miami, 1960-​2000.” Cuban Studies, no. 44, 2016, pp. 283–​308. Case, Sue-​Ellen. Feminism and Theatre, Routledge, 1988. Castro Mariño, Soraya M. “U.S.-​Cuban Relations During the Clinton Administration.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 4, July 2002, pp. 47–​76. Céspedes, Karina.“Cuban Bomberas on Stage: Carmelita Tropicana Speaking in Tongues Against History.” Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory, and Aesthetics, vol. 11, no.1, 1999, pp. 7–​16. Chansky, Dorothy. “The WOW Cafe: A Stage of Their Own.” Theatre Week, 24–​30 Sept. 1990, pp. 39–​41. Chao, Manu. “Clandestino.” Clandestino,Virgin, 1998. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. Directed by Lillian Manzor, University of Miami Libraries and College of Arts and Sciences, in cooperation with Cuba’s National Council for the Performing Arts, 2011. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org Davy, Kate. “Constructing the Spectator: Reception, Context and Address in Lesbian Performance.” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1986, pp. 43–​52. –––​. “From Lady Dick to Ladylike: The Work of Holly Hughes.” Acting Out: Feminist Performances, edited Linda Hart and Peggy Phelan, University of Michigan Press, 1993. –––. “Heart of the Scorpion at the WOW Cafe.” The Drama Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1985, pp. 52–​56. –––. Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre, U of Michigan P, 2010. –––​. “Outing Whiteness: A Feminist/​Lesbian Project.” Theatre Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, 1995, pp. 189–​205. Diamond, Elin. “Brechtian Theory/​Feminist Theory.” The Drama Review, vol. 32, no. 1, spring 1988, pp. 82–​94. Dolan, Jill. “Carmelita Tropicana Chats at the Club Chandalier.” The Drama Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1985, pp. 26–​32. –––​. The Feminist Spectator as Critic, UMI Research P, 1988. Escher, Cornelia. “Performing Tropicality: The Tropicana Cabaret in Havana.” Journal of Urban History, vol. 47, no. 5, 2021, pp. 980–​96.

236  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Estorino, Abelardo. “La Cucarachita Martina.” 1961. Teatro completo, Ediciones Alarcos, 2012, pp. 85–​99. Fernández, Enrique. “Fiebre del trópico.” Más, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer 1990, p. 14. Flores Martínez, Oscar.“Tour de Fuerza.” El Universal y La Cultura, 28 Aug. 1989, pp. 1+​. Forte, Jeanie. “Female Body as Text in Women’s Performance Art.” Women in American Theatre, edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, Theatre Communications Group, 1987, pp. 259–​70. Gage, Julienne. “An Iconic Image Challenged the Politics of Cuban Americans.” The World, 6 July 2018, www.pri.org/​stor​ies/​2018-​07-​06/​ico​nic-​image-​cha​llen​ged-​ polit​ics-​cuban-​americ​ans. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.’The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Hutchinson, 1987. Goodman, Lizbeth. Contemporary Feminist Theatres, Routledge, 1993. Grubb, Kevin. “Havana’s Top Banana.” New York Native, 5 Oct. 1987, p. 28. Guerra, Lillian. “Elián González and the ‘Real Cuba’ of Miami: Visions of Identity, Exceptionality, and Divinity.” Cuban Studies, vol. 38, 2007, pp. 1–​25. Gurza, Augustin. “It’s still all work, no play; L.A.’s Latino theater scene has a promising new venue but no major productions lined up, leaving backers scrambling to build support.” Los Angeles Times, 23 May 2004, p. E29. Hernández, Jesús.“With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? By Alina Troyano. Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles, April 3, 2005.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, spring 2006, pp. 173–​6. Horn, Laurie.“Hispanics Debate Politics of Dance.” The Miami Herald, 6 Nov. 1988, 1K+​. Horowitz, Adam S. “Global Voices: Performers in Conversation.” Theater, vol. 40, no. 1, 2010, pp. 97–​105. Hourie, Troy. Photographs of scenographic design for Carmelita Tropicana, With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? Cuban Theater Digital Archive. http://​ctda.libr​ary.miami. edu/​digita​lobj​ect/​18473 Hughes, Holly, et al. Memories of the Revolution. The First Ten Years of the WOW Café, University of Michigan Press, 2015. Jefferson, Margo. “When Things Kept Silent Are Finally Said Aloud.” The New York Times, 7 Sept. 1998, p. 2. La Fountain-​Stokes, Lawrence. “Commentary: Martina, Catalina, Elián, and the Old Man: Queer Tales of a Transnational Cuban Cockroach.” Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, University of Michigan P, 2014, pp. 84–​91. Lemoine, Xavier. “Performer l’intersectionnalité à la fin du XXe siècle: Carmelita Tropicana, une lesbienne cubano-​ américaine au coeur du Village newyorkais.” Horizons/​Théâtre, nos. 10–​11, 2017, pp. 57–​76, DOI: 10.4000/​ht.478. López, Ana M. et al. Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, BFI, 1993. López, Iraida H. Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora, U of Florida P, 2015. López, Ana M. and Daniel Balderston,“Memories and More Memories: A Conversation with Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano).” South: Cultural Studies in the Americas, Tulane University, 1994. Lowinger, Rosa and Ofelia Fox. Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub, In Situ P, 2000. Madan, Nora. Batalla por la liberación de Elián González, Editorial Política, 2000. Mañach, Jorge. La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba e Indagación del choteo, Ediciones Universal, 1991.

Cuatro. “La vida en rosa”  237 Manzor, Lillian. “La redifinición de la familia cubana: ceguera cultura.” El Nuevo Herald, May 2004, Opinion. Manzor-​Coats, Lillian. “Too Spik or Too Dyke: Carmelita Tropicana.” Ollantay Theater Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1, 1994, 39–​55. Manzor-​Coats, Lillian, and Inés María Martiatu Terry. “VI Festival Internacional de Teatro de La Habana: A Festival Against All Odds.” The Drama Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 1995, pp. 39–​70. McAdams, Donna A. Production photographs of Memorias de la Revolución /​ Memories of the Revolution. 1987. Memorias de la Revolución /​ Memories of the Revolution. Documentary video filmed by Uzi Parnes, 1987. Excerpt: www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​r6l_​7p4K​Jo4&t=​34s Montero, Douglas. “Biting, Fondling? No Big Deal.” The New York Post, 4 Feb. 2000, nypost.com/​2000/​02/​04/​biting-​fondling-​no-​big-​deal/​. Montiel, Sara. “La vida en rosa.” Inolvidable (50 Canciones para Recordar), EMI, 2013. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Persephone Press, 1981. Morowitz, Laura.“Crossing Borders: An Interview with Alina Troyano.” Letras Femeninas, Número especial Encuentros Transatlánticos: La identidad femenina en voces españolas y latinas actuales, vol. 31, no. 1, verano 2005, pp. 161–​8. Mosquera, Gerardo. “Bad Taste in Good Form.” Social Text, no. 15, 1986, pp. 54–​64. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, U of Minnesota P, 1999. –––​ Cruising Utopia:The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York UP, 2009. Ortiz, Fernando. “Choteo.” 1937. Albur, Special issue, no. 4, May 1992, pp. 1–248. –––​. Glosario de afronegrismos, Imprenta El Siglo XX, 1924. Palma, Michael. Production photographs of Carmelita Tropicana in With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? 2007. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked:The Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993. Piedra, José. “His/​Her Panics.” Dispositio, vol. 16, no. 41, 1991, pp. 71–​93. Rivera-​Servera, Ramón H. Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics, U of Michigan P, 2012. Rivero, Eliana. “From Immigrant to Ethnics: Cuban American Writers in the U.S.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, edited by Asunción Horno-​ Delgado et al., U of Massachusetts P, 1989, pp. 189–​200. –––​ . “(Re)Writing Sugarcane Memories: Cuban Americans and Literature.” The Americas Review, vol. 18, nos. 3–​4, 1990, pp. 164–​82. Rodríguez, Chantal. The Latino Theatre Initiative/​Center Theatre Group Papers, 1980-​2005, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2010. Rodríguez, Diane et al.“Amor Eterno. Nine Lessons in Love.” Unpublished manuscripts and production program. Latino Theatre Initiative /​Center Theatre Group Papers, 1980-​2005, 41. Box 15, Folder 4; Box 15, Folder 5; Box 38, Folder 3; Box 46, Folder 6; Box 46, Folder 23. Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Román, David. “Latino Performance and Identity.” Aztlán vol. 22, no. 2, 1997, pp. 151–​67. Ryer, Paul. “The Rise and Decline of La Yuma: Global Symbols, Local Meanings, and Remittance Circuits in Post-​Soviet Cuba.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 2, 2017, pp. 276–​97. Sandla, Robert. “Downtown Not Dead Yet.” Dance Magazine, Mar. 1991, pp. 70–​1.

238  Cuatro. “La vida en rosa” Sandoval-​Sánchez, Alberto, and David Román. “Caught in the Web: AIDS and Allegory in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Musical.” American Literature, vol. 67, no. 3, 1995, pp. 553–​85. Sandoval-​Sánchez, Alberto. José, Can You See?: Latinos on and Off Broadway, U of Wisconsin P, 1999. Solomon, Alisa. “The WOW Cafe.” The Drama Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1985, pp. 92–​101. Stasio, Marilyn. “Carmelita: A Havana Treat-​a.” The New York Post, 19 Sept. 1987, p. 70. Stein, Jean. “All Havana Broke Loose: An Oral History of Tropicana.” Vanify Fair, Sep 2011. www.van​ityf​air.com/​cult​ure/​2011/​09/​tropic​ana-​201​109 Stimac, Elias. “Havana Under the Sea.” Backstage, 18 Apr. 2003, www.backst​age.com/​ magaz​ine/​arti​cle/​hav​ana-​sea-​1-​49910/​. Stone, Laurie. “Cuba Libre.” The Village Voice, 22 Sept. 1987, pp. 32, 38. Svich, Caridad et al. “The Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes: A Collection of Impressions and Exercises.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 31, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 1–​32. Tafolla, Carmen. To Split a Human: Mitos, Machos y la Mujer Chicana, Mexican American Cultural Center, 1985. Taylor, Diana. “Negotiating Performance.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 1993, pp. 49–​57. Torres, María de los Ángeles. “Elián and the Tale of Pedro Pan.” The Nation, 27 Mar. 2000, pp. 21–​4. Tropicana, Carmelita. “Milk of Amnesia/​ Leche de Amnesia.” 1995. Latinas On Stage: Criticism and Practice, edited by Alicia Arrizón and Lillian Manzor-​Coats, Third Woman Press, 2000, pp. 118–​37. –––​.“With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? /​¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha?” Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, U of Michigan P, 2014, pp. 69–​83. Tropicana, Carmelita, and Uzi Parnes. “Memorias de la Revolución /​Memories of the Revolution.” 1987. Theatrical script. Troyano, Alina. E-​mail to author. 21 Jul 2021. Troyano, Alina et al. I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures, edited by Chon A. Noriega, Beacon Press, 2000. Villanueva-​Collado, Alfredo. “Emigration/​Immigration: Going Home Where I Belong.” Hispanic Immigrant Writers and the Question of Identity, edited by Pedro Monge Rafuls, Ollantay Press, 1989, pp. 35–​48. With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? By Carmelita Tropicana, directed by David Schweizer, 4 Nov. 2004, INTAR, New York, NY. With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? Documentary video filmed by Daniel Correa. New York, 2004. Cuban Theater Digital Archive, restricted. Yúdice, George. “Músicas plebeyas. Memorias, saberes y redes de las culturas populares en América Latina, Editorial de la Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2016, 1–​29. –––​. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke UP, 2003.

5 Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” From Bridges to Greater Cuba

Introduction Theater is the experience of a chosen diaspora from the world we know, from the certainties and alibis of our culture. At times, some of our endeavors are caressed by the clouds, look beautiful and are applauded. But their incandescence and duration in the memory of the Small Histories and the Big History are indissolubly linked to the anonymous action of men and women who embody the paradoxical task of ubiquity: taking a stance in dissidence towards the world around us in order to live in Utopia. (Eugenio Barba, 2002) In 2016, during President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba, he addressed the Cuban people at Gran Teatro de La Habana Alicia Alonso. At the moment he talked about reconciliation, he showed a photograph of Melinda López and said: So many Cuban exiles carry a memory of painful and sometimes violent separation. They love Cuba. A part of them still considers this their true home. . . And for the Cuban American community that I’ve come to know and respect, this is not just about politics. This is about family, the memory of a home that was lost, the desire to rebuild a broken bond, the hope for a better future, the hope for return and reconciliation. For all of the politics, people are people, and Cubans are Cubans. And I’ve come here, I’ve traveled this distance on a bridge that was built by Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits. . . So the reconciliation of the Cuban people, the children and grandchildren of revolution and the children and grandchildren of exile, that’s fundamental to Cuba’s future. . . You see it in Melinda Lopez, who came to her family’s old home. And as she was walking the streets, an elderly woman recognized her as her mother’s daughter and began to cry. She took her into her home and showed her a pile of photos that included Melinda’s baby picture, which

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231196-6

240  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” her mother had sent 50 years ago. Melinda later said, “So many of us are now getting so much back.” (The White House) President Obama had no way of knowing that Melinda López is a Boston-​ based US Cuban playwright. He could not have known that the project for reconciliation between Cuban people that started in 1979 (see Introduction) was picked up in 1992 and that theater practitioners were the avant-​garde of reconciliation projects in the 1990s. When I talked to Melinda about her experience and the history of that photograph, she told me: “My mom’s best friend, Juanita, kept stroking my face and saying ‘What happened to them? They never came back; they never came back’ ” (M. López). Theater, as we will see in this chapter, was at the forefront of reconciliation projects because, as I have argued elsewhere, theater allows us to go back (Manzor, “Theater”). Each performance is, like Juanita’s stroke, a burning caress that touches our sensibilities and intimate wounds, pushing us toward places that are hidden within us. Performances create a space of shared experience through which we can revisit the past and, in so doing, open the possibility to move forward.

Figure 5.1 Photograph of Melinda López, Juanita Miranda, and Alfonso Miranda in Caibarién, Cuba, 2011. Courtesy of Melinda López.

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  241 This chapter analyzes a series of projects and performances as small gestures of reconciliation between Cubans. I argue that, when put together, these small gestures constitute a transgressive cultural project that intervened in and disrupted the Miami/La Habana divide. I study five different gestures or moments of this project: the publication of Teatro cubano contemporáneo (1992); the cancelled Encuentro (Meeting) in La Habana (1993); theater exchanges in the late 1990s between Cuba and New York; the First International Monologue/​ Performance Festival (2001) that brought 27 Cuban artists to Miami; and the first La Habana-​Miami theatrical coproduction by Miami’s La Má’ Teodora (2002).1 The transgressive nature of these performances slowly intervened in the cultural policies in Cuba and in Miami; borrowing from Barba, they were “sand, not oil in the machinery” (8). As gestures, the performances themselves did not enter the cultural history of their various communities nor have they entered the history of Transnational Latine Studies. I will first present an analysis of cultural policy theories focusing on the contrast between the formation of national modern subjects in revolutionary Cuba and in exile and the articulation of cultural citizenship in Greater Cuba proposed by these gestures. I will analyze how these five gestures constitute pivotal instances of a cultural project that enacts rather than imagines a nonexclusive cultural terrain of Greater Cuba outside of the traditional island/​exile dichotomy. My title borrows the phrase “Todos por lo mismo” (everyone working toward the same goals) from Cuban composer/​singer Pedro Luis Ferrer’s eponymous song that Carmelita Tropicana used at the end of her performance, Milk of Amnesia. The refrain says: Everyone for the same thing /​against dictatorial pages, /​materialists, homosexuals, /​atheists, witches, and moralists. /​Everyone for the same thing /​against the colonial pages, /​materialists, homosexuals, /​atheists, witches, and moralists.2 (1988) Though written in 1988, this song advocating for diversity was very popular during the early to mid-​1990s in Cuba at a time when tolerance toward homosexuality and freedom of creed began to be accepted. It encapsulates Ferrer’s views that ideologies should not control individual beliefs: The concept of Homeland will be fully sustained, only when there is not even one soul alienated from its vital space. Only in this way will we coexist in peace and harmony.3 (2021) In Milk of Amnesia, the tape begins to play Ferrer’s song in Spanish. Carmelita then sings an English version, and the audience eventually sings along in both languages. Giving the last voice of the performance to Ferrer’s song, Carmelita’s

242  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” “virtual duo” with Ferrer, and the audience singing with the two of them are powerful performative acts. It underlines the desire of Usonians and many Cubans, both islanders and diasporic, for reunification and for tolerance toward difference, and it leaves us with a sense of futurity. This chapter picks up where Milk of Amnesia’s and With What Ass’ performances ended. It focuses on various performances that attuned the audience to enact “Todos por lo mismo” ’s defense for tolerance and added reconciliation toward that futurity. The title is also indebted to the groundbreaking conference and eponymous publication Bridges to Cuba/​Puentes a Cuba. I met US Cuban anthropologist Ruth Behar in La Habana in 1993. She was in Cuba talking to artists for a conference that she was planning and which took place in 1994 at the University of Michigan. The conference brought together Cuban and Cuban diaspora artists and scholars. It highlighted “the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties” (Behar back cover). Most importantly, the conference brought together diaspora scholars and artists who had been working in different places in the US building bridges to Cuba unaware of each other’s work. The conference and the various publications that ensued allowed us to see and theorize the various ways in which we were redefining homeland, nationality, and transnationalism; it created another network in the United States of Cuban diasporic intellectuals who had been involved in the dance between Small History and Big History. Theoretically and methodologically, this last chapter differs from the previous ones. The networks I analyze are between Cuban theater artists in the United States and on the island, primarily though not exclusively, those producing in Spanish. I focus on these variegated performances as gestures, public policies toward theater, and cultural heritage policies in Greater Cuba, that is, in that “border zone” where citizenship is reformulated as a result of the encounter between competing national jurisdictions and the global economy, as first theorized by film critic Ana López. Although Greater Cuba encompasses physical, psychic, and aesthetic spaces beyond the Cuba/​United States or the La Habana/​Miami axes, I concentrate on the latter because it is here that the relevant cultural and political policies are most disputed. I study the interplay between cultural policies and the performances supported and suppressed by them to understand how the process (and not necessarily the result) has the possibility to transform people’s notions of citizenship. My interest here is on how the participants negotiated dialogues as they intervened in official and unofficial revolutionary and exile cultural policies, regardless of each specific outcome. In other words, I concentrate on how participants utilized communicative reason, on how they became more effective and better actors after their encounter and relationship with “the other.” The open-​endedness of these gestures and their continuing proposals of futurity are of particular importance here, as is their impact on Greater Cuba’s public sphere as they intervened in the ever-​slow transformation of diplomatic policies on both shores.

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  243

Gestures within the Big History of Cultural Heritage Gestures may be read as evanescent forms of cultural heritage. As intangible cultural manifestations, they transmit an embodied memory that is extremely fragile and risks disappearing, as Barba’s initial quote poetically suggests. Yet, despite their impermanence and ephemeral character, they are effective forms of community transformation. For these reasons, the theorization of these projects as gestures of “Small Histories” and as forms of cultural knowledge and strategies of cultural transformation are key to the effective understanding of the “Big History” of cultural policy, politics, and heritage. Theoretical work on cultural heritage coming from academics in the United States has emphasized the interplay of localized cultural expressions in a globalizing context. Indeed, the relationship between the local and the global is key to understanding most contemporary cultural productions because these are marked by various kinds of displacements from the human to the aesthetic. While any study of cultural heritage forces us to examine closely the “local” factors that have given rise to cultural manifestations, the ones in Greater Cuba suggest that the local political and cultural forces that shape such developments in the United States are born of an interplay between Miami and La Habana.4 Furthermore, cultural heritage discourses run against the grain of current transnational or globalizing tendencies in so far as it is no longer possible to establish a direct, fixed relationship between the locus of production and consumption of culture. Arjun Appadurai has argued that in order to understand culture, or the imagination as a social practice, one has to study the relationship among the movement of people, finances, ideology, information, and technology. His model theorizes an alternative social space where the rigid notions of center-​ periphery, or this-​shore that-​shore, are replaced by more fluid concepts such as networks, circuits, and borders, despite the material realities of increased border security, militarization, and immigrant detention in the post-​9/​11 world, especially in the United States. Indeed, in Greater Cuba, as in other transnational communities, the “local” is no longer attached to only one geographical locus. We need to develop a cultural heritage discourse in which the notions of the local and the national can transcend place. Nations and regions declare their cultural specificity to legitimize themselves and forge the unity necessary to create an imagined community. In modern nation-​states that unity, its national identity and culture, presupposes a specific and demarcated geographical space with established borders. In the case of Cuba, the performances I study as gestures are also shaped in that liminal space of the memory of a nation that is imagined differently by those within both the national and the diasporic/​exilic spaces. In the US context, these gestures occurred during the 1990s, the decade of the Latino, and toward the end of regional theaters’ drive to go multicultural (see Chapter 1). In relation to Cuba, they took place during Cuba’s Special Period at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tightening of the US embargo resulting in the devastation of

244  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” Cuba’s economy.5 As a result, Cuba transformed its socialist economic policies into a dollar dominated one, although that change has not led to a capitalist economic system. By the end of the 20th century, Cuba had become part of a transnational world, where economic and political diasporas, globalization, and international division of labor, including cultural labor, affected all citizens. The very notion of national culture and citizenship, then, needs to be reconceptualized. In Cuba’s case, despite blockades and embargoes from the United States, and despite heavily militarized and surveilled borders, the previous separation of Cuba from the United States, specifically La Habana from Miami, has become ever more tenuous. The constant geopolitical and cultural border crossings by the nomads of Cuban diaspora force us to theorize culture from the perspective of displacements and cultural discontinuities, to disengage the concept of culture from one geographical space and one linear history. How can we imagine or theorize a transnational cultural citizenship? How can we begin to think about Cuba outside of the island/​exile paradigms and reconfigure it as Greater Cuba? Cultural citizenship is based on the development and maintenance of a cultural heritage through education, traditions, one language and its multiple manifestations. For transnational communities, however, this patrimony or heritage is no longer anchored in one country or one language and is affected by all those variants associated with diasporas and pressures from the global marketplace. The state apparatus still defines citizenship in legal, social, and cultural terms so that those uncontained become the undocumented, the detained, and the balsero. However, the state is no longer the main frame through which cultural citizenship is conceived since it must face transborder affinities that the state apparatus can no longer contain. In the specific case of Cuba and its diaspora in the United States, those transborder affinities become much more complex given the fact that Cuban cultural policies after 1959, on the island and in exile, with their regulatory mechanisms that dictate and control what constitutes the norm for citizenship, have followed a confrontational Manichean impulse based on opposites.6 Very much like modern constructs of citizenship and subjectivity are based on the need to overcome alterity, the construction of citizenship in both shores depends on the other it rejects.7 In Cuba, the citizen, “el hombre nuevo” (“the new man”) was constructed against its others of the post-​1959 diaspora, while in Miami, it is this very other that constitutes the norm of an exile identity that rejects and excludes anything associated with revolutionary Cuba. The construction of Cuban identity, both in Cuba and the United States, has followed this logic of repudiation, as I began to present in Chapter 1. Cuba rejects the “uncultured gusano” (worm) and/​or Miami’s economic and political “mafia,” and Miami rejects the communists, that is, those who reside on the island.8 And both shores share a long legacy of racism and homophobia that plays into this construction in analogous and problematic ways, so that Blacks, queers, and others in the LGBTQ community are repudiated in both places.9 Before analyzing the various performative gestures that initiated a dialogue from below between Miami and La Habana, I will discuss various documents

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  245 that helped to forge cultural policies in Greater Cuba from the 1960s to the 1990s to understand the development of this Manichean strategy. Cuban cultural policy, post 1959, has forged a construct of belonging through educational and cultural regimes, with the background of the benevolent socialist state and the threat of “el imperialismo yanki” along with Miami’s “uncultured Cuban mafia.” Initially, during the 1960s (1959–​1967), the state and its cultural policy, as custodians of nationalism, wrote a cultural history that excluded those not residing in the physical territory of Cuba, as well as those artists within Cuba whose work was deemed questionable because of formal elements or questions of content. “Within the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing” was and continues to be the motto of that cultural policy. In the decade of the 1970s, this motto was institutionalized through a series of real and symbolic acts of violence. The so-​called Gray Quinquennium (1971–​ 1976), a very dark decade for those involved, had a nefarious effect in theater. Some playwrights died in total anonymity. Others, like Abelardo Estorino, continued writing in Cuba but his plays were not staged. And others were forced to or opted to abandon Cuba, like Alberto Sarraín who left after being thrown out of the university and serving a jail sentence.10 Generally, cultural policies are formulated by nation-​states or by a network of institutions and have a set of documents in which those policies are outlined. In the case of Cuban exile cultural policies, although those documents do not exist, the basic tenets of cultural policies can be discerned from the various cultural institutions that have been the mouthpiece of such policies, and they are taken for granted by the older exile communities. In exile, cultural policies, a specular reflection of their abject other, have also operated following the same motto with a small variation: “against the Revolution everything, within the Revolution nothing.” Max Castro has demonstrated how The figure of Fidel Castro. . . encourages the adherence of moderate and liberal elements to the coalition in the United States in favor of a hardline policy and exposes opponents of such a policy to vicious ideological and moral attacks.11 (212) As a result, the historical exile has favored those genres and forms of Cuba’s Republican period as the true representatives of cultural heritage. The emotive concept of fatherland continues to function as a driving force behind this collectivity, but it is completely separated from the revolutionary state and its cultural production. In Miami, specifically, that cultural policy has been articulated as if exile was the true and only source of authentic Cubanness, a homogeneous and univocal construct. A subject can belong to this repository once s/​he has abandoned the island and can produce in “true freedom.”12 Clearly, the construction of exile’s cultural heritage constitutes an act of symbolic violence that hides the very power relations that guarantee the legitimacy of those who defend that very heritage.13 Max Castro argued that

246  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” although the Cuban-​ American community is politically more diverse today and its center of gravity less extreme in its discourse and tactics, the hardline faction has more power today than ever. It maintains its dominance in the community and, by its instrumentation of the institutions of the hyperpower, has incalculably greater power than twenty years ago.14 (116) Although he was writing in 2005, the same is true today.The most conservative sectors of the exile community would like this policy and its bellicose rhetoric to continue, as is evident in the political debates following the November 2020 and July 11, 2021 protests in Cuba. Concomitant with the Special Period, there was an opening of Cuban cultural policies in the 1990s with the goal of “the theoretical and practical reconstitution of our [Cuba’s] own social project” (Suarez Durán 151).15 Cultural policies revisited the concept of the national and began to connect it openly to culture. The Ministry of Culture through its various departments made explicit its cultural policy. The National Council for the Performing Arts (CNAE), for example, has as its main goal to establish a direction that facilitates the active participation of creators in the elaboration and execution of its cultural policy.16 (Consejo Nacional de las Artes Escénicas) But what is the role of diasporic creators in this cultural policy that, as all cultural policies, is at the service of promoting a national culture? According to Abel Prieto, Minister of Culture between 1997 and 2012, Cuban cultural policy tried to recuperate and integrate all Cuban creators regardless of where they resided and regardless of their political inclinations. His answer to that question was the following: Since the 80s, many years ago, there is an editorial policy that tries to place literary authors who have emigrated within Cuban literature, through an evaluation of their contribution in terms of Cuban art. We feel we are responsible for the totality of Cuban culture, regardless of where the works are produced. Nowadays, we have a better knowledge of émigré artists and writers here than in Miami, for example. In the National Museum, in the wings of contemporary art, the works of émigré artists are exhibited in total hierarchy. It is a mature cultural policy, based on a clear criteria of acknowledging a creator’s contribution to a national culture.17 (Arreola) Despite the fact that Cubans in Cuba and in its multiple diasporas live in distinct spaces operating under different economic, cultural, and juridical systems which cannot be collapsed so readily, Cuban cultural policy tried to go beyond those differences. The maturity of this cultural policy is clear. However, the rhetoric utilized exhibited the competition between “here” and “there,” characteristic

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  247 of cultural policies on both shores. Implicit in the Minister’s phrase, “here we know better than in Miami,” is the notion that Miami’s exile is ignorant and uncultured, a notion that Cuba’s press has promoted constantly, especially in times of heightened conflict with the US. This competition between “here” and “there” is also promoted consciously or unconsciously by policies and is now part of the unconscious of contemporary Cuba’s audience, as we will see in this chapter.18 In November 1998, the UNEAC (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists) celebrated its VI Congress. The main thread of those meetings was to present Cuban cultural policy as one that respected diversity. Carlos Martí, then-​president of the UNEAC, characterized the National Union as a space of unity around the cultural policy of the Revolution, but in the midst of great diversity, and the institution is very respectful of that diversity because here creators from very different origins and projects converge, coexist, and that strengthens us.19 (Castañeda,“Seis” 51) The Congress also brought up the need to discuss the Cuban artists’ prolonged international trips and stays as well as the need to consider the situation of émigré artists.20 Carlos Padrón, then-​president of UNEAC’s Performing Arts section, underscored that Of its 1,104 members, the Association has more than a hundred abroad, who maintain their ties, and we try to analyze the causes that led them to this economic migration, so that the number does not increase, not because we are against people traveling (I myself have just returned from Paris, where I went to do a play), but so that great Cuban artists do not have to stay in other countries.21 (Castañeda, “Seis” 53) The ebb and flow of cultural policies analyzed above can be read as part of the Big History poetically theorized by Eugenio Barba: There exists a Big History which drags us along, submerging us, and in which we often feel incapable of intervening. . . Only when we observe it in retrospect, when time has passed, do its twists and turns appear clear to us. The Big History concedes us no freedom at all. (2) However, amid this inexorable current, Barba suggests that It is possible to outline small islands, tiny gardens where our hand may make its mark and where we can live out our Small History. . . Clearly

248  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” the Big History and the Small History are not independent. But the Small Histories are not merely portions of the Big one. (2) For him, theater is one of those islands: Theatre is an attempt to stand in the waters of the river without letting oneself be dragged away by the current. This is the history of theatre: small gardens and tiny pools of water sheltered from the force of the current. Sometimes submerged by it. (3) My reading of the various performances and projects in this chapter as gestures that are part of Small Histories dancing with Big History theoretically brings together ideas presented in e-​misférica’s issue on Decolonial Gestures, Judith Butler’s reading of José Esteban Muñoz’s various takes on gestures, Juana María Rodríguez’s beautiful work on queer gestures, and Eugenio Barba’s theorizations. Gesture in English and gesto in Spanish come from the Latin word gestus that means (1) movement of the limbs, bodily action, carriage, gesture, and (2) performance (duty).22 The Real Academia de la Lengua’s dictionary includes in its definition of gesto (1) a movement of the face, hands, or other parts of the body with which various mood affects are expressed; (2) an exaggerated movement of the face due to habit or illness; (3) an act or deed; (4) a notable character or behavior trait. If we take “gesture” to mean a movement of part of the body to express a certain set of affective responses, what are “transgressive gestures” within the context of the cultural policies analyzed above? And if “gestures” are a trait and an act, at what juncture could gestures be theorized as transgressive within the context of Greater Cuba? Juana María Rodríguez’s work allows me to think through some of these questions. She performatively demonstrates that gestures are not just nonverbal enunciations; oftentimes we express through gestures what cannot or should not be said through words (4). She argues that Gestures are where the literal and the figurative copulate. The reach of the hand forward to touch the face of the Other is also a process of extending the limits of one’s spirit to diminish the space between bodies. Likewise, the political gestures we undertake . . . enact the process of forging collectives. Gestures can be so small or quotidian as to escape notice.They can be large, definitive, and demanding. (4) For her, queer gestures are not inherently transgressive; they are ways that allow us to imagine radically different futures and embodied ways of being. Like Rodríguez who underscores the connection between sociality and futurity in José Esteban Muñoz’s work, Judith Butler reads the potentiality

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  249 or futurity inherent in Muñoz’s theoretical corpus. Butler states that “Gesture sounds weak; it is barely an act and surely not a collective revolutionary action. But perhaps gesture names those forms of power that do not conform to mastery or heroism—​weak messianic upheavals, if you will, or potentialities” (8). Analyzing Walter Benjamin’s notion of scenic events in Kafka, she clarifies how the “setting no longer provides the points of reference for understanding the gesture that emerges in its midst; that gesture has turned against the setting in order to become its own scenic event” (9). This is precisely my argument in this chapter: the five gestures analyzed here “turned against” their contexts. However, in order to “turn against,” as we will see, they had to somehow enter into dialogue with the hegemonic “forms of power,” namely the cultural institutions on both sides of the Florida Straits within and against which these gestures were enacted. In Barba’s words, these gestures/​Small Histories danced with Big History. Furthermore, these gestures, in so far as they “include the endless sequence of partial moves, interrupted starts, and disheartening breakdowns that occur when we dare to move beyond the possible” (Rodríguez 9), these Small Histories or scenic events, interrupted the linear temporal frame of Big History. Their open-​endedness was full of potential so that “a foreclosed future breaks into present time. The future does not exactly arrive but flashes up in a gesture that disturbs the terms of constriction” (Rodríguez 10). They enacted the futurity of a Greater Cuba beyond the Miami-La Habana divide of Big History because, as Butler argues via Muñoz, “[f]‌or those whose future is uncertain, or even unimaginable, however, it is potentiality that emerges when the frame breaks apart or, indeed, when some collective tears open the map to see what other pathways are possible” (7).

First Gesture: Teatro cubano contemporáneo As I argued in the Introduction, Lourdes Casal was one of the first Cuban intellectuals to establish bridges to Cuba in the late 1970s and who inspired a generation of US Cuban critical intellectuals who continued her work in the early 1980s. However, that work came to a halt during the 1980s for several reasons related to Big History.23 It was picked up in the 1990s through debates in the public sphere around the issue of the incorporation of émigré artists in Cuba’s cultural heritage sparked by a series of publications in the realm of theater. In 1992, Carlos Espinosa Domínguez (who resided in Spain at the time) published the anthology Teatro cubano contemporáneo (Contemporary Cuban Theater). Like all publications sponsored by the Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, it was an exquisite edition—​hardcover, fine paper—​which, because of its cost, did not circulate widely among theater critics or playwrights, in Cuba or in the United States. This anthology generated a polemic because of its unusual and transgressive character: it was the first post-​revolutionary anthology that dared to include Cuban playwrights from both shores. In the Introduction titled “Una dramaturgia escindida” (A Divided Dramaturgy),

250  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” Espinosa Domínguez wrote an excellent 64-​page summary of the different tendencies and trends in 20th century Cuban dramaturgy. The last two sections are dedicated to theater produced “En la Cuba de enfrente” (“In the Cuba across the way”) in “a space of/​for liberty and memory.” This is the first theatrical “gesto” of breaking down the Cuba-​US divide, a gesture toward a Greater Cuba even before the concept was theorized. The first review of the anthology was done by Rine Leal, dean of Cuban theater history, in La Gaceta de Cuba, the official publication of UNEAC. At the end of the review, Leal stated the following: The heart of the matter is that we must accept that “other” theater as a part of our own, as an expression of our culture, and most importantly, study its development inserted within our own, not as a foreign element. If dialogue is fundamental in theater, then it is time to converse theatrically with that “other” dramaturgy which is also our own [. . .] It is one and the same dramaturgy produced under different circumstances. I welcome discussion and replies to my own questions.24 (“Asumir” 7) These suggestions are important for Cubans and other US Latines since it was one of the first times that Caribbean intellectuals recognized the theatrical or artistic production by Latines who reside in the United States as part of their national tradition. Leal’s words are especially relevant in the Cuban case given the specific cultural and sociohistorical bind in which they were immersed. It is well-​known that Chicane and Nuyorican writers and intellectuals had begun to dialogue with their Mexican and Puerto Rican counterparts in the United States, even if the result of those dialogues initially were unsuccessful in overcoming prejudices. For Cubans, both in the United States and on the island, however, the words “dialogue” and “exchange” are charged automatically with solely economic and political allusions. Cuba was experiencing in 1992 one of the most difficult moments of its history. For them, not only was collective survival of the values and accomplishments of the revolutionary process at stake, but also human survival, the physical survival of each individual who, for the first time since the Revolution, had no means by which to acquire vital necessities. Within that daily chaos of survival, the US embargo acquired other dimensions. For many US Cubans who support the embargo for its supposedly political consequences, dialogue—​even within civil society—​means “to cooperate directly with the Castro regime.” Some Cubans on the island, for example, Enrique Núñez Rodríguez who published a reply to Rine Leal’s article, also in La Gaceta de Cuba, read this dialogue as a means to “to turn the other cheek” so that “they can slap both,” (“poner la otra mejilla … nos abofeteen las dos,”Núñez Rodríguez 32). Consequently, any cultural encounter for Cubans is tied to a dialogue always charged with these economic and political repercussions; on both shores civil society is intermingled and confused with the state.

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  251 Despite those difficulties, a number of Cubans from both shores have been ready and willing to establish communication and exchange ideas, in other words, to dialogue in the true sense of the word. In the realm of theater, for example, proof of this is the fact that a photocopy of Rine Leal’s article circulated via fax and snail mail among many Cuban playwrights and critics outside of Cuba, the majority of whom learned about the anthology from Leal’s review. In addition, Leal’s article was published in its entirety in an issue of Ollantay Theater Magazine—​the first magazine dedicated to the study of Latine theater—​edited by Pedro Monge Rafuls (Leal, 1993). Also published in that same issue was a reply to Leal’s and Núñez Rodríguez’s articles titled “Manos a la obra” (“Let’s Get to Work”). The reply emphasized the necessity and desire to compare our literary preoccupations and Cuban theater produced on and off the island. Yes, we want to see our plays participating in the festival of the monologue, in the festival in Camagüey or in Havana.We want to share the theatrical expertise which we may have acquired abroad. We want to be branded as good or bad authors after seeing our plays staged in Cuba. We want to exercise with you, the right to be Cuban playwrights and to be included in the same anthologies. Yes, united, we want to remove the ‘ghosts,’ bitterness and disintegration from the stage. (39)

Second Gesture: (Cancelled) Encuentro en La Habana In 1993, the EITALC, Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe (International School of Latin American and Caribbean Theater), then headquartered in La Habana and directed by the Argentine playwright Osvaldo Dragún and Cuban theater researcher Ileana Diéguez, invited me to participate in a seminar on “Ritual and Theatricality,” speaking on Cuban theater in the United States. The seminar was part of their September activities in Machurrucutu, and it coincided with the Festival Internacional de Teatro (FIT)-​93. Capitalizing on this opportunity, I suggested to Osvaldo Dragún, as director of the EITALC, the possibility of a small forum or round table discussion of Cuban theater critics and artists from both shores where some of the questions raised in Leal’s article and in Espinosa Domínguez’s introduction could be explored. This Encuentro en La Habana, as Rine Leal named it, was received with enthusiasm and suspicion in the United States and in Cuba. Rine Leal and I, via intermittent fax communications rerouted via Canada and Texas, organized the round table. In the United States, Pedro Monge Rafuls and I were coordinating the details of the diaspora artists. Following guidelines suggested by him in his review, Monge Rafuls and I offered a series of topics that could be the base of our discussion; ultimately it was to revolve around the theme of “Uprootedness/​Deterritorialization and the Struggle for Identity.”25 Unfortunately, the Encuentro was cancelled the first week in July as the Ministry of Culture in Cuba did not feel the moment was right for such an

252  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” encounter.26 Indeed, our Encuentro was ahead of the series of official dialogues and conferences that took place shortly afterward. The first conference “La Nación y la Emigración” (Nation and Migration) took place in April 1994 in La Habana; and in May 1994 the Olof Palme International Center in Sweden sponsored the first encounter of writers from Cuba and its diaspora.27 Despite the Encuentro’s cancellation, some of the US Cuban participants decided to travel to La Habana in an unofficial capacity and attend the theater festival as members of the “US Latin [sic] community” (“comunidad latina en los Estados Unidos”).28 Though that first Encuentro never took place, the experience of its organization, Troyano’s and my trip to Cuba (see Chapter 4), and the many people-​to-​people exchanges that we had, initiated a very fruitful dialogue and exchange. The cancelled Encuentro started an important collaborative network of US Cuban, island-​Cuban, and Latine theater artists and scholars, and one of the first academic articles coauthored by Cubans residing on and off the island was published.29 Most importantly, it changed all of us involved. We discovered that politics does not have to be always about “polemos”: war, struggle, and antagonistic endeavors.Theater was able to bring us together, despite our many differences, so that we found points of commonality upon which to base those communications and future collaborations. As artists, critics, and intellectuals, we discovered that none of us could be reduced simply to one of two camps, us versus them. Indeed, like Barba’s anonymous men and women of the quote, we took a stand in dissidence and unknowingly laid the groundwork for future gestures, as I demonstrate in the following sections.30

Third Gesture: Repertorio Español’s Revoltillo and CubaTeatro in New York US Cuban Eduardo Machado (Cojímar, 1953) left Cuba with his brother through Operation Pedro Pan in 1961 (see Cuban Theater Digital Archive). After reuniting with his parents, they moved to Canoga Park, in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. Machado embraced his gay sexuality in high school when he also started acting. For many years, he attended California’s Padua Hills Playwrights Festival first as an actor and then as playwright studying with María Irene Fornés and Sam Shepard, among others. In 1981, he was selected to participate in INTAR’s Hispanic Playwright-​ in-​ Residence Lab under María Irene Fornés, which he eventually directed for seven years in the 1990s. He finally moved to New York in 1983 and has been living there ever since, often splitting his time between New York and Los Angeles. Revoltillo is the Spanish translation of Broken Eggs, the last play in his famous Floating Island tetralogy. Like his early plays, it is informed by his family’s history. Machado has said that “When you are young, you write out of anger” (Petersen). And one can see this anger in his early plays: toward oppressive familial ties, homophobia, and Cuban exilic nostalgia. They were first produced by the Ensemble Studio Theater both in New York and Los

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  253

Figure 5.2  Photograph of Eduardo Machado. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Angeles during the early 1980s, and then by Theater for a New City and Los Angeles Theater Center after 1986. His most significant breakthrough came in 1994 when the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles produced his Floating Island Plays, the same year that he was playwright-​in-​residence at the Taper through the Latino Theater Initiative, coinciding with the 1994 balsero crisis in which more than 35,000 Cubans arrived at the US shores in makeshift rafts (see Chapter 1). There are many points of convergences between the United States and Latine networks in which Machado and the other playwrights discussed in this book participated. María Irene Fornés and her workshops in California and New York are one of the most important. INTAR’s Hispanic American Music Theater Lab, the Latino Theater Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum, and South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project are other key nodes of these shared networks. But Machado brings a new node: New York’s Repertorio Español. This addition is key for the under-​studied networks of African American and Cuban artists in New York since at least the mid-​1960s, for the networks established between US Cuban playwrights and Cuban theater on the island, and for the networks of Latine playwrights who write in Spanish and/​or have Spanish productions of their work.

254  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”

Figure 5.3 Photograph of Gilberto Zaldívar. Photo by Bert Andrews. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Repertorio Español was founded in New York in 1968 by US Cuban producer Gilberto Zaldívar (1934–​2009) and US Cuban Artistic Director René Buch (1925–​2020). Zaldívar had opened Teatro Arlequín in the mid-​1950s, one of the most important pocket theaters in La Habana, while Buch came to Yale during the same period to study literature after a short but successful career as a playwright and theater director. Zaldívar left Cuba for New York in 1961 where he continued to work as an accountant for Diners Club. He met Stella Holt and Frances Drucker, a lesbian couple who ran the Greenwich Mews Theater, an Off-​Off-​Broadway company that produced Black theater, including the work of Alice Childress, Langston Hughes, and Wole Soyinka. They were also one of the first companies to perform with an integrated and nontraditional casting. Zaldívar joined them in 1965 as Associate Producer, and when Holt suddenly died of a heart attack in 1967, Zaldívar became Producing Artistic Director. In 1966, Zaldívar started the Spanish Mews Workshop that led to the creation of Repertorio Español.31 Repertorio’s original mission was to introduce the best of Latin American and Spanish theaters through quality productions in the Spanish language and to bring theater to a broad audience in New York City and across the country, including seniors, students, and Hispanics (Repertorio’s preferred term), and

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  255

Figure 5.4 Photograph of René Buch. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Latines of all national backgrounds.32 Robert Weber Federico joined them as a resident designer and associate artistic producer in 1970. In 1972, Repertorio Español moved to the Gramercy Arts Theater where the company has since remained. From the very beginning, Repertorio had a resident company of actors such as Ricardo Barber, Ofelia González—​the first actress to win an Obie without speaking English—​Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado, and René Sánchez. In 1984, the company began to present and commission new plays by Hispanic American playwrights who lived in the United States, and in 1991 inaugurated an infrared simultaneous translation system which provides an opportunity for non-​Spanish-​speaking audiences to enjoy the company’s vast selection of plays. During the first two decades of Repertorio Español, Black artist Bert Andrews was one of its photographers. Andrews documented African American theater in New York for decades and was a close friend of Zaldívar since their early days at Greenwich Mews. In 1998, Repertorio established The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship for Directors, bringing in new directors to the company, such as Victoria Collado, Michael John Garcés, Leyma López, and José Zayas. Since 2000, through the annual MetLife Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition, Repertorio has been fostering new Latine playwrights who write primarily in Spanish.

256  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” Repertorio Español’s relationship with Eduardo Machado started in 1986 when they were the first ones to stage Machado in Spanish, Las damas modernas de Guanabacoa (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa). The next season, 1987–​1988, Revoltillo was presented over 100 times to great success.33 And in 1988, they commissioned Machado to develop the play Resident Alien. By 1988, even Time magazine was capitalizing on the decade of the Hispanic (see Chapter 1) devoting a special issue to Hispanics. In an article dedicated to the theater, William A. Henry III wrote: “Like blacks a generation ago, Hispanics have become the ethnic group of the moment, both off-​Broadway and at many of the nation’s foremost regional theaters” (83). And avant-​garde theater director Joanne Akolaitis, interviewed for the piece, stated “the Latin flavor imports ‘a much more visceral energy’ and ‘leads to an art that family history, romance, politics, and the history of a nation all fit into’ ” (83). This article featuring four different artists characterized Machado as “The most gifted of all Latino playwrights” (82). Although Machado had become one of the most staged Latine playwrights—​his work was well-​known primarily to Off-​ Off-​Broadway Anglo audiences on the East Coast and to mixed audiences on the West Coast—​he was not well-​known to Spanish-​speaking audiences until Repertorio’s Revoltillo. Machado’s plays, while generally well-​received by the audience and the press, were somewhat controversial. According to Machado, his work “was stereotyped for a long time because I write about wealthy Cubans and I think people have a hard time dealing with Hispanics who are not poor or on drugs” (Diane Butler, B3). Politically, his works were also offensive to liberal US Americans because of the plays’ anti-​communist messages. Furthermore, his playbills often included that “he is still not an American citizen, that he is still waiting to take a plane ‘back to where I belong,’ that he is a political exile ‘in a country that has been kind enough to take me in’ ” (Miguel Pérez). As a self-​identified political exile who often wrote about rich Cubans, his plays were also received with apprehension by some Latine audiences and artists immersed in identity politics as well as by regional theaters who embraced multiculturalism, both characteristic of the decade. The Miami 1988 production of Revoltillo met a similar lukewarm audience response. However, before discussing the play’s reception, it is important to understand how and why the play traveled from New York to Miami. The play was presented as part of the Festival of Hispanic Theater, a festival that started in 1986 under the name of Festival of Ethnic Theater. It was founded by Teatro Avante, along with Acting Together, an organization of Miami’s Hispanic theater companies who came together to promote each other’s works. By 1989, Teatro Avante and its founding director, Mario Ernesto Sánchez, were the sole sponsors, and they started inviting international companies; the festival changed its scope and name to International Hispanic Theater Festival (IHTF) in 1990. Currently, it is the only one of its kind in the United States bringing the most established theater companies from Latin America and Europe and occasionally inviting US-​Latines.34 The relevance and artistic quality of this festival have

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  257 been acknowledged internationally by a number of important awards including the Regional Award for the Arts (1994) by the Cultural Olympiad of Atlanta’s Olympic Committee and the prestigious Federico García Lorca Award (1995) in Fuentevaqueros, Spain, for its contribution to the development of Hispanic theater in the United States. For all these reasons, American Theater recently described it as “[t]‌he most distinguished U.S. portal to the Americas” (Gener, 79). The festival garnered international recognition throughout the years despite its less than auspicious beginning. In 1986, it found itself amid an unwanted (and unwarranted) political controversy: the cancellation of Teatro Nuevo’s production of Dolores Prida’s Coser y cantar.35 This is the quintessential US Cuban/​ Latina play about the internal struggles of a bicultural woman trying to negotiate between her US self, portrayed by the character “She,” and her Latina self, portrayed by “Ella.”The play should be staged bilingually, according to the playwright, thus performing the dualities of Latinas who live between two cultures, two languages, and two world visions. Like the rest of Prida’s plays, there is no mention of (macro) political issues, but her works do open the space for the audience to think about gender politics and the different plights of Latinas in the United States. However, Dolores Prida had traveled to Cuba several times and was in favor of normalizing relations between Cuba and the United States. As a result, a sector of the Cuban exile community demonized her as a communist and “enemy of the exile community.” Vilification elevated to threats against the Museum of Science where the play was going to be staged, and to death threats against members of Teatro Nuevo and its artistic director, Rafael de Acha. As a result, Acting Together voted unanimously to cancel the play. Prida still came to Miami to participate in the educational component, and the play received a staged reading under close police surveillance.36 By 1988, Acting Together decided to create an academic panel in charge of selecting the local and national theater companies that were to participate in the festival, which finally had found a home at the South Florida Theater Company’s Minorca Playhouse. Repertorio Español’s Revoltillo was one of two national productions chosen, and Cuban audiences in Miami gave it a lukewarm reception. The play is about a dysfunctional family in exile and the generational disagreements vis-​à-​vis acculturation in the United States. The older generation in the play holds a staunch anti-​communist stance and lives in a nostalgic world where everything was better in Cuba. The younger members of the family, on the other hand, consider themselves “first-​generation white Hispanic American” (Machado, “Broken” 181) and often remind their parents and grandparents that Cuba “was and is a myth. Your life there is mythical” (Machado, “Broken” 177). Set in a wedding party where Lizette, a young Cuban-American, is marrying her Jewish boyfriend, we see a multigenerational set of complex characters who are all addicted to something ranging from alcohol and valium to Tab and cocaine.37 Their addiction, like Sedgwick has theorized and Ricardo Ortiz has eloquently analyzed, “resides only in a structure of a will that is somehow insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is

258  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”

Figure 5.5 Production photograph of Revoltillo. Photo by © Gerry Goodstein. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

insufficiently pure” (Sedgwick 132). Insufficiently free because all the characters are tied to the trauma of exile and homophobia directly or indirectly. Rather than focusing on the importance of family ties, the play unveils the claustrophobia of family gatherings and an examination of both old and new values. As Oscar, the gay character, says at the end of Act One: “The family portrait? This family . . . My family. The Father, Jesus Christ his only son and the Holy Ghost (Crossing himself) . . . why the fuck did you send me to this family?” (194). It was probably the questioning of traditional values that led many Cubans to consider the play to be an attack on sacrosanct Cuban exilic constructions of the family, middle-​class ethos, heteronormativity, and communism. Machado was right when he said, talking about his plays in general: “God knows the Cuban people don’t want to see themselves as anything but heroic, but all minorities are like that. It’s exciting to audiences which want to be challenged but difficult for those who don’t want their comfort zones moved” (Reynolds). I still remember (and my notes from the play’s Miami production register) the audience’s bouts of laughter throughout the play as well as the soft whispers during what seemed uncomfortable moments for audience members—​the hint toward incest between two brothers and the cocaine-​ snorting scenes, for example.

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  259 Norma Niurka’s review in El Nuevo Herald titled “Un Revoltillo en la cabeza” (Jumble in the Head), played with the double meaning of “revoltillo” (scrambled eggs and jumble) to suggest what she thought was the play’s confusing ideas: Through brushstrokes that are sometimes humorous, other times melodramatic, it raises the demystification of the Cuban family, and exposes generational conflicts between Cubans, the emotional distance between nostalgia and current affairs, religious hypocrisy, the relativity of ideas, depending on the side from which it is viewed. These ideas may be valid, but they are presented one on top of the other, without exploring much, with a fragmented dialogue, in a work built through bits and pieces that are connected through the entrances and exits that the director, René Buch, has ordered to his actors.38 (4C) The jumble that Niurka sees is a result of the fact that, indeed, this play’s characters embody multiple contradictions and perform the paradoxes of their cultural identity. As Nelson P. Valdés has studied in a different context, This family also seems to have a formalistic attachment to Catholicism yet fails to demonstrate even minimal religious values. It is a family immersed in the cult of the mother (“Momism”), but its authority relations remain patriarchal. The family left behind a nationalist revolution but not its nationalism or national pride. (7) The fragmented dialogue and short scenes Niurka mentions, trademarks of his mentor Fornés, are characteristic of Machado’s early plays, as are the traces of Chekhov and O’Neill. As a matter of fact, Machado’s plays were described often as transculturated Chekhov: “Imagine Checkhov in tropical colors humming Guantanamera and you have a sense of Eduardo Machado—​Russian despair lightened by Latin impetuosity” (Gimbel 94). If the play was received coldly by Cubans in Miami, it became a polemic in 1998 when Repertorio took its production to Cuba as part of their CubaTeatro project. Repertorio Español had been successful in developing several cultural exchange programs with Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.39 Therefore, to celebrate its 30th anniversary in 1998, it made sense that they revisit their Cuban roots. In 1995, Repertorio’s producer, Gilberto Zaldívar, traveled to Cuba on a personal trip to see his aging relatives.40 During that trip, he had the opportunity to meet old friends in the theater world, including Carlos Padrón, an actor and playwright who was head of the Performing Arts section at the UNEAC. This informal meeting led to a signed exchange agreement in 1995 between Repertorio Español and UNEAC. The CubaTeatro project was born out of this personal trip and informal meetings with theater artists. As Zaldívar explained:

260  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” Although CUBATEATRO is not intended to address political issues between the U.S. and Cuba, it will create hope that these types of artistic partnerships will continue and serve as an example to those in power. CUBATEATRO can be a cultural bridge between Cuba and the United States, creating an open forum where people can learn about the richness and dynamics within the Cuban and Cuban-​American histories. Audience reactions to the ideas and themes presented, we suspect, will vary greatly. Older and younger Hispanics (and certainly non-​Hispanics) often have very different perceptions of Cuba and life before and after Castro. (Zaldívar, “CubaTeatro” 2) Like the cancelled Encuentro, CubaTeatro was born out of friendships and networks from below to facilitate cultural engagement with and dialogue between theater artists. But it also had to negotiate with the UNEAC, a cultural organization with its own juridical identity but with close ties to the Ministry of Culture. The various materials in Repertorio Español Records include the financial arrangements and the grants requested for this ambitious project. Major funding came from the ARCA Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation (Fuentes, “CubaTeatro”). In a letter to Tomás Ybarra Frausto from the Rockefeller, Zaldívar underscored that Few, if any, of the CUBATEATRO plays to be presented at our New York City theatre will be explicitly political in point of view. Delving instead into the paradoxes, ambiguities, contradictions, and ironies of history, Repertorio’s CUBATEATRO productions will explore the deeper realms of a country’s rupture of culture and community. The project will strive to include all people, not only those with Cuban or Latin heritages. (Zaldívar, “Letter”) This letter included a proposed budget of $51,280 for CubaTeatro’s varied Humanities Program. Repertorio’s project of reconciliation through theater started with various actors and companies traveling from Cuba to New York between 1996 and 1998. Repertorio invited to New York Vagos rumores (Vague Rumors), by Cuban playwright Abelardo Estorino, with three actors and the playwright traveling from Cuba. They also brought Las penas saben nadar (Sorrows Know How to Swim), a monologue by Estorino with Adria Santana acting. Both performances played to full houses for three weeks and won an award from the Drama Critics Association. Cuban actors Vladimir Cruz and Omar Alí followed Santana and joined the New York cast of Senel Paz’s Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) for 25 performances.41 The next step for this exchange was the staging of Revoltillo in Cuba, which caused an uproar in the more conservative sectors of the Cuban exile

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  261 community.The Cuba staging of this play garnered many articles in both mainstream and non-​mainstream US press in English and Spanish. At stake was, first, the fact that some believed it was the wrong play to take to Cuba as an ambassador of goodwill. Ángel Cuadra, for example, wrote Why are they taking this play, which was presented a long time ago at the Miami Hispanic Theater Festival, in a mediocre staging, because of the play’s very mediocrity? . . . It will serve as complacency to the Castro regime, which strives by all means to present the Cubans who did not accept the new island society as bad and perverse.42 (A45) Theater critic Juan Carlos Martínez criticized the play because he read it as a product of the political correctness of US ethnic theater: The author was tempted by the picturesqueness of ethnic minorities and the politically correct paternalism of the devine left; those who could have been Smith became Márquez Hernández and instead of being marked by the Vietnam War, they came from Cuba fleeing from communism, and twenty years later they are returned to us devoured by brutal capitalism, the vacuum of identity. Sounds familiar?43 (4) However, Margo Jefferson from The New York Times, aware of the polemic, wrote in support of the play: artists . . . are often accused of betraying the family’s, the race’s or the nation’s honor; telling secrets that render them less than implacably noble in their triumph or suffering. . . “Broken Eggs” is anti-​American and anti-​ Cuban American, go the complaints. There is homosexuality and divorce. The family is unhappy and neurotic. . . But artists . . . are attacked for the same reasons: told wrongly and naively that they must embody the virtues, but only the virtues, of their people. Why? Because their people’s political and social status is constantly being challenged or attacked. So the group voice declares, “They have always thought we’re ignorant, pathologically damaged by what we’ve gone through.” . . . Or: “They’ll never understand, and they’ll use it against us.” (2) Indeed, it was the performance of the dirty family secrets which stirred the emotions of sectors of the Cuban exile community who, additionally, could not understand how Ricardo Barber, one of the actors, who came to the United States after being interned in one the UMAP labor camps, would want to travel back to Cuba. Or how one of the most revered members of the Cuban exile community, famous actress Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado, had

262  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”

Figure 5.6 Ricardo Barber and Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado, in Revoltillo. Photo by © Gerry Goodstein. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

agreed to participate in this cultural exchange. She was the one with the most televisual presence, since she had starred in ¿Qué pasa, USA? the first bilingual sitcom in the United States and the quintessential series about the trials and tribulations of three generations of Cuban-Americans. The complaints of the hardline sector of the Cuban exile community in Miami resulted in the cancellation of various TV appearances and commercial contracts of Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado. The press also documented the response of others in the Cuban exile community who connected the above acts to the exile community’s intolerance and repudiated its past acts of real and symbolic violence—​such as the cancellation of Dolores Prida’s Coser y cantar. Luis Ortega, from New York, for example, wrote: Since she announced that she would go to Cuba with the Spanish Repertory group to do several performances, the Miami bestiary has launched a campaign to claim the head of Ana Margarita. It is nothing new. It is almost a ritual. They have been doing the same for 40 years.44 (2C)

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  263

Figure 5.7 AFP article sent to René Sánchez with the word MORIRAN (they will die). Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

If the word “bestiary” sounds like an exaggeration, the many violent responses the Cuba production elicited is proof that “bestiary” is actually a mild word (see Figure 5.7). Others, like Ileana Fuentes who wrote at least four articles in both English and Spanish, highlighted the connection between these actions and decidedly masculinist approaches to politics: Exiles are trampling on their own: Panamerican Hospital has canceled an ad campaign featuring Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado. There is no Viagra for political impotence, but there are scapegoats on who to vent the frustrations. The spirit of the mucho-​macho looking to test his anti-​Castro testosterone still is around, waiting for the next vulnerable Cheo or Juana to pick-​on. Mucho-​macho’s favorite target—​both in repressive Cuba and in we-​ought-​to-​be-​better-​exile—​is the artist, the intellectual, the academician, the musician, the writer. It must be Martinez-​Casado’s turn. (“Exiles”) Finally, others, like Dora Amador, in an article titled (ironically) “Chronicles from Friendly Miami,” simply celebrated Repertorio’s trip:

264  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” I interrupt. . . to record my rejoicing at a news flash: the decision of Teatro Repertorio Español (TRE) to travel to Cuba next month to put on a play in La Habana. My congratulations to the actress Ana Margarita MartínezCasado. . . and the entire Cuban cast, especially the playwright Eduardo Machado and the founders of TRE, Gilberto Zaldívar and René Buch. . . Bravo for the artists from here and there who open their arms towards a needed encounter.45 (17A) Despite multiple setbacks such as Hurricane George and visa delays, Repertorio Español traveled to Cuba with Revoltillo’s 1998 cast, which included three non-​Cuban actors, among them Nuyorican actress Miriam Colón who had played Manuela, the family matriarch, in the Taper production of Floating Island. (Colón replaced Ofelia González who refused to travel to Cuba.) The director René Buch could not travel because, according to him, he had another play in production in New York. Eduardo Machado was supposed to travel but records indicate that he decided not to travel for personal reasons that are probably understandable only to US Cubans facing their first return to Cuba. In a fax to the cast and the production team of Revoltillo, he wrote: I regret not being able to come to Cuba, and I wonder and ponder at my hesitation . . . But please know that the pressure of going to Cuba and having my play produced at the same time was not something that I was ready to experience; that’s why I so much wanted to go to Cuba this summer for the first time so I could experience Cuba as someone returning home, and then Cuba as a playwright with you. But that didn’t happen. Reading about your experiences in Cuba broke my heart and filled it with longing. It is rare that a playwright, most often encased by the microcosm of theater and art, is afforded the opportunity to see their work mean something to the larger world. I will be forever indebted to all of you and the sacrifices I know you have made to have this happen. (Machado, “Fax”) Although all the actors were traveling to Cuba for the same reason, the visas they received were different. The Cuban-​ born actors received a visa that allowed them to stay for 21 days, but the US-​born actors were given 30 days. This different treatment was and still is characteristic of the dissimilar way in which Cuban-​born people leaving abroad are treated when it comes to Cuban travel permissions. It is also indicative of how a cultural project, even when it is approved and technically desired by the Ministry of Culture, is dependent on decisions that ultimately come from the Ministry of Foreign Relations. I was intrigued about how they had managed to navigate the dangerous and unclear area of censorship in Cuba, given the many times Fidel Castro is directly named in the play. Anyone familiar with contemporary Cuban theater knows that it is highly critical of current sociopolitical realities, but

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  265

Figure 5.8 Miriam Colón, José Cheo Oliveras, Adriana Sananes in Revoltillo. Photo by © Gerry Goodstein. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

Fidel’s name is never mentioned on stage. I asked Robert Weber Federico, Repertorio’s stage designer who had traveled with Zaldívar to Cuba on several occasions and was part of the Repertorio-​UNEAC cultural exchange. He said the following: We were free to stage the play the same way it was done in New York. Carlos Padrón had read the script and did not see any problems. However, we didn’t want to insult them or the Cuban audience. The UNEAC was really trying to establish a dialogue, a cultural exchange, and we didn’t want to embarrass our hosts. So, we gave UNEAC a copy of the script and the only suggestion I remember was the elimination of one line where the play credits the Chinese for help. (Federico) Eduardo Machado corroborated Federico’s narrative: he said that as a playwright, he had approved several changes to the script before they traveled to Cuba (Machado, Personal communication). I also talked to actor Chaz Mena but his impression was different. He said that after UNEAC had read the play

266  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” while they were in La Habana, it came back with many changes so that the New York and Cuba versions were not the same because the playscript had been censored (Mena). After closely analyzing the Spanish script used in the New York production and the videotapes documenting the first half of one of the performances in La Habana and the complete play in Santa Clara, there were indeed several deletions. All of them, as I had imagined, included the name of Fidel usually voiced by Manuela, the play’s matriarch.The lines that Federico remembered about the allusion to China is one example: MANU ELA :  Because

he oppresses them. He has the guns, Fidel has the bullets. Not the people. He runs the concentration camps. He has Russia behind him. China. We have nothing behind us. My cousins are starving there. (181)

Interestingly enough, the above censored lines about Fidel Castro and the others didn’t alter the meaning of the scene or of the play: MIR IAM : 

. . . A few weeks ago I read an ad. It said “Liberate Cuba through the power of Voodoo.” There was a picture of Fidel’s head with three pins stuck through his temples. MAN UE LA : They should stick pins in his penis. SON IA :  Mama! (She laughs) MA NU ELA :  Bastard. MI RIAM : The idea was that if thousands of people bought the product, there would be a great curse that would surely kill him—​all that for only $11.99.Twelve dollars would be all that was needed to overthrow the curse of our past. (178) The only mention of Fidel that remained was in the following line: “M I RI A M :Let’s go. Remember when we thought Fidel looked sexy” (211), which brought down the house with laughter and comments so that the actors had to wait for almost two minutes before continuing with the play.46 René Buch, the play’s director, explained the importance of Revoltillo in his artistic career. When asked in an interview what triggered creativity in a director, he responded: For me it’s when I read a play and I know I’m going to die if I can’t do it. The excitement. For example, when I read Eduardo Machado’s Huevos Rotos (Broken Eggs), the scope, the extension of the Cuban experience was all there. It showed how these Cuban exiles extended their feelings between California and Cuba. (Bartow 50)

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  267 And Eduardo Machado also noted the importance of having Buch as director: I am writing to let you know how grateful I am for your hard work and perseverance in working on this production of BROKEN EGGS. I found—​as is always the case when you are in, direct, and produce my plays—​a full realization of my writing. It was a deeply moving experience to have my play take on such social, political, and historical significance. (“Fax”) It is probably because of those feelings and the production’s historical relevance that they played to sold-​out audiences in La Habana, Matanzas, and Santa Clara. Both their trip and the bridge they helped to establish were a complete success personally and artistically. Martínez-Casado, Ricardo Barber, and René Sánchez were able to meet their relatives whom they hadn’t seen for more than 30 years in some cases.They also met fellow theater artists and friends and were received with open arms. The US press in both English and Spanish underscored their successful presentations in Cuba. Juan M. Méndez, for example, in an article aptly titled “Repertorio Triumphed in Cuba Despite Everything,” quoted Gilberto Zaldívar, producer and mastermind behind the project: we accomplished what we were going to do: establish an artistic communication with the Cuban theater community and show the people that what we do could be of great interest to the public there. 47 (Méndez) And Adriana Carrera also quoted Zaldívar’s account of the audience response in Cuba: The reception that the public gave us was unbelievable. The theaters were completely sold out. People were already applauding from the beginning as a welcoming gesture. . . In the streets they told us ‘Thank you for coming.’ These are bridges that we are building. They are small but important achievements. . . Art is always the goodwill ambassador.48 The “unbelievable” Cuban audience reception is corroborated in Repertorio Español’s documentation videos of the productions in Cuba. The Cuban press also had ample coverage of the trip both before and after their presentations. The articles in Cuba presented Repertorio Español’s history and its importance in the New York theater scene, the relevance of their presentations in Cuba, as well as the names of the actors, which must have helped to attract the general audience. Theater artists and the older general audience must have recognized the names of Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado, and Ricardo Barber who were well-​known in Cuba before leaving for the United States. Theater artists must have also recognized the name of Miriam Colón because of

268  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” her work with the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, a company whose repertoire is also familiar in Cuba. Some articles captured various actors’ responses to the importance of their trip. Mireya Castañeda, for example, in Granma—​the official newspaper of the Communist party—​quoted Ricardo Barber’s re-​encounter with the Cuban audience: “I had forgotten how people here express themselves, spontaneously, wholeheartedly, warmly, and people received us wonderfully, with tolerance, unlike the sectors in Miami that have criticized this trip” (“A Mix” 12). Carlos Padrón, the other mastermind behind the project, wrote an excellent critique and summary for Tablas, Cuba’s most important theater magazine, aptly titled “Repertorio Español Breaks Down Barriers”: The balance of the visit is highly positive for Repertorio Español, who breaks down barriers and initiates an action that will not be isolated; for UNEAC, which reaffirms its leading role in guiding cultural policy; and for Cuban theater, which, as we have said elsewhere, is one, no matter where its creators live and work.49 (93) And Humberto Arenal, in Casa de las Américas’ Conjunto, an important Cuban theater magazine focusing on Latin American and Caribbean theater, offered a complete history of Repertorio in an article titled “Cuba-​Estados Unidos: Repertorio Español” (116). It is important to note the advertisement of the Espacio Editorial de la Comunidad Iberoamericana de Teatro placed at the end of the article: Ollantay Theatre Magazine, published by Pedro Monge Rafuls—​ who self-​ identifies as Cuban exile playwight—​ is included among the US magazines, not an insignificant success which was achieved because of discussions in Cuba during the cancelled Encuentro. But the most important and telling article for the gestures toward reconciliation through theater presented in this chapter is a review published in Girón, a Matanzas newspaper. This review is critical to understand how the play was received in Cuba, as well as the importance of its Cuban production: Additionally, I think that, surprisingly, in Matanzas we are no longer used to realistic theater. Almost paradoxical. The full theater applauded, more than the play, the actors who came with a great desire to work on the soil of their myth and to be able to talk with us about family matters. 50 (García 3) Indeed, the play responds, as I have mentioned, to the codes of realism typical of the US stages, codes that Cuban theater on the island had abandoned since, at least, the 1980s if not before. However, despite the play’s realist tendencies and direct language, suggested in this and other reviews of the play in Cuba, the significant point, as the review underscores, was the fact that exiled Cuban actors from the United States returned for the first time to perform on Cuban stages. Regardless of the subject matter of the play, what is relevant for my argument and for the project was the dialogue that was established about family matters outside

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  269 of the play’s family issues. In other words, a fictional play about three generations of a Cuban family in exile becomes the conduit for a discussion about that other real, non-​fictional split Cuban family, the family matters of the review’s title. Revoltillo’s tour in Cuba is an example of a performative gesture’s power and of how Small Histories dance with Big History. The Cuba performance was a challenge to the Cuban government in at least two ways: first, in the fact that Cubans residing outside the island traveled to Cuba and, second, in the fact that exiles were now seeking recognition as part of the national culture, the “family matters” of the review. It was also a challenge for some sectors of the Cuban exile community who thought that [t]here should not be any opening of any kind while the murderous dictator is in power and he will remain in power as long as there are unworthy Cubans who bow down to ask for permission to be able to return to the homeland which we have the right to visit whenever we want without the permission of the dictator.51 (Pou 5A) The way in which the performance moved spectators and the ways in which different Small Histories came together in that La Habana, Matanzas,

Figure 5.9 Production photograph of Revoltillo. Photo by © Gerry Goodstein. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

270  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” and Santa Clara of 1998 are what stands out in that dance of the Small and Big Histories. The Girón review also stated: “Between reality and the characters the shadow of separation has been erected” (“Entre la realidad y los personajes se ha erigido una sombra, la separación,” García, 3). And Rosa Ileana Boudet who saw the play in La Habana reminisced in an article almost ten years later: We could almost smell [the 1950s of] Las Máscaras, Arlequín, or Hubert de Blanck itself . . . The Hubert seemed inhabited by the spirit of the small pocket theaters that fought to legitimize the art theater in Cuba.52 (149) The play in Cuba performed that shadow of separation, and it moved audiences in different ways, but it moved them all. The older theater goers, like Boudet, felt the return of the 1950s theater spirit. And almost everyone was struck by the ghost of families divided. Barba is instrumental in understanding how each performer is able to touch individual spectators: This dialogue with oneself can only come about if the actor succeeds in awakening the torpid energies of every single spectator, sensations and memories from the intimacy of his or her Little History. Only if the actor succeeds in moving himself does he create the premises for moving the spectators, seducing them momentarily and dragging them out of the trenches of their convictions. (5) Undeniably, a small gesture not only went against its context, but a potentiality of reconciliation emerged in which spectators in Cuba saw an alternative pathway to the Miami-La Habana divide.

Fourth Gesture: The First International Monologue/Performance Festival in Miami The exchanges during the late 1990s through Repertorio Español’s CubaTeatro project allowed the Cuban diaspora in the United States to get to know Cuban artists, though not in Miami. This is the reason why Alberto Sarraín and I organized the First International Monologue/Performance Festival in 2001.53 For the first time in 40 years, Cubans from the island and from the diaspora in Miami experienced theater together. It was described by the Miami press as “the ten days that changed the cultural landscape of Miami” because it brought 23 artists from La Habana to Miami and, despite past violent actions, this time the city quietly welcomed the Cuban visitors. Again, it is important to analyze the outcome of this festival at two levels: first, at the level of those involved, and then its impact in the public sphere.54 Alberto Sarraín (La Habana, 1949, see Cuban Theater Digital Archive) is also a new and important node in the network of Cuban theater artists producing plays in Spanish in Miami. He was Artistic Director of the Miami International

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  271 Theater Festival during the 1980s. In the late 1990s, he founded La Má’Teodora Cuban Cultural Group, a small Miami nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to staging primarily Cuban playwrights residing on the island. Throughout the 1990s, through his directorial work first with Teatro Prometeo and then with La Ma’ Teodora, he brought to Miami the work of Cuba’s most important living playwrights. This garnered him a lot of negative press along with various cancellations of his plays. But it has also made him one of the theater directors, if not the director, who has staged the most Cuban plays in South Florida. In 2001, he received the PEN/​Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for having challenged Miami-​Dade County’s ban on arts funding for cultural organizations that stage or produce work by artists currently living in Cuba. Howard L. Simon, ACLU of Florida Executive Director, explained in the press release: For a small independent Cuban theater director with everything to lose, Alberto displayed an extraordinary amount of courage in defending the First Amendment. He ran into countless difficulties—​both professionally and personally—​after joining the ACLU lawsuit against the county, but it was his passion for theater and free expression that gave him the power to continue to fight against censorship of the arts. (Quoted in American Civil Liberties)

Figure 5.10 Alberto Sarraín receiving the PEN/​ Newman Award. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

272  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” He used funding from the PEN award for the First International Monologue/​ Performance Festival.The festival’s budget of $23,000 also was covered through funding from various units at the University of Miami and Florida International University.The Miami press published more than 20 articles during the 10 days of the festival, in Spanish and English. An analysis of the coverage demonstrates that the press treated the event respectfully. It is interesting to note, however, how the articles changed in tone as the festival progressed.Wilfredo Cancio Isla’s first article in El Nuevo Herald, for example, “Nutrido grupo cubano al Festival del Monólogo” (Large Cuban Group at the Monologue Festival) reported in a detached and “objective” manner the artists and works that were going to be presented, as well as the funding for the festival (15A). Towards the end of the festival, though, he was interested in how “Cuban theater artists comment upon loneliness caused by exodus” (“Teatristas” 19A). In a similar manner, Marta Barber, culture critic for The Miami Herald, started her reports with “Cuban Actress Wows ‘em at Festival” (2C). By the end, however, she felt compelled to write an opinion piece, “A Bridge over the Sorrows of Cubans from Cuba and Miami,” on how art was able to break through political barriers and how proud she felt to have participated in that historical event (2B). In other words, the articles captured and performed the ways in which this gesture moved individual spectators, including El Nuevo Herald’s theater critics, and captured the dance between Small History and Big History. Granma, on the other hand, did not publish anything until May 10th when Omar Valiño submitted the festival’s review. Much to everybody’s surprise in Miami, however, the article, appropriately titled “El monólogo fue un diálogo auténtico” (“Monologue Was an Authentic Dialogue”), was accompanied by the familiar references to the extreme right and the Miami mafia as well as to “the fuss of local radio stations” (“la alharaca de las emisoras radiales locales,” “El monólogo”). While “the fuss of radio stations” in Miami is generally true, nothing of the sort was heard on the radio waves nor on television stations during the festival. The article’s conclusion was very positive but managed to allude ambiguously to Miami’s mafia at the end: “The event . . . undoubtedly marked a historic moment because it evidenced the type of relationships that, with total naturalness, the Island and its communities abroad have to sustain, despite the fuss that the extreme right and the mafia tend to show when faced with a cultural event of such dimensions.”55 (“El monólogo”) Much more surprising, however, was the fact that Omar Valiño, the reviewer who submitted the article to Granma, publicly acknowledged in El Nuevo Herald that Granma’s editorial board had added those two sentences (“Un crítico” 3A). Most, if not all the artists who came from Cuba to Miami, were artists with whom the festival’s organizers had established long-​lasting personal and professional relationships since the cancelled Encuentro.56 As a matter of fact, the

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  273

Figure 5.11  From left to right, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Abelardo Estorino, Grettel Trujillo, Alberto Sarraín, Francisco (Pancho) García, Omar Valiño, unknown woman, Abilio Estévez, Wilfredo Cancio at the First International Monologue/Performance Festival. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries.

festival could be read as a repurposing of that Encuentro. The experience of the festival, the inter-​relational communication established, moved all participants to act and think differently, to open themselves to the others in our midst; it was an experience that forced everyone to modify their views of Miami and of La Habana and to act accordingly as agents of that change, as Valiño did. The festival staged convivial encounters between individuals with differing points of view, and it created spaces for acknowledgment and recognition. Marta Barber’s concluding words are relevant in this regard: In that brief moment . . . I realized how far we have come, and how, right under the eyes of both governments, the invisible barrier that has separated our communities for four decades is crumbling. . . . Leave it to the arts to be the hammer that deals that fatal blow to this political conundrum. . . After 10 days of kisses, embraces and emotional tears what struck me most about this theater event is the banality of trying to keep our communities split. (“A Bridge” 2B) The festival “whose beginning initiated a groundbreaking cultural and artistic journey and whose ending undeniably opened doors long shut” (Leonin) was proof that transformative politics can take place in the realm of culture. Indeed, more than a theater showcase, the festival was a gesture that opened a simple door toward peaceful coexistence, toward reconciliation. The potentiality, the

274  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” futurity of that gesture is nowhere better captured than in Omar Valiño’s article that appeared in Granma, 20 years later: Although the great performances by actresses and actors, young or old, and the effusive reception of the audience remain in our memory, the most important thing, 20 years later, was the resounding proof of vivid dialogue within our own culture in which all were protagonists. . . But, like a zenith that follows the actress or the actor alone, on the edge of the proscenium, this is how that experience illuminates a path, in the end, destined to be reborn.57 (“Dos décadas”)

Fifth Gesture: Parece blanca or Coproducing the Tragedy of Cubanness The ghost of separated families and artists that was erected in Cuba during Revoltillo’s performances was also present but performed differently in Cuba’s National Theater on September 12, 2002, during the premiere of Cuba’s first theatrical coproduction between Cuban artists residing on the island and in Miami. The production in question is Parece blanca (She Looks White), by Abelardo Estorino, a playwright residing on the island, and directed by Alberto Sarraín, of Miami’s La Má’ Teodora’s Cuban Cultural Group. For this production, five actors from Miami traveled to La Habana to work with five actors from the island, creating a team from “both enemy sides,” as the European newspapers reported. Like Revoltillo in 1998, the production also traveled to two of the oldest national theaters in Cuba: Santa Clara’s Teatro La Caridad and Matanzas’ Teatro Sauto. Its Miami’s performances that were scheduled at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in the heart of Liberty City—​Miami’s historic Black neighborhood—​never took place because the Cuban actors were denied visas after George W. Bush’s policy changes toward Cuba. Immediately after the festival, Sarraín and various artists residing on the island who had participated in the Monologue Festival started to plan a theatrical coproduction that would bring together artists from both sides of the Florida Straits to the premier first in Cuba and then in Miami. The coproduction was sponsored once again by La Má’ Teodora and Cuba’s National Council for the Performing Arts under the Ministry of Culture. The institutional support of Cuba’s most important cultural organization situates the project at the center of Cuban cultural policies but within the periphery of global centers of culture. Similarly, La Má’Teodora’s participation comes from within and against the cultural periphery of Miami’s exile politics, but from Miami, nevertheless, the cultural capital and door to Latin America and the Caribbean. Interestingly enough, neither one of them was able to provide any significant cash contribution to the project. Most funds came from nonprofit organizations whose goals were to establish cultural links between the island and exile: (1) Puentes Cubanos, an organization that promoted person-​to-​person exchanges with Cuba and the

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  275 normalization of US-​Cuba relations through a Ford Foundation grant; (2) The Cuban Artist Fund through a Rockefeller Brothers grant; (3) Miami Light Project through a Miami-​Dade Cultural Affairs International Exchange Grant; and (4) Xael Charters, the travel agency that advertised itself as the agency in favor of the arts (Program for Abelardo Estorino). The coproduction of Parece blanca could not have taken place without the success of the First International Monologue/​ Performance Festival which facilitated negotiations leading to the institutional support of the National Council for the Performing Arts, Cuba’s Ministry of Culture, and the financial support that came from successful grant applications to progressive US foundations. This time, the complete Miami team received one-​month visas, which were renewed, regardless of whether they were Cuban or US born. Someone who was instrumental in this exchange on the Cuba side explained to me: Your project was always more risky but more essential. X in the Ministry of Culture oversaw the project and sure that your cultural visas were renewed monthly at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.58 (Name withheld) Most importantly, though, the coproduction was the result of a collaborative and collective undertaking of actors, directors, and researchers who abandoned

Figure 5.12 Parece blanca cover dedicated by playwright to Alberto Sarraín. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

276  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” other projects for about one year and threw themselves into this quixotic endeavor. All participants were committed to a project that could transcend national, political, and economic barriers to build through the experience of theater as process a bridge between those who experience Cubanity through “arraigo” and “aislamiento”—​rootedness in a physical space that can lead to isolation—​and those who experience Cubanity not as deterritorialization or “desarraigo” but rather through multi-​territorialization or “multiarraigos.” Parece blanca (She Looks White) was the script selected for this collective project. Loosely based on Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés and borrowing elements from Reinaldo Arenas’ La Loma del Ángel (Graveyard of the Angels), the dramatic text is, according to Estorino, “an unfaithful version of a novel about infidelities.” Sarraín’s spectacular text adds another unfaithful turn. The dramatic and spectacular texts, along with their 19th-​and 20th-​century intertexts, present much more than a foundational allegory of the Cuban nation. They present ten characters that run the social, racial, and class gamut of 19th-​century Cuba, as well as contemporary Cuba. These ten characters live their Cubanness as a tragedy. Conscious of the role they each have in Villaverde’s fiction and in the national imaginary, they struggle desperately and passionately against the tyranny of their author. The play thematizes its metatheatricality through a game of literal and metaphorical mirrors that serve to dissolve the border between past and present, history and fiction, fiction and reality, Black and white, Cuba/​ “criollo” and foreigner. From the very beginning, the visual tableau created by the stage and light designers (Jesús Ruiz and Carlos Repilado respectively) suggests a static image that transports the viewer to a liminal space: the white curtains of memory and fiction hide the characters of this tragedy; the very fine thread of sand that falls at different moments marking the passage of time; the wooden structure placed center stage that sends us back to the church of the fictional pretext as well as to the present of a beautiful but decaying La Habana. The stage is divided in two by a white rug which suggests the aisle of a church, or a path. Its red line takes us to blood at the level of plot, resulting from Leonardo’s death which is staged at the very beginning. Through an allegorical reading, the blood can be read as the trace of the family feuds. Like in Revoltillo’s “family matters,” the audience knew before entering the theater that there were several family feuds at stake. At the level of plot, we recognize the pain ensuing from the family splits resulting from the violence of slavery and colonialism in the 19th-​century Cuba as suggested by the performance and its hypotexts. This family, however, can also be read as Cuba’s contemporary family split by politics and exiles. In other words, the line that divides the stage in two serves as a visual inscription of the pain of diaspora as it erases the divisions between past and present, between fiction and reality. The focus on race remains relatively absent from this production, although it is central to Estorino’s hypotext. Camilla Stevens concludes her excellent article on Parece blanca as follows:

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  277

Figure 5.13 Jesús Ruiz’s stage design model for Parece blanca. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Reading race from different reception standpoints challenges the use of the iconic mulata – the contradictory embodiment of the discourses of racial harmony (mestizaje) and racial erasure (blanqueamiento) – ​to celebrate the foundations of Cuban identity and to invite audiences to imagine a (re) united Cuban nation. In the context of insular Cuba, the play would appear to parody the concept of whitening in an effort to remind Cubans of the need for solidarity in a time of crisis.Yet in the context of diasporic Cuba, while the project of acting together is undoubtedly a serious and worthwhile effort to join Cubans, the choice of text that symbolically refounds the Cuban nation on a unifying myth such as mestizaje seems problematic, given that race is implicated in the social and economic barriers to be confronted in whatever path post-​Castro Greater Cuba might take. (103) Indeed, as a literary advisor, I can attest to the many discussions we had in Miami and in La Habana about the problematic issues of race the play was parodying, the possible unreadability of that parody in this production, and the casting choices. The only Afro-​ Cuban actors in the production were Sonia Boggiano playing Chepilla, Cecilia’s grandmother; and Néstro Trevejo

278  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” playing Tondá, a Black policeman. The characters of Charo, Cecilia’s mother, and Cecilia were played by white actors Doris Gutiérrez and Amarilys Núñez Barrios, respectively. Furthermore, Doris Gutiérrez makeup included a darker base which, though not in Blackface, suggested her character’s darker complexion as “mulata.” Although I opposed the use of darker makeup for the character of Charo, the rest of the artistic team did not see any problems in the use of makeup and believed I was bringing into the discussion US constructions of and debates around race. In the end, the fact that Estorino’s hypotext, Cecilia Valdés, is an allegory for the Cuban nation based on the problematic concept of “mestizaje” was not important to Estorino’s rewrite. And it was not questioned by Sarraín’s production either, which focused on bringing the Cuban diaspora—​ absent race—​into that allegory. The connections between the present of Estorino’s story, the past of Villaverde’s text, and the spectators’ present are also achieved through the choice of costumes, designed by Adalberto Castrillón. The costumes and makeup situate the characters in the 19th century and serve to underscore that these are fictitious characters of the past, flat, and very old, dusty from the passage of time, as if these were characters rising from the dead and speaking. However, the sensuality of some of Cecilia’s costumes, and the queer costumes of Isabel,

Figure 5.14 Amarilys Núñez Barrios and Michel Hernández in Parece blanca. Cuban Theater Digital Archive.

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  279 played by a male actor in drag, allude to the present-​day reality of “jineterismo” (prostitution in Cuba since the Special Period). The expressionistic staging is achieved through metatheatrical elements that are interwoven to shape the spectacular text through numerous literary, visual, cultural, and musical citations. The metatheatrical intertexts connect Estorino’s characters with other literary characters and are a conduit for the spectator to be transported to their present, that is, they have a distancing effect that brings the spectators to their present. Although only the spectator with a specific cultural competency can recognize these literary intertexts, they do recognize the references to present-​day Cuba: this is the racial drama of 19th-​century colonial Cuba as much as it is the contemporary drama of 21st-​century Cuba suffering the differential effects of diaspora, globalization, and tourism. From the first scene when Rosa talks directly to the spectator and asks “And my son? Someone has to pay for my son’s death. Open the book” (“¿Y mi hijo? Alguien tiene que pagar la muerte de mi hijo. Abre el libro,” Estorino, 3), the performance invites in the spectator as an accomplice.59 The spectator travels with these characters looking in vain for the guilty party.This complicity becomes even more evident in one of the scenes where the political situation in the 19th century and the characters’ search for freedom and escape can be read otherwise. The scene where there is a debate about the best governments and the tyranny of the best kings ends with the entrance of Leonardo saying, “I am Cuban and I also have rights” (“Yo soy cubano y también tengo derechos,” 19). This is one of the strongest scenes of the performance where it is difficult for the audience to separate Leonardo, the fictional character, from Pablo Durán, the US Cuban “Marielito” actor embodying the character of Leonardo. Thus, the fact that a Cuban residing in the United States makes a triumphal entrance in that symbolic space that is Cuba’s National Theater and can affirm “I am Cuban” is a significant moment in which the audience is forced to negotiate the borders of Cuban citizenship and make room in that real and symbolic space for the “abject” of its community. As in Revoltillo, when Ana Margarita MartínezCasado through Sonia’s last line “I’ve been kicked out of better places” was met with applause, followed by the performance’s five-​minute standing ovation, in Parece blanca, Durán through Leonardo’s line of “I am Cuban” also elicited the audience’s applause. The character of Pimienta was played by the Nuyorrican actor Teo Castellanos, an actor who accepted the challenge of doing his first role in Spanish. The inclusion of actors whose first language was not Spanish was a conscious decision. On the one hand, the postnational family in Greater Cuba includes subjects whose first language may not be Spanish. Furthermore, although this play has as its referent Cuba’s foundational drama, the staging underscored that the pain of these family feuds resulting from a legacy of diasporas and cultural colonizations is also shared by others in the region and the continent. In other words, the staging through Castellanos was also an attempt to widen the family to include non-​Cuban Caribbean diasporic groups who have also negotiated difficult “returns” to Caribbean islands.

280  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” The reviews, however, and some spectators in La Habana, were not ready to assume the “strangeness” of a staging that incorporated the challenge of migration through an actor speaking Spanish with a non-​ Cuban accent. Thus, the press interpreted the non-​Cuban accent in acting terms as “la poco convincente, como doblada presencia sobre las tablas de Teo Castellanos” (“the unconvincing, like ‘stilted’ presence on stage of Teo Castellanos,” del Pino). Unconvincing for whom? We know, as Josette Féral and others have studied, that judgment about theater can never be conclusive. It is not my goal here to talk about the role of theater criticism or the role of the critics. What I do want to address is the connection between cultural norms and the formation of a public voice authorized to talk about good or bad theater as if it were something natural. The vision or point of view with which one approaches an art form is intimately tied to the audience’s habitus which will shape not only the aesthetic experience but also the ways in which we talk about a work of art, what to say, in whose name, and how to say it. An analysis of the published reviews in Cuba and elsewhere is revealing. There were over ten articles and interviews published in the national and international press, although the National Council for the Performing Arts tried to avoid the press. As Fernando Ravsberg noted in BBC World: The Council for the Performing Arts of Cuba maintains the work almost as if it were a state secret; its vice president, Gisela González, banned foreign press from the rehearsals. (Ravsberg)60 The various articles could be read as an intervention on the cultural policies at the moment which presented the dialogue with artists from the diaspora as not newsworthy thus avoiding the specific mention of Miami. While the international articles underscored the importance of the play’s presentation because of the bridge it was establishing between La Habana and Miami or between artists from both shores, Cuba’s Granma characterized the staging as a collaboration “among Cuban artists residing anywhere in the world” (Abreu) and Bohemia described it as a collaboration between Cuba and the United States (González López 59). Other than this, Granma’s articles were fair and measured, in the sense that this was probably the first time that it published an article on something related to Miami without mentioning the Cuban mafia or over-​politicizing the event. In Miami, however, that restraint was read as overtly political. The first article that appeared in El Nuevo Herald by its editorial board underscored that Cuban theater artist Alberto Sarraín, a former political prisoner exiled in 1979, has just appeared interviewed in the pages of the official newspaper Granma. . . Now Granma tries to sanctify these ‘artistic bridges’ that Sarraín seeks to build by making theater ‘for all Cubans’, but it is worth insisting that this initiative arises from the theater artists from Miami, the city that

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  281 the same newspaper describes daily as a ‘cultural wasteland’ and ‘Mecca of the Cuban-​American mafia’.61 (Redacción 3A) Furthermore, the Cuban reviews unconsciously followed the Manichean structures to which I was referring previously, always comparing the quality of the Cuban actors with those from Miami. Of all the Cuban articles, only one approached the staging from the point of view of migration, the article on La Jiribilla, an electronic journal not accessible to most Cubans at the time. The critic had interviewed all the participants and had followed the multiple ups and downs of the coproduction. She was the only one who grasped or wrote about the project as a real possibility of an artistic dialogue that shows a new concept of the total nation, of a sense of Cubanity. Art as a space of identity, as a common nation, beyond artificial borders and life projects.62 (Sablón) Like the Girón article on Revoltillo which allegorically read the play’s “family matters,” Sablón also captured the importance of Parece blanca as a gesture toward a dialogue that proposes a different and more inclusive construct of Cubanity, the one I argue was the aim of these five gestures.

Futurity in Greater Cuba Ricardo Ortiz, in his groundbreaking reading of Eduardo Machado’s Fabiola, disussed that “the play performs the tragic fallout of a missed historical rendezvous between the two chief forces, revolution and exile” (Cultural Erotics 159). The five gestures I have studied in this chapter precisely take advantage of all those “missed historical rendezvous” to transcend the divide between revolution and exile, though critically leaving out Afro-​Cubans and a discussion of race and racism. Ortiz concludes his analysis with the potentiality, the futurity that is still open in what he calls the play’s “gestures of generosity” by stating that if the play helps any of its possible audiences to see beyond consolation to some other way to “know” and remember even a unthinkably traumatic past, and if . . . it helps these same audiences to see beyond good and evil to some other possible stagings for not only the familial and the erotic but also the political and the ethical, then perhaps in these ongoing gestures of a spirited generosity and respect among all Cubans, gestures that have for a very long time crossed all relevant national and ideological lines, we might be able to think our way beyond the ungenerous acts of refusal (embargo, stalemate, impasse) that continue to outweigh that eminently possible generosity

282  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” and toward some future whose “hither side” (to quote Homi Bhabha) we might still, together and at once, touch. (“Cultural” 189) Ortiz’s use of gesture captures the ways in which performances attune their audience to feel differently and can move them beyond traumatic pasts in the present, as well as Barba’s dance between Small History and Big History. This chapter has analyzed different stages of that dance within the context of Cuba’s Special Period and has presented those stages as gestures toward a cultural reunification project that has tried to overcome the traditional island/​ exile dichotomy in Greater Cuba’s culture, some of them at the expense of race. The five gestures that gave shape to this project of reconciliation proposed a more encompassing notion of Greater Cuba based on cultural citizenship rather than national space, and they were relatively effective in transforming cultural policies. However, they were not incorporated or acknowledged by the cultural heritage industries in Cuba or the United States because these industries tend to equate heritage with the very constructs of patriotism/​nationalism that these performances are questioning; in other words, the performances were “sand, not oil in the machinery” (Barba 8) of heritage. Additionally, although documentation gives us only partial access to gestures and performances, in this chapter and throughout this book I have “summoned up through the auspices of memory, the acts and gestures that meant so much to us” (Muñoz 271–​2). Furthermore, the performances in question transformed their communities (both on the island and in the diaspora) and their constructs of Cuban identity, an identity that neither the Cuban state nor exile policies can confine only to and of the island. I have studied not only the gestures themselves but their affective traces, the feelings they leave behind. Their analysis and digital documentation aim to make sure that these gestures, as intangible culture, remain not only in the memory of its participants but they can continue their dance with the Big History of cultural heritage discourse. Most importantly for me, this research project and our cultural work in the public sphere underscore that historicizing, theorizing, and documenting intangible cultural heritage is a transformative personal and political commitment that goes beyond a purely academic exercise in theory construction, an embodied practice that aims “toward various forms of engaged action, even when these are flawed, imprecise and corruptible” (Juana M. Rodríguez 8). From within but at the margins of states, these gestures have been drawing a new map that recognizes the fluctuating dynamics within US-​Cuban relations. These theater artists have forged new relationships from the ground up and have created real networks in which cooperation, mutual understanding, and common aesthetic and intellectual goals bring us together in a culture of reconciliation that needs to continue despite what happens between governments and states.There have been other similar gestures in the 21st century, especially during the period of Obama’s presidency when Cuba and the United States tried to normalize relations (see Cultural Exchanges). These include, among

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  283 many others, the introduction of Melinda López, with whom I started this chapter, to Cuban audiences through the publication in Cuba of López’s Ser Cuba and the staged reading of Sonia se fue (Sonia Flew) in La Habana and Camagüey, directed by Alberto Sarraín with actors from La Habana’s Argos Teatro. However, I am finishing this book in January 2022 in the middle of the ongoing Covid pandemic, of the closure instead of opening of cultural policies, of intolerant and bellicose attitudes on both sides of the Florida Straits, of the persecution of artists who are protesting the current situation in Cuba, and of the public shaming in Cuba and in the diaspora of all who have proven to be, in Barba’s words “sand, not oil in the machinery” (8). At this moment, when it feels like Big History is swallowing us up, it is crucial to remember the potentiality and futurity of these past gestures and the importance of keeping the light of theater alive, even if only in the memory of our Small Histories now. Small History will continue its dance with Big History, as it has done since the theater’s very beginning. May these five gestures serve as a model for future initiatives to explore much-​needed productive and creative models for US-​Cuba collaboration.

Notes 1 For more information on these performances consult their respective pages in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive. http://​cuban​thea​ter.org 2 “Todos por lo mismo /​contra las páginas dictatoriales, /​materialistas, homosexuales, /​ateos, brujos y moralistas. /​Todos por lo mismo /​contra las páginas coloniales, /​materialistas, homosexuales, /​ateos, brujos y moralistas.” 3 “El concepto de Patria se sostendrá plenamente en pie, sólo cuando no exista ni tan siquiera un alma enajenada de su espacio vital. Sólo así coexistiremos en paz y armonía.” 4 I am not suggesting that Miami and La Habana are the only cities in Greater Cuba. Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Madrid, Paris, DF, Tijuana, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Santiago, and many others are also part of Greater Cuba. However, given the political role of historic exile communities in Miami, projects of reconciliation are more complicated in the La Habana-​Miami divide than in other cities. 5 See Esther Whitfield for an analysis of the fiction from this period. 6 Although my focus on this chapter is Cuban cultural policy after 1959, I agree with Jorgelina Guzmán (“Creación”) who argues that Cuban cultural policies in the 20th century should be seen as part of a process of continuities and disruptions between the state and its various institutions such as Dirección de Cultura (1949–​ 1951), Instituto Nacional de Cultura (1955–​ 1959), and Consejo Nacional de Cultura (1961–​1976). For other studies of Cuban cultural policy, see Guzmán “Government,” Gallardo Saborido, Gordon-​Nesvitt, Pogolotti, and Weiss. 7 See McAfee, Molavi. 8 For a brief commentary on the language used by Granma and El Nuevo Herald, see Manzor, “Más allá.” 9 For an analysis of the abject relationship between nationality and homosexuality in 19th century Cuba, see Bejel. 10 See Manzor, “De homosexual,” and Machado Vento.

284  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” 11 “La figura de Fidel Castro . . . fomenta la adhesión de elementos moderados y liberales a la coalición en Estados Unidos a favor de una política de línea dura, y expone a lo opositores de tal política a ríspidos ataques ideológicos y morales.” 12 Max Castro has also suggested that “El exilio believes that it is a repository and a trustee of what is most authentic in Cuban culture, which, in its view, has been virtually destroyed on the island by nearly four decades of communism. It tries to hold on to this culture—​a culture relatively frozen in time and place-​and to pass it on to the second generation” (“The Trouble” 306). 13 See Manzor and Rizk. 14 “si bien políticamente la comunidad cubanoamericana actualmente es más diversa y su centro de gravedad menos extremista en su discurso y sus tácticas, la fracción de línea dura tiene hoy más poder que nunca. Mantiene su dominio en la comunidad y, por su instrumentación de las instituciones de la hiperpotencia, cuenta con un poder incalculablemente mayor que veinte años atrás.” 15 “la reconstitución teórica y práctica de un proyecto social propio.” My periodization differs slightly from the one offered by Desiderio Navarro in “In Media Res Publica.” I am basing my analysis in the participation in the “public sphere” of art intellectuals in the area of theater and performance. 16 “establecer una forma de dirección que suponga la participación activa de los creadores en la elaboración y ejecución de la política cultural.” 17 “Hace muchos años, desde los 80, hay una política editorial que busca colocar autores emigrados en la literatura cubana, mediante la evaluación de su aporte en términos artísticos cubanos. Nos sentimos responsables de la totalidad de la cultura cubana, se produzcan las obras donde se produzcan. Hoy aquí se conoce mejor la obra de los artistas y escritores emigrados, que en Miami, por ejemplo. En el Museo Nacional, en las salas contemporáneas, está la obra de los artistas emigrados, expuesta con total jerarquía. Es una política cultural madura, fundada en claros criterios de reconocer el aporte de un creador a una cultura nacional.” 18 During her visit to Miami for the First International Monologue/​Performance Festival, Gisela González, then vice-​President of CNAE, extended an invitation to many playwrights, actors, and dancers to go to Cuba to perform their work. She was instrumental to the coproduction of Parece blanca (She Looks White) explored later in this chapter. Since the late 1990s, Cuba’s audience has been able to see the works of the following Cuban or US Cuban artists: Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Nilo Cruz, María Irene Fornés, Melinda López, Eduardo Machado, Eduardo Manet, Pedro Monge Rafuls, Matías Montes Huidobro, Caridad Svich, and José Triana, among others. 19 “un espacio de unidad en torno a la política cultural de la Revolución, pero en medio de una gran diversidad y en la institución se es muy respetuoso de esa diversidad pues aquí convergen, cohabitan, coinciden creadores de muy diferentes procedencias y proyectos, y eso nos fortalece.” 20 Enrique del Risco, in his personal read of how La Gaceta de Cuba followed 1990s Cuban cultural policies underscores how they created an equivalence between cultural policy and national culture, La Gaceta’s “timid approach to exile cultural production” (102) and its insistence in rechaneling ideological debates into aesthetic ones. 21 “De sus mil 104 miembros, la Asociación tiene más de cien en el exterior, quienes mantienen sus vínculos, y tratamos de analizar las causas que los llevaron a esa migración económica, para que no aumente la cifra, no porque estemos en contra de que la gente

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  285 viaje (yo mismo acabo de regresar de París, donde fui para hacer una obra de teatro), pero si para que grandes artistas cubanos no tengan que estar en otros países.” 22 Latin Dictionary, www.latin-​dic​tion​ary.net/​def​i nit​ion/​21482/​ges​tus-​ges​tus 23 See Martínez Reynosa and Lutjens, and Alzugaray et al. 24 “El centro de la cuestión es que tenemos que asumir ese “otro” teatro como parte del nuestro, como expresión de nuestra cultura, y lo que es más importante, estudiar su desarrollo inserto en el nuestro, no como parte ajena. Si el diálogo es fundamental en el teatro, hora es de dialogar teatralmente con esa “otra” dramaturgia que también es nuestra. . . . Se trata de una misma dramaturgia que se realiza en circunstancias diferentes. Invito al debate y a la respuesta a mis propias interrogantes.” 25 Besides Rine Leal, the participants from Cuba were going to be playwrights Abilio Estévez and Abelardo Estorino, Víctor Varela (Director of Teatro Obstáculo), and Raquel Carrió, theater critic associated to the Teatro Buendía. From the United States, the participants who agreed to attend were playwrights Pedro Monge Rafuls and María Irene Fornés, performance artist Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano), director Alberto Sarraín who was in Venezuela at the time, Laureano Corcés, and I. 26 EITALC was and is an independent organization. Though it was located in La Habana at the time, it was not totally dependent of nor independent from the Cuban Ministry of Culture. It was forced at the last minute to negotiate the visas of the Cubans through Casa de las Américas as opposed to directly with the Ministry of Culture, as it did for other artists and scholars. Unofficially, the EITALC was having problems with Casa de las Américas; some believe that Casa was both “jealous” that this Encuentro had not been organized through them and at the same time was not ready for this sort of “encuentro.” For documentation on this Encuentro, see “Faxes.” 27 See Conferencia “La Nación . . .” and Vázquez Díaz. 28 The EITALC, via Casa las Américas, presented visa requests for Alina Troyano, Laureano Corcés, and Lillian Manzor; Pedro Monge Rafuls declined to attend in an unofficial capacity. Supposedly, due to a series of miscommunications, Fornés’ and Sarraín’s requests arrived too late for the visas to be processed. 29 See Manzor-​Coats and Martiatu Terry. 30 Not only did Troyano develop her performance piece Milk of Amnesia, but the trovador Pedro Luis Ferrer was invited to the United States. Other theater artists and critics such as Ileana Diéguez, Magali Muguercia, and Víctor Varela, director of Teatro Obstáculo were also invited. The Drama Review published a review coauthored by Manzor and Martiatu Terry, and Rine Leal published with Ollantay Press Teatro: 5 autores cubanos. 31 See Cuban Theater Digital Archive, Joey Rodríguez, and Federico. 32 Information about Repertorio Español taken from its website and the Repertorio Español Records. 33 Broken Eggs in English received its first reading in Miami at The Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Playwrights at Seven series (December 7, 1987). 34 The IHTF has a multifaceted educational component directed by Dr. Beatriz J. Rizk since 1994. 35 You can read a complete analysis of this controversy in Manzor, “Archiving.” 36 For a partial history of these acts of real and symbolic violence in Miami, see Manzor and Rizk. 37 Ricardo Ortiz, in his excellent analysis of addiction in this play, suggests that “the Cuban cultural body is nothing if not caffeinated, caffeine-​driven and addicted” (“Café” 64).

286  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” 38 “Mediante pinceladas a veces jocosas, otras veces melodramáticas, plantea la desmitificación de la familia cubana, y expone conflictos generacionales entre cubanos, la distancia emocional entre nostalgia y actualidad, la hipocresía religiosa, la relatividad de las ideas, según el lado desde donde se mira. Estas ideas pueden ser validas, pero se plantean una sobre otra, sin explorar mucho, con un dialogo fragmentado, en un trabajo construido a pedacitos que se conectan mediante las entradas y salidas que el director, René Buch, ha ordenado a sus actores.” 39 “Repertorio invited three directors from Brazil, Colombia and Chile to direct plays with the resident ensemble. Brazil’s Antunes Filho’s 1989–​1990 production of Nelson 2 Rodrigues, a combined title for two plays by Nelson Rodrigues: Family Album and All Nudity Will Be Punished, Colombia’s Jorge Alí Triana’s 1991 production of La Cándida Eréndira and Chile’s Guillermo Semler’s July 1990 production of El Abanderado received excellent reviews and challenged the Company to new artistic heights.” (Zaldívar, “Letter” 5). 40 See Navarro 1995. 41 For more information and press response for these productions, see CubaTeatro Project. 42 “¿Por qué llevan esta obra, que ya se presentó hace tiempo en el Festival de Teatro Hispano de Miami, en una mediocre puesta en escena, por mediocre la obra misma? . . . Servirá de complacencia al régimen de Castro, que se afana por todos los medios en presentar como malos y perversos a los cubanos que no aceptaron la nueva sociedad insular.” 43 “el autor se dejó tentar por el pintoresquismo de las minorías étnicas y el paternalismo políticamente correcto de la izquierda exquisita y los que pudieron ser Smith pasaron a ser Márquez Hernández y en lugar de estar marcados por la guerra de Vietnam, estos vinieron de Cuba, huyendo del comunismo, y veinte años después nos los devuelven devorados por el capitalismo brutal, el vacío de identidad. ¿Suena familiar?” 44 “Desde que anunció que iría a Cuba con el grupo de Repertorio Español para hacer varias actuaciones, el bestiario de Miami se ha puesto en marcha para reclamar la cabeza de Ana Margarita. No es nada nuevo. Es casi un ritual. Llevan 40 años haciendo lo mismo.” 45 “Interrumpo . . . para hacer constar mi regocijo ante una noticia de última hora: la decisión del Teatro Repertorio Español (TRE) de viajar el mes que viene a Cuba para montar en La Habana una obra de teatro. Mis felicitaciones a la actriz Ana Margarita Martínez-Casado . . . y a todo el elenco cubano, en especial al dramaturgo Eduardo Machado y a los fundadores de TRE, Gilberto Zaldívar y René Buch.” 46 The other lines that were deleted are the following: O S CA R : 

How can you think that’s true?! are the proof of my theory—​Cubans. He did it to us—​Fidel, our neighbors, everybody. So never feed a hungry man. O S CAR : You don’t really believe that. (189) A L F R E D O :  I must say I did not suspect it. I was so bored with Batista’s bullshit I thought, a revolution, good.We’ll get rid of the bums, the loafers, but instead, they got rid of us. S O N I A :  Good for the band! Remember when we thought Fidel was going to send us to Russia, to Moscow? Siberia, Siberia, this place is like Siberia! (196) A L F R E D O : We

Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo”  287 M A N U E L A :  I

hope he rots. Rot, Fidel Castro, die of cancer of the balls. hope. M A N U E L A : Then they came. And they took our businesses away, one by one. And we had to let them do it. (205) A L F R E D O :  Let’s

47 “se cumplió lo que íbamos a hacer: establecer una comunicación artística con la comunidad teatral de Cuba, y demostrarle al pueblo que lo que hacemos podía ser de gran interés para el público allí.” 48 “La acogida que nos dio el público fue increíble. Los teatros eran llenos totales. La gente ya aplaudía desde el principio a manera de recibimiento. . . En las calles nos decían ‘gracias por haber venido.’ Son puentes que se tienden. Son pequeños pero importantes logros . . . El arte es siempre el embajador de buena voluntad.” 49 “El saldo de la visita es altamente positivo para Repertorio Español – ​que rompe barreras e inicia una acción que no quedará aislada-​; para la UNEAC, que reafirma su papel de vanguardia en la orientación de la política cultural; y para el teatro cubano, que – ​como hemos dicho en otra parte –​es uno solo, no importa dónde vivan y trabajen sus creadores.” 50 “Además, creo que con sorpresa en Matanzas nos estamos desacostumbrando al teatro realista. Casi paradójico. Más que la obra, el teatro repleto aplaudió a unos actores que vinieron con unas ansias grandísimas de trabajar en el suelo de su mito y de poder hablar con nosotros asuntos de familia.” 51 “no habrá apertura de ninguna índole mientras el asesino dictador esté en el poder y seguirá en el poder mientras haya cubanos indignos que se dobleguen a pedirle permiso para poder regresar a la patria la cual tenemos derecho de visitar cuando nos dé la gana sin el permiso del dictador.” 52 “Se respiraba un cierto olor a Las Máscaras, Arlequín, o al propio Hubert de Blanck . . . el Hubert parecía habitado por el espíritu de las pequeñas salas de bolsillo que lucharon por legitimar el teatro de arte en Cuba.” 53 For information on the different performances, educational events, and bibliography, consult Manzor, “Festival.” 54 For an analysis of plays by Cuban playwrights staged in Miami during the 1990s, see Rizk 2000. 55 “El evento . . .marcó sin dudas un momento histórico porque evidenció el tipo de relaciones que, con total naturalidad, han de sostener la Isla y sus comunidades en el exterior, a pesar de los aspavientos que la ultraderecha y la mafia suelen evidenciar ante un hecho cultural de estas dimensiones.” 56 Although the festival was planned to take place only in Miami, Repertorio Español picked up several productions and presented them in New York. They also agreed to be co-​sponsors of the Second International Monologue/​Performance Festival that was planned for 2002. However, despite receiving over 100 proposals, lack of funding made it impossible to produce the festival the following year as it was originally planned. 57 “Aunque quedan en la memoria las grandes funciones que rindieron actrices y actores, jóvenes o veteranos, y la efusiva acogida del público, lo más trascendente, 20 años después, fue la rotunda prueba de vívido diálogo en la cultura propia protagonizado por todos. . . Pero, cual cenital que circula bajo la luz a la actriz o el actor en solitario, al borde del proscenio, así ilumina aquella experiencia un camino, al final, destinado a renacer.” 58 “El de ustedes fue siempre más arriesgado e imprescindible. X en el Ministerio de Cultura estaba encargado de que sus visas culturales fueran renovadas mensualmente.”

288  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” 59 “¿Y mi hijo? Alguien tiene que pagar la muerte de mi hijo. Abre el libro.” All future citations come from this version of the text. 60 “El Consejo de las Artes Escénicas de Cuba mantiene la obra casi como si se tratara de un secreto de Estado; su vicepresidenta, Gisela González, prohibió la entrada de la prensa extranjera a los ensayos.” 61 “El teatrista cubano Alberto Sarraín, exprisionero político exiliado en 1979, acaba de aparecer entrevistado en las páginas del oficialista diario Granma . . . Ahora el Granma trata de santificar estos ‘puentes artísticos’ que busca tender Sarraín haciendo ‘teatro para todos los cubanos’, pero vale insistir en que esa iniciativa surge de los teatristas de Miami, la ciudad que el mismo periódico califica a diario de ‘páramo cultural’ y ‘Meca de la mafia cubanoamericana’.” 62 “una posibilidad real de una diálogo artístico que evidencia un nuevo concepto de nación total, de sentido de cubanidad. El arte como espacio de identidad, como nación común, más allá de fronteras artificiales, y proyectos de vida.” Zoila Sablón is a pseudonym for Cuban cultural critic Maité Hernández-Lorenzo.

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292  Cinco. “Todos por lo mismo” Names withheld. Personal communication with author. 15 Aug. 2021. Navarro, Desiderio. “In media res publica: Sobre los intelectuales y la crítica social en la esfera pública cubana.” La Gaceta de Cuba, no. 3, 2001, pp. 40–​5. Navarro, Mireya. “Exile Returns, Lured by Memory of Cuba.” The New York Times, 24 Sept. 1995, p. 1+​. Niurka, Norma. “Un Revoltillo en la cabeza.” El Nuevo Herald, 29 May 1988, p. 4C. Núñez Rodríguez, Enrique. “¿La totalidad del teatro cubano?” La Gaceta de Cuba, no. 6, Nov-​Dec, 1992, p. 32. Ortega, Luis. “Untitled newspaper clipping.” 1998, p. 2C. Repertorio Español Records, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5257, Box 6, Folder 7. Ortiz, Ricardo L. “Café, Culpa and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 63–​84. ––​–​. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, U of Minnesota P, 2006. Padrón, Carlos. “Repertorio Español rompe barreras.” Tablas, vol. 57, no. 3, 1998, pp. 91–​3. Parece blanca. By Abelardo Estorino, directed by Alberto Sarraín, La Má’ Teodora and CNAE, 12 Sep. 2002, Teatro Nacional de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba. Parece blanca. Documentary video filmed by Daniel Correa. La Habana, 2002. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. http://​ctda.libr​ary.miami.edu/​admin/​arch​ive/​digita​lobj​ect/​ 14361/​ Parece blanca. Production photographs. La Habana, 2002. Cuban Theater Digital Archive. http://​ctda.libr​ary.miami.edu/​digita​lobj​ect/​17851/​ Pérez, Miguel. “The Cuban Experience.” Daily News [New York], 8 Mar. 1984. Eduardo Machado Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5164, Box 8, Folder 10. Petersen. Newspaper clipping. Eduardo Machado Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5164, Box 8, Folder 10. Photograph of Alberto Sarraín. 2001. Alberto Sarraín Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5131, Box 5, Folder 2. Photograph of Eduardo Machado. Eduardo Machado Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5164, Box 9, Folder 8. Photograph of Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Abelardo Estorino, Grettel Trujillo, Alberto Sarraín, Pancho García, Omar Valiño, Abilio Estévez, Wilfredo Cancio. 2001. Alberto Sarraín Papers, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5131, Box 5, Folder 2. Photograph of René Buch. Repertorio Español Records, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5257, Box 47, Folder 37. Pogolotti, Graziella. Polémicas culturales de los 60, Letras Cubanas, 2006. Pou, Diario. “El derecho de Ana Margarita.” Las Américas, 1998, p. 5A. Repertorio Español Records, University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5257, Box 6, Folder 7. Program for Abelardo Estorino’s Parece blanca. Teatro Nacional de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba. Playbill, 2001. Ravsberg, Fernando.“Obra teatral para las dos orillas.” BBC Mundo, 9 Sept. 2002, http:// ctda.library.miami.edu/media/publications/cuba.pdf. Redacción. “Teatrista exiliado en el Granma.” El Nuevo Herald, 20 Aug. 2002, p. 3A. Repertorio Español Records. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, CHC5257.

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Index

Note: Illustrations or captions are indicated in bold.

Abreu Felippe, José 7

abstraction 89 accent 47, 48, 85, 86, 92–​4, 110n32, 122, 143, 146, 151, 153, 154, 194, 208, 211, 220, 221; Anglo 208; as a sign of otherness 194, 208; British 221; Castilian Spanish 224; Creole 91; Cuban 208, 232n3; discrimination 92, 93; European 93; European-​sounding 93; “foreign” 48; French 92; “Latin” 220; Latine 144; non-​Cuban 280; over-​acted 192; Spanish 92, 93, 94, 208; Spanish/​Cuban 200; Yiddish 210 acculturation 23, 36, 257 Acosta, Iván 7 Act Up-​San Francisco 161 Acting Together 256, 257 Actor’s Playhouse 160 Actors Studio 69, 70, 85, 110n32 Adler, Stella 69, 70, 110n32 Affects 14, 16, 77, 83, 111n46, 129, 147, 155, 156, 157, 158, 168, 177, 178, 195, 248, 282 Afrocubanismo 141, 186 Afro-​America 49, 182; African American 3, 26, 27, 39, 40, 41, 125, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 141, 143, 144, 158, 160, 177, 178, 186, 253, 255 Afro-​Caribbean 13, 40, 45, 122, 129, 162, 175 Afro-​Cuban 13, 22, 51, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 139, 140, 151, 163, 179, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 277, 281 Afro-​US Cubans 63, 126, 127, 131 Afro-​Latinidad 18, 51, 126, 127; Afro-​Latino 3, 18, 65, 126, 128, 129, 131, 146, 160, 177, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 189

agency 3, 42, 55n6, 150; sexual 150 AIDS 133, 161, 174; activist 156 Akolaitis, Joanne 256 Akuara Teatro 7 Alabau, Magali 6, 15, 16, 69, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 102, 107, 108, 108n2, 191; see also Duo Theater; Teatro Duo; Teatro Duo Theater Alarcón, Norma 11 Alasá, Michelangelo 135 Alegría Hudes, Quiara 9, 159 Alfaro, Luis 160, 212, 213; Black Butterfly 160 Alomá, René 7 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre Company 132 Amagatsu, Ushio 112n64 American Academy of Dramatic Arts 85 American Dream 30, 31 Amor Eterno: Nine Lessons in Love (collective play) 213 Anderson, Walt 85; Me, Candido! 85 Andrews, Bert 254, 255 Angelos, Maureen 199 anthology 3, 43, 45, 58n43, 215, 249, 250, 251 Antigone (Anouilh) 11n41 Antonio Maceo brigade 1, 18n2 Anzaldúa, Gloria 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 141, 232n11 Appadurai, Arjun 42, 243 Arenal, Humberto 87, 268 Arenas, Reinaldo 276; La Loma del Ángel 276 Argos Teatro 283 Ariza, René 7

296 Index Arrabal, Fernando 87, 88; Guernica 111n37; The Executioner 88; Impossible Loves 87, 88; Picnic in the Battlefield (Pique-​Nique en campagne) 88, 111n37 Arrizón, Alicia 36, 57n31, 196 Artaud, Antonin 94, 96; Les Cenci (The Cenci) 96 assimilation 23, 44, 197, 207; linguistic 45, 46 atonality 97, 98, 100 audience 9, 10, 14, 54, 71, 78, 81, 87, 90, 93, 94, 97–​99, 102–​104, 106, 112n62, 122, 126, 130–​132, 146, 147, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 162, 165, 168, 171, 173, 174, 177, 195, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205, 208, 210–​212, 220, 221, 225, 232n3, 233n21, 257, 258, 260, 265, 267, 268, 270, 274, 276, 277–​283, 284n18; Anglo 46, 47; Anglo-​American 40, 218, 256; Anglo lesbian 14; as social body 16; bilingual 73; ethnic American 40; foreign 192; implied 14; Latine 46, 256; mainstream 9; monolingual 47; “real” 14; Spanish-​ speaking 100, 255; straight Latina 14; white lesbian 201, 202

Báez, Josefina 181n52; Dominicanish 181n52 Baker, James 26, 27 Bakhtin, Mikhail 144 Baldwin, James 145 balseros 31, 36, 56n6 Barba, Eugenio 241, 243, 247, 248, 249, 252, 270, 282, 283 Barber, Marta 272, 273 Barber, Ricardo 255, 261, 262, 267, 268 Barceló, Randy 132, 135, 142, 143 Barquet, Jesús 105 Barrientos, Bárbara 8 Batista, Fulgencio 55n6, 95, 149, 286n46 Bay of Pigs invasion 77, 78 beauty 25, 133, 168, 218, 224 Beckett, Samuel 108 Behar, Ruth 53, 179n17, 242; Bridges to Cuba/​Puentes a Cuba 242 Belpré, Pura 218 Benjamin, Walter 249 Berliner Ensemble 112n64 “Bésame mucho” (song) 208 Betances, Ramón Emeterio 121 Bhabha, Homi 282 biculturalism 23, 34, 197 Big History 242, 243, 247, 248, 249, 269, 272, 282, 283 bilingual education 28, 29, 37, 46

Bilingual Education Act 28 bilingualism 44, 45 bimodalism 96, 97 Birenbaum Quintero, Michael 141 Black American Vernacular English (AAVE) 142, 144; Southern 144, 146 Black Lives Matter 33, 52 Black Power Movement 145 blackface 137, 278 Blackness 14, 16, 17, 119, 122, 125–​126, 134, 145, 148, 156, 177, 178n3; anti-​Blackness 128, 129, 147; commodification of 145, 152, 153, 154; Cuban 119, 126, 135, 138–​140, 163, 172; diasporic 171; into Cubanity 121; US 128, 130, 131, 132, 144; vaivén of 125, 126, 140, 146, 153 Blanco, Richard 234n30 Boadella, Alberto 112n64 Boggiano, Sonia 277 Bola de Nieve see Ignacio Villa bolero 170–​1, 225 Bonet, Wilma 159 Boudet, Rosa Ileana 270 A Bowl of Beings (theater production) 38 Bracho, Ricardo 161, 168, 181n46, 213; A to B 213 Brava Theater 161 Bread and Puppet Theater 102 Brecht, Bertolt 69, 94, 103 Brenner, Carolyn 85 Broadway 71, 89, 145, 160 Brook, Peter 96, 112n64 Brown 129, 131, 162, 177; affect 178; commons 130–​1, 147; sense of, 122, 129–​130, 135, 164, 213 Brownness 130, 131, 132, 177 Buch, René 71, 254, 255, 259, 264, 266, 267, 286n38, 286n45; see also Repertorio Español Buena Vista Social Club 216, 220, 225 Bush, George W. 226, 274 Butler, Judith 13, 248, 249

Caffe Cino 70, 71

Camhe, Pamela 191 camp 94, 196, 201, 205; ethnic 17; lesbian racialized 190; queer 196; queer white 196; racialized 190, 197, 205, 208; see also picuencia campiness 201 Campo Santo Center for the Arts 119, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 168, 177

Index  297 Cancio Ramírez, Marlene 161 canon; ethnic 39; Latine Studies 6 Caracas International Theater Festival 100, 105, 106, 107 Carby, Hazel 39, 40, 149 Carmines, Al 71, 72, 83 Carrillo, Juliette 157 Carrió, Raquel 285n25 Carter administration 31, 38 Carter, Jimmy 31, 33 Casa de las Américas 268, 285n26 Casal, Lourdes 1–​2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 18n6, 23, 31, 125, 249 Castellanos, Teo 279, 280 Castrillón, Adalberto 278 Castro, Andrés 69, 70, 71, 85, 100, 103, 111n41 Castro, Fidel 1, 24, 31, 33, 34, 217, 227, 230, 245, 260, 264, 265, 266, 284n11, 286n46, 287 Castro, Max 245, 284n12 Castro, Raúl 33, 34 Catholic Welfare Bureau 26, 27 censorship; of the arts 271; in Cuba 3, 94, 149, 264 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 26, 27, 77 Césaire, Aimé 134; Return to My Native Land 134 Chang, Tisa 72 Chao, Manu 228 Chávez, César 73 Chekhov, Anton 259 Cheo Oliveras, José 265 Chicago 8, 53, 283n4 Chicano theater movement 9, 73 Childress, Alice 254 Chirino, Willy 22, 23, 55n2 choteo 17, 190, 195–​6; Carmelita Tropicana’s campy 197–​231; Ortiz’s definition of 196 Círculo Dramático Puertorriqueño 87 Citizenship (citizen) 69, 242; affective 14; American 18n10, 24, 25, 29, 256; Cuban 29, 32, 57n20, 106, 244, 279; cultural 241, 282; transnational cultural 244; US 54, 56n7, 78, 94, 106, 192, 228 Civil Rights Act 125, 127, 128, 180n33 Civil Rights movement 46, 95, 232n11 Clark,VèVè A. 49, 50 class 16, 31, 46, 50, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 152, 162, 168, 174, 180n30, 180n38, 190, 194, 195, 204,

206, 232n11, 276; Cuban middle 30; hegemonic 23; investing 26; low 180n38; low-​income 233n24; middle 141, 168, 174, 180n30; working 26, 124, 163, 168 Clinton administration 31, 216 Clinton, William 33, 227, 230 Club Chandelier 233n25 Club de Teatro Experimental Café La MaMa 111n39; see also La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Coatlicue/​Las Colorado Theatre Company 92 Cocteau, Jean 108n4 code-​switching 44, 45, 221, 222, 223 Cold War 15, 24, 26, 27, 31, 33, 106 Collado,Victoria 255 Colón, Miriam 69, 73, 85, 87, 264, 265, 267 colonialism 121, 134, 145, 147, 148, 155, 276; Spanish 123 Colorado, Hortensia 92 colorism 128, 130, 181n53 commodification 152; of Blackness 145, 153, 154; of music 137 community 20, 53, 69, 86, 124, 129, 156, 161, 173, 181n41, 196, 211, 241, 243, 260, 273; -​activism 16, 69, 73; African American 125, 131, 134; Afro-​descendant 43; Black 133, 151; -​building 54, 164; Cuban exile 6, 26, 28, 30, 34, 35, 43, 51, 52, 134, 158, 162, 163, 172, 174, 181n50, 195, 215, 216, 226, 229, 230, 239, 245, 246, 257, 261, 262, 269, 283n4; dismembered 174; imagined 42, 243; gay 133, 161, 194; hybrid 201; indigenous 130; Latine 13, 40, 127, 151, 159, 162, 169, 195; Latinx 6; lesbian spectatorial 17, 190, 197, 201, 203; multiracial 162; -​of women 155; Puerto Rican 26, 87; -​theater 9, 15, 40, 46, 119; transcultural 159; -transformation 243, 282; transnational 34, 243, 244; US Cuban 31, 43, 47, 51, 159 Consejo Nacional de Cultura (National Council of Culture) 111n47, 283n6 contact zone 22, 23 contrapunteo (counterpoint) 80, 107, 119, 158; contrapuntal 16, 151, 157, 178; mulato 177 Corcés, Laureano 285n25, 285n28 Corrales, José 43, 58n39 Cortiñas, Jorge Ignacio 6, 15, 16, 45, 119, 120, 122, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 169, 170, 177,

298 Index 178, 179n22, 181n46, 181n49, 181n51, 213, 273, 284n18; Bird in the Hand 45; Maleta Mulata 16, 119, 120, 122, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 156–​77, 170, 178 Costa Mesa 8, 157 creación colectiva (collective creation) 45, 94, 102, 106, 112n65 Cruz González, José 157 Cruz, Migdalia 158; Fur 158 Cruz, Nilo 9, 56n11, 284n18; Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams 56n11 Cruz,Vladimir 260 Cuba’s National Theater 274, 279 Cuban Adjustment Act 29, 57n20 Cuban American National Foundation 34, 216, 217 Cuban Artist Fund 275 Cuban Coordinating Committee 29 Cuban Culture on the Edge 35 Cuban Museum 34 Cuban Refugee Program 28, 29, 31 Cuban Revolution 1, 4, 7, 24, 25, 26, 55n6, 77, 94, 95, 97, 106, 107, 119, 121, 125, 205, 217, 231, 239, 245, 247, 250, 281 Cuban success narrative 15, 23–​35, 44 Cuban Theater Digital Archive (CTDA) 9, 10, 18n12, 56n11, 57n29, 88, 111n35, 120, 170, 178n2, 181n42, 219, 220, 221, 227, 234n31, 252, 270, 275, 277, 278, 283n1, 285n31 Cubanaso 164, 162, 163, 167, 176; see cubanazo cubanazo 129, 162, 163–​7, 170, 176, 203, 204, 222 cubaneo 163; Pérez Firmat concept of 163, 181n50 cubanía 163 cubanidad 129, 163, 204, 207, 288n62 Cubanity 8, 16, 19n21, 69, 121, 163, 276, 281 Cubanness 19n21, 124, 174, 178n3, 245, 274, 276 CubaTeatro 34, 252, 259, 260, 270 La Cucarachita Martina y el Ratoncito Pérez see La Cucarachita Martina La Cucarachita Martina (folktale) 17, 190, 215, 217, 218 “Cucurrucucu Paloma” (song) 223, 224 cultural heritage 243–​5, 282; Cuba’s 249; exile’s 245; industries 282; policies in Greater Cuba 242 cultural mediation 13 cultural policy 241, 243; Cuban 245–​7, 268, 274, 283n6, 284n20

culture 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 18, 18n8, 23, 36, 42, 48, 57n31, 58n32, 107, 122, 141, 190, 196, 203, 204, 222, 223, 231, 239, 243, 273; Afro-​Cuban 122, 132, 151, 163; “American” 8, 23, 45, 51, 52; Black 154; counter 69, 71, 191; culture industry 40, 41; Cuban 3, 12, 46, 58n37, 94, 119, 121, 122, 284n12; Cuban exile 121; defined by Canclini 6, 58n34, 58n38; dominant 16, 51, 122, 196; fractal 42; Greater Cuba’s 282; hegemonic 23, 207, 211, 231; hip-​hop 229; in-​between 126, 172, 257; intangible 282; Latin American 5, 12, 106; Latine 5, 128; material 229; Miami exile 15; minority 39; “mixed-​race” 125; national 11, 192, 243, 244, 246, 250, 260, 269, 274, 284n20; popular 45, 192, 198, ​ 207; Puerto Rican 228; racism in 156, 158, 177; revolutionary 165; uncultured 244–​45, 247; US 8, 12, 71, 125, 230; US Cuban 5, 23, 43; white Cuban-​American 129; -of intolerance 33–​35, 43; -of reconciliation 282 Culture Clash 38, 160 Cummings, Scott T. 69, 74, 77, 78, 109n11

Dance Theater of Harlem 132

Darling, Candy 16, 92, 93 Davis, Angela Y. 150, 181n41 de Acha, Rafael 257 de Cárdenas, Raúl 18n11, 89; La palangana 89 decade of the Hispanic 15, 37–​8, 119, 256 decade of the Latino 15, 37, 119, 169, 243 DeLanda, Manuel 13 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 4, 11, 208, 233n26 desire 16, 157, 174, 177, 178, 190, 201, 202; colonial 205; dynamics of 201; for whiteness 128; lesbian 18n4, 190, 208, 211; lesbian dynamics of 17, 202, 203; queer 111n49, 112n55; same-​sex 150 deterritorialization 11, 43, 251, 276 Diamond, Elin 200 diaspora 7, 35, 54, 230, 239, 276, 279; African diaspora 130; Cuban 7, 17, 35, 54, 234n30, 242, 244, 246, 251, 252, 270, 278, 280, 282, 283; literacy 49; post-​1959 54, 244; revolutionary 43; within a diaspora 161, 162 Díaz Souza, Eddy 8 Diéguez, Ileana 251, 285n30 discrimination 23, 55n3, 119, 137, 228; accent 92, 93; gender 125; language 37; linguistic 46; racial 125

Index  299 discursive erasure 121 Domingo, Colman 160, 161, 162, 168, 169, 170 Dragún, Osvaldo 251 Drucker, Frances 254 Du Bois, W. E. B. 130, 156 Duo Theater 73, 86–​91, 93, 105, 106, 107, 108, 146, 151; see also Teatro Duo; Teatro Duo Theater Durán, Pablo 279

EITALC (Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe) 251, 285n26, 285n28

El Teatro Campesino 73, 160 Elián González international conflict 17, 190, 215–​7, 230 emotigraphs 74, 77 emotional embargo 217, 223, 234n30 Encuentro en La Habana 241, 251–​2, 260, 268, 272, 273, 285n26 ensemble 6, 7, 13, 21, 101, 158, 220, 286n39 entanglement 13, 14, 17, 138, 162, 181n51, 194 eroticism 89; erotic 96, 130, 146, 150, 153, 185, 281, 292; homoerotic 167 Escarpanter, José A. 7 Escartín, Adela 110n32 Escuela Nacional de Arte 94; Cubanacán 111n47 Espinosa Domínguez, Carlos 249, 250, 251; “Una dramaturgia escindida” 249; Teatro cubano contemporáneo 241, 249 Estévez, Abilio 22, 273, 285n25; La verdadera culpa de Juan Clemente Zenea 22, 43 Estorino, Abelardo 17, 87, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 245, 260, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 285n25; La Cucarachita Martina 218, 220, 222, 223; Los mangos de Caín (Caín’s Mangoes) 85, 87, 88, 107; Parece blanca (She Looks White) 17, 274–​81, 275, 277, 278, 284n18; Las penas saben nadar (Sorrows Know How to Swim) 260; Vagos rumores (Vague Rumors) 260 ethnicity 7, 16, 17, 19n19, 23, 39, 41, 43, 50–​3, 59n53, 119, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 151, 155, 166, 179n17 excess 17, 140, 146, 150, 193, 197, 204, 208, 211, 231; of power 95 exoticism 151, 152, 153, 192 experimentation 89, 93, 96, 197

Eyen, Tom 16, 71, 89, 91, 93, 107; La estrella y la monja (The White Whore and the Bit Player) 90, 91–​4, 107

Faerron, James 160, 169, 170

Fanon, Frantz 145, 162; Black Skin,White Masks 145 Farías, Joann 157 Federico, Robert Weber 255, 265 Felipe, Carlos 159, 176; Réquiem por Yarini 159 femininity 14, 223, 224; differing models of 16, 122; black 154 Féral, Josette 280 Ferencz, George 136, 211 Ferreira, Ramón 87; ¿Dónde está la luz? 87 Ferrer, Pedro Luis 241, 242, 285n30 Festival Internacional de Teatro (FIT) 214, 251 Festival of Hispanic Theater 34, 256 Filho, Antunes 112n64, 286n39 First Festival of Latin American Popular Theater 106 First International Monologue/​ Performance Festival 17, 34, 241, 270–​4, 273, 275, 284n18 Fornés, María Irene 6, 8, 15, 16, 45, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 96, 107, 108, 119, 135, 136, 146, 156, 157, 158, 211, 212, 213, 221, 222, 252, 253, 259, 284n18, 285n25, 285n28; Cap-​a-​Pie 45; Letters from Cuba 74, 80; Lovers and Keepers 83; Mud 146; The Office 84; Promenade 16, 69, 83, 84, 89–90; Successful Life of 3 74; Tango Palace 16, 68, 79, 83; La viuda (The Widow) 15, 16, 68, 69, 74–​85, 76, 81 Fornés, Rafael 74 Foucault, Michel 2, 4, 163, 164 Frías, Cristina 160, 161, 168 Fuentes, Ileana 263 Fulana 161 Fulcrum Theater 156 FUNDarte 35 “Funkytown” (song) 173, 174 Fusco, Coco 52 Futurity 8, 16, 18, 54, 134, 157, 172, 173, 178, 231, 232, 239, 242, 248, 249, 274, 281, 283; queer 231

Garcés, Michael John 255

García, Francisco (Pancho) 273

300 Index García, Santiago 112n64; see also La Candelaria García Canclini, Néstor 6, 18n8, 58n34, 58n36, 58n38 García-​Peña, Lorgia 125–​26, 179n16 gaze 167, 177, 201; colonial male 205; deracialized 139; male 139, male 201; masculine 167; queer female 198, 201 gender 5, 11, 16, 17, 51, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 139, 141, 156, 171, 174, 177, 181n50, 190, 194, 196, 197, 200, 232; bending 197; discrimination 125; nonconforming 6; politics 191, 257; performance of 75, 162, 203, 231; representations 193, 231; role 81, 82, 84, 152, 211 Genet, Jean 108n2, 108n4 geopolitics 17, 190, 202, 203 George W. Bush administration 35 gestus 17, 82, 190, 195, 201, 202, 203, 204, 221, 234n34 ghost 16, 69, 94, 158, 159, 171, 172, 177, 251, 270, 274; see also race, ghost of Gilroy, Paul 141, 196 globalization 42, 48, 244, 279 golden exiles 24, 52 Gómez Peña, Guillermo 12, 38, 40 Gomez, Marga 212, 213, 232n10; I’m Marga, Pretty,Witty and Gay; Memory Tricks 232n10 González Pando, Miguel 7 González, Elián 215–​16, 217, 222, 223, 230, 231 González, Gisela 280, 284n18, 288n60 González, Ofelia 255, 264 Gordon, Avery 171 Gramercy Arts Theater 255 Gray Quinquennium 245 Greater Cuba 17, 18, 26, 223, 231, 241, 242, 243, 244, 248, 249, 250, 279, 281, 282, 283n4; cultural policies in 245; public sphere 242; post-​Castro 277 Greenwich Mews Theater 72, 254, 255 Greenwich Mews Spanish Theatre 90 Grenet, Eliseo 137, 140 Grotowski, Jerzy 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103; Towards a Poor Theatre 98; see also Teatr Laboratorium gusano 18n10, 31, 52, 53, 54, 244

La Habana 2, 17, 22, 25, 26, 27, 35, 53, 55n6, 56n6, 74, 77, 85, 88, 95, 97, 108n2, 110n32, 111n41, 111n47, 144,

172, 173, 195, 198, 199, 202, 205, 206, 214, 217, 222, 223, 224, 231, 241, 242, 243, 244, 249, 251, 252, 254, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270, 273, 274, 276, 277, 280, 283, 283n4, 285n26, 286n45

Hall, Margo 158 Hall, Stuart 18n8 Hansing, Katrin 35 Harlem Renaissance 16, 149 haunting 16, 69, 156, 171 Healy, Peggy 199 hegemony 4; Anglo 19n19; US 26 Hemphill, Essex 132, 133, 134; “Heavy Breathing” 132, 133 Hernández, Michel 278 heterogeneity 12, 37, 125, 159 heteronormativity 8, 14, 258 Hialeah 30, 176 Hispanic American Music Theater Lab (HAMTL) 83, 95, 135, 136, 137, 151, 180 n25, 185, 187, 211, 253 Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP) 8, 157, 160, 212, 253 Hispanic Playwrights-​in-​Residence Laboratory (HPRL) 8, 83, 107, 135, 136, 137, 211, 212, 213 Hollywood 26, 181n53, 192, 193 Holt, Stella 254 homophobia 3, 107, 173, 244, 252, 258 homosexuality 96, 173, 177, 241, 261 Hourie, Troy 217, 219, 220 Hughes, Holly 191, 197, 206; The Lady Dick 197; The Well of Horniness 191, 234n37 Hughes, Langston 254 Hurston, Zora Neale 145 hybridity 11, 15, 34, 68, 140, 197 hypervisuality 139, 153, 154

identification 8, 49, 50, 51, 111n47, 154, 155, 156, 196; group 130; national 7, 11; racial forms of 124; racialized forms of 130; self 19n19 identity 4, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19n18, 48, 49, 54, 58n32, 73, 105, 106, 122, 134, 135, 163, 197, 224, 231, 251, 256, 261, 281, 282; Afro-​Cuban 129; Afro-​Latine 128; Afro-​Latino 178n3; bicultural 106; collective 19n19; Cuban 8, 24, 54, 244, 277, 282; Cuban cultural 11; cultural 41, 123, 259; ethnic 156, 169; exile 244; -​formation 4, 13, 15, 51; gender 156; homosexual 156; juridical 260; Latin

Index  301 American 19n18; Latine 8, 16, 41, 69; lesbian 191; national 8, 11, 16, 17, 24, 124, 156, 190, 231, 243; racial 125, 145, 156, 169; self-​ 197; spectacular 192; US Cuban 2, 7, 15, 53, 122; US Cuban hybrid 44; see also identity-​in-​difference identity-​in-​difference 7, 11, 14, 16, 54; performance of 122 imagery 13, 134 imaginary 42, 179n13; Anglo 126, 193; diasporic 126; national 276; racial/​sexual 202; tropicalized imaginary 218 imperialism 25, 39, 40, 155, 202; commercial 192; US 202; US cultural 202; yanki 245 “in-​between” 11, 14, 16, 36, 53, 54, 122, 126, 141, 172, 174, 211, 231 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) 97 Instituto Superior de Arte 7, 195 INTAR (International Arts Relations) 8, 73, 83, 90, 107, 135, 136, 137, 151, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 222, 252, 253 International Hispanic Theater Festival (IHTF) 22, 256, 285n34 intersectionality 54, 196; intersectional 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 20, 23, 53, 119, 122, 124, 126, 153, 166, 171, 184, 177, 185, 165, 190, 192, 196, 197, 202, 203, 204, 231, 236; Ionesco, Eugène 108n2

jineterismo 279

Judson Poets Theater 71, 83 Julia, Raúl 85

Kantor, Tadeusz 112n64

Khachaturian, Aram 96, 97 Kilomba, Grada 5, 147, 148, 156, 185 King, Martin Luther 151, 180n36 Kornfield, Larry 72 Koutoukas, Harry 72 Kutzinski,Vera 139

La Candelaria 106; Guadalupe, años sin cuenta 106

La Fountain-​Stokes, Lawrence 218, 222, 228 La Má’ Teodora Cuban Cultural Group 6, 7, 34, 241, 271, 274; see also Alberto Sarraín La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club 71, 72, 73, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 111n39, 112n64, 131, 136, 212; see also Club de Teatro Experimental Café La MaMa

La Raza 37, 38 La Rueda Roja 106; La pulga 106 Landaluze,Víctor Patricio 139; La mulata 139 language 14, 15, 18n8, 23, 24, 29, 38, 44–​49, 53, 58n42, 58n44, 59n46, 59n47, 68, 85, 87, 102, 110n32, 122, 123, 127, 128, 142, 144, 146, 153, 154, 161, 162, 167, 168, 177, 180n31, 180n32, 196, 208; as an index of class status 143; body 150, 163, 167, 168, 180n38, 192, 211, 225, 241, 244, 254, 257, 279, 283n8; corporeal 7; -​discrimination 37; gender-​inclusive 6; ideology 92; beauty of 178; minority 208; poetic 119, 158, 177; theatrical 16, 69, 71 Las Máscaras 111n41, 270, 287n52 Latina Theater Lab 160, 161 Latinidad 87, 121, 128, 129, 193, 204, 207; Afro-​ 51; Caribbean 122; proto-​ 3, 18n7; queer 202; tropicalized constructions of 192; see also afrolatinidad; Latinness Latinness 140, 153 Latino Theater Initiative (LTI) 8, 157, 212, 213, 233n27, 234n28, 253 Latino Theater Lab 212 Latins Anonymous 160, 212 Leal, Rine 250, 251, 285n25, 285n30; Teatro: 5 autores cubanos 285n30 Lechuga, Carlos 95, 111n47 Lecuona, Ernesto 137, 140, 180n28; “La canción azul” 140; “Galanes y damiselas” 140; María la O 137; Niña Rita 137; “Siboney” 208 Lee Strasberg Studio 70 Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute 88 Lemoine, Xavier 192 León, Tania 131, 151; Stride 151 Literature 12, 19n18, 51; African American 39, 49, 133; Cuban 246; Cuban-​ American 6, 44, 51, 59n54; ethnic 35; exile 43, 45; Little Havana 27, 29, 30 The Living Theatre 86 Llamas, Lorraine 211 López Arenal,Yvonne 7 López, Ana 193, 242 López, Antonio 126, 129 López, Iraida 3, 45, 54 Lopez, Josefina 213 López, Leyma 255 López, Melinda 56n11, 239, 240, 283, 284n18; Ser Cuba 283; Sonia se fue (Sonia Flew) 56n11, 283 Los Angeles 7, 8, 22, 47, 57n28, 135, 160, 211, 252, 253, 283n4

302 Index Los Angeles Theater Center 253 Luperón, Gregorio 122 Lyotard, Jean-​François 42

Ma Rainey see Gertrude Rainey

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (film) 160 Maceo, Antonio 121, 124 Machado, Eduardo 6, 15, 17, 34, 213, 252, 253, 256, 258, 259, 264, 265, 266, 267, 281, 284n18, 286n45; Las damas modernas de Guanabacoa (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa) 256; Fabiola 281; Floating Island Plays (tetralogy) 252, 253, 264; Resident Alien 256; Revoltillo (Broken Eggs) 17, 34, 252–​70, 258, 262, 265, 269, 274, 276, 279, 281, 285n33 Macunaíma 112n64 Malina, Judith 112n62 Mañach, Jorge 195, 196; Indagación del choteo 195 Manet, Eduardo 18n11, 284n18 marginality 1, 4, 11, 134, 140, 164, 195 marginalization 5, 16, 39, 41, 46, 107, 133, 145, 211, 228 Mariel boatlift 30, 31, 32, 51, 55n6, 158, 162, 173, 175; post-​ 164 Marielitos 31, 36 Mark Taper Forum 8, 160, 212, 213, 253 Mark, Jordy 191 Marqués, René 73; La carreta 73 Marrero, Teresa 8, 19n13, 45, 58n43, 181n43 Martí, Carlos 247 Martí, José 121, 124 Martiatu Terry, Inés María 285n30 Martín Jr., Manuel 6, 15, 16, 69, 70, 71, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 119, 120, 122, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 177, 178, 180n33, 180n35; Fight! 180n26; Francesco: The Life and Times of the Cenci (Francesco: Vida y milagros de los Cenci) 94–​100, 95, 101, 102, 104, 112n55; Rasputin 94, 100–​5, 101, 103; Rita and Bessie 16, 107, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 130, 131, 135–​56, 142, 143, 144, 148, 155, 177, 178; Swallows 107, 108; Union City Thanksgiving 108; see also Duo Theater; Teatro Duo; Teatro Duo Theater Martín, Mario 18n11 Martin, Randy 13

Martínez-​Casado, Ana Margarita 34, 255, 261, 262, 263, 264, 267, 279, 286n44, 286n45 Martínez-​San Miguel,Yolanda 179n13 masculinity 14, 122, 133, 165, 166, 167, 181n51, 223, 228; American white 191; Cuban 134, 164, 165; cubanazo 166; Latino hyper-​ 204; stereotypical Black 134 Matanzas 267, 268, 269, 274, 287n50 Matas, Julio 18n11 Matsuda, Mary 92, 93 Mayer-​García, Eric 11n46, 111n49, 112n55 McKittrick, Katherine 154, 163, 164 Medusa’s Revenge 108, 191 Melfi, Leonard 16, 89; Birdbath (El bebedero) 89 memory 16, 17, 75, 80, 133, 156, 158, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178, 239, 243, 250, 274, 276, 282, 283; political 43; politics of 16, 157; split 190, 231 Mena, Chaz 265 Mendive, Manuel 34; El pavo real 34 mestizaje 57n31, 58n32, 123, 124, 178n13, 277, 278; see also mulataje; transculturation metarepresentation 13 metatheatricality 81, 82, 83, 98, 218, 225, 276, 279 Miami 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55n4, 55n6, 57n28, 73, 122, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 181n51, 190, 203, 216, 217, 218, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233n21, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 280, 281, 283n4, 284n17, 284n18, 285n33, 286n42, 286n44, 287n56, 288n61; as an anomaly 23; Cuban 215; Latine 33; 1980s 158; sound 174 Miami International Theater Festival 270 Miami Light Project 34, 35, 275 Miami-​Cuba 4, 22, 23, 33, 43 Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) 32, 33 Militello, Anne 80 Minh-​ha, Trinh T. 11 Mirabal, Nancy 121, 126 Miranda, Carmen 192, 193, 200, 208, 232n9 Miranda, Lin-​Manuel 9, 128, 159; In the Heights 128, 159, 181n53

Index  303 Monge Rafuls, Pedro 7, 45, 251, 268, 284n18, 285n25, 285n28 Montaner, Rita 119, 137–​40, 138, 149, 192 Montes Huidobro, Matías 18n11, 43, 45, 58n39, 284n18; Once Upon a Future 45 Montiel, Sara 222, 224, 225; “La vida en rosa” 222, 224, 225 Moore, Robin 122, 139, 140, 178n4 Moraga, Cherríe 137, 156, 161, 213, 232n11 Moran, Rachel 127 mulataje 124, 131, 178n13; see also mestizaje; transculturation multiculturalism 15, 37, 38, 39, 41, 212, 256; corporate 38; critical 39, 40, 41; failure of 41; liberal 41 Muñoz, José Esteban 10, 14, 16, 19n20, 19n21, 122, 129, 130, 131, 146, 156, 163, 164, 172, 178, 179n22, 195, 213, 248, 249; Cruising Utopia 172; Disidentifications 195; The Sense of Brown 129–​30 music 14, 23, 70, 83, 91, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 122, 131, 137, 140, 141, 150, 152, 154, 155, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 180n26, 205, 218, 221, 222, 224, 225; Afro-​ Cuban 121; aleatoric 97; Baroque 96; Black 151, 152, 155, 174; Brechtian use of 83; commodification of 137, 152; commoners 233n24; contemporary 35, 97; Cuban 137, 140; disco 174; industry 152; popular 14, 141; Renaissance 97, 98; soul 170, 171, 174

N-​word 145, 146

National Council for the Performing Arts (CNAE) 246, 274, 275, 280, 284n18 National Council of La Raza 37, 38 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 8, 9, 136, 157 nationalism 46, 134, 245, 259, 282; Cuban patriarchal 112n55; “mixed race” 125 nationality 53, 54, 128, 155, 242 naturalism 135, 146 Négritude 134; nationalism 134 Negro spiritual 154 neoculturation 36, 43, 195 networks 4, 11, 13, 15, 16, 22, 26, 35, 40, 42, 54, 68, 73, 87, 108, 122, 130, 131, 135, 156, 161, 181n47, 211, 213, 242, 243, 245, 252, 253, 260, 270, 282 New School for Social Research 69, 100 New York 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 16, 17, 40, 47, 56n7, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 84, 85, 86,

87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 100, 106, 108, 108n2, 108n5, 110n32, 111n41, 119, 122, 135, 141, 151, 153, 156, 159, 160, 162, 173, 177, 190, 191, 194, 195, 199, 211, 213, 228, 233n25, 241, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 287n56; 1960s 68 New York State Council for the Arts 136 nostalgia 51, 78, 172, 202, 225, 259, 286n38; Cuban American 178; Cuban exilic 252 novísimos 19n12 nudity 71, 90, 96, 107 Nunes-​Ueno, Paulo 119, 160, 166, 168 Núñez Barrios, Amarilys 278 Núñez Rodríguez, Enrique 250 Nuyorican Poets’ Café 72, 73

O’Horgan, Tom 89

Obama administration 32 Obama, Barack 32, 33, 35, 240, 282; visit to Cuba 239 Obie 73, 156, 191, 255 objectification 16, 122; of female sexuality 149; of racialized female bodies 231; sexual 145 Off-​Broadway 70, 71, 256 Off-​Off-​Broadway 15, 16, 46, 68, 69–​73, 74, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108n4, 119, 136, 160, 254, 256; Anglo 96; Latine 16, 68, 69, 70, 89, 94, 96, 107, 108 Ollantay Press 285n30 Ollantay Theater Magazine 251, 268 Los Once 89 The Open Theater 86 Operation Bootstrap 26, 31 Operation Pedro Pan 26, 252 Ortiz, Fernando 36, 37, 41, 42, 58n32, 119, 122, 123, 137, 140, 158, 159, 178n5, 178n6, 195, 196, 205, 206; “Choteo” 195, 196, 205, 207; Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar 137, 158, 178n5; El engaño de las razas 122–​3; Glosario de afronegrismos 195; Los negros brujos 178n5; Nuevo catauro de cubanismos 159; see also picuencia; transculturation Ortiz, Ricardo 257, 281, 282, 285n37

Padrón, Carlos 247, 259, 265, 268

Palacio, Mónica 212, 232n10; Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche 232n10; Latin Lezbo Comic 232n10 Palumbo-​Liu, David 39

304 Index Pan Asian Repertory Theater 72 Papp, Joseph 72, 73 Parnes, Uzi 197, 200, 206, 212, 233n25 parody 7, 197, 204, 207, 222, 231, 277; self-​ 193 Partido Independiente de Color 124 Pavis, Patrice 10, 82 Pavlovsky, Eduardo 106; El señor Galíndez 106 Payán, Ilka Tanya 108, 135 Paz, Senel 59n55, 260; Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) 260 Peña, Mario 88 Pereiras, Manuel 211 Pérez, Lisandro 30 Pérez Jr., Louis A. 24, 25 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 19n17, 44, 51, 158, 163, 164, 165, 181n50; Life on the Hyphen 165, 181n50 performance art 13, 193–​5; Latina 194; US Cuban 5, 17 Performance Space 122; 195, 197, 198, 212, 233n21 Phelan, Peggy 194 phonochromy 96, 112n50 Piaf, Edith 222; “La vie en rose” 222 picuencia 17, 190, 196, 197, 205–​8, 210, 211, 217, 222, 223, 225, 230, 231; Fernando Ortiz ideas on, 205–​6; see also camp Piñera,Virgilio 88, 89; Dos viejos pánicos (Two Old Panics) 88, 89; Falsa alarma (False Alarm) 88 Piscator-​Bühne 100, Rasputin, die Romanovs, der Krieg und das Volk das gegen sie aufstand (Rasputin, the Romanovs, the War and the People Who Rose Against Them) 100, 105, 112n61; see also Erwin Piscator Piscator, Erwin 69–​70, 71, 94, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 112n61, 112n62; see also Piscator-​Bühne pluralism 39, 151; cultural 54, 151, 154 polytonality 97 Portes, Alejandro 23 power 38, 39, 42, 53, 54, 83, 90, 93, 95, 105, 195, 217, 223, 246, 249; buying 38; the crevices of 161; differential 92; imbalances 124; moves 165; relations 144, 153, 180n29, 245; structures 49, 194; uneven relations of 223 Pratt, Mary Louise 22 Prida, Dolores 34, 43, 45, 58n39, 108, 257, 262; Beautiful Señoritas 45; Coser y cantar 34, 45, 257, 262

Prieto, Abel 246 Probyn, Elspeth 4, 5 proximity 130, 228; networks of 11 Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida 161, 181n46 public sphere 242, 249, 270, 282, 284n15 Puente, Tito 83, 136 Puentes Cubanos 274 Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (Teatro Rodante Puertorriqueño) 72, 87, 268 Puerto Rico 4, 12, 15, 16, 26, 27, 28, 31, 46, 68, 69, 71, 73, 77, 85–​87, 106, 151, 178n3, 202, 228, 250 Pulitzer Prize 9, 131, 151, 216

Queer Black 132

queer divas of the Blues 16, 149 queer facultad 49, 50 queer futurity 231 queer gestures 248 queerness 14, 133 Quintero, José 73, 108n4 Quiroga, José 3

race 3, 5, 14, 16, 19n19, 21, 31, 33, 39, 50, 51, 52, 53, 72, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 151, 152, 154, 157, 172, 177, 178n12, 179n14, 179n17, 180n29, 190, 196, 200, 201, 204, 208, 229, 261, 276, 277, 278, 281, 282; as a socio-​ historically constructed category 125, 197; ghost of 119, 134, 156, 158, 162, 163, 164; linguistic construction of 126; Fernando Ortiz’s theory of 122–​23, 178n6; relations 124

racial formation 123 racialization 16, 17, 27, 39, 122, 128, 162, 177, 194, 20; Cuban 125 racism 5, 8, 94, 107, 119, 128, 131, 137, 145, 156, 158, 164, 177, 179n23, 180n35, 244, 281; Anglo 126; everyday 147–​8, 171; Cuban 119, 121, 156; institutionalized 125; internal 13, 16; Latino 126; systemic 181n53 Raines, Walter 132 Rainey, Getrude 149, 150 Ramírez, José Erasto 98 Ramirez, Lisa 160, 168, 169; Exit Cuckoo (nanny in motherland) 160 Rancière, Jacques 146, 153 realism 135, 146, 156, 204, 205, 268

Index  305 reception 13, 42, 195, 201, 202, 256, 257, 267, 274, 277; critical 17; fragmented 42–​3 reconciliation 13, 234n30, 239, 240, 241, 242, 260, 268, 270, 273, 282, 283n4 religion 47, 122, 129, 162; Afro-​Caribbean 175 Reno, Janet 227, 230 Repertorio Español 6, 17, 34, 71, 72, 90, 91, 253, 254–​5, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 286n39, 286n44, 286n45, 287n49, 287n56 Repilado, Carlos 276 reterritorialization 11, 36, 43 Rey, Antonia 100 Riofrancos, Osvaldo 73 Rivas, Fernando 83, 137, 211, 212 Rivera-​Servera, Ramón H. 38, 202 Rivero, Eliana 45, 52 Rizk, Beatriz J. 285n34 Robinson, Roberto 160, 161, 168 Rodney King riots 161 Rodriguez, Diane 212, 213 Rodríguez, Juana María 130, 248 Rodríguez, Timothy 160 Rodríguez Suárez, Roberto 16, 86, 87, 108; Home for Christmas 86; Lillie XVI 87; Penitents 86, 87 Roig, Gonzalo 137; Cecilia Valdés 137 Romero, Jill 120, 141, 144, 148, 155 Rosa, Jonathan 12, 48 Ruhl, Sara 85 Ruiz, Jesús 276, 277

S.P.O.N.G.E. (Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything) 180n33

Saguar, Luis 158 Salcedo, Guadalupe 106; see also La Candelaria Samora, Julián 37; La Raza: Forgotten Americans 37 San Francisco 8, 16, 119, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 169, 173, 174, 177, 195 San José, Sean 158, 161 Sanabria, Roberto “Bobby” 137, 211 Sananes, Adriana 265 Sánchez, Mario Ernesto 56n11, 256; Matecumbe, el vuelo de Pedro Pan 56 Sánchez, René 255, 263, 267 Sánchez, Zilia 89, 111n41 Sandoval, Chela 11 Santa Clara 266, 267, 270, 274

Santeiro, Luis 211 santería 22, 122, 166, 175, 181n55 Santiago, Héctor 7 Sarraín, Alberto 7, 17, 22, 245, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 280, 283, 285n25, 285n28, 288n61; see also La Má’ Teodora Cuban Cultural Group “Schubert Follies” 140, 192 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 257 segregation 26, 39 sensuality 139, 278 servitude 153; eroticization of 153 sexism 8, 23 sexuality 16, 17, 50, 121, 122, 123, 124, 137, 138, 141, 152, 172, 177, 178, 180n29, 190, 192, 193, 196, 197, 202, 203, 231; female 149; gay 252; lesbian 202, 206 Sharpe, Jenny 171 Shaw, Peggy 191, 192 Simo, Ana María 96, 108, 135, 191, 211 Simpson, Lillian 149, 150 simulation 95, 105, 153, 204; capitalist ideological 152 slavery 121, 154, 155, 171, 276; abolition of 123; institutionalized 127; US slavery 154 Small History, 242, 247, 248, 272, 282, 283 Smith, Bessie 119, 137, 141, 149, 150; Harlem Frolics (show) 149 Solís, Octavio 156, 157, 158, 161; Santos & Santos 158, 161 son 141 Sontag, Susan 74, 75 Soto, Leandro 8 South Coast Repertory (SCR) 8, 157, 253 Spanglish 8, 41, 167, 168, 169, 177, 181n52 Spanish Mews Workshop 254 Special Period 56n6, 222, 243, 246, 279, 282 Spillers, Hortense J. 153 Stepick, Alex 23 Stevens, Camilla 276 Stewart, Ellen 16, 71, 91, 93, 94, 111n45, 131 Stone, Scheherazade 160, 169, 173 Strasberg, John 88 Strasberg, Lee 69, 70, 85, 87, 88, 103, 110n32 strategic obliquity 135 subjectification 2, 10; hybrid 2 subjectivity 11, 171, 244; hybrid 11; individual 171 suprasegmentals 146, 154 Svich, Caridad 135, 221, 284n18

306 Index syncretism 58n32, 121, 124; see also transculturation

tango 121

tango congo 121, 140 Taylor, Diana 13, 41, 194 Teatr Laboratorium 96; Akropolis 96, 100, 102, 103; Apocalypsis cum Figuris 96; The Constant Prince 96; see also Jerzy Grotowski Teatro Avante 7, 256 teatro bufo 7, 139, 140; see also theater -​ vernacular Teatro Duo 86; see also Duo Theater; Teatro Duo Theater Teatro Duo Theater 108, 119, 135, 177; see also Duo Theater; Teatro Duo Teatro Nuevo 257 Teatro Obstáculo 7, 285n25, 285n30 Teatro Prometeo 22, 271 Ten Years’ War 123, 227 theater; African American 255; American 157; Anglo-​American 146; art 270; avant-​garde 86, 88, 89, 105, 198, 256; Black 254; Caribbean 159, 268; Chicano/​ Latino 107; classical 105; collections 10, 73; commercial 8, 70; of commitment, 69; criticism 71, 280; of cruelty 96, 112n55; Cuban 13, 15, 17, 18, 35, 71, 159, 177, 242, 250, 251, 252, 253, 264, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 280; of Cuban diaspora 7, 17; Cuban-​American 7, 43; devised 94; see also creación colectiva; documentary 105, 107; epic 69, 103; European avant-​ garde 15, 94; exile 7, 17, 46; experimental 16, 69, 71, 86, 91, 160; of Greater Cuba 18; Hispanic 91, 256, 257; “Hispanic” 72, 87, 108n1; “imagine otherwise” 169, 171, 172, 173; Latin American 5, 254, 268; Latin American avant-​garde 15; Latine 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 40, 58n43, 68, 72, 73, 86, 87, 89, 91, 94, 108, 108n1, 157, 211, 251, 252; lesbian 198; live 5, 13, 14; lyric 83; -​making practice 7, 68; minority 212; musical 212; non-​Anglo 88; Nuyorican 86, 87; -​of the absurd 89; poor 98, 99; realistic 268; repertory 8; Spanish 254; Spanish or Hispanic 15, 68; Spanish-​ speaking 89, 91; total 70; US 70, 71, 156; US Cuban 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 23, 40, 44, 45, 46, 51, 69, 107, 108, 121, 157, 252; US ethnic 261; US experimental 94; vernacular 7, 47, 139; see also teatro bufo;

transformative power of 169, 242, 273, 282; within theater 74 Theater at St. Clement’s 92 Theater Rhinoceros 160, 161 Toraño, María Elena 38 Torres-​Saillant, Silvio 128 Torres, María de los Angeles 31, 43, 53, 54, 56n10, 57n24, 59n56, 216, 217 Torres, Michael 158, 160 transculturation 15, 36, 37, 41–​3, 54, 57n31, 58n32, 68, 73, 89, 103, 121, 122, 124, 125, 195; see also Fernando Ortiz; mestizaje; mulataje; syncretism transnationalism 7, 15, 18, 34, 42, 54, 57n27, 73, 125, 141, 214, 228, 241, 242, 243, 244 Triana, José 18n11, 89, 90, 284n18; La noche de los asesinos (The Criminals) 89, 90 Tropicana (nightclub); 192, 197, 198; reduction through “choteo” 198–​9 Tropicana, Carmelita 6, 14, 15, 17, 190–​232, 234n39, 241, 285n25; Candela y Azúcar 192; Carmelita’s Boiler Time Machine 212; 233n25; Memorias de la Revolución /​ Memories of the Revolution 17, 190, 197–​211, 198, 200, 203, 207, 209, 210, 231; Milk of Amnesia /​Leche de Amnesia 214, 215, 233n25, 241, 242, 285n30; Tale of Two Cities 212; With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit /​¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? 17, 190, 212, 214, 215–​31, 219, 220, 221, 227; see also Alina Troyano Troyano, Alina 190, 191, 192, 197, 199, 201, 204, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 222, 227, 228, 229, 232n3, 234n36, 252, 285n25, 285n28, 285n30; I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures 215; see also Carmelita Tropicana Troyano, Ela 200, 206, 211, 212, 213, 233n25 Trujillo, Grettel 273 Trump, Donald 32, 34, 56n6

Ubieta, Enrique 96–​7, 98, 99, 100; “Himno Agrario” 97; “Momento Renacencista” 97, 98

UMAP labor camps 94, 261 UNEAC (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba) 247, 250, 259, 260, 265, 268, 287n49

V-​effect (Verfremdungseffekt) 200

vaivén 125, 126, 140, 146, 153 Valdés, Luis 73, 212; Zoot Suit 212

Index  307 Valenzuela, José Luis 212 Valiño, Omar 272, 273, 274 Varela,Víctor 7, 285n25, 285n30 Vázquez, Alexandra 14 Vega, Liliam 7 Veloso, Caetano 224 Verena, Marisela 55n2; see also Willy Chirino Vietnam War 95, 151, 261 Villa, Ignacio 137, 139, 140, 180n28 Villaverde, Cirilo 276, 278; Cecilia Valdés 276, 278

Warner, Janis 120, 141, 144, 148, 155

Washington, DC 34, 156, 217; 1980s 133 Weaver, Louis 191 Wet Foot-​Dry Foot policy 32, 57n20, 57n22 white supremacy 125, 127; Anglo 126; Latino 126

whiteness 14, 126, 128, 129, 131, 156, 158, 201; as a privilege 129, 132; Cuban American 129; non-​ 232n11; “pure” 138; seduction of 128–​9, 131, 132, 169, 204 womanhood 153; Black 153; Cuban 205 Wong, Joni 201 WOW Café (Women’s One World) 190, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 212, 233n21

Ybarra Frausto, Tomás 260

Yesckas, Manuel 104 Yudice, George 123, 178n5, 233n14, 233n24

Zaldívar, Gilberto 254, 255, 259, 260, 264, 265, 267, 286n45 zarzuela 83, 137 Zayas, José 255 Zelaya, Gloria 108