Santa Claus vs los Reyes Magos: Ups and Downs in the Expansion of U.S. Culture into Pre­revolutionary Cuba

• In Event: The Personal, the Public, and the Political: Civil Society and Early Twentieth Century U.S.-­Cuban Relations

Abstract

This paper is focused on the reception of U.S. culture in Cuba and its interaction with the national and local culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. values and commodities were presented to the inhabitants of the island in a more systematic way than before. There were complex cases of simultaneous acceptance­-and-­rejection that seem as a “cultural struggle.” The historiography has tended to favor the analysis of either the vision of assimilation or the manifestations of cultural resistance, rather than asking the reasons for the appearance of these two type of interactions. I argue in this essay that the reception of U.S. culture was easily adopted by some groups and rejected by others in different regions of Cuba. I further contend that the upper classes were captivated by U.S. cultural forms, although they successfully managed to reinvent them. The elites, and their reinterpretation of U.S. values, presented a mild version of U.S. cultural patterns to the popular classes, a “version aplatanada” of North American culture. I finally claim that beyond those broad patterns of hegemony versus resistance, there was a multilayered cultural consumption leaving space for different receptions altogether. I believe that this essay will ultimately contribute to discuss the established frameworks of cultural history, by combining contrasting perspectives and considering its implications for both global and local history.

Author

• Maikel Fariñas Borrego, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill