Before the Thaw: The Politics of Cuban Popular Culture in 21st Century Miami and Havana

• In Event: Queers, Laughs, Jabs, and Visitas: Exploring New Directions in Cuban-American Studies

Abstract

History will likely frame the announcement of warming relations between the United States and Cuba on December 17, 2014 (17D) as a pivotal moment from which to measure a “before and after” of US-Cuba relations. But in doing so, a critical part of the story is left out—the ways in which Cubans themselves have been bringing the two countries closer together for over 20 years.

The conversation about Cuba and its diaspora has remained stubbornly mired in the logic of “two Cubas” separated by political ideology. Cuban Miami is no longer the “exile” stronghold that supports the embargo and regime change tactics by the U.S. government. Migrants from Cuba since the 1990s now outnumber the exile generation in South Florida. These Cubans want more engagement with the island instead of less. The result has been a shift in what it means to be Cuban in Miami. Post-revolutionary popular culture, once the target of attacks, has become part of the cultural fabric of Cuban Miami in the twenty-first century. Artists visiting from Cuba now appear in auditoriums, cabarets, and have even hosted television shows. While some social scientists have tracked these changes statistically, this paper seeks to engage with how these shifts are lived and felt in quotidian life through popular culture. To do this work, I focus on the presence of artists in Miami associated with a popular Cuban comic variety show in the 1990s called Sabadazo.

This circulation of popular culture is by no means a one-way affair. Cuba’s relationship with the diaspora is also changing the cultural and economic landscape on the island through el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paquete refers to the bundling and distribution of mostly foreign film, television, and music across the island to the tune of a terabyte weekly. While el paquete has attracted a great deal of attention from the international media, academic analysis has been lacking. Most crucially, absent from media narratives has been the role of the diaspora in its production. I explain the role el paquete is having in Cuba culturally and economically while emphasizing that it would not exist in the way it does today without the support of Cubans abroad. Finally, el paquete’s transnational connection to the diaspora is not only about money and computer hardware. Content like television programs produced by Cubans in Miami circulates on el paquete in a manner that undermines the government’s negative narrative of the diaspora while simultaneously producing a “transnational social field.”

Cuba and its diaspora are not put into critical conversation enough despite the realities on the ground. This paper argues that the future of the island and diasporic centers like Miami will be impossible to articulate without thinking through them together.

Author

• Albert Laguna, Yale University