A Tale of Two Cities: Observing and Enjoying Havana in the 1950s and 1990s

• In Event: Ways of Seeing: Foreigners and Cuba in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The social and economic changes that were felt in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to shifts in attitude both within and from without the island. These shifts were also visible in mainstream areas of written and visual cultural production such as photojournalism, music pictures and detective or crime fiction. Internally, with regard to the latter, the rigid police procedurals that underlined the utter reliability of the socialist state gave way to a darker and more ambivalent perspective in which the detective was for the first time individualized and problematized. Externally, the move to a dollar economy prompted greater interest in and access to Cuba, and from the early 1990s onwards a new breed of mystery production from an Anglo-American perspective exploited the potential of both the island’s perceived exoticism and socio-economic uncertainty. Two broad trends can be observed: a harking back to the Batista era of the 1950s when the North American mafia ran a social economy based on tourism, gambling and prostitution; a morbid fascination with the so-called Special Period of the 1990s when a new era of possible corruption and exploitation was ushered in by the dissolution of dependency on the Soviet Union. In both cases, the limits of Northern or Western liberalism are revealed as a postmodern chivalric observer oscillates uneasily between individualism and collectivity, identification and distance, sincerity and exoticization. This paper examines and seeks to understand the parameters of the complicated web of tensions, particularly as manifested in the detective’s apprehension of Havana – a fluid zone representing a hybrid border space between the old and the new. Production from within and without Cuba is contextualized and complemented by case studies of foreign representations of the city.

Author

• Philip Swanson, University of Sheffield