Beyond Cuban Waters: Africa, La Yuma, and the Island's Global Imagination

by Paul Ryer

Overview

Twenty-first-century Cuba is a cultural stew. Tommy Hilfiger and socialism. Nike products and poverty in Africa. The New York Yankees and the meaning of "blackness." The quest for American consumer goods and the struggle in Africa for political and cultural independence inform the daily life of Cubans at every cultural level, as anthropologist Paul Ryer argues in Beyond Cuban Waters. Focusing on the everyday world of ordinary Cubans, this book examines Cuban understandings of the world and of Cuba's place in it, especially as illuminated by two contrasting notions: "La Yuma," a distinctly Cuban concept of the American experience, and "África," the ideological understanding of that continent's experience. Ryer takes us into the homes of Cuban families, out to the streets and nightlife of bustling cities, and on boat journeys that reach beyond the typical destinations, all to better understand the nature of the cultural life of a nation.

This pursuit of Western status symbols represents a uniquely Cuban experience, set apart from other cultures pursuing the same things. In the Cuban case, this represents neither an acceptance nor rejection of the American cultural influence, but rather a co-opting or "Yumanizing" of these influences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826521187
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Paul Ryer is Director of Scholar Programs at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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CHAPTER 1

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF LA YUMA

The Caribbean story as I read it is less an invitation to search for modernity in various times and places — a useful yet secondary enterprise — than an exhortation to change the terms of the debate. What needs to be analyzed further, better, and differently is the relation between the geography of management and the geography of imagination that together underpinned the development of world capitalism and the legitimacy of the West as the universal unmarked.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World

Beginning with a seemingly simple popular term, La Yuma, this chapter interrogates one Cuban vernacular space of privileged foreignness. This chapter's focus on Cuban commonsense ideas about the boundaries between Cuba and the unmarked, whiter, richer foreignness of Europe and North America and the once and future place occupied by the Soviet Union's "lo bolo" along with the following chapter's exploration of África as another imagined space that marks a different shore of cubanidad, I propose, are part of a worldwide Cuban geography of the imagination. In this imagined geography, the foreign is largely stripped of the impurities of home, and the Cuban:foreign boundary does indeed effectively constitute a new form of racial distinction (Roland 2011). Relying less on interviews than on observations and more on bodily style than on verbal ideologies, here I work through the lens of Western material goods and symbols that connote capitalism. The value of the commodities and the meaning of the metaphor have changed rapidly over the past two decades, and I argue that these changes index Cuba's painful reintegration into a not-new world economic order, specifically as symbols of a new remittance economy. However, even the humblest product — a pair of socks, a "Tommy" T-shirt — may be locally sought out in ways unanticipated from an outside perspective. Only after foregrounding such agentive desires of ordinary Cubans do I move to consider micropractices and macrostructures of the contemporary socioeconomic context. For despite the encroaching US dollar, Cuba's economy retains elements of a centralized command structure and is hardly "postsocialist." While also evident in events such as the state's distinctive civil defense against hurricanes, contemporary Cuban state socialist particularity is best illustrated, I argue, through an ethnographic examination of the parallel economy, which is officially invisible yet omnipresent in daily life. Although, rather than negating Cuba's Caribbean context or history, this examination will also, in fact, begin to suggest answers to many of the questions posed at the beginning of this book. If this balancing act seems unconventional, it is nevertheless a deliberate attempt to avoid the twin perils of pathologizing and pitying. Celebrating the ways Cubans pursue, appropriate, and reinterpret the goods and symbols of La Yuma does not deny the staggering inequalities of global capitalism or the severe experience of scarcity in fin de siècle Cuba, but it does localize the global and presents Cubans as subjects, rather than objects, of desire.

The Rise of La Yuma

In Havana, two possible origins for the vernacular Cuban term La Yuma are commonly proposed by those interested in the topic. Often, it is believed to derive from a 1957 American Western, 3:10 to Yuma, and thus to refer literally to Yuma, Arizona — infamous in the United States, ironically, for its prison. The film, based on an eponymous Elmore Leonard short story and directed by Delmer Daves, starring Van Heflin, Glenn Ford, Felicia Farr, and Richard Joeskel, recounts the struggle of a stubborn farmer with a captured but still powerful robber baron as they both wait for a train that will deliver them to the US legal system. It apparently was extensively screened and widely popular in Cuba just before an era dominated by a genre of Soviet war movies, which seem to have been considerably less popular as entertainment. In such a context, this theory suggests, 3:10 to Yuma had enough recognition, or captured enough of the Cuban imagination, to come to denote the United States (Daves [1957] 1993; also see Dopico 2004; Roland 2011, 65).

Another widely and often concurrently cited theory proposes that Yuma is simply derived from a mispronunciation of "US man" or of "United States." Common Cuban linguistic patterns, such as an elided "s" would seem to support this thesis. In either case, it is clear that as a spatial term, La Yuma's primary and original referent is the United States. In this context it is a singular feminine noun. It can also refer to a person or people from La Yuma:2 I was el yuma or un yuma; a North American woman could be una or la yuma; and a group (or the total nation of people) would be los yumas. Clearly, the meanings ascribed to the term have a historical trajectory: it seems to have become increasingly popular, first with increased US-Cuba contact during the "blue-jean revolution" of the Carter administration (1978–79) and then especially in the Special Period following the end of the Soviet era. Since the millennium and the post-Chavista special relationship with Venezuela and ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) and the related stabilization of the now hybrid, dual-currency state socialist system, the term has declined in popularity and changed in tone. As I will argue below, it is probably no coincidence that the term was most prevalent during the period that Western goods first became widely (if unevenly) available, disrupting the previous uniformity of material culture under socialism, which Nadine Fernandez (1996, 44) succinctly described just before the 1993 legalization of the US dollar: "Every store has the same items, just as in every Cuban household you can find the same model of T.V., the same dishes, the same pots, the same glasses, the same sheets, the same knickknacks, and the same plastic flowers" (also see Veenis 1999, 91; Patico and Caldwell 2002, 285; Sunderland and Denny 2007; A. Porter 2008; Weinreb 2009; Pertierra 2011).

In any case, depending on context and intonation, the designation of a person as a yumamay be factual, envious, or critical — perhaps because it bespeaks more familiarity than conventional or official terms such as Americano or estadounidense. Although not vulgar per se, and despite frequent intellectual analysis of its charter, the term has been distinctly more common on the street (and especially among men) than in the academy, and my self-referential use of the term was most warmly received in non-intellectual circles. Finally, while ostensibly apolitical, in its heyday in the 1990s it would have been very surprising to hear the term La Yuma used by a Party official or in the state media — which referred instead to the United States and its citizens as los EE UU, los Estados Unidos, los yanquis, los imperialistas,los norteamericanos, los gringos, and so on. With so many readily available official terms, why, then, should another have emerged in popular discourse?

I propose that La Yuma does have distinct meanings easily lost in translation, for it does not simply denote the geographic space as known to those of us who actually live in the United States. In the mid-1990s, perhaps the most common and compelling context for the term was encapsulated in a standard articulation of surprise, "¡Asere, qué cosa más yuma!" ("What a most yumathing, buddy!"). Other common variations included: "¡Ño, comp'ay, eso está yuma, yuma!" ("Damn, compadre, that is yuma, yuma!"); "¡Eso está yumático!" ("That's yumatic!"); or even occasionally "¡Eso está yumatiquísimo!" ("That is most yumatic!"). This was often heard when faced with evidence for some new technological item such as a CD player, color TV, even a cruise missile. In such contexts, La Yuma was powerful, marvelous, and generally admirable (for the quality, beauty, or efficacy of its stuff, not its politics). Furthermore — as I would invariably be reprimanded for pointing out that the color TV "from La Yuma" had actually been made in Korea — by the turn of the millennium, the word no longer referred strictly to the fifty states, but rather to all the developed world, including especially the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, but also to South Korea, parts of South America, and all other sites with an abundance of such goods. La Yuma, then, quintessentially excludes Cuba, the nations of the former Soviet Bloc, Africa, and the third world in general. Initially, during the Cold War, the closest contrasting term to yuma would have been bolo or bola. Literally "ball" or "ninepin," bolo was a popular referent to Russians and to the Soviet Bloc. Just as "yuma" could refer to a place, to its goods, or to the people from that place, one might hear "bolo" or "bola" as a reference to a Russian man or woman and less frequently, and somewhat impersonally, to their place of origin. In such contexts, what we might call the popular discourse of lo bolo was largely affectionate, although perhaps with a trace of irony and sense of cultural distance or difference, in which Cuba was of the West and los bolos of the East. Most commonly, however, the term would be deployed as an adjective marking the goods or products of the Soviet Union or the socialist world, from popular muñequitos rusos (Russian, Polish, or popular Socialist-world cartoons), to goods such as Selena shortwave radio receivers or Russian washing machines. Such goods were seen as the shoddy, inefficient, and ugly — if serviceable — products of the colorless socialist "Second World," and any history of Cold War Cuban vernaculars would need to further explore "lo bolo" as the antonym of "la yuma."

In an ethnography of post-Soviet Cuba, however, the vernacular geographic imaginary that best came to contrast to La Yuma after the Russians went home and their goods stopped flowing is "África," in no small measure owing to the popular associations of that continent with backwardness, socialism, and scarcity, as I will demonstrate in the following chapter (also see Mbembe 2001). In any case, in counterpoint to Cockaigne La Yuma and its marvelous goods, the Soviet Bloc was strongly associated in this vernacular discourse with shoddy, rough, or crude goods, and, at the level of material culture, the inimitable word chapucería (literally "shoddiness") summed up an entire geopolitical critique of the shortcomings of state socialism and the rejection of ideologies of postcolonial solidarity. In contrast, for many if not most Cubans, La Yuma was at least initially an idealized land of milk, honey, and capitalism and, at that time, a reference for the sunniest side of the States. In the words of one Cuban scholar:

La Yuma would always be associated with: Madonna; Coca-Cola; McDonalds; the Oscars; Michael Jackson; New York's skyscrapers; Bill Gates; etc. — the so-called "American Dream" or "American way of life" and its uppermost symbols. Never would La Yuma be associated with: south side Chicago — or Liberty City, Miami; crime and drugs; homelessness; U.S. imperialism; racism; etc. — for those who have a-critically and even unconsciously accepted yuma ideology, this would be only part of the official state discourse, or, to put it crudely, of the "communist propaganda." (Iván Noel Pérez, personal communication, 1998)

Pérez's words here are very much akin to Alexei Yurchak's extended description of the circulation of Western cultural symbols and forms of imagination in the later years of the Soviet Union — a phenomenon that he calls the "Imaginary West" (2006, chapter 5). Indeed, in its Special Period heyday, Cuban discourse about La Yuma also bore striking similarities to the discourse of "the normal" in late socialist and early postsocialist Europe, as documented by Fehérváry (2013), Rausing (2004), Veenis (1999), and Yurchak (2006). If at first "the material world ... had sparkled so brightly on the other side of the Wall" for East Germans (Veenis 1999, 84), and the West provided a standard for equating "normal" with "civilized" (Fehérváry 2002, 390), then the "normal" was rooted in tastes, desires, and an idealization of Western life developed under state socialism. People "used it to refer to things that were clearly extraordinary in their local context, but were imagined to be part of average lifestyles in Western Europe or the United States" (Fehérváry 2013, 27). More generally, of course, yuma discourse also reflects wider Caribbean and Global South aspirations, such as those evident in the hopes of Dominican sex workers to find a westerner to marry and take them to "La Gloria" (Cabezas 1999, 108), and one can find analogous scales of value throughout the Caribbean (e.g., D. Miller 1997, 335–36; but also see Mazzarella 2003, 50). However, the Cuban background of a centralized, state-dominated economic system, political barriers to the completion of a "transnational migrant circuit" (Rouse 1991), limited or nonexistent advertising for these yuma goods (Hernández-Reguant 2002), and the fact of a rapid reintroduction to a hard-currency economy seems a distinctive mixture of late-socialist longing and Caribbean-rooted material culture.

Any well-dressed foreigner, including comunitarios, Africans, or South Americans, has at least the potential to be a yuma. Importantly, the typical or default images associated with La Yuma also disproportionately involve "whiteness," and in a sense, yumanidad itself (or cosas más yuma) whitens and cleans: yumas who are phenotypically "white" come from places that by default confer the right sort of genealogy. Even yumas who are not white in Cuban terms become a shade or two lighter for displaying yumanidad. Raymond Smith (1988) and others have long described similar phenomena elsewhere in the Caribbean; this is a context in which Cubans of whatever color will often retell the "joke" with which I began my conversation with Professor Trouillot in the Introduction, about the young white woman marrying a black doctor with a car (also cited by Roland 2011, 35–36). In effect, markers from La Yuma can partly erase or shift normal racial, age, or other distinctions — thus, Kaifa Roland, an African-American anthropologist in Cuba, described herself as a yuma morena (2004, 52, 133). There are exceptions, of course, (such as students and other poor foreigners), and thus, yumanidad is marked contextually by a whole range of signs and symbols. Expensive, well-fitting, or difficult-to-obtain clothing; jewelry; a good watch; a smartphone; a rented Japanese automobile (rather than a Russian lada); a camera or video camera: such goods mark los yumas.

The Brands of Yumanidad

Of course, with the decline of state socialist power, legalization of the US dollar in 1993, post-Soviet growth in international tourism, and an unevenly distributed assistance from family abroad, many Cubans of both genders and across the full racial spectrum as well as Africans and other resident foreigners increasingly have been able to acquire such goods. This does not quite make them yumas — by their passports, they were and are still unmistakably Cuban — or from the third world, but it did (and still does) indicate relatively high status to display such cosas más yuma, and thus certain yuma goods have come into great demand. There are far too many yuma signifiers in Cuba today to list them comprehensively, so I will principally focus on three central, groundbreaking ones: Nike, the US flag, and the Oscars. Perhaps not surprisingly, each of these in some manner approaches the position of what Daniel Miller famously called a "meta-symbol" (1998, 170). As Miller argued when looking at the meanings given to Coca-Cola in Trinidad, the values accorded global brands are largely perspectival and thus must be closely interrogated. What is in New York a "soft drink," in Port of Spain is a "sweet drink," signifying entirely different things. In the Cuban case, many of the most popular symbols are associated both with the original epicenter of La Yuma, the United States, and also more broadly with representations of an imagined cosmopolitan, capitalist world (see Hernández-Reguant 2002, 302–3; Foster 2008).

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction: An Antillean Archipelago, 1,
1. The Rise and Decline of La Yuma, 25,
2. África in Revolutionary Cuba, 57,
3. Color, Mestizaje, and Belonging in Cuba, 89,
4. Beyond a Boundary, 123,
Conclusion: Geographies of Imagination, 157,
Notes, 163,
References, 189,
Index, 219,

Editorial Reviews

"Zeroing in on discourses of race in Cuba, Ryer counterposes two 'imagined geographies': the 'geography of management' of the Cuban state, which has insisted on an absence of racial hierarchies and racism, and the 'geography of desire' in everyday conversations about racial and national identity and the beckoning yet forbidden capitalist world beyond the island. Ryer is an endlessly fascinating and sure-footed guide to the interplay of the global and local in Cuba."
—David Luis-Brown, author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States

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