Fernandes has written a ground-breaking book about the relationship between the Cuban state and the Cuban cultural scene rooted in its present flexiblity, porousness and dynamism, capturing the complexities and contradictions held within the revolutionary project and spilling out at its edges. The arguments here explore critical spaces within the arts which Fernades calls ‘artistic public spheres’ and are salient for and will resonate with scholars interested in creativity and cultural politics and in the relationship between culture, the individual and society (p. 3). Through its vibrant discussions, Fernandes' book goes a long way to explain just why this small island in the Caribbean has throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century created quality levels of cutting-edge art that has entered the transnational arena with artistic and commercial impact.
In four potent chapters, Fernandes reveals the dynamic ways culture structures everyday life in Cuba, showing how the arts have taken on a vital role in formulating, articulating and making sense of everyday life, the multiple ways that film, music and the visual arts in particular are used by ordinary Cubans in ongoing debates about what it means to be Cuban and complex notions of Cuban identity. This is summed up neatly in a piece of ethnography where after several abortive attempts typical of modern Cuban life (bus breaking down, projector breaking down), Fenandes and a close friend finally manage to see Humberto Solas' Miel para Oshún in the cinema. Fernandes describes how, at the end of the film, when the main actor Jorge Perrugorio says to a group of onlookers in the film, ‘I'm confused I don't know whether I'm American or Cuban. You have difficulties here but at least you know who you are’, a young woman in the cinema stands up and shouts at the screen, ‘No we don't know who we are. What makes you think we know who we are?’ (p. 42).
Fernandes reveals the arts as a window into an extremely complex and contradictory moment of transition in Cuban society in the 1990s' ‘Special Period’ when Cuban dependency on the USSR ended, the island's economy fell into a black hole and the state re-invented itself ideologically, politically and economically (Fairley Reference Fairley and Dawe2004, pp. 79–80). Fernandes juxtaposes analysis of Cuba's shifting cultural politics during this period of ‘late’ socialism vis à vis different art forms, the role, views and histories of artists, key institutions and organisations, with transcribed discussions from small focus groups of friends, neighbours and colleagues as to the multiple meanings actual examples of artistic expression elicit in the moment.
Locating herself as a multi-racial scholar (living in New York with an Australian passport with parents born in Portuguese-colonised South India), and a practising musician with ‘academic, activist and artistic concerns’ (p. xii), Fernandes seeks to ‘create space for alternative epistemologies and for the unorthodox blendings of creative, political, intellectual and personal pursuits’ (p. xiii). Her work enriches other key work on this period (Foehr Reference Foehr2001; Fairley Reference Fairley and Dawe2004, Reference Fairley2006; Hernández-Reguant Reference Hernández-Reguant2004; Perna Reference Perna2005; Moore Reference Moore2006). At the same time it differentiates itself from these accounts in its methodology and clear theoretical positioning within the discourses of artistic public spheres and the state, notably moving beyond Eurocentric theoretical paradigms to embrace Latin American ones. She uses García Canclini's notion of ‘Interpretative communities of consumers’ as ‘ensembles of people who share tastes and interpretative pacts … that provide for the basis for shared identities’(p. 14). By embedding discussion and debates around art among the everyday conversations of Cubans themselves, her approach supports the idea of modern forms of power operating through the diverse networks and relations of civil society. Her introductory chapter, ‘Artistic Public Spheres and The State’, elegantly critiques Habermas and succinctly sets out a post-Gramscian analytical framework in the light of a subsequent network of radical culturalists and analysts. Refreshingly she includes the work of Cuban scholars' analysis of the ‘redimensionalising’ of the state–society relationship in the early 1990s (Acanda 1997; Dilla 1999; Limia 1999).
Fernandes argues that during this period the arts became an important forum in which ordinary Cubans evaluated competing political alternatives, re-thought the basic values of the revolution, and reformulated visions for the future. In this way, ultimately she uses the Cuban case to challenge any view of the (Cuban) state as a repressive centralised apparatus that enforces and dictates on citizens from the top down, showing instead how highly critical forms of popular art have emerged to address such issues as bureaucracy, racial and gender discrimination, unequal distribution of wealth, and alienation in Cuban society. She thereby eschews popular media representations of the island as ‘communist’ and cliché representations of an island lead solely by a dogmatic Fidel Castro, in favour of the debates, democracies and dialectics that actually lie at the heart of cultural power in Cuba, something which became most apparent in the 1990s when cultural capital became pivotal on so many levels when a new mixed economy was introduced. Her arguments show how state is itself constituted by the activities of various social actors, and that even when it incorporates, that often entails intense dialogue and a public profile and forum for the critical issues raised by artists pushing the boundaries of cultural politics, and often opening them up much further.
In four highly readable chapters, Fernandes opens up Cuban society to readers in ways that many will find astonishing as well as illuminating. True, the daily media in Cuba has a limited number of state radio stations, TV channels and state newspapers, and extremely limited access to the Internet, yet it has its own unique cosmopolitanism underpinned by informal markets, cultural news and knowledge exchanged between informal private networks and on the street. In many ways, what Cuban people create and are offered for cultural consumption is as important as the sophisticated ways they actually actively participate as consumers.
In chapter one, ‘Remaking Conceptual Worlds: Changing Ideologies in Socialist Cuba’, Fernandes explores ideological transitions and notably the use of the arts as a way of incorporating and re-integrating the Cuban people into a new hegemonic project increasingly defined as national rather than revolutionary. She situates this argument within a historical analysis of Cuba's attempts to solve problems of under-development and dependency in a small country that in all but name was a colony of the USA; through the shifts during the Soviet-influenced period, to the neo-liberalism of the 1990s, she focuses on the pivotal role of discussion, debate and new dynamic modes of discourse and incorporation emblematised by new Minister of Culture Abel Prieto.
In chapter two, ‘Old Utopias, New Realities: Film Publics, Critical Debates, and New Modes of Incorporation’, Fernandes focuses on film as one of the largest and most far-reaching critical art forms in post-revolutionary Cuban society, engaging audiences across the country in lively and polemical discussions about politics. In chapter three,‘Fear of Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings and State Power’, she looks at the critical intervention of Cuban rap, hip-hop culture and visual arts within the perspective of race and black identity, a long-denied category of analysis in Cuba itself. In a book of strong chapters, this is the strongest and most nuanced, in particular its welcome discussion of gender.
In chapter four, ‘Post War Reconstruction: State Institutions, Public Art and the New Market Conditions for Productions’, Fernandes explores the creative initiatives of the visual artists, focusing on just a few key moments in a scene of abundant challenge and ingenious innovation. In her open-ended conclusion, Fernandes offers a dynamic view of a unique island whose contribution to world culture is still hidden to many, or at best is epitomised only by the retro-nostalgia of the Buena Vista Social Club. In 2008, Cuba's cultural scene was constantly shifting, with more artists seemingly able to move in and out of the island re-defining the interactive relationship between individual, national and transnational projects.
In Sounding Salsa, Performing Latin Music in New York City: Performing Latin Music in New York City, Christopher Washburne, like Fernandes, finds the 1990s a vibrant and pivotal era. In Washburne's case it is for salsa music, marked by a second generation of salseros who co-opted the music of their parents, re-inventing and transforming the salsa scene with sounds and expressions that better represented their own experiences as Latin youth growing up in New York City. A professional trombonist, Washburne writes from the vantage point of a practising musician as well as a scholar, offering a dynamic view of salsa as seen from the bandstand over an eighteen-year period during which he played with key orchestras of Tito Puente, Ray Barreto, Celia Cruz, Pete ‘El Conde’ Rodriguez and Hector Lavoe, among many others. The book's perspective is that of professional salsa musicians who live and work in New York in the highest echelons of the industry, doing the majority of the recording and performing with the most famous bands.
Each chapter begins with an ethnographic description – so the book starts in August 1992 at a 7 p.m. rehearsal in the basement of the Boys and Girls Harbor School in Spanish Harlem, where veteran singer Hector Lavoe is putting together a new band. Twelve musicians and others including children gather, and whether arriving on time or late they never fail to follow Latin etiquette and do the full greeting round, rehearsing until a young Dominican hit man bursts in brandishing a large gun. As Washburne writes, these are music-making lives involving ‘Violence, community, drugs, cultural identity, exploitation, interculturality and, above all, beautiful music’ (p. 4). And at one level this sentence encapsulates a series of key words that inform the book's arguments.
Apart from its undoubted academic merits, the book convinces through its insider-out perspective, incisive and evocative scenarios, and the way analysis and theory are embedded within its ethnography. In six highly readable chapters, the salsa scene in all its richness is described, unpicked, critiqued and celebrated. The introduction provides a vital history of salsa, of the role of New York as a place in shaping the performance practices and aesthetics of musicians coming from different countries and traditions, and the role of key figures and pioneering companies like Fania Records and RMM. Washburne marks salsa as ‘inter-Latino’ and ‘trans-Caribbean’, the latter not so much a geographical location as a conceptual framing marked by migration, immigration, movement and flow (p. 11). Chapter one maps ‘Salsa Bands and the Performance of Pueble’, the latter a term coined by Mayra Santos-Febres which captures the dynamics of economics and artistry guided by a firm connection between gente, plebe and familia (people, common folk and family), i.e. pueble ‘… that is … peopleness, a tradition larger than national and broader than ethnic’ (p. 39).
In chapter two, ‘The music is so good, but the scene is pure dues!’, Washburne, quoting Stuart Hall, explores the lives of the twice diasporised Caribbeans in New York (p. 77). Concentrating on the everyday and night lives of musicians with a focus on ‘sidemen’, he looks at the economy of salsa while considering it as ‘a music that remains emergent, underpinned by transit, between-ness, deterritoralised cultural pluralism and multiple sites of identification – unlocatable yet at the same time signifying the ‘rooted essence of those who play it’ (p. 78).
Keeping alive in a scene surrounded by drug culture underpins chapter three, ‘Play it like there's a gun to your head! The Aesthetics and Performance Practice of Sounding Violence in Salsa’. Starting with a group of musicians arriving for a gig to find themselves trapped outside the stage door between two armed drug dealers, in what may be a first for academia, Washburne analyses the range of violent encounters, personal and institutional, physical and psychological that salsa musicians working in New York City routinely experience (p. 115). He shows how trophes of violence permeate performance practice, concluding with a comment from trumpeter Héctor Colón, ‘There is nothing like the groove in salsa. It swings the way it does because of all the violence. All that shit is in there’ (p. 129). This leads to chapter four, ‘New York Salsa and Drugs: Aesthetics, Performance Practice, Government Policy and the Illicit Drugs Trade’, which deals with the ‘narco-economics’ of the scene and the way cocaine and its associated business practices has informed salsa aesthetics and performance practices (p. 131).
Chapter five, ‘La India and the Masquerading of Gender’, tackles issues around gender with a fascinating account of performances by singer La India, an analysis that builds on pioneering academic work by Frances Aparicio and Lise Waxer. I particularly enjoyed Washburne's analysis of La India's repeatedly overstepping the mark, pushing accepted norms for female on-stage behaviour, through her embodiment of the ‘bad street girl’ and the poetics of chusmería and excess. Finally, chapter six, ‘“They are going to hear this in Puerto Rico. It has to be good!”: The Sound and Style of Salsa’, engages with some deeper issues of musical analysis following introductory descriptive remarks concerning salsa's formal structure, instrumentation, playing techniques and performance practice. Washburne has written a book that is as entertaining, informative and provocative as it is ground-breaking.
Raúl Fernandez' From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz offers a lighter standpoint, a short focused account of the role of key Cuban musicians to Latin music in the USA placed in the context of the Caribbean. This is an informative introduction by a Cuban-born US social scientist and percussionist whose childhood was spent in Santiago de Cuba and whose passion for his country and fascination with its music inform his writing. His focus falls particularly upon ‘Cachao’ López, Mongo Santamaría, Armando Peraza, Patato Valdés, Francisco Aguabella, Candido Camero, Chocolate Armenteros and Celia Cruz, all innovators in Cuba in the 1950s who became part of the Cuban diaspora living in the USA. Fernandez' interviewed them as part of his work for the Smithsonian Institution Jazz Oral history Program. Echoing an on-stage boast by Nuyorican and Latin Jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri, that Cuban musicians have produced, ‘the most complex and exciting rhythms of the planet’ (p. viii), Fernandez begins by tracking the rhythms underpinning Cuban son dance music, moving into a discussion of the concept of salsa, the ontology of son and the aesthetics of sabor (flavour). Part II, ‘On The Road to Latin Jazz’, profiles key musicians enumerated above in an argument that sees Cuban influence on jazz as a long and gradual process dating back to the nineteenth century. It's an empathetic book that will interest anyone wondering why Cuban music has been so influential in world music cultures, never mind salsa and jazz.
