This intriguing ‘semiotically oriented, ethnographically rooted study’ ventures into the remarkably complex and compelling subject of the figure of Africa in the Cuban imagination. It considers the lived experiences of people who were among the 400,000 Cubans who went on international missions to Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and dozens of other African countries, as well as the tens of thousands of African students who spent their formative years being educated in revolutionary Cuba (3).

Anthropologist Paul Ryer, whose connection to the country dates to 1994, draws upon a wealth of data that he gathered through participant observation and interviews, primarily in Havana but also the Isle of Youth and eastern Cuba, as well as documentary films, social media, and blog posts. His interlocutors are Cubans across the racial spectrum (those who both have and have not had direct contact with Africans on the continent and in Cuba) and Cuban-educated African students from Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Sudan, Tanzania, Congo, South Africa, Ethiopia, the Western Sahara, Zimbabwe, Mali, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. The material in the last chapter of the book, in which the author challenges conventional paradigms of Cuban diasporic studies, argues that Cuban-educated African students have the right to call themselves Cuban. This chapter draws on the experiences of Cuban-educated Ghanaian students arriving on the Isle of Youth since 1983, Western Saharans (Saharauis, also referred to as Cubarauis) who came via refugee camps in Algeria in 1978, and South Sudanese. In 1985 over 600 Dinka, Nuer, and Shillok students, aged six to twenty-two, were sent to Cuba from southern Sudanese refugee camps. Some of them were subsequently granted refugee status in Alberta, Canada, in the late 1990s.

The book is ‘a study of Cuban-ness, rather than an ethnography of African students’ (159). One of its primary objectives is to illustrate that ‘the ostensibly national category “Cuban” has, in effect, become a racialized term as mapped against putative purities imagined to be elsewhere’ (157). One ‘elsewhere’ that Ryer considers is ‘La Yuma’, a colloquial term referring to the United States and, more broadly, the capitalist world as signified by imported consumer goods. The other is ‘África’, which symbolizes ‘poverty, Blackness and socialism that many would prefer to leave silent’ (159). In juxtaposing Cuba (imagined to be mixed or brown), the capitalist world (imagined to be white), and Africa (imagined to be Black), Ryer brings together a geography of management located in ‘state policies, economic structures and scarcities, [and] the reproduction of historical silences’ with a geography of imagination, ‘the painful and contested categories and divisions of daily life, imaginary far-off purities, motivating silences and desires’. Ryer contends that both have ‘shaped a nation [Cuba] and defined its color . . . as the midpoint of a global racial scale’ (161).

Though intriguing and valuable to scholars interested in the more contemporary Cuba-Africa connection, Beyond Cuban Waters is not without its deficits. Among the factors that detract from the text's main contributions are certain organizational shortcomings and missed opportunities. The ethnographic vignettes are not consistently well-integrated into the main arguments, and there is some lack of narrative coherence.

This is most obvious in the placement of the chapter on race and place as the third chapter. This chapter rehearses arguments about race and color in Cuba that do not shed new light on the subject, in part because it does not effectively apply them to the matter at hand, which is the presence and figure of ‘the African’ in Cuba. Worse still, it does contain important background information that contextualizes encounters described and comments made in the preceding chapters that are left underexplained. Furthermore, this chapter would have benefited from adopting an intersectional approach and allowing for a gendered analysis in its discussion of racial categorization — a process evidenced through topics such as patterns of partnership, as illustrated in the book's opening story, which recounts a white woman's partnering with a Black male doctor whose racial identity changes with his heightened education and economic status.

The book does have its strengths. Beyond Cuban Waters shines a light upon the complexities of diaspora. Ryer's argument — that Africans who spent their formative years in Cuba are part of a Cuban diaspora — is so convincing in part because he situates it within complicated patterns of migration that destabilize the notion that Cuba is the singular origin of the Cuban diaspora. Considering how many Cubans and other Caribbean peoples have roots in multiple nations and/or move back to or back and forth between their nations/islands of origin, locating African students for whom Cuba might be as much or more of an origin than anywhere else is a brilliant move. However, Ryer's use of the Jewish Cuban American diasporic experience as the primary case with which to build this argument is curious and represents another missed opportunity. It seems that the comparison would actually be between African Cubans and Jewish Cubans and/or other groups of African descent in Cuba, such as Haitians and Anglophone Caribbean Cubans. Indeed, using Haitian or Anglophone Caribbean Cubans as the comparative group would enrich conversations not only about the complications of origin, but also about foreign Blackness in Cuba.

The second missed opportunity occurs in the interpretation of La Yuma as disengaged from racial and cultural markers. Ryer challenges Sujatha Fernandes's argument that young Black Cubans’ adoption of Black American slang is an assertion of identity.Footnote ¹ Ryer misses two points here: the politics of mestizaje and the many layers of ‘Black Cool’. While Cuba certainly cannot be divided into Black and white bodies, this does not negate the presence and power of these categories in the corporeal and cultural spheres. Another way in which Beyond Cuban Waters could have pushed its analysis is in the racialization of La Yuma. Placing La Yuma in opposition to the Blackness of Africa and mixture of Cuba, but then failing to directly interrogate the whiteness of La Yuma, misses the opportunity to make an argument about whiteness and its impurities as well as the centrality of Blackness to the modern, both in the everyday and the discursive. While Africa can unequivocally be imagined as Black and Cuba as mixed, La Yuma is not-quite-white, perhaps because its whiteness is complicated by the presence of Blackness within and the circulation and commodification of Black popular cultures that undergirds the appeal of its consumer goods.

Beyond Cuban Waters opens up an important conversation that invites scholarly inquiry into a number of different areas. A welcome contribution to the sparse scholarship on the African presence in Cuba that moves outside of a limited focus on the foundational role of Africans and their descendants, it is of particular value to scholars interested in Cuban internationalism and the ways in which racial politics are embedded in the lived experiences of South-South solidarities.