Smoking Habaneras, or A Cuban Struggle with Racial Demons

Jill Lane

I rst saw an object similar to the one pictured on the following page in Havana in 1996: standing about six inches tall, this painted clay gurine models a woman of color wearing a headdress, with a disproportionately large bosom and bottom, and smoking a cigar (g. 1). The gure sat alone on a shelf in one of the then very few tourist shops on a street in Old Havana. The street, Calle OReilly, had not yet been but would soon be gentried in Cubas attempt to make tourism central to the economy. In 1996, the crumbling, colorless colonial- era buildings had not yet been refurbished and repainted. Residents mostly and not coincidentally black families had not yet been forcibly relocated from the dilapidated buildings that were their homes. Those homes had not yet been renovated as quaint hotels to house tourists from Spain or Canada or beyond. That had not happened yet. What had happened was this object. She struck me with particular force: I recognized her, and felt and feared both the past she embodied and the future she threatened. What was she doing here ? The year 1996 marks a midpoint in the extreme economic crisis in Cuba occasioned by the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the consequent loss of Soviet nancial support and the Eastern bloc as a market for Cuban goods. The level of scarcity facing Cuban society was extraordinary; all previous episodes of economic downturn or international isolation could not have prepared the Cuban people for this new struggle to survive. The economy was eviscerated in a matter of months: economists estimate that the country lost fully 75 percent of its imports and 75 percent of its exports. Everyday life became a state of siege, with relentless shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, punctuated by daily power outages, long waits

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Figure 1. Ceramic smoking habanera. Photo: Jill Lane

for the few remaining buses in operation, long waits for rationed food. The lack of fuel, replacement parts, animal feed, and fertilizer meant the islands own food production diminished as need and hunger grew. The stories were poignant: advanced engineers and doctors t he pride of the Revolution who became hotel porters just to win hard currency in tips; women standing at the edge of cordoned- off hotels begging tourists
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for any extra soap, shampoo, or baby aspirin; cheerful television programs explaining how to make a meal of lemon rinds; a population of individuals who, on average, lost twenty pounds in the early years of the crisis.1 Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro has made recourse to a signature strategy of other revolutionary imaginations before him: to mark the radical break implicit in the revolution, he chose to remake the terms and measures of historical time itself. Just as the proponents of the French Revolution restarted the historical clock, Castro began to mark the passage of time, historical periodicity, with his own categories, rallying the Cuban people to see themselves and their historic mission in a series of temporal frames that were given to them alone among all peoples. And so, the nightmare of total economic collapse of the 1990s was not the total economic collapse of the 1990s, but instead, in his terms, was Cubas Special Period in a Time of Peace t he perodo especial en tiempos de paz i n which Cubas revolutionary society would face perhaps its strongest challenge to date. One can be cynical about such terms, seeing them as euphemisms designed to head off the inevitable anger of a population left without food or recourse to get it due in part to the policies of that same regime. Many Cubans I met in those years spoke the term special period like so much sour milk on their lips. The word special euphemistically glossed those ostensibly temporary economic reforms (most still in effect today) that abruptly reinserted Cuba into the global economy: the development of dollar- based industries like tourism; the legalization of the dollar and foreign remittances; the reauthorization of self- employment in small private businesses, among other reforms. As many have noted, these reforms duplicated in Cuba an experience of economic inequality, scarcity, and suffering comparable to those produced by the structural adjustment policies imposed on Latin America in the 1980s. 2 There was nothing special about Cubas belated experience of the neoliberal shock doctrine other than its governments unwavering insistence that the country nonetheless continue on its same revolutionary path. One symptom of the economic crisis, and one challenge to Castros exceptionalist narrative of the Revolution, is that little clay object, which I shall call a smoking habanera . The smoking habanera was an iconic image from Cubas nineteenth- century colonial landscape, especially, as I argue here, as depicted and disseminated through the works of the periods foremost illustrator, Vctor Patrcio Landaluze. Her curious return during the Special Period calls on other ways of understanding the movement, pace, and progress of national time: she does so as I argue in this essay by illuminating not only the insistent presence of a colonial past shaped by slavery, but also the gendered and racial underpinnings of the triumphalist narrative of the Revolution itself. Through this gure I explore how material and visual culture may capture and transmit ways of knowing the past
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that sit in tension with the narrative strategies that underwrite so many political, literary, and historical narrations of the nation.3 In what follows, I trace the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the gure of the smoking habanera, elaborating a method that Joseph R. Roach has named a critical genealogy of performance: that is, a genealogy comprising the discontinuous but insistent passing of knowledge through bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), a genealogy that attends to counter- memories, or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences.4 I invoke performance here less because my objects of study involve embodied culture, although some do, and more because I engage these objects in their performative dimension, asking what they mean but, even more, what they do in the social contexts by which and into which they were cast.
Revolutionary Time

To deepen and further illuminate Castros rendering of the historical project of the Revolution, I call on two well- k nown Cuban lms that attempt to narrate both the genesis of revolution and its corresponding temporal imaginary: Humberto Solss Luca (Instituto cubano del arte e industria cinematogrcos, 1968) and Toms Gutirrez Aleas Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (Cuban Struggle against the Demons ; Instituto cubano del arte e industria cinematogrcos, 1971).5 What is revolution after The Revolution? Within the imaginary of the revolution, what are the possibilities for rendering a new time, for rendering both continuity with a revolutionary past and a denitive break with the immediate past present? Resonating with the rhetoric of the revolutionary regime, the two lms offer contrasting understandings of the nature, pace, and scope of revolutionary time. I draw on them here rst as illustrations of the range of possibilities in the early years of the revolution for imagining a break with the colonial past particularly in relation to race and gender a nd as representations that will help us understand the different ways in which the presence of that smoking habanera smuggles a particular history of colonial slavery into the present. Solss epic lm Luca , released in 1968, maps the Cuban revolution of 1959 as the apotheosis and completion of a century of revolutionary struggle. Made in the centenary anniversary year of the rst war for independence (1868), Luca comprises three separate episodes that correspond to the three great moments of revolution in Cuba: the anticolonial wars of the latter three decades of the nineteenth century; the struggle to overthrow Machado in the years of the U.S.- supported republic; and
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nally, the contemporary revolution, whose episode is titled 196 with an open- ended dash. Each story is told from the point of view of a woman, each named Luca, whose life illustrates both the heroism of the era and the social contradictions that threaten and sometimes ensure the failure of anticolonial revolution. A great deal has been written about this lm; here I will note that the Lucas of the lm are carefully coded by race and gender behavior. The Luca of the wars of independence is white, hails from the landed aristocracy, and while sympathetic to the independence struggle is nonetheless European in her values; her poor judgment in putting love over country compromises the struggle and costs her brothers life and her own sanity. The Luca of the Republic, in turn, trades European aristocratic values for those of an Americanized commercial middle class; she too sacrices for the struggle, but only as the support gure for her man. Luca of the revolution nally becomes her own protagonist, and now she is decidedly darker, a mulata, and comes from the rural working class. This Luca works on a new agricultural commune and readily avails herself of the new literacy and educational programs provided by the revolution. Her conict with her lover shows him to be anachronistically invested in patriarchal values, while she dances fervently into a Cuban future. Solss rendering of revolutionary history is not so much feminist as it is gendered, and it complements another gendered version of this same history that one heard often in Cuba, particularly in speeches by Castro himself. That story is about prostitution. Just as, once upon a time, prostitution was rife in Cuba, particularly in the casinos and tourist industry owned by and catering to Americans, so Cuba herself was formerly prostituted rst to Spain and then to the United States. The revolution, so the narrative unfolds, had rescued her and returned her honor, an act evinced by the actual eradication of prostitution in Cuba. As Castro noted in a 1971 speech that recounted the struggle for Cuban independence since 1868, in the decades prior to the revolution the United States
convirtieron a nuestra patria en un lugar de placer. Es decir, no solo se apropiaron de los recursos naturales, de las industrias bsicas y todo lo que se construy all fue en servicio de sus intereses econmicos, sino que desarrollaron adems en nuestro pas la prostitucin a escalas increbles. Baste decir que haba decenas y decenas de miles de mujeres que por las condiciones sociales y la corrupcin establecida por el imperialismo, y sobre todo la situacin de hambre y miseria, se vieron obligadas a vivir de la prostitucin.6 [had transformed our country into a pleasure locale. That is, not only did they appropriate our natural resources, our primary industries and all they produced in service of their economic interests, but they developed prostitution in our country at an incredible scale. Sufce to say because of
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these social conditions and the corruption created by imperialism, and more importantly because of hunger and misery, tens and tens of thousands of women felt obligated to live from prostitution.]

Those very women who might have otherwise made their living selling sex had, like the postrevolutionary Luca, radically new social possibilities in the 1960s and 1970s: access to full employment, education, public health, and equal rights with men under the law. It is not surprising that Sols and others chose these women to symbolize the revolution: their former plight had become a symbol of the nations exploitation, and their rehabilitation seemed to embody the triumph of the revolution over its colonial and neocolonial past. Toms Fernndez Robainas fascinating text, Recuerdos secretos de dos mujeres pblicas (Secret Memories of Two Public Women), offers the testimonials of two former prostitutes and reinforces a sentiment that was, by the 1970s and 1980s, nearly universal in Cuba: prostitution had been eradicated by the revolution, and as long as it succeeded, prostitution would not return. As one of the women recounts:
Se nos haca imposible pensar que aquella vida pudiera acabarse, que hubiramos podido contribuir a ese cambio; pore so muchas de nosotras, al comprender que todo era verdaderamente distinto, nos sumamos de lleno al proceso. No por resentimiento o por la toma de consciencia ante la explotacin tan grande de la cual nosotras ramos vctimas, sino por algo ms vital, ms importante: evitar que aquella vida continuara, que en el futuro no hubiera jvenes que pasaran por las humiliaciones y degradaciones humanas que nosotras conocimos.7 [It was impossible to imagine that that life could come to an end, and that we would have been able to contribute to that change. That is why, when we understood that everything really was different, many of us joined the process fully. Not out of resentment nor from an act of consciousness in the face of the enormous exploitation of which we were victims, but for something more vital, more important: to prevent that life from continuing, that in the future there would be no young women who would endure the human humiliations and degradations that we knew.]

The Revolution was committed to the eradication of the sex industry, and the Revolution made possible the ongoing work against its return for those who had suffered its consequences. Like the story of the three Lucas, the success of the revolution was repeatedly imagined as a steady, forward- moving progression over and beyond the colonial and capitalist obstacles of the past. The second lm that I call upon puts the revolution in a different temporal register. Toms Gutirrez Aleas extraordinary lm from 1971,

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Una pelea cubana contra los demonios, restages a historical episode in a small coastal town in 1672, in the era of the Spanish Inquisition and regular pirate raids on the coast. In the lm, a fanatical priest tries to relocate the townsfolk out of the reach of pirates and heretics against the resistance of the landowners. 8 Through the expressionistic style of the lm both the Church and the landed oligarchy emerge as obstacles to true social progress. The scene that I, like everyone else, remember most vividly comes at the very end. The skeptic, Contreras, whose own desires for change have been stalled, visits a shaman woman. As lm critic Michael Chanan tells it: She speaks of native blood to come. Her voice is heard over a blank screen while tachiotoscopic images it by, a frame or two at a time: the faces of Jos Mart, Fidel, Che Guevara. He understands from her vision that the rebellion of the people is inevitable.9 Like Luca , Una pelea imagines Cuban history through choppy episodes in which the opportunity for social revolution is emergent, luminous, but abortive: the revolution is always already there, waiting for the right constellation of social actors to emerge. But Luca sees history as progressive movement forward in time, made evident in racial terms: in each generation, Luca is a little less white, less European, until she emerges as that strong dancing mulata. Una pelea , in turn, offers a much more radical a lmost narcotic rendering of history: Mart, Fidel, and Che are icons of a time outside history as we know it; they are not the outcome of the struggle that develops progressively through time, but are instead the sign of that struggle that follows another temporal logic altogether. The struggle against social demons, the title suggests, has always already been Cuban, even from the earliest days of lawless banditry and fanatic religion. Walter Benjamin might have understood this cinematic moment as enacting his notion of dialectical images, specic images through which the contemporary revolution is i n a kind of shock pushed through the past to signal an emergent present. Benjamin explains,
Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a ash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what- has- been to the now is dialectical: is not progression, but image, suddenly emergent.10

The image of Mart, Fidel, and Che emerging from the dream of an early colonial shaman is a fabricated moment in which what has been comes together in a ash: it performatively enacts the historical relation that it proposes, and in so doing it conjures a particular path through time, one that denes the past, present, and future in the same gesture. Rather than

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presenting history as continual linear progression, Benjamins dialectical image freezes the unfolding of time (dialectics at a standstill) and allows the now to break, all at once, into a specically congured present a new constellation to be deciphered by the historical materialist. Michael Taussig interprets Una pelea s dialectical images thus: The intent here was to facilitate the construction of paradise from the glimpses provided of alternative futures when otherwise concealed or forgotten connections with the past were revealed by the juxtaposition of images.11 For Eduardo Cadava the image interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, one that spaces time and temporalizes space.12 The dialectical image will, through the interpretative critical eye of the historian, propose and illuminate not only a certain way of knowing the past, but a way of making and occupying it: it re- situates our now in relation to an inhabitable future. It goes without saying that lm, like ction, makes its claims on the past and future through a sequence of images l iterally a sequence of celluloid frames, like a sequence of print on sequential pages of a book. Both Luca and Una pelea self- consciously use such images to situate and suture the revolutionary present to a particular past and future. While Luca evokes the steady march of revolutionary desire over 100 years and beyond, Una pelea evokes a perpetual revolutionary becoming. Such images conjure the subjects of revolution at the very moment that they narrate its past: the public that is asked to remember the settling of the island or the battles of 1868 as the past of their own revolutionary moment is constituted in the making of such images. As Michel- Rolph Trouillot remarks of a comparable example, Their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past. As such, they do not succeed such a past: they are its contemporaries.13 I hope to show that the smoking habanera functions as a dialectical image, counter to but in dialogue with the models proposed by Luca and Una pelea , within the landscape of postcolonial, revolutionary Cuban historiographic imagination. What past and what present subjects does she conjure?
Landaluzes Habaneras

I rst encountered the smoking habanera two years before I saw her on that shelf in Old Havana. She was in a time- worn manuscript at the National Library of Cuba: Vctor Patrcio Landaluzes Calesero cortejando una cocinera (The Carriage Driver Courting a Cook ), which most likely dates from the 1870s (g. 2). It is not the rst Cuban painting to show a black woman smoking a cigar. A few earlier illustrators, along with numerous foreign commentators, had noted the regular phenomenon of both white and black women smokers in Cuba, although there are few
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records of white women smoking in public streets. The image pictured here, however, by Cubas foremost illustrator of the nineteenth century, formed part of a repertoire of racial representation that both taught and codied a way of seeing race. Landaluzes importance to the representation of race and gender in nineteenth- century Cuba cannot be overstated. He dominated the visual depiction of Cuban life for a long generation. As the primary or only illustrator for a succession of major newspapers, his lithographs, cartoons, and sketches were in constant circulation. He was the illustrator for the two most important volumes depicting Cuban social life at midcentury: Los Cubanos pintados por si mismos (Cubans Painted by Themselves) in 1852 and Tipos y costumbres de la isla de Cuba (Types and Customs of the Island of Cuba) in 1881, to which he contributed more than eighty illustrations. Many of his lithographs and paintings (if not his satirical cartoons) were accepted in their day and still circulate today as accurate representations of street life in nineteenth- century Havana. Now as then, his images are accepted as a kind of candid snapshot capturing life on Figure 2. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, Calesero cortejando una the street as it really cocinera (The Carriage Driver Courting a Cook). Courtesy was. They form part of Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana a naturalist genre known as costumbrismo, and viewers then and now often accept costumbrismo s realist conceits. As we shall see, that acceptance comes at a high cost.14 Landaluzes oil painting En la ausencia (In the Absence) captures well how his images consolidated and circulated a way of seeing race, particularly black women (g. 3). This is, on one level, a satirical portrait of a house slave caught in the act of impersonating her mistress.15 She wears her mistresss hat and bustle, and preens in front of the mirror. In the mistresss
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absence, the guilty slave does not labor her broom stands in for a parasol or walking stick a nd instead indulges in the impossible fantasy of living as her mistress does. On another level, the image speaks directly to the central problematic of race in mid- n ineteenthcentury Cuba. Who is absent, after all? The white mistress, whose racial and sexual purity was imagined in contemporary cultural discourse to be gravely threatened by the scandal of miscegenation that slavery made possible. For decades, efforts toward Cuban independence were stalled by what was called the Africanization scare, a racial panic that feared for Cuba the fate that had befallen nearby Haiti. Cubas future, it was feared, would be African if it was not Spanish: any attempt Figure 3. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, En la ausencia (In the to sever the islands fate Absence). Courtesy Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana from the stronghold of Spain would, it was said, trigger a race war which could only end in the Africanization of the island.16 This image, then, performs a certain exercise in the fantasy of Africanization and the crisis of surrogation that it occasions: the white mistress is absent, and is replaced by a slave t he black surrogate is in the white womans space, in her clothes, even in her physical stance. One imagines that the humor of the image t he idea that the surrogate fails to accurately impersonate the mistress is meant to contain any fear such a surrogation might cause. Indeed, the image might work to reassure a racially panicked white population that such surrogation has no hope of succeeding, and I have no doubt that this was the dominant way the image was understood. That much is clear when we view other related images of black women, especially portraits of women attending dances and other social events for
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the free black community in Havana, which fascinated Landaluze and was a favored subject of his work (see g. 4). What En la ausencia teaches rst and foremost is that black women who dress like this are putting on airs, pretending to be aristocratic or rened white women. Here again, Landaluze allows the spectator to look at a black woman looking at herself in a mirror, thereby refracting these different gazes: does she see herself as we see her? What does she want to see? Does she share our standard of female beauty; could she meet it if she did? Again the white woman is present through her absence: it is she who would normally occupy such a dress, look demurely over her Figure 4. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, Calzndose los guantes shoulder, and hold her (Putting on the Gloves). Courtesy Museo de Bellas Artes, fan and outstretched Havana hand just so. The element of satire from En la ausencia carries over into images like these, such that the black women (and the men, who are another story) always appear in effect to be in whiteface. However, the image presented by En la ausencia nonetheless advances the very surrogation that it aims to satirize: the portrait is, after all, of a house slave, and not of her mistress. This image looks nothing like the formal portrait of the white man perhaps the master of the house t hat hangs just over the slaves shoulder. Where is the mistresss portrait? In the absence of a matching portrait of the white mistress, we have a portrait of her slave. Placing the image of the master so close to that of his slave in this domestic interior i n the absent wifes boudoir, no less raises, rather than quells, the specter of miscegenation. While the viewer is invited to measure the slaves inadequate performance of her white mistress, the viewer is nonetheless xed on her, and not on her mistress. Indeed Landaluze painted few portraits of white women. Instead he focused on black women and devoted inordinate attention to illustrating
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the changing racial landscape produced precisely by the realities of mis cegenation. A primary example is Las cuatro generaciones (The Four Generations) (g. 5). The four women who peer from a window to enjoy the entertainments of a street musician represent, as the title suggests, four generations of women: the black matriarch (at top center), her mulata daughter (right), her lighter- skinned mulata granddaughter (left), and her even lighter- skinned great- g randdaughter at center. This image advances a central ideological wish in the discourse and panic of white supremacy: Figure 5. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, Un organillero o here black women do not Las cuatro generaciones ( An Organ- Grinder, or The Four produce black children Generations). Courtesy Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana and will not proliferate their race. Instead, black female sex, presumed to be with white men, over time will produce nothing less than a white girl. The image, like the lm Luca , offers us a gendered view of Cuban temporal progression as a succession of generations, but now in racial reverse: Cubas future is secured in the Cuban womans progressive whitening rather than her darkening. As a lesson in racial viewing, this image teaches us to see black women, especially mulatas, not as the feared blurring of the races, nor as a threat to the purity of whiteness, but as women on their way toward whiteness. The implication that interracial sex is a viable social strategy for whitening the population was not fanciful. Colonial Cuba had inherited from Spain a complex social hierarchy based on purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). While this ideological system developed in Reconquest Spain and initially distinguished those with Jewish or Muslim blood from the allegedly pure blood of Christians, in the Americas the sistema de castas (castes, as it was known) took on a new racial logic. The purity of Spanish blood was now primarily threatened by its encounter with indigenous peoples and, soon after, enslaved Africans. The remarkable tradition of
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casta painting in the colonies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals a keen interest on the part of artists and their patrons in understanding the exact progression of mestizaje over generations. Usually created in sets of sixteen images, each image illustrates a man and woman of different races and their offspring, giving a taxonomic classication of each newly produced racial type. The sixteen images typically represent four sets of four generations that begin with pure races and follow the progressive movement back toward purity. For example, the rst image of the rst set depicted how the progeny of an Indian and a Spaniard would be mestizo or mestiza; in the second, a mestiza and a Spaniard would produce a castiza, and so forth. The second set would follow instead the generational racial line between a Spaniard and a black; the remaining two sets would trace and similarly identify the combination of Indians and blacks. Many scholars, notably Ilona Katzew, have discussed at length the various motivations for the production of these images and the many ways they may have been understood.17 For my purposes here, I note that the four generations were used to explicitly track the possibilities for blood mending. By the fourth generation of the SpaniardIndian union, the offspring returns to being a Spaniard. In colonial Mexico, this was the only sequence that could successfully mend bloodlines. There, in contrast, the union between Spaniard and black, which in its rst generation produces a mulata, then a morisca, by the third has produced an albino, an unusual whiteness that, apparently, is not passed on. In the fourth generation the albino gives birth to a torna atrs, or a turn back, that abruptly returns to blackness. In the Cuban case, where the indigenous population largely disappeared in the rst generations of conquest, concerns over mestizaje settled almost exclusively on relations between white and black. Unlike colonial Mexico, in colonial Cuba the black- white union could indeed be mended over time, and such whitening was advocated as an explicit social goal, not only to rehabilitate particular family bloodlines, but to whiten the population as a whole.18 Avid proponents of whitening in Cuba, such as Francisco Arrango y Parreo, argued for increases in white immigrant labor; only miscegenation among working- class whites and blacks could lead to the erasure or destruction of the preoccupation with color.19 Seen in this light, Landaluzes depiction of the four generations enacts not just a wish, but a long- standing colonial social theory that blackness could be made to yield whiteness through interracial sex. Thus in Landaluzes visual world, the Cuban color line does not quite hold. En la ausencia tries to rmly draw the line between white and black women, between an aristocracy and their slaves. The slave and white woman are mutually exclusive social beings, not the extreme ends of a racial scale: the slave comes into view only in the absence of her mistress.
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Figure 6. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, Muestras de azucar (Samples of Sugar ). Reprinted from the poster series El Grabado en Cuba, produced by the Ocina del historiador de la ciudad de la Habana (Canarias: Ediciones Canaricard, 1995)

Las cuatro generaciones does the opposite: while no class status is conferred on the white girl produced over three generations of interracial sex, it conrms the reality of the constant sexual crossing of racial boundaries and leaves the white- yet- i nterracial- g irl as its nal outcome. Still other images mediated between these two approaches to race, working to rationalize and naturalize the landscape of racial difference. Consider one of several series of marquillas tobacco lithographs used in packaging cigars t hat Landaluze created illustrating the ascending types of women in Cuba. In Muestras de azucar (Samples of Sugar), employing a metaphor that was common both in his work and in the popular press of the day, he used the language of sugar whose process of renement transformed it from brown to white to illustrate different grades of racialized women in Cuba (g. 6). Under each portrait is a term that corresponds to the sections of sugar cane: the very bottom which
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produced dark, coarse sugar was known as cucurucho; the top was simply blanco, or white; and the middle section was known as quebrado (fraction). While pure white sugar could command high prices, the markets favored combinations of these elements, so reners worked to combine different percentages of each. Landaluze borrows this vocabulary of agricultural- commercial renement as a metaphor for miscegenation: between the cucurucho and the blanco renado are the possible combinations of the three elements that will produce various degrees of whiteness. Like Mexicos casta paintings 150 years earlier, Landaluzes series invents a taxonomy of differential gradations of whiteness (or blackness) that appear to x a uid racial reality that otherwise resists such taxonomic capture. Landaluzes taxonomy is considerably more fanciful than the castas, again allowing an ambiguous layer of satire into the viewing frame. Does he take pleasure in casting women as grades of sugar, or is he satirizing this way of seeing Cuban women? The racialized metaphor of sugar is complex. On one hand, it seems to represent racial categories in an organic, natural taxonomic hierarchy: just as there are different grades of sugar, so too are there different grades of racialized women; just as society values the most rened white sugar, so too do they most value the racial purity of white women. On the other hand, the grades of sugar are man- made products of careful engineering, not naturally occurring elements. The metaphor might suggest that the different racial categories are, precisely, man- made inventions. Yet rather than suggest that whiteness and blackness are invented social products with no essential or natural referent (an intriguing but unlikely possibility in this context), I suspect the metaphor instead bolsters the same ideological assumptions as Cuatro generaciones : it provides reassuring visual evidence that blackness can be transformed into whiteness. The differences among the women, after all, are possible only through variations in interracial sex a nother kind of male engineering. While there are no white men in these images, their presence and sexual behavior is implied by the entire metaphor. The absence of white men, then, is again constitutive of the logic of this system of racial representation and of the system of racialized labor of which it forms part. The unmarked white men and women are the master class who prot from the production of sugar and tobacco, the two primary Cuban exports produced by slave labor, which meet in these tobacco lithographs in a spectacular moment of colonial over- determination. These marquillas bearing images of sugarraced women were literally wrapped around bundles of cigars: slave labor and the racial regime that underwrites it are here uidly transformed into objects of leisure consumption. Is the slave- made cigar more satisfying when packaged in images of racially malleable women? What then of that black woman who smokes cigars herself? How
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does she interact with or complicate this regime of race, labor, and pleasure? By the time we return to the smoking habanera in Calesero cortejando una cocinera , or in another related image, Una mulata con soldado (A Mulata with Soldier), we can begin to see her through these viewing conventions established by Landaluze (g. 7). In both of these examples, the smoking habanera is depicted as a mulata: the woman from Calesero is a visual match to Landaluzes imagined mulata granddaughter in the Cuatro generaciones ; Figure 7. Vctor Patrcio Landaluze, Una mulata con soldado ( A the woman from Una Mulata with Soldier). Courtesy Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana mulata con soldado is an exact match to the second grade in the Muestras series. Here we should note as well that relative darkness is not the visual measure of mestizaje in Landaluzes images, as the title of Una mulata con soldado makes clear. Who is the mulata? Assumed to be the offspring of a white Spanish man and an enslaved African woman, the mulata powerfully embodies an origin tale of Cubas colonial history, often standing in for the very idea of Cuban identity in the rst place. This is true from Landaluze all the way to Luca . As I have argued at length elsewhere, the mestizaje of the mulata in the nineteenth century especially prior to abolition in 1886 conjured a deeply ambivalent vision of Cuba, signaling both the promise of Cubas progressive whitening and social renement and its opposite: the continued Africanization of the island and the adulteration of moral and sexual values that the mulatas own birth represents. That ambivalence is present in the depiction of the smoking habanera. On one hand, the mulata is not in the company of any white suitor, but rather a black man of her same class and condition, to use the then- common Cuban phrase. In the company of black suitors, these particular mulatas do not suggest a future movement toward whiteness t hey denitely point to its opposite.
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Further, the smoking habanera is not presented as a black woman aspiring toward the ideal of white womanhood. Whereas the slave from En la ausencia or the woman in Calzndose los guantes literally rehearses a standard of white feminine beauty, the smoking habanera presents a contrasting body language and dress. Her bare shoulders and relaxed stance suggest an alternate perhaps suspect code of dress and behavior in public. In comparison with the self- conscious reexivity of the women in front of the mirror, the smoking habaneras gaze is unconcerned, even condent. Her interlocutor is not a mirror but a black man, and the casual cigar in hand opens her body to him or to us, as viewers. Here we have not happened upon a private or intimate scene; she seems to know she is being looked at, and does not care. As depictions of public streets rather than domestic interiors, these images differently instruct our gaze. Whereas no one really imagines that Landaluze literally discovered the slave in En la ausencia or was actually in the humble room of the couple dressing for the baile, Landaluzes street scenes seem captured as though from life itself t hat is the primary conceit and claim of most costumbrista representation, after all. The smoking mulata is thus not only a racial type, but a particular urban type: one picturesque element among others (including her suitors, the calesero and the soldado) that comprise the character of the city streets. 20 The conservative social mores of the day would, of course, nd this public woman sexually suspect for the simple reason that she walks the streets alone and deals openly with men in public. Yet the composition of the image does not quite direct us to that harsh judgment. Instead I suggest that it is her smoking that allows us to see her as somewhat deant or brash not because it was unusual for black women to smoke, but because it is pictured, like that house slave in front of the mirror, as a leisure activity to which she does not have an inherent right. Rather than completing her errand, the cook (likely a house slave) instead dallies on the street, smoking and talking with the carriage driver. The mulata with the solider seems to have no purpose at all, other than smoking in the street. It is this unauthorized or excess leisure that marks the smoking mulata: she is transgressive in her refusal of work and in her refusal of the sexual ideology of whitening, but nonetheless she remains more titillating than threatening. After all, she is made available to the viewer as a consumable image: whether or not she refuses our gaze, she is permanently xed within and by it. Thus these images of the smoking habanera form part of a developing idea of the Cuban mulata, soon to be known as the mulata de rumbo or the mulata of the street, typically a stunning beauty who refused labor, marriage, or purpose, preferring to spend her days waiting, languishing, and preparing for her rumba nights. 21 These basic coordinates were still in place in her representation well into the era of U.S. occupation and the
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republic. Consider the ubiquitous presence of the mulata in travel posters from the 1930s and 1940s, beckoning the U.S. tourist to enjoy Cuba as a year-round pleasure locale, as many hundreds of thousands did in the years of the republic. The structural position of the mulata has changed relatively little. The smoking habaneras refusal of work has been fully naturalized as the new mulatas inherent tropical character: in most such images, she suggests no occupation other than leisure, pleasure, and dance; performing to a rumba beat on the beach, she is open to the gaze of the tourist. The prime viewer remains male and white, but he is now the rich and politically dominant neighbor to the north. He is exactly that American t he marine, tourist, businessman, or politician t hat became the arch antagonist in the story of prostitution in Cuba and the prostitution of Cuba. He was exactly the American who was resisted and refused by the Cuban Revolution.
Racial Return

I return to the clay gure of the smoking habanera in 1996, on that shelf in Old Havana: before long, she began to multiply, lling table after table in the areas newly emergent tourist markets (g. 9). Why now, why her? From one view, it makes sense that she might accompany the economic reforms of the Special Period that reopened Cuba to foreign investment and aimed to rebuild the very tourist economy that socialism had otherwise eschewed. Cuba was on sale again; why wouldnt the image most closely associated with Cubas former colonial past materialize alongside the new hotels in refurbished colonial- era buildings, or the renewed interest often backed by foreign investment i n restoring the former beauty of Havanas colonial center, site of greatest interest to tourists? She is a nostalgic citation of a racial economy of the past otherwise absent or repressed during the revolution a n economy in which dark Cuban women were relentlessly gured as accessible sexual objects to be picked and enjoyed like so much tropical fruit by visitors from the north. The gurine is certainly a citation from the nineteenth- century archive, but holding her fruit Copacabana style she is also dressed up for republican- era tourist consumption. In other words, she recalls the colonial and neocolonial worlds of the rst two Lucas of Solss lm, and she elides the Luca of the revolution. From this view, the smoking habanera is neo/colonial memorabilia, an object that reverses the progressive narratives of revolutionary triumph in such lms as Luca and Una pelea by reestablishing an open connection with the past exploitative economies of gender and race. As colonial racial memorabilia, the gurine may function like the memorabilia associated with Aunt Jemima in the early-twentieth- century
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Figure 8. Figurines in the marketplace of Old Havana. Photo: Diana Taylor

United States a ll those images, paper dolls, cookie jars, pitchers, and more that once lled U.S. homes with so much bright red painted clay and porcelain in the shape of the most famous mammy long after the end of slavery. That both the United States and Cuba would produce such racial memorabilia is not surprising: the dense systems of racial formation in both countries have parallel and often related histories of colonialism and

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slavery through which both have produced comparable forms of racialized popular culture. Both the smoking habanera and Aunt Jemima are material images of black women wrested from the material context and legacy of slavery; they are memorabilia because these citations of slavery are transformed into consumable objects, a fragment of slaverys history to be kept on a shelf or hung on a wall. Both re- capitalized on black female labor by extending the labor of black women into a consumable popular representation. For Aunt Jemima, the image is literally multiplied as the brand logo on every box of pancake mix. As M. M. Manring writes of early Aunt Jemima advertising: They seemed to be saying to white women, you can approximate the lifestyle once created for plantation mistresses by the efforts of female slaves through purchasing the creation of a former female slave. The ads urged white housewives to have Aunt Jemima, not be Aunt Jemima. JWT [J. Walter Thompson] was selling the idea of a slave, in a box.22 Those taking pleasure in the smoking habaneras languid presence in Landaluzes images could, like the housewives buying slaves in a box, simultaneously enjoy and disavow their actual relation to slave labor and the work of black women in maintaining white privilege. Could not the contemporary tourist nd some comparable pleasure in buying that sexualized gurine? She can indeed function as a kind of titillating afrmation of the continuity of white privilege, making the link between colonial masters of old and neocolonial tourism both visible and palatable. As memorabilia, the smoking habanera keeps company with several other signature productions from the Special Period that either implicitly or explicitly establish connections with a prerevolutionary Cuba while eclipsing the revolution itself. Ana Mara Dopico signals the popularity throughout the 1990s of images i n photographic volumes, postcards, and lm of Havanas majestic but crumbling buildings. Read as a synecdoche for Cuba, these dilapidated buildings seem to invite rescue from abroad: the image of buildings, silent, decayed, and ready for renovation, bridged a historical and ideological gap, promising a material site, a neutral aesthetic object that had survived the political and imaginative blockades of the Cold War.23 As Dopico also notes, the blockbuster phenomenon of the Buena Vista Social Club, which has included multiple CD releases and a lm (Buena Vista Social Club, dir. Wim Wenders, 1999), similarly staged the rescue of aging Cuban musicians from their apparent consignment to the scarcity and oblivion of the revolution. While virtually no mention of Cold War ideological struggles is made, the underlying script is clear: socialist Cuba has failed to recognize the brilliance of these musical masters. Charting the journey of the musicians from the dusty humble streets of their Cuban origin to their soaring success at Carnegie Hall, the lm suggests that the rightful place for such artists is not at home in Cuba but

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in cosmopolitan centers of consumption and at the very top of the economic market. Both the ruined buildings and the aging musicians invite foreign discovery of the neglected past of Cuba, casting the revolution itself in suspension, as nothing more or less than an interval of decay. The smoking habanera performs a similar operation on the past, literally forgetting the revolution in favor of reviving the colonial past. Despite Castros repeated insistence that opening Cubas economy would only proceed under the strictest respect for national independence and sovereignty,24 the newly freed artisan market allowed this marker of Cubas colonial and neocolonial past to multiply. Suddenly, it seemed, there were hundreds and hundreds of her. On open market days in Old Havana, table after table was lled with these objects: a sea of curve- bodied black clay women smoking cigars (g. 8). The more she multiplied the less nostalgic she seemed. Rather than signal a continuity with the past, she marked the wholesale return of widespread racial discrimination in Cuba and the return of prostitution in the Special Period. Nadine Fernndez aptly summarizes the situation: As access to dollars becomes increasingly central in determining ones standard of living and social status, the limited opportunities that darker and poorer Cubans have for receiving dollars directly from their jobs (such as tourism, in the newly formed joint corporations), professional travel abroad, or family in exile become more evident. As a result, their quest for dollars, which is no more intense than that of any other Cuban, moves into the much more visible and public arena25 w ith prostitution as a leading source of income. The return of prostitution marks the return of a capitalist tourist market, in which tourists discover exactly what they hoped to nd in Cuba, so long as they offer cash for its (re)appearance. It also reveals an underlying system of racialized inequalities that were challenged but never fully dismantled by government policies. Most agree that a majority of prostitutes, known as jineteras in Cuba, are young women and girls of color, a sad fact explained by black Cubans relative disadvantage in nding other dollar- paying tourist- sector work, along with the tourists own racialized notions of sexuality and pleasure, as Alejandro de la Fuente puts it. 26 Alongside the proliferating number of jineteras, the smoking habanera announced the arrival of a time when Cuban black women were again for sale; their commodity value again lies in their ability to perform and produce leisure and sexual pleasure for a privileged white and usually male consumer, and to disguise their own labor in that production. Far from racial nostalgia, she became the veritable signature of the Special Period a n object popular now, in this particular material form, as at no other time before. Like Benjamins dialectical image, she indexes a series of pasts of which Landaluze is a major referent, but which also includes santeras past

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and present (practitioners of the Afrocuban religion santera), Copacabana girls, Josephine Baker, Carmen Miranda, even Rita Montaners Mama Ins, among others. She indexes that otherwise repressed past by way of illuminating a road, not to paradise or revolution, but toward another future one not likely calculated by Castro t hat, in turn, reinvents the past in a raw new present. She is not a displaced Luca, but her latest and troubled iteration. The line between the image in the archive and the clay gurine is not a progressive movement forward, but something closer to the narcotic gures of Mart and Che in Aleas Una pelea , now in reverse: she is a dialectical image that tells us that the racial past of slavery is not over at all; in this new racial and ideological economy, the commodication of this gure of a black woman, in the name of producing a saleable Cuban identity, will take new and virulent form.
A Cuban Struggle against Racial Demons

Several years later, in 2001, another variation of the smoking habanera appeared: a women dressed up like the colonial gure, cigar and all, who walks the streets of Old Havana some of the very same streets that Landaluze pictured those many years ago. She will charge you a dollar to take her picture against the picturesque backdrop of the now refurbished colonial era buildings refurbished to provide tourists with a supposedly more authentic experience of Cuba and its colonial heritage. She is not part of a theatrical reconstruction, nor is she paid by an agency or by the state to be an actor for tourists in this scene, as we might nd in colonial Gettysburg or other colonial contexts. No. One very resourceful woman, in the absence of other opportunities in the Special Period, learned that tourists were attracted to this image and would pay money to take photographs of it. Cadava reminds us that dialectical images perform a spatial operation on time: A force of arrest, the image translates an aspect of time into something like a certain space, and does so without stopping time.27 Riddling the Havana urbanscape with images from the past of slavery, it is as though such images open the way for a reoccupation of the past they cite, a gurative and literal space of that past as present. Thus a living woman steps into the place, the role, the mold of black female Cubanness cast well back in the nineteenth century. And now, apparently, Cuban women really are like this. Anecdotally, it appears that tourists know that these women are simply performing in a money- making venture. Many photographs of such women usually smiling for the camera, holding their cigar just so now populate image- sharing sites like ickr.com, each with a title and description that frames her image: Traditional Cuban woman, Cuban Cigar Woman, National dress. One photographer offered an interest32
Lane Smoking Habaneras , or A Cuban Struggle with Racial Demons

ing caption: A street performer dressed as a Cuban stereotype. Most tourists who see and photograph these women will likely assume that the image has always been there in some form; that she is to Cuba what a amenco dancer is to Spain, or a dirndl- wearing Bavarian is to Germany: that she is traditional and represents some national heritage that has been cultivated and maintained by social and cultural institutions over the years. Her exaggerated presence where tourists congregate will seem almost natural maybe even annoying. One tourist photographer warned: She may sneak up on you wrap her arm around your arm and kissing you and gesture to whoever is with you to take a photo . . . 28 Most will likely assume that the clay gures of the smoking habanera in the nearby market are an image of her and will not suspect that history unfolded the other way around: she is an embodied version of the gures, and the gures are a multiplying reactivation of an ambivalent image that had for a generation and more during the revolution disappeared, an image that carries the long shadow of slavery into the present. Why does it matter that the image came before the performance? Because it allows us to see how images may act as repositories for violent colonial histories, and that their force may be unleashed and rerouted through and on bodies in unexpected ways. One of the most commonly photographed smoking habaneras appears in gure 9. She is a very photogenic elderly woman who sits on a stool on Calle Obispo at the intersection with Plaza de Armas, a heavily trafcked tourist area. When and why did she start? I ask her. In the Special Period, because times were hard. She had no family to look after her, she was hungry. She lives in the neighborhood. Why does she wear what she wears? She is dressed, she says, as a santera because she is a santera and the clothes are very beautiful. She is not, she says, like those young girls who come to town from Santiago de Cuba to sell themselves. Her life is hard, but it is not like that. A tourist passes and sets up to take her photograph. She lifts her unlit cigar to her mouth and poses. He snaps. She asks for a peso. He is surprised; he walks away. She shakes her head. As with all other entrepreneurial ventures in Cuba paladares (family- r un in- home restaurants), bed- a nd- breakfasts, or selling homeg rown produce t he government has decided to tax the women who make their living this way. Women who wish to so circulate in Old Havana must pay a monthly tax to the Ofce of the Historian of the City, the municipal entity overseeing the renovation of the entire neighborhood, to obtain a permit that allows them to walk the streets and request payment for photos. She is not there in some tourist board scheme to enhance visitors experience, like a mambo band that might have greeted happy tourists on their arrival in Varadero in decades past. She pays the state a tax in a mutually begrudging acknowledgment that acting out tourist fantasies

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can be more lucrative than working for the state. I ask: does she know her image is on the Internet? Yes, she has heard that, but she has never seen the pictures because she like most everyone else in Cuba cannot access the Internet. She wishes people would send her copies of their photographs. Once someone did, and she has it on her shelf. It is a beautiful picture. She heard that some photographer is making a hundred dollars selling pictures of her. She wishes he would send her some of the money. It would be the right thing Figure 9. Santera poses for photograph, Old Havana, to do. May 2008. Photo: Jill Lane The tourists and visiting photographers l ike the very talented Mr. Mark who took her photo a re the new Landaluzes, capturing scenes of Cuban life, only apparently caught candidly in the streets. Most interesting to me are the assumptions that the photographer brings to the scene. Mr. Mark notes on his ickr page that she is just sitting around waiting to make a buck off the tourists who nd her so irresistible & stereotypically Cuban. He insists on her fake performance: youll notice her cigar isnt even lit! Something about the ease with which she acknowledges the theatricality of the scene is irritating, and her request to receive compensation appears brazen. The problem, it seems, is not that she is acting, but that she so willingly admits it: in doing so, she reveals the theatricality as a whole, and the constitutive role of the photographer within it. He too is playing his part, and she knows the game. No, he has not happened upon a beautiful street scene: the reality he captures l ike all the Landaluzes before him was already so shaped d iscursively, ideologically, and materially precisely in order for it to be so illustrated or photographed by him. Even having experienced and acknowledged all this artice, Mr. Mark still recuperates the truth of her image. His photograph works, he says, because she has lost interest in him which is to say, he thinks she is no

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longer posing a nd instead she is looking for the next sucker to come along with a camera and some change. . . .29 Having claried this, he announces: The deep lines in her face and powerful eyes . . . seem to have as rich a history as the country itself.30 Apparently, she cannot protest too much: she will be enlisted as the expressive body of the country itself. But the claim is valid only if the candid nature of the photograph is re- established, which is to say, if he is again invisible to her return gaze. The surprise and irritation of the numerous photographer- tourists I witnessed while sitting with her on a warm day in May 2008 were instructive. Her insistence on pay seemed to unveil, in one terribly awkward moment, the tourist- photographers own sense of entitlement to be able to occupy that privileged position of the one who sees but is not seen, whose structural (or is it theatrical?) absence denes the terms of racial privilege and visibility in the rst place, then as now. It made me wonder. It made me reconsider the scene in which Landaluze produced his images of the smoking habanera to begin with. Did one of those smoking habaneras ever pose for Landaluze, holding her cigar just so, and then, when his long painterly attentions were nally satised, did she ever turn and ask for . . . compensation for her trouble? Did she always already know that she was acting out his fantasy of what she could and would mean?
Notes
1. Luis A. Prez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 38187; Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jimnez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, eds., Introduction. History as Prologue: Cuba before the Special Period, in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littleeld, 2008), 124; Pedro Monreal, Development as an Unnished Affair: Cuba after the Great Adjustment of the 1990s, in Brenner et al., A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 11727. For an excellent review essay of analyses of the Special Period, see Carmelo Mesa- L ago, The Cuban Economy during the Special Period and Beyond, Cuban Studies 37 (2006): 15978. 2. See Kathy Powell, Neoliberalism, the Special Period, and Solidarity in Cuba, Critique of Anthropology 28 (2008): 17797. 3. Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 4. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26. 5. Humberto Solss Luca was re- released by Clsicos del cine cubano (Cuba: Video ICAIC, 1999); Toms Gutirrez Aleas Una pelea cubana contra los demonios was re- released by Cinemateca de Cuba (Tenerife: Impulso, 2007). 6. Fidel Castro Ruz, Discurso pronunciado por el comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Secretario del Comite Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario, en el Estado de Rancagua, Chile, el 24 de noviembre de 1971, Departamento de Versiones Taquigracas del Gobierno Revolucionario. Translation mine. Available at www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1971/esp/f241171e .html (accessed March 30, 2010).

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7. Toms Fernndez Robaina, Recuerdos secretos de dos mujeres pblicas (Secret Memories of Two Public Women) (Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial las letras, 1983), 99. Translation mine. 8. The lm is based on Fernando Ortizs account of these events in Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios. Relato documentado y glosa folklorista y casi teolgica de la terrible contienda que, a nes del siglo XVII y junto a una boca de los inernos, fue librada en la villa de San Juan de los Remedios por un inquisidor condicioso, una negra esclava, un rey embrujado y gran copia de piratas, contrabandistas, mercaderes, bateros, alcaldes, capitanes, clrigos, energmenos y miles de diablos al mando de Lucifer (1959; repr. Madrid: Erre, 1973). 9. Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba (London: British Film Institute Publishers, 1985), 260. 10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 462. 11. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 369. 12. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 61. 13. Michel- Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995). 14. Los Cubanos pintados por si mismos: Coleccin de tipos cubanos (Havana: Imprenta de Barcina, 1852); Antonio Bachiller y Morales and Victor Patricio Landaluze, Tipos y costumbres de la isla de Cuba: Colleccin de artculos (Havana: Miguel de Villa, 1881). On costumbrismo in Latin America see Susana Zanetti, ed., Costumbristas de Amrica Latina (Costumbristas of Latin America) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de Amrica Latina, 1973). On costumbrismo in Cuba, see Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 18401895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), especially chap. 1; and Salvador Bueno, Costumbristas cubanos del siglo XIX (Cuban Costumbristas of the Nineteenth Century) (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985). 15. Vera Kutzinski offers an excellent analysis of this oil paintings companion, which depicts a male house slave kissing a white female bust, in Sugars Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993). 16. On the Africanization scare, see, e.g., Chester Stanley Urban, El temor a la africanizacin de Cuba, 185355 (Fear of Africanization of Cuba, 185355 ) (Habana: Crdenas y Cia, 1957); Luis Martnez- Fernndez, Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 18401878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 18681898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 17. Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth- Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). For the Peruvian case, see Estenssoro Fuchs et al., Los cuadros de mestizaje del virrey Amat: La representacin etnogrca en el Per colonial (The Mestizaje Paintings of the Viceroy Amat: Ethnographic Representation in Colonial Peru) (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 1999). 18. In the Peruvian casta series of Virrey Amat, whiteblack unions instead do allow for blood mending. This case, however, takes seven generations, and whiteness is approximated but not fully achieved. The last two Peruvian categories are Gente Blanca (white people) and then Gente Blanca, Casi limpio de orgen (white people, almost puried of origin). Fuchs et al., Los cuadros de mestizaje del virrey Amat , 4142.

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19. Cited in Christopher Schmidt- Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 18331874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 20. 20. The image depicts a solider from the black militias of colonial Cuba. For extraordinary research on the militias and their relation to race politics and the colonial regime, see Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and David Sartorius, My Vassals: Free- Colored Militias in Cuba and the Ends of Spanish Empire, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 (2004), muse.jhu.edu/ journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v005/5.2sartorius.html. 21. I engage in a detailed analysis of the gure of the mulata de rumbo, also mulata de rango, in the theater of this period in Lane, Blackface Cuba . 22. M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 140. 23. Ana Mara Dopico, Picturing Havana: History, Vision, and the Scramble for Cuba, Nepantla: Views from South 3 (2002): 45193. 24. Preamble to Cubas Foreign Investment Act of 1995. Ley Nmero 77 de inversin extranjera. A full copy can be found at Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos del Mundo, www.icap.cu/medidas/inversion_extranj.html (accessed March 30, 2010). 25. Nadine T. Fernndez, The Color of Love: Young Interracial Couples in Cuba, in Women in Latin America, ed. Sheryl L. Lutjens, special issue (part 2), Latin American Perspectives 23 (1996): 112. See also Nadine T. Fernndez, The Changing Discourse on Race in Contemporary Cuba, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14 (2001): 11732. 26. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 326. See also Alejandro de la Fuente, The Resurgence of Racism in Cuba Social Problems That Cuban Authorities Had Deemed Solved Have Reappeared during the Structural Crisis of the 1990s, NACLA Report on the Americas 34 (2001): 29; Julia OConnell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism: Cuba (Bangkok: ECPAT International, 1996) and Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism 2: Cuba (Bangkok: ECPAT International, 1996). 27. Cadava, Words of Light , 61. 28. Cuban Stereotype . . . ? by Freenoodle, www.ickr.com/photos/2012 7920@N00/2037425827 (accessed March 30, 2010). 29. Havana woman with cigar, by Mr. Mark, www.ickr.com/photos/mark _boucher/117389077/in/set- 1152920 (accessed March 30, 2010). 30. Ibid.

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