De que color es el oro? Race, Environment, and the History of Cuban National Music, 1898-1958

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3979907
AutoresGregory T Cushman (autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Volumen26
Número2
Páginas164-194
Fecha de publicación2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLatin American Music Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-0350 • E-ISSN: 1536-0199
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lat.2006.0007
OpenAlexW1574610149
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas39

De qué color es el oro? Race, Environment, and the History of Cuban National Music, 1898–1958 Gregory L. Cushman (bio) Modern Cuban identity is intimately tied to the perception that a poor Antillean "island of shacks" (isla de bohíos) became rich through its music.1 During the twentieth century, many writers have identified Cuba's national singularity with a supposed cultural miracle. Beginning in the 1920s, the new Cuban republic established its place on the globe by exporting "sounds sweeter than its sugar" that proceeded to conquer Europe and the United States. The famed Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote that músicas negras from the United States, Brazil, and Cuba (blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, samba, bossa nova, son, rumba, and salsa) bathed European shores with "a warmth greater than the Gulf Stream." In his view, "The world has been Africanized" by these musical forms, and paradoxically, "Africa has been westernized . . . not by soldiers, missionaries, merchants, white hunters, or doctors playing Bach on the organ," but by the introduction of "African" musics created in the West. "Africa now dances to the rhythms of America," while "Hitler—and Wagner of course—turn in their graves in tune with the rumba."2 Contrary to Cabrera Infante's claim, the history of Cuba's music during this global invasion has hardly been "inaudible."3 In fact, this international phenomenon inspired some of Cuba's most important cultural figures to write the first histories of music in Cuba. This essay examines four of the most influential examples of this prose genre written during the supposed Golden Age of Cuban music before the upheaval of the 1959 Revolution. Though Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Emilio Grenet, Alejo Carpentier, and Fernando Ortiz were all responding to Cuba's peculiar cultural climate and historical situation, they participated in a long-standing, pan-American intellectual movement to write histories interpreting the connection between racial inheritance, environment, music, and national identity. [End Page 164] These four intellectuals shared the same basic problem and came to similar solutions. Each used the history of Cuba's music and musicianship to explore the meaning of Cuban nationality (cubanidad). In turn, each focused inevitably on the divisive race question, since Cuba was—and remains—a multiracial society fractured by racism. Each author presented a theory of music that attempted to reconcile the fractious ideas of race and nation, often by applying theories of environmental influence. Through the act of writing history, each constructed an ideology of national unity for a society divided by conflicts. Their texts reveal something about the individual mind as both a product and interpreter of its time, including some of the premises about human nature that lie at the heart of all histories. In short, this study is both an exploration of the Cuban imagination and the imagination of Cuba. Writing the Nation: History, Race, and Music Preoccupation with the "race" of a country's national music is neither the exclusive domain of Cuban intellectuals nor of the written word. The relationship between music, race, and nation was the central organizing theme of Ken Burns's recent documentary film Jazz. In episode one, "Gumbo," the first voice heard is that of trumpeter/intellectual Wynton Marsalis: "Jazz objectifies America. It is an art form that can give us a painless way to understand ourselves." This is not Marsalis's message alone, but that of Burns's entire nineteen hour film: Jazz "is America's music born out of a million negotiations . . . between black and white . . . between the Old Africa and the new Europe that could only have happened in an entirely New World." Substitute "son" for jazz and "Cuba" for America and this could have been a statement made by Alejo Carpentier fifty years before.4 Yet taken as a whole, Burns's film is not as inclusive as this beginning might suggest. We are told briefly in episode one that West Indian slaves "filled with the infectious pulse of the Caribbean" were a key ingredient of the primordial New Orleans "gumbo" that gave birth to jazz. We do not hear of any additional "Caribbean" contribution until the momentary appearance of Afro-Cuban percussionist

Art · Art history · Blues · Cartography · Counterpoint · Ethnology · Geography · Humanities · Jazz · Literature · Musical · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies