Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

144 reframing latin america
understand the world, how North American ways revealed themselves, and
how these revelations shaped the people Cubans became [. . .].
Central to this discussion is the proposition of national identity not as a
fi xed and immutable construct but rather as cultural artifact, as contested—
and contesting—representations often fi lled with contradictions and incoherencies,
almost always in fl ux. This national identity constantly adjusts
to and reconciles perceptions of reality with changing needs, and vice versa,
with its own particular history, specifi cally a way to experience the meaning
of inclusion of previously disparate constituencies within the notion
of nationality. It is, as it were, a work in progress, in a state of continual
development. This is identity as historically contingent, as both national
expression and individual construction, possessing multiple forms, often simultaneously,
sometimes successively; it is always changing with changing
times: open not fi xed, more a process than a product. In this sense, culture
exists as a system of representation, signifying the practices and institutions
from which nationality is derived and acted out [. . .].
Cubans early mastered the skills to negotiate their encounter with
the North, which meant that they developed an extraordinary—but not
unlimited—capacity to accommodate North American cultural forms in
their midst. Cubans themselves introduced baseball to the island in the
nineteenth century. Some of the most noteworthy Protestant inroads were
registered by Cuban missionaries. These phenomena became even more
pronounced in the twentieth century. Cuba was a country in which many
citizens knew something about big-league baseball and professional boxing.
Cubans participated eagerly in North American consumer culture and
developed loyalties to U.S. brand names. They were unabashedly devoted
to Hollywood, its movies and movie stars. In remote country stores it was
common for rural consumers to have direct access to canned foods and
ready-made clothing, as well as tools and farm equipment, manufactured in
the United States, not as instruments of oppression, but as material goods
eagerly adopted to improve daily life.
North Americans, in turn, in varying degrees throughout the twentieth
century, appropriated and adapted elements of things Cuban in response
to cultural transformations and commodity imperatives. Such negotiations
took place in both Cuba and the United States, often as a result of tourism,
typically by way of popular culture, most notably in the areas of music and
dance. The resonance of U.S. hegemony was such, however, that Cubans
reappropriated North American representations of “Cuban” as a strategy
calculated to accommodate North American market forms.
North American hegemony was experienced mainly as a cultural infl ection:
culture served to condition the moral order in which power was ex-